Just as the name Sappho has not been selected by the poet without reference to a Lesbian custom, so the elements of the dream in which persons act above and below, point to fancies of a sexual nature with which the dreamer is occupied and which as suppressed cravings are not without connection with his neurosis. Dream interpretation itself does not show that these are fancies and not recollections of actual happenings; it only furnishes us with a set of thoughts and leaves us to determine their value as realities. Real and fantastic occurrences at first appear here as of equal value—and not only here but also in the creation of more important psychic structures than dreams. Much company, as we already know, signifies a secret. The brother is none other than a representative, drawn into the childhood scene by “fancying backwards,” of all of the later rivals for the woman. Through the agency of an experience which is indifferent in itself, the episode with the gentleman who scolds about the King of Italy again refers to the intrusion of people of low rank into aristocratic society. It is as though the warning which Daudet gives to youth is to be supplemented by a similar warning applicable to the suckling child.[[DJ]]
In order that we may have at our disposal a third example for the study of condensation in dream formation, I shall cite 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 ugly but high-minded one. The aristocrat who seduces the little goose, is opposed to the working man who feels aristocratic, and behaves accordingly. It is impossible to tell character from people’s looks. Who could tell from her looks that she is tormented by sensual desires?
In the same year in which the little girl started her butterfly collection, the region in which they were staying suffered much from a pest of June bugs. The children made havoc among the bugs, and crushed them cruelly. At that time she saw a person who tore the wings off the June bugs and ate them. She herself had been born in June and also married in June. Three days after the wedding she wrote a letter home, telling how happy she was. But she was by no means happy.
During the evening before the dream she had rummaged among her old letters and had read various ones, comical and serious, to her family—an extremely ridiculous letter from a piano-teacher who had paid her attention when she was a girl, as well as one from an aristocratic admirer.[[DK]]
She blames herself because a bad book by de Maupassant had fallen into the hands of one of her daughters.[[DL]] The arsenic which her little girl asks for recalls the arsenic pills which restored the power of youth to the Duc de Mora in Nabab.
“Set at liberty” recalls to her a passage from the Magic Flute:
“I cannot compel you to love,