Erotic literature -- History and criticism; Psychoanalysis and literature; Sex in literature
Freud ventures the opinion that dreams about complicated machinery
and landscapes and trees have a definite sexual significance. If this
is so, and he gives his reason therefor, it would mean that all those
authors who have a partiality for describing landscapes and machinery
in their works continually, are unconsciously revealing a personal
trait they never intended to convey. Ruskin for example is rich in
landscapes in his works. Is there any connection between his propensity
for such description and his attachment to his mamma, his youthful
love disappointment, his unsuccessful marriage and his sad love for
Rose La Touche? Is it not likely that many of the painters who made a
specialty of landscape painting were driven to this special choice by
an unconscious cause that the world has not fathomed, a sexual one?
No doubt there is a connection between paintings of female nudes and
the sex life of the author in his unconscious; why should not the
same be true of the landscape painters and all the writers who abound
in landscape descriptions? Is it not possible that Turgenev, who has
given us so many landscapes, was unconsciously thinking of his first
love disappointment and also of his love for Madame Viardot? We find
landscapes in every literary work that deals with the country, but
Freud's theory can have applicability only to the author who has a
mania for them.
Why does Kipling have a keen interest in bringing descriptions of
machinery into his works? If dreams of machinery relate to sex, then we
must follow the logical conclusion that an undue interest in machinery
must evince a sexual meaning. We are also aware that a large number of
popular sexual terms are taken from instruments in the machine-shop.
I do not maintain that objects do not have a literal significance, free
from any symbolic intent.
There can be no doubt about the significance of the phallic worship of
old times, in which the serpent was symbolic. Dreams where the serpent
figures and folk tales telling of dragons who are symbolic of the
lustful side of man both have a sexually symbolic meaning.
Again, if Freud is right in claiming that the dream of a woman throwing
herself in the water is a parturition dream, then one would have to
conclude that a woman occupied constantly with stories about herself
swimming was probably absorbed with thoughts about child-bearing. That
this significance for such a dream is not absurd may be seen from the
following statement by Freud: "In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery
of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion
as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of
Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well known illustrations of this."
III
Freud was not the first one to interpret dreams symbolically. There
have been excellent symbolical interpretations in literature. I will
mention one in Chaucer and another in Ovid.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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