Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/289

Rh the partial analysis of another dream for which I am indebted to an elderly lady who is being psychoanalytically treated. In harmony with the condition of severe anxiety from which the patient suffered, her dreams contained a great abundance of sexual thought material, the discovery of which astonished as well as frightened her. Since I cannot carry the interpretation of the dream to completion, the material seems to fall apart into several groups without apparent connection.

III. Content of the dream: ''She remembers that she has two June bugs in a box, which she must set at liberty, for otherwise they will suffocate. She opens the box, and the bugs are quite exhausted; one of them flies out of the window, but the other is crushed on the casement while she is shutting the window, as some one or other requests her to do (expressions of disgust).''

Analysis: Her husband is away travelling, and her fourteen-year-old daughter is sleeping in the bed next to her. In the evening the little one calls her attention to the fact that a moth has fallen into her glass of water; but she neglects to take it out, and feels sorry for the poor little creature in the morning. A story which she had read in the evening told of boys throwing a cat into boiling water, and the twitchings of the animal were described. These are the occasions for the dream, both of which are indifferent in themselves. She is further occupied with the subject of cruelty to animals. Years before, while they were spending the summer at a certain place, her daughter was very cruel to animals. She started a butterfly collection, and asked her for arsenic with which to kill the butterflies. Once it happened that a moth flew about the room for a long time with a needle through its body; on another occasion she found that some moths which had been kept for metamorphosis had died of starvation. The same child while still at a tender age was in the habit of pulling out the wings of beetles and butterflies; now she would shrink in horror from these cruel actions, for she has grown very kind.

Her mind is occupied with this contrast. It recalls another contrast, the one between appearance and disposition, as it is described in Adam Bede by George Eliot. There a beautiful but vain and quite stupid girl is placed side by side with an