CHAPTER VI
Transposition Upward. Infantilism.
A series of examples of sexual symbolism should be made of special mention in which transposition upward is utilized; Freud[1] has shown how among the dream symbols that represent the female genitals, another bodily organ, the mouth, is often employed, and what happens to it in the dream signifies what happens to the genitals. That just this displacement to the mouth is frequently utilized by the dream has its foundation in different determining factors. The mouth, because of its analogy, is a very obvious symbol in the same body; the relation to one's own person may be given very simple expression, etc. The mouth, moreover, is one of the Freudian erogenous zones.
Jung[2] has given illuminating examples of this from the dream of an hysteric and from a patient with dementia præcox.
The following example from the case history of an hysteric shows in an unequivocal way this "upward transposition," wherein the serpent symbol appears with the same significance as in "Oda and the Serpent."
A twenty-two year old woman suffered from hysteria of sexual genesis with a wonderfully clear, transparent structure.[3] Special circumstances assisted the upward transposition of the
- ↑ Especially in "Bruchstücke einer Hysterieanalyse," Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, Bd. XVIII, 1905.
- ↑ Jung, "= Diagnostische Associationsstudien," VIII Beitrag.
- ↑ Her father loved her, sexually; it struck her as a child that he, besides other evidences of tenderness, slapped her in a peculiar way on her nates, and indeed only in the absence of her mother. When she was fifteen years old, and, on the occasion of a holiday play, looked very pretty in her costume, her teacher (an alcoholic) and her father, who also had been drinking too much on this day, sought—one following another—to seduce her. These experiences had no pathogenic results until after her father jealously destroyed her tender relations with a young man. From then on she was unable to sing in the singing club directed by that teacher. The transposition of the symptoms was completed by an undeserved box on the ear,—the only one,—a counterpart to the sexual caresses, transposed upward, which the father applied to her somewhat later in a fit of jealousy.
