These lessons stood before his eyes already when he was a mere boy. They served as terrible warnings: beware of woman!
During the next days his fear of woman is the chief theme of his associations. His father’s and his uncle’s fate stand before him as a perpetual warning. Already as a small child he had absorbed very clearly the thought: one must beware of women! His mother did everything to fix permanently this fear in his mind.
But every fear is the fear of self. This fear of women must have a deeper determinant. The deeper relations are indicated by the following dream:
I am on the street and it is towards evening. The roadbed in front of me is badly torn up. A wagon drives by; it rolls past at dusk and the farther end of the street is already plunged in darkness. Horse and driver will not be able to see that the road is torn. A powerful bear jumps up to warn the horse, the driver draws tight his reins, the animal turns around at the same time holding his head anxiously away from the torn pavement until he finally reaches again the straight road. Before the wagon disappears into the night the powerful bear jumps once more at it.
I am tremendously roused to think that such wild animals are sent out as warning. There might be small children in the wagon who would be frightened to death.
Every statement in this dream is a psychic disclosure. The dream records his life’s journey. A portion of the street is torn and impassable. He can only go through the homosexual pathway. The heterosexual is so broken up as to be unusable. It is dark and he might easily meet with disaster in his life’s journey over this point. The darkness symbolizes the forgetting of the aboriginal determinants; the driver is consciousness, the horses are the instincts.
A bear warns him of the dangers of the torn-up road. He is angered at this form of warning. The reference to small children shows that the warnings date back to childhood, when he was actually threatened with a bear.
“There may be small children in the wagon who would be frightened to death,” records the dream. As a child he has heard repeatedly about his uncle’s suicide, because of the wife’s faithlessness. In the depths of his soul this story could not but act as a perpetual warning against woman. The story of his father’s duel, too, and the latter’s scar on the forehead influenced his childhood and filled him with fear of woman.[[41]] It made him resolve to submit to no woman. And is not hatred the surest self-defence against the dangers of love?
Who or what is the mysterious bear in the dreams? Naturally,—like every figure in the dream, it is the dreamer himself. There is the power of a wild beast in his breast. We recall that one of his dreams was staged at Schönbrunn, the Zoölogical Garden of Vienna, where the wild beasts may be seen. We recall Shylock, the pound of flesh, and the various sadistic determinants of his neurosis.
We now approach the kernel of his homosexual neurosis which turns out to consist of a powerful protective wall against his criminal self. His attitude towards woman is characterized by a tremendous hatred. He is a Lustmörder, the wild bear who attacks women, who strangles them and would drink their blood. The bear represents his own image and a terrible warning.