In case of my own children, who followed one another rapidly, I missed
the opportunity to make such observations; I am now retrieving it
through my little nephew, whose complete domination was disturbed after
fifteen months by the arrival of a female competitor. I hear, it is
true, that the young man acts very chivalrously towards his little
sister, that he kisses her hand and pets her; but in spite of this I
have convinced myself that even before the completion of his second year
he is using his new facility in language to criticise this person who
seems superfluous to him. Whenever the conversation turns upon her, he
chimes in and cries angrily: “Too (l)ittle, too (l)ittle.” During the
last few months, since the child has outgrown this unfavourable
criticism, owing to its splendid development, he has found another way
of justifying his insistence that she does not deserve so much
attention. On all suitable occasions he reminds us, “She hasn’t any
teeth.”[BZ] We have all preserved the recollection of the eldest
daughter of another sister of mine—how the child which was at that time
six years old sought assurance from one aunt after another for an hour
and a half with the question: “Lucy can’t understand that yet, can she?”
Lucy was the competitor, two and a half years younger.
I have never failed in any of my female patients to find this dream of
the death of brothers and sisters denoting exaggerated hostility. I have
met with only one exception, which could easily be reinterpreted into a
confirmation of the rule. Once in the course of a sitting while I was
explaining this condition of affairs to a lady, as it seemed to have a
bearing upon the symptoms under consideration, she answered, to my
astonishment, that she had never had such dreams. However, she thought
of another dream which supposedly had nothing to do with the matter—a
dream which she had first dreamed at the age of four, when she was the
youngest child, and had since dreamed repeatedly. “A great number of
children, all of them the dreamer’s brothers and sisters, and male and
female cousins, were romping about in a meadow. Suddenly they all got
wings, flew up, and were gone.” She had no idea of the significance of
the dream; but it will not be difficult for us to recognise it as a
dream of the death of all the brothers and sisters, in its original
form, and little influenced by the censor. I venture to insert the
following interpretation: At the death of one out of a large number of
children—in this case the children of two brothers were brought up in
common as brothers and sisters—is it not probable that our dreamer, at
that time not yet four years old, asked a wise, grown-up person: “What
becomes of children when they are dead?” The answer probably was: “They
get wings and become angels.” According to this explanation all the
brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings like angels
and—this is the important thing—they fly away. Our little angel-maker
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account