Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/60

 52 F. P. MULLER

the last to come out was Fritz'. (He meant himself, he used the childish method of expression in giving his Christian name instead of employing the pronoun. Fritz is not his actual name). He said that he had found his deHrium and the dreams following it very pleasant. 1 finally obtained the following details from him.

In his delirium he was promoted to company sergeant-major, and marched at the head of his company of •Schutterij' (an old Dutch civil guard). He conducted the music as band-master. He was accompanied to his grave in Utrecht with music. He also visited his mother's grave there. He saw the coffin into which he was to go, and felt how the sexton lowered him in the coffin into the grave, and how sand was then thrown on the coffin. Then his body putrified, and a large hole came in his breast. There was ' sand between his skin and flesh. He had pain in his sexual organs, and sound came from his glans penis. The hole in his breast now became smaller until nothing remained of it but a little animal like an earth-worm. He was now no longer aHve. Then he was with his sisters and brodiers and many others as semen in his father's sexual organs. It was so arranged that none of the semen was lost. The door moved round and round. (In connection with this an object which decorated the wall opposite the patient played a part). First his brothers were born, he who was the youngest child was hurled out last. He went into the chamber-pot as a little bit of phlegm. Also his two little sons (whom he actually has) were bom from his own semen.

I was not able to discover which of these events the patient experienced in his delirium and which in his dreams. However, this is immaterial as both delusion and dream are products of the imagination. The chief fact is that the patient has created a phantasy and its principal theme, his death and re-birth as a spermatozoon in his father's body, is represented quite undisguised. Like so many things ab-eady discovered by analysis that have later been corro- borated by their occasional undisguised appearance in dreams and delusions, so here too an undistorted phantasy of the father's body has shown that a human being is actually able to long to be back again to his existence as a spermatozoon.

Many details, however, require analysis even in a phantasy so transparent as the present one, but as a detailed investigation was not undertaken with this patient I only feel justified in expressing a few suppositions.

n