Introduction to Psychoanalysis

Chapter 18 The Symbolism of Dreams (2)
When we first heard that our parents would become emperors and queens in dreams, it would be very strange, but in fairy tales, there is indeed such a symbol.Many fairy tales begin with this: A long time ago there was a king and queen.Shouldn't we think that really means "Once upon a time there was a father and a mother"?As far as family life is concerned, the son is sometimes called the son, and the eldest son is called the prince.The King is often referred to as the "Father of Nations".Children are sometimes nicknamed small animals, in Cornwall, southwest England, they are called "little frogs", in Germany they are called "little worms", and children are called "poor little worms".

Let's come back to the symbolism of the house.In the dream, every protruding part of the house can be climbed, which coincides with a German saying. When talking about a woman with particularly developed breasts, the Germans say: "She has a place for us to climb." There is another saying Parallel to this: "There is a lot of wood in front of her house." What was said before that wood is a symbol of femininity and motherhood is confirmed here again.

As far as wood is concerned we still have a lot to discuss.It is difficult to understand why wood represents women or mothers, but here we can make a comparative study of the languages ​​​​of various countries.The German "wood" and the Greek "mat" come from the same root, which means "raw material". The general term "raw material" eventually evolved into the noun of special materials, and it is very common to change the broad sense into a narrow sense in the language.A small island in the Atlantic Ocean today is named "Madeira", which was taken when the Portuguese discovered it. At that time, the island was densely forested, and the Portuguese word for "wood" was "Madeira".And "Madeira" is just a deformation of the Latin "material", which also means raw materials. The word "material" comes from "mater", which means "mother". The raw materials used to make any item are regarded as items. mother.Therefore, wood is a symbol of femininity or motherhood, and we invoke the ancient meaning of this word.

A woman's childbirth is often expressed by things related to water, such as entering or exiting water, which means she is giving birth or being born.Never forget that this symbol actually refers to a double evolution.One includes that human beings and all terrestrial animals evolved from aquatic animals. This important fact is far away. The second is that the first stage of life of every mammal and human is in water, that is, the embryos are raised in water. , live in the amniotic fluid of the mother's womb, so childbirth is all out of water.Of course I do not claim that the dreamer knows such things, nor does he need to know.He may have heard of it when he was a child, but I think it has nothing to do with the composition of symbols.The nursery school tells the children that the babies are carried by the storks, but where did the storks get the babies?The answer is often from the pool or well, so it comes out of the water.One patient, who heard this from someone else when he was a child, was a little count, and he could not be found all afternoon, and no one knew where he had gone.He was later found by the lake in the house, lying there with his eyes fixed on the water, wanting to see the baby in the water.

Psychoanalyst Rank once analyzed and compared the birth of heroes in mythology. Among them, King Sargon of Akkad was the earliest, about 2800 BC, who threw or rescued the baby in the water. The story of the way takes the majority.Rank considers this to be a symbol of childbirth, and this method of symbolization belongs to the same category as the symbolism of dreams.When a man dreams of rescuing someone from the water, whoever it is, Ranke thinks it is a mother, his or anyone else's; in mythology it is always the birth mother who saves the child from the water.There is such a joke that someone asked a very clever Jewish child who was Moses' biological mother, and the child replied "Princess".The man said his answer was incorrect, and explained that "the princess just saved the child from the water".The kid said, "That's what she said!" So his explanation was pretty good.

Traveling is a symbol of death in a dream.In kindergarten, if a child asks where a deceased person has gone, the nurses often tell him that the person has gone on a "far journey".Such symbolism is also found in poetry, where the afterlife is described as "the land of nowhere to which the traveler, once arrived, never returns."In daily chatting, death is often regarded as "the last journey".No matter who, if he knows the ancient rituals well, he will understand that all funerals are very solemn and solemn. For example, in ancient Egypt, people often put the so-called "Book of the Dead" next to the mummy as a guide for their final journey.The cemetery is often so far from the settlements of the living that the final journey of the dead becomes a real thing.

Sexual symbols do not belong exclusively to dreams.You should know that women are sometimes jokingly called "bedding" as an insult, but no one knows that "bedding" is a symbol of genitals.The Bible "New Testament" says: "A woman is like a very fragile instrument." The Jewish holy book, whose style is close to poetry, also has many sexual symbols, but people know little about it, so its commentary has been There have been many misunderstandings, such as "Song of Solomon" and so on.In later Hebrew literature, houses were often used to represent women, and doors were used as a symbol of the entrance and exit of the genitals. For example, the husband would use "I found the door has been opened" to indicate that the wife is no longer a virgin.The symbol of the table as a woman also comes from Hebrew literature. For example, a wife said of her husband, "I set the table for him, but he overturned it."Lame children are like this precisely because the man "turned over the table."These examples are from Symbols in the Bible and the Talmud, by Levi of Buren.

