Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/30

 186 AUGUST STARCKE

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The cheese-store at once reminded me on waking of butter- making and dairy-work. At its entrance I lost the beautiful bird, and in its place I had a walking-stick. This is another elaboration of the Lohengrin motif engram-complexes from the suckling period form its original melody: faint memories of the joy of sucking at the mother's breast: the beautiful bird, somewhat more pink than the real avocet, that fed out of my mouth or my hand. If "or" is replaced by "and" one arrives at the situation of the sucking child who touches the breast, with mouth and little hands. The beautiful bird is not only my brother, but also my mother's breast. The entrance to the cheese-store represents a booking-office, this leads to distribution; it is a place where something is ser- ved out.

The feeling of disappointment over the loss of the beautiful bird at the entrance to the cheese-store is the reproduction of that first disappointment where the nipple turns out to be only a temporary possession of the ego, and disappears, leaving only the genitals and the thumb as a solace. Moreover, the Dutch name for the dream-bird "Kluit" (avocet) recalls a similar word that means testicle.

Why is the mother's breast represented as a cheese-store? "Adipocire" came as an association to the two cheeses on the board: they could represent the two round breasts. But why a cheese-store and not a dairy? Then suddenly there came to mind something my mother had often told me: the milk in her breasts had clotted and become cheese, according to the doctor's state- ment, and he had warded off a commencing mastitis by massage. The clotting ("klonteren", Dutch) again recalls the name of the bird. "Kluit" (Klumpen) is also a name for butter.

Black and white are the real colours of avocets. The asso- ciations to these colours are: the white breast and the dark areola, the ambivalence, white love and black hate. White and black are also the two colours of death. Death recalls Paul's awakening, and that other black and white bird the stone-chat, which Paul's father (F. van Eeden) has praised and described as the "bird with the decoy-tail". I find that associations to one dream ele- ment constantly lead me to a train of thought that had already occurred with another dream element, which expresses the ten- dency to do away with a separation, a tendency which had persisted during the work of interpretation in the morning. It also implies