Analysis. This dream belongs to a type of patient which is not
favourable from a therapeutic point of view. They follow in the analysis
without offering any resistances whatever up to a certain point, but
from that point on they remain almost inaccessible. This dream he almost
analysed himself. “The Rotunda,” he said, “is my genital, the captive
balloon in front is my penis, about the weakness of which I have
worried.” We must, however, interpret in greater detail; the Rotunda is
the buttock which is regularly associated by the child with the genital,
the smaller front structure is the scrotum. In the dream his father asks
him what this is all for—that is, he asks him about the purpose and
arrangement of the genitals. It is quite evident that this state of
affairs should be turned around, and that he should be the questioner.
As such a questioning on the side of the father has never taken place in
reality, we must conceive the dream thought as a wish, or take it
conditionally, as follows: “If I had only asked my father for sexual
enlightenment.” The continuation of this thought we shall soon find in
another place.
The court in which the tin sheet is spread out is not to be conceived
symbolically in the first instance, but originates from his father’s
place of business. For discretionary reasons I have inserted the tin for
another material in which the father deals, without, however, changing
anything in the verbal expression of the dream. The dreamer had entered
his father’s business, and had taken a terrible dislike to the
questionable practices upon which profit mainly depends. Hence the
continuation of the above dream thought (“if I had only asked him”)
would be: “He would have deceived me just as he does his customers.” For
the pulling off, which serves to represent commercial dishonesty, the
dreamer himself gives a second explanation—namely, onanism. This is not
only entirely familiar to us (see above, p. 234), but agrees very well
with the fact that the secrecy of onanism is expressed by its opposite
(“Why one can do it quite openly”). It, moreover, agrees entirely with
our expectations that the onanistic activity is again put off on the
father, just as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream. The
shaft he at once interprets as the vagina by referring to the soft
upholstering of the walls. That the act of coition in the vagina is
described as a going down instead of in the usual way as a going up, I
have also found true in other instances.[CZ]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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