Page - 113 - in Dream Psychology

portions subsequently fitted in, regularly furnish the key to the interpretation. Cf. below, about forgetting in dreams. [9] Similar “counter wish-dreams” have been repeatedly reported to me within the last few years by my pupils who thus reacted to their first encounter with the “wish theory of the dream.” [10] See Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses, p. 133, translated by A.A. Brill, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Monograph Series. [11] It is only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death which represents nothing but a projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and is thus the source and model of the emotion of fear. [12] Cf. Zentralblatt für psychoanalyse, I. [13] Or chapel—vagina. [14] Symbol of coitus. [15] Mons veneris. [16] Crines pubis. [17] Demons in cloaks and capucines are, according to the explanation of a man versed in the subject, of a phallic nature. [18] The two halves of the scrotum. [19] See Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, vol. i., p. 2. [20] They share this character of indestructibility with all psychic acts that are really unconscious—that is, with psychic acts belonging to the system of the unconscious only. These paths are constantly open and never fall into disuse; they conduct the discharge of the exciting process as often as it becomes endowed with unconscious excitement To speak metaphorically they suffer the same form of annihilation as the shades of the lower region in the Odyssey, who awoke to new life the moment they drank blood. The processes depending on the foreconscious system are destructible in a different way. The psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on this difference. [21] Le Lorrain justly extols the wish-fulfilment of the dream: “Sans fatigue sérieuse, sans être obligé de recourir à cette lutte opinâtre et longue qui use et corrode les jouissances poursuivies.” 113