A General Introduction to PsychoanalysisFreud, Sigmund
Science
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
must leave this differentiation to those psychoanalysts who can gather
examples in other lands where the people speak but one language.
Among the symbol-representations of the male genital there is scarcely
one that does not recur in jokes or in vulgar or poetical usage,
especially among the old classical poets. Not alone do those symbols
commonly met with in dreams appeal here, but also new ones, e.g., the
working materials of various performances, foremost of which is the
incantation. Furthermore, we approach in the symbolic representation of
the male a very extended and much discussed province, which we shall
avoid for economic reasons. I should like to make a few remarks,
however, about one of the unclassified symbols--the figure 3. Whether or
not this figure derives its holiness from its symbolic meaning may
remain undecided. But it appears certain that many objects which occur
in nature as three-part things derive their use as coats-of-arms and
emblems from such symbolic meaning, e.g., the clover, likewise the
three-part French lily, (fleur-de-lys), and the extraordinary
coats-of-arms of two such widely separated islands as Sicily and the
Isle of Man, where the Triskeles (three partly bended knees, emerging
from a central point) are merely said to be the portrayal in a different
form of the male genitals. Copies of the male member were used in
antiquity as the most powerful charms (_Apotropaea_) against evil
influences, and this is connected with the fact that the lucky amulets
of our own time may one and all be recognized as genital or sex-symbols.
Let us study such a collection, worn in the form of little silver
pendants: the four-leaf clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horse-shoe, a
ladder, a chimney-sweep. The four-leaf clover, it seems, has usurped the
place of the three-leaf clover, which is really more suitable as a
symbol; the pig is an ancient symbol of fertility; the mushroom is an
unquestionable penis symbol--there are mushrooms that derive their
systematic names from their unmistakable similarity to the male member
(Phallus impudicus); the horseshoe recalls the contour of the female
genital opening; and the chimney sweep who carries a ladder belongs in
this company because he carries on that trade with which the
sex-intercourse is vulgarly compared (_cf._ the _Anthropophyteia_). We
have already become acquainted with his ladder as a sex symbol in the
dream; the German usage is helpful here, it shows us how the verb "to
mount"[30] is made use of in an exquisite sexual sense. We use the
expressions "_to run after women_," which literally translated would be
"_to climb after women_," and "_an old climber_."[31] In French, where
"_step_" is "_la marche_" we find that the analogous expression for a
man about town is "_un vieux marcheur_." It is apparently not unknown in
this connection that the sexual intercourse of many of the larger
animals requires a mounting, _a climbing upon_ the female.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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