Dreams of this sort are parturition dreams; their interpretation is
accomplished by reversing the fact reported in the manifest dream
content; thus, instead of “throwing one’s self into the water,” read
“coming out of the water,” that is, “being born.” The place from which
one is born is recognised if one thinks of the bad sense of the French
“la lune.” The pale moon thus becomes the white “bottom” (Popo), which
the child soon recognises as the place from which it came. Now what can
be the meaning of the patient’s wishing to be born at her summer resort?
I asked the dreamer this, and she answered without hesitation: “Hasn’t
the treatment made me as though I were born again?” Thus the dream
becomes an invitation to continue the cure at this summer resort, that
is, to visit her there; perhaps it also contains a very bashful allusion
to the wish to become a mother herself.[CQ]
Another dream of parturition, with its interpretation, I take from the
work of E. Jones.[95] “_She stood at the seashore watching a small boy,
who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the water
covered him, and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near
the surface. The scene then changed to the crowded hall of a hotel. Her
husband left her, and she ‘entered into conversation with’ a stranger._”
The second half of the dream was discovered in the analysis to represent
a flight from her husband, and the entering into intimate relations with
a third person, behind whom was plainly indicated Mr. X.’s brother
mentioned in a former dream. The first part of the dream was a fairly
evident birth phantasy. 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.
The bobbing up and down of the head in the water at once recalled to the
patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only
pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a reverie in
which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him into the
nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her
household.
The second half of the dream, therefore, represents thoughts concerning
the elopement, which belonged to the first half of the underlying latent
content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half
of the latent content, the birth phantasy. Besides this inversion in
order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the
first half the child _entered_ the water, and then his head bobbed; in
the underlying dream thoughts first the quickening occurred, and then
the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her
husband left her; in the dream thoughts she left her husband.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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