Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/190

172 ''fashion. He asks, "What business are the Turkish (drawings, strips of cloth...) of yours? But we then become quite friendly with each other.''

In the analysis of this dream there occurs to me quite unexpectedly the novel which I read, that is to say, which I began with the end of the first volume, when I was perhaps thirteen years old. I have never known the name of the novel or of its author, but the conclusion remains vividly in my memory. The hero succumbs to insanity, and continually calls the names of the three women that have signified the greatest good and ill fortune for him during life. Pélagie is one of these names. I still do not know what to make of this name in the analysis. À propos of the three women there now come to the surface the three Parcæ who spin the fate of man, and I know that one of the three women, the hostess in the dream, is the mother who gives life, and who, moreover, as in my case, gives the first nourishment to the living creature. Love and hunger meet at the mother's breast. A young man—so runs an anecdote—who became a great admirer of womanly beauty, once when the conversation turned upon a beautiful wet nurse who had nourished him as a child, expressed himself to the effect that he was sorry that he had not taken better advantage of his opportunity at the time. I am in the habit of using the anecdote to illustrate the factor of subsequence in the mechanism of psychoneuroses.... One of the Parecæ, then, is rubbing the palms of her hands together as though she were making dumplings. A strange occupation for one of the Fates, which is urgently in need of an explanation! This is now found in another and earlier childhood memory. When I was six years old, and was receiving my first instructions from my mother, I was asked to believe that we are made of earth, and that therefore we must return to earth. But this did not suit me, and I doubted her teaching. Thereupon my mother rubbed the palms of her hands together—just as in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them—and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis which were thus rubbed off as a proof that it is earth of which we are made. My astonishment at this demonstration ad oculos was without limit, and I acquiesced in the idea which I was later to hear expressed in words: "Thou owest nature a