a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

should make the discovery that your chambermaid understands Sanskrit,
although you know she was born in a Bohemian village and never learned the
language. It is not easy to harmonize this fact with our psychological views.
We can only say that the dreamer's knowledge of symbolism is unconscious,
that it is a part of his unconscious mental life. We make no progress with this
assumption. Until now it was only necessary to admit of unconscious
impulses, those about which one knew nothing, either for a period of time or
at all times. But now we deal with something more; indeed, with unknown
knowledge, with thought relationships, comparisons between unlike objects
which lead to this, that one constant may be substituted for another. These
comparisons are not made anew each time, but they lie ready, they are
complete for all time. That is to be concluded from the fact of their agreement
in different persons, agreement despite differences in language.
But whence comes the knowledge of these symbol-relationships? The usages
of language cover only a small part of them. The dreamer is for the most part
unacquainted with the numerous parallels from other sources; we ourselves
must first laboriously gather them together.
Secondly, these symbolic representations are peculiar neither to the dreamer
nor to the dream work by means of which they become expressed. We have
learned that mythology and fairy-tales make use of the same symbolism, as
well as do the people in their sayings and songs, the ordinary language of
every day, and poetic phantasy. The field of symbolism is an extraordinarily
large one, and dream symbolism is but a small part thereof. It is not even
expedient to approach the whole problem from the dream side. Many of the
symbols that are used in other places do not occur in the dream at all, or at
best only very seldom. Many of the dream symbols are to be found in other
fields only very rarely, as you have seen. One gets the impression that he is
here confronted with an ancient but no longer existent method of expression,
of which various phases, however, continue in different fields, one here, one
there, a third, perhaps in a slightly altered form, in several fields. I am
reminded of the phantasy of an interesting mental defective, who had
imagined a fundamental language, of which all these symbolic representations
were the remains.
144