Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/327

Rh perversions. I avail myself as an example of the dream of a patient who was extraordinarily modest in waking life. He saw himself enveloped in an antique peplum, fastened in front with a safety-pin; suddenly the pin fell out, the white garment opened in front, and his nakedness was admired by a great crowd of men. Another, equally modest patient, told me this, which is an exhibition dream with somewhat altered circumstances: She was enveloped from top to toe in a white garment and bound to a pillar; around her stood foreign men, Turks or Arabs, who were haggling over her. The scene reminds one very strongly, apart from her enveloping garment, of an Oriental slave market; and, indeed, analysis brought out that this lady, now so modest, when a young girl had read the tales of the "Thousand and One Nights," and had seen herself in fancy in many of the situations of the highly colored love scenes of the Orient. At that time she imagined that slaves were exposed for sale not clothed, but naked. At present she repudiates the idea of nudity so strongly even in dreams that the suppressed wishes which bear upon this theme can only come into being when changed to their opposite. A third dreamer only allowed herself so much freedom in this respect as to move about in the midst of the other forms of her dream incompletely clad, in her stockings or with bare feet; and here analysis showed that as a child for a long time she enjoyed greatly removing her clothes and going without them, so that she was nicknamed "the naked Pancri" (her name was Anna, in Hungarian Fauna). Such exhibition dreams are so frequent that Freud was able to put them in the class of his "typical dreams," which recur with most people from time to time and have the same origin. They are based on the fact that there is living on in all of us an undying longing for the return of the paradisical conditions of childhood; this is the " golden age," that poets and Utopians project from the past into the future. It is a very common means of dream disguise to circumvent the censorship by presenting the wish not as such, but only in the form of an allusion in the dream. It would not be possible to understand, for example, why one of my patients dreamed so often of sexual scenes with a man by the name of Frater, who was quite indifferent to her, if we had not learned that in her youth her brother (frater) was her ideal and that in childhood the affection of the pair had often taken on a purely erotic form and manifested itself by relations that she now repressed as incestuous. This repression of forbidden things often enters into the dream, especially with persons who in consequence of incomplete satisfaction of the libido are inclined to the development of anxiety (Freud's anxiety-neurotics). Nocturnal anxiety can become so great