Obvious resistance against the uncovering of the heterosexual tendencies.
One dream out of a large number deserves to be reproduced:
I go on a walk with mother. We are tender with one another and she tells me sweet words. I pluck wonderful anemones from a river and want to make a garland to crown my mother with it. But the petals fall off and only the empty green stems remain in my hand.
Any one familiar with the symbolism of plucking flowers (vid. my Dreams and Sex: The Language of Dreams, translated by Dr. James S. Van Teslaar, Badger, Gorham Press, Boston, 1922, Publisher) will readily recognize that this is a reference to an indulgence of an erotic nature. These love pats lead to empty stems. The love cannot come to blossoms or fruition.
He dwells on his relations with his mother. It is virtually a marriage without any erotic elements. He does not tolerate his mother’s tendernesses and he has asked her to refrain. There is now between them genuine shyness. Erotic matters are never so much as touched upon. Against his incestuous leanings he secures himself by the wall of an apparent aloofness. But they live together, they go out together, they share every enjoyment. His mother is a woman who has a grip on his whole life. And at bottom he is not angry because she has interfered with his other friendship. He understands her, that is, he sympathizes with her. That friendship was an attempt to free himself of the mother. But the mother instinctively did the right thing when she stepped in between her son and his friend. He does not at bottom care to be liberated from the slavery of his affection. He allows himself to be led about and to be treated as a child. He talks as if the love and the chain were disagreeable to him. Both trends—towards the mother and away from her—are active in his soul: bipolarity.
The treatment should improve his neurotic condition only but should not interfere with his attitude towards his mother. He dreams that he is well and that he tells his mother, now he is all well and they are going to be happier together than ever.
In connection with a dream another love affair comes to surface, dating some 16 years back. He courted a certain girl and sent her some poems. He thinks it was mere play, an attempt to “imagine” that he was also capable of loving girls. That is how he endeavors to dismiss lightly his heterosexual tendencies. But he thinks that the love poems were irrelevant. He also composed poems to his mother, when he was away from home for a short time:
“Du meines keuschen Herzens Allgebieterin,
Der ich mich neige in tiefer Demut ...”
“You, mistress of my chaste heart,