An engine has to be started. He is a machinist and has daily to do with machines. Engine is symbol for his soul which functions so poorly, a symbol for himself, for all the impulses and energies within him. He accomplishes through his own powers what his physician and his mother are unable to bring about. First I try to put the engine in motion. I take the mysterious paper package and throw it on; the mother attends to the other side of the fire. But he gets up and takes care of the fire from above.[24] He is above, he triumphs over me and surpasses me in the ability to cure him. He recalls a pupil of his who had to commute to Brünn. It brings to his mind an occasion when he was the teacher. Thus I am his pupil, I am learning from him how to start an engine. Though I may know something about sick souls, I don’t understand a thing about his specialty (he is a machinist), there he is the master and I am ignorant. This consoling thought serves to strengthen his feeling of self-regard and prevents a feeling of inferiority from developing in his relations to me. There are a number of scornful references to the impotent father and to the equally unskilful physician. He is with me one half hour daily. He had noticed that I looked at the watch, to see whether his time was up. The half hour and the looking at the watch appear in the dream. The day before he showed his father how a technical problem was solved. In this dream he also shows me that something must be done a particular way. We observe that this attitude towards the physician, as representative of the father, pervades the whole dream. But this does not exhaust the meaning of the dream. It is a pollution dream (gratification without responsibility). It is interesting to see how the onanistic act, represented as pollution, is dramatized in the dreams. In the first dream he flees from homosexuality and there the relationship between homosexuality and the hidden mother complex is clearly shown. In the second dream the mechanism of sexuality is represented in action. Neither the father (the engineer working around the engine), the mother nor the physician can do it. He alone is able to accomplish it. This shows the secret pride of the masturbator, the self-sufficiency of the autoerotic personality. (The engine’s flame covered running board, a phallic symbol; later note.) Onanism is shown as a protection against all sexual perils. The safety valve hisses and relieves itself—an intimation of the subsequent pollution.