"Example 9. I lost the thread in a train of thought. I make an effort to find it again, but I have to recognize that the point of departure has completely escaped me.

"Symbol. Part of a form of type, the last lines of which have fallen out."

In view of the part played by witticisms, puns, quotations, songs, and proverbs in the intellectual life of educated persons, it would be entirely in accordance with our expectations to find disguises of this sort used with extreme frequency in the representation of the dream-thoughts. Only in the case of a few types of material has a generally valid dream-symbolism established itself on the basis of generally known allusions and verbal equivalents. A good part of this symbolism, however, is common to the psychoneuroses, legends, and popular usages as well as to dreams.

In fact, if we look more closely into the matter, we must recognize that in employing this kind of substitution the dream- work is doing nothing at all original. For the achievement of its purpose, which in this case is representation without interference from the censorship, it simply follows the paths which it finds already marked out in unconscious thinking, and gives the preference to those transformations of the repressed material which are permitted to become conscious also in the form of witticisms and allusions, and with which all the phantasies of neurotics are replete. Here we suddenly begin to understand the dream- interpretations of Scherner, whose essential correctness I have vindicated elsewhere. The preoccupation of the imagination with one's own body is by no means peculiar to or characteristic of the dream alone. My analyses have shown me that it is constantly found in the unconscious thinking of neurotics, and may be traced back to sexual curiosity, whose object, in the adolescent youth or maiden, is the genitals of the opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But, as Scherner and Volkelt very truly insist, the house does not constitute the only group of ideas which is employed for the symbolization of the body, either in dreams or in the unconscious phantasies of neurosis. To be sure, I know patients who have steadily adhered to an architectural symbolism for the body and the genitals (sexual interest, of course, extends far beyond the region of the external genital organs)- patients for whom posts and pillars signify legs (as in the Song of Songs), to whom every door suggests a bodily aperture (hole), and every water-pipe the urinary system, and so on. But the groups of ideas appertaining to plant-life. or to the kitchen, are just as often chosen to conceal sexual images; * in respect of the former everyday language, the sediment of imaginative comparisons dating from the remotest times, has abundantly paved the way (the vineyard of the Lord, the seed of Abraham, the garden of the maiden in the Song of Songs). The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be thought or dreamed of in apparently innocent allusions to culinary operations, and the symptoms of hysteria will become absolutely unintelligible if we forget that sexual symbolism may conceal itself behind the most commonplace and inconspicuous matters as its safest hiding-place. That some neurotic children cannot look at blood and raw meat, that they vomit at the sight of eggs and macaroni, and that the dread of snakes, which is natural to mankind, is monstrously exaggerated in neurotics- all this has a definite sexual meaning. Wherever the neurosis employs a disguise of this sort, it treads the paths once trodden by the whole of humanity in the early stages of civilization- paths to whose thinly veiled existence our idiomatic expressions, proverbs, superstitions, and customs testify to this day.

* A mass of corroborative material may be found in the three supplementary volumes of Edward Fuchs's Illustrierte Sittengeschichte; privately printed by A. Lange, Munich.

I here insert the promised flower-dream of a female patient, in which I shall print in Roman type everything which is to be sexually interpreted. This beautiful dream lost all its charm for the dreamer once it had been interpreted.

(a) Preliminary dream: She goes to the two maids in the kitchen and scolds them for taking so long to prepare a little bite of food. She also sees a very large number of heavy kitchen utensils in the kitchen, heaped into piles and turned upside down in order to drain. Later addition: The two maids go to fetch water, and have, as it were, to climb into a river which reaches up to the house or into the courtyard. *