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

dream work with which you are familiar. "He goes on living since then,"
disguises itself with the wish to have him alive again as well as with the
promise of the dentist that the tooth will be preserved. A very subtle phrase,
however, is the following: "The dreamer does everything to prevent him (the
father) from noticing the fact," a phrase calculated to lead us to conclude that
he is dead. Yet the only meaningful conclusion is again drawn from the
onanism complex, where it is a matter of course for the young man to do
everything in order to hide his sex life from his father. Remember, in
conclusion, that we were constantly forced to interpret the so-called toothache
dreams as dreams dealing with the subject of onanism and the
punishment that is feared.
You now see how this incomprehensible dream came into being, by the
creation of a remarkable and misleading condensation, by the fact that all the
ideas emerge from the midst of the latent thought process, and by the
creation of ambiguous substitute formations for the most hidden and, at the
time, most remote of these thoughts.
4. We have tried repeatedly to understand those prosaic and banal dreams
which have nothing foolish or repulsive about them, but which cause us to
ask: "Why do we dream such unimportant stuff?" So I shall give you a new
example of this kind, three dreams belonging together, all of which were
dreamed in the same night by a young woman.
(a). "She it going through the hall of her house and strikes her head against
the low-hanging chandelier, so that her head bleeds."
She has no reminiscence to contribute, nothing that really happened. The
information she gives leads in quite another direction. "You know how badly
my hair is falling out. Mother said to me yesterday, 'My child, if it goes on like
this, you will have a head like the cheek of a buttock.'" Thus the head here
stands for the other part of the body. We can understand the chandelier
symbolically without other help; all objects that can be lengthened are
symbols of the male organ. Thus the dream deals with a bleeding at the lower
end of the body, which results from its collision with the male organ. This
might still be ambiguous; her further associations show that it has to do with
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