That something new attracts people’s attention is a
well-known belief of children. Now I have been told the following story
of my childhood; I remember hearing the story rather than the occurrence
itself. I am told that at the age of two I still occasionally wetted my
bed, that I was often reproached on this subject, and that I consoled my
father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the
nearest large city). (Hence the detail inserted in the dream that _we
bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it_; one must keep one’s
promises. Attention is further called to the identity of the male urinal
and the feminine trunk, box). All the megalomania of the child is
contained in this promise. The significance of the dream of difficulty
in urinating in the case of the child has been already considered in the
interpretation of an earlier dream (_cf._ the dream on p. 145).
Now there was another domestic occurrence, when I was seven or eight
years old, which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed
I had disregarded the dictates of discretion not to satisfy my wants in
the bedroom of my parents and in their presence, and in his reprimand
for this delinquency my father made the remark: “That boy will never
amount to anything.” It must have terribly mortified my ambition, for
allusions to this scene return again and again in my dreams, and are
regularly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes,
as though I wanted to say: “You see, I have amounted to something after
all.” Now this childhood scene furnishes the elements for the last image
of the dream, in which of course, the rôles are interchanged for the
sake of revenge. The elderly man, obviously my father, for the blindness
in one eye signifies his glaucoma[BN] on one side is now urinating
before me as I once urinated before him. In glaucoma I refer to cocaine,
which stood my father in good stead in his operation, as though I had
thereby fulfilled my promises. Besides that I make sport of him; since
he is blind I must hold the urinal in front of him, and I gloat over
allusions to my discoveries in the theory of hysteria, of which I am so
proud.[BO]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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