I am worried because he alone wants to stop them up.

When I ask him why it worried him, he answered, "Because father took all that trouble alone. I could help him. That is not a suitable task for so great an artist." He rationalizes his dream - to use the fitting expression of Jones. But we prefer to take the dream literally. The young man is an Alexander who is worried because Philip leaves him nothing