Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/32

 188 AUGUST STARCKE

cheese-store the bird is changed into a walking-stick. Finally, the cheese-store is my spare room where I concealed my hoarded cheese during the war.

spare room — only for a short time— thoughts about life and deaUi cheese-store going and coming back — my mother::

Mamma with clotted milk

For reasons that can be understood and in order not to distract the attention too much, I refrain from amplifying a number of trains of thought; the details that are important for this subject are sufficiently represented in what I have said to admit of con- clusions. The dream portrays a part of my work of sorrow. It concerns the undoing of losses felt to be castration; at the same time the castration is carried through by the wish-capacity of the secondary meanings of its symbols which express the removal of rivals and the representation of incest.

I shall now restrict myself to the consideration of the oral- erotic significance of the castration complex.

The dream puts me back in the suckling period, that paradise where feelings exist and thoughts are scarcely known. The dream reflects the joy ■ at possession of the source of life and the dis- appointment when my mother's mastitis made suckliqg difficult or impossible.

A second scene can be reconstructed; namely, my witnessing the way in which my little brother (two and a quarter years younger than myself) was suckled by my mother. This situation must have made a very great impression upon me, seeing that all its elements, my mother, her nipple, my little brother and myself, have become con- densed into a unity, the elements of which can represent each other symbolically. (The beautiful bird symbolises all the elements that are lacking in me). In this powerful sensation the older feelings of disappointment are fused with that of jealousy when the new-comer receives what has been taken from me. At the same time I identify myself with him, and thus, through him, enjoy my lost happiness. When I lose my brother the dream phantasy seizes upon the same means of consolation which had healed my first great loss (viz. that of the nipple).

If I arrange the memories and wishes that form the content of this dream according to the three levels, conscious, precon-

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