In dreams, boats also represent women. This belief is also advocated by linguists. They believe that the original meaning of the German word "ship" means "clay sculpture utensils", which is the same word as "barrel" or "puppet".And the "stove" symbolizes a woman or a mother's womb, and the story of Periander and his wife Melissa in Corinth in Greece can be regarded as its argument.According to Herodotus' notes, the tyrant Periander loved his wife very much, but killed her because of jealousy.Afterwards, the shadow of his wife appeared before him, and he ordered the shadow to identify herself, so the deceased woman told Periander that she put his buns in a cold furnace, so the cryptic words , a third party cannot know.Another example is the book "Sexual Life of Various Nations" written by Klaus, which is the first choice for studying the sexual life of various nationalities. In the book, it is mentioned that when some Germans delivered a woman, they said that "her stove is broken into pieces." .Fire or anything related to fire has a sexual symbolic meaning, while the flame is a metaphor for the male genitalia, and the stove or stove is a symbol of the woman's womb.

If you were surprised by the many occurrences in your dreams of mountain and forest landscapes representing female genitals, then read the mythology and you will understand how important the concept of "earth as mother" was in ancient religious rituals. all ideas about agriculture.The use of a room in a dream to refer to a woman can find its origin in German colloquialism; in German the word "woman's room" stands for "woman", that is, a house in which one can live.For another example, there was a saying that "Turkish palace" alluded to the sultan and its government, and there was a saying that the pharaoh in ancient Egypt meant "the main hall".In the ancient oriental races, the court before the double city gate often gathered many people like the market in ancient Greece and Rome.However, the reasoning of this origin seems to be superficial. I think that the room as a symbol of women is due to its "people living in it" feature.We have already learned that houses have this meaning; looking at mythology and poetry, we can all the more see towns, castles, and forts as symbols of femininity.This is confirmed today even in the analysis of the dreams of non-German or non-German speakers.In recent years, most of the patients I have treated are foreigners. In my memory, they also use houses as symbols of women in their dreams, although there is no such word as "Frauenzimmer" in German in their words.In addition, the claim that symbols can transcend the boundaries of language comes from Mr. Schubert, an expert on dreams before.However, all of my foreign patients have some knowledge of German, so this issue is left to the scientists who do not understand German and only care about foreign patients in their mother tongue to make the final sentence.

All symbols of male genitalia have appeared in jokes, sayings or poems, especially ancient Greek and Latin poems.We do not only present these symbols in dreams, but also in various tools, of which the plow is the most typical.The symbol of male genitalia has a wide range and is more controversial, so in view of the time constraints, it is the best policy to leave it alone.Here I just want to talk about the number "three".Leaving aside for the time being, whether this number is regarded as sacred because of its symbolic significance, however many natural creatures composed of three parts, such as cloverleaf, are used as coats of arms or coat of arms because of their symbolic significance; The so-called "French" three-petal lily and the strange emblem shared by the distant Sicily and the Isle of Man are nothing more than a disguise for the male genitals, because the ancients believed that the image of the genitals can be used as a powerful force to ward off disasters. The talisman can also be seen as a sex symbol.Most of these amulets are small silver ornaments that can be hung, such as four-leaf clover, pigs, mushrooms, horseshoe-shaped utensils, long ladders, chimney sweeps, etc.The four-leaf clover is a substitute for the three-leaf clover. As far as the symbol is concerned, naturally the three-leaf clover is the most suitable; the pig indicated abundance in ancient times; The shape of a horseshoe is similar to a woman's vulva; because chimney sweeps are often compared to sexual intercourse, chimney sweeps and long ladders are regarded as symbols of sexual intercourse.We have already understood that the long ladder in the dream is a symbol of sexual intercourse, so the word "shengdeng" does contain the meaning of "sex", such as "stalking women", "old climber" and so on."March" in French also means "old apprentice".Perhaps this association is confirmed by the fact that in most animals the male clings to the back of the female during coitus.

Branch breaking is a symbol of masturbation, not only because the action of breaking branches resembles masturbation, but also in myths and stories, there are many similarities between the two.What is especially noteworthy is that the loss or extraction of teeth is a symbol of masturbation or the punishment of masturbation, that is, castration; the same situation occurs in traditional stories, but the dreamer does not know it.I think the circumcision performed by many ethnic groups is a symbol of castration.Recently, it has been discovered that some primitive tribes in Australia hold circumcision ceremonies to congratulate boys on coming of age, while other neighboring tribes have replaced it with tooth extraction ceremonies.

I'll end with these examples here.They are just examples; if it is not collected by smattering people like me, but by real experts including mythology, anthropology, linguistics and ethnology, the information collected must be rich and interesting. , but also allows us to know more about this issue.However, we must make a conclusion based on this. Although it is inevitable to miss everything, it is enough for our thinking.

First of all, it is surprising that although the dreamer can use symbols, he does not know anything about symbols and cannot understand them when he is awake. The maid had never learned Sanskrit, but suddenly she found that she knew Sanskrit like that.This fact of nature is hard to reconcile with our psychology.And we can only think that symbolic knowledge belongs to the subconscious mind of the dreamer, and is a psychological activity attached to his subconscious mind; however, even with this assumption, it does not seem to help us much.In the past we just assumed that there were subconscious tendencies that we don't know or never know, but now it's a bigger problem, the fact that we have to trust subconscious knowledge, ideas and comparisons between different things so that one idea supersedes another. one point of view.This kind of comparison does not need to have new materials every time, ready-made materials are available at any time; why?Because the languages ​​of different nationalities are different, but they all use the same comparison.

Where did this symbolic knowledge come from?The habit of language is only one branch of it.Numerous facts in other aspects are not known to the dreamer for the time being; so our first priority is to analyze and sort out all these materials.

The second is that these symbolic relationships do not only appear in dreams, but also in myths and fairy tales. We already know the same symbols, and they are also found in colloquialisms, folk songs, poetry and prose.The symbolism of dreams is only a small branch of it, and the range of symbolism is so vast that we cannot use dreams to study the whole problem of symbolism.Many symbols do not originate in dreams, or if they do occur in dreams, they occur in a very small proportion, and more often they are found elsewhere; on the other hand, we have seen that a large number of symbols also appear accidentally elsewhere.Therefore, we deeply feel that the way of symbolism is used in the past and discarded in the present, but it is only slightly deformed in its fragments.This reminds me of the fantasy of a very interesting patient, who felt that there must be a "primitive language" in the world, and all symbols are relics of this so-called "primitive language".

Again, you must think that other symbols are not limited to sexual issues, but why do the symbols of dreams always represent sexual objects and sexual relationships?This is naturally not easy to understand.Can we assume that the symbols originally belonging to sex were later transferred to other places, or that the symbols of sex were degraded and became expressions of other aspects?Obviously this problem cannot be explained on the basis of dream symbols alone, and we can only insist that real symbols have a special and intimate connection with sex.

On this point, it is appropriate to consult a linguist, Sberger of Uppsala, whose research has not been influenced by psychoanalysis in any way, and who believes that in the origin and development of language the position of neutral needs is extremely important.He said that the earliest voice in the evolution of animals was a tool for calling partners of the opposite sex. After development, language also became the voice made by primitive humans when they were working.This rhythmic sound can generate associations at work, so work is also full of sexual pleasure.Thus primitive man seems to have substituted work for sexual activity, thereby making work enjoyable.The sounds they make when they work thus have a double meaning, that is, one is related to the sexual act, and the other is related to the substitute or labor of the sexual act.Over time, the meaning and original usage of sex gradually disappeared from these voices.After a few generations, the meaning of sex was given a new word, and this word was transferred to a new job, and thus a large number of basic words appeared, which belonged to sex at first, and then lost their meaning of sex.If this theory holds true, at least it becomes possible for us to use it to understand dreams.Originally, the dream retains part of the most primitive situation, so there are so many sexual symbols in the dream, we can also understand why weapons and tools are symbols of men, and why wood represents women.Therefore, the symbolic relationship can be regarded as the synonymous meaning of the ancient word. For example, the symbol of the genitals in today's dreams was once in ancient times the thing with the same name as the genitals.

Further, all the parallels with dream symbolism enable you to understand why psychoanalysis is of general interest, while psychology and psychiatry are not; Folklore is closely related to many other disciplines, such as ethnopsychology and religion, and its findings provide valuable insights into these disciplines.You should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysts have written a book with the sole purpose of strengthening the relations between these disciplines. The first edition of 1912, The Object of First Love, is what I call such a book, edited by Sachs and Ranke.Giving more than receiving is characteristic of psychoanalysis in relation to other disciplines.Although all the major achievements of psychoanalysis have gained a lot from the confirmation of other disciplines; however, in general, psychoanalysis has provided other sciences with effective research methods and viewpoints.It is the study of the spiritual life of individual human beings by psychoanalysis that enables us to unravel many of the mysteries of our lives, or at least give hope to the solution of these problems.

And how those hypothetical so-called "basic language" or psychosis with "basic language" as the main feature will be understood in a deeper way, I haven't mentioned yet.And if you do not understand this, you cannot grasp the true meaning of the whole matter.Neurological data can be obtained from the symptoms and expressions of neurotic patients, and psychoanalysis is to interpret and treat these data.

Finally, let's go back to the beginning and repeat the old saying.We said before that dream analysis is difficult even when the dreamer does not have the role of dream inspection, because we have to translate the symbols of dreams in the language of life.So far it has been seen that symbolism is a further independent element of dream-disguise, which exists side by side with censorship.It is obvious that the censorship is very fond of symbols, since both have the same purpose, and both will make dreams strange and difficult to understand.

We will soon find out whether our further investigation of dreams will reveal other factors which contribute to the camouflage of dreams.And before ending the symbolism of dreams, it is necessary to mention again the oddity that mythology, religion, art, and language undoubtedly have many symbols, yet the symbolism of dreams has repeatedly provoked violent protests from educated people.Is this not due to the relation of dream symbols to sex?

(End of this chapter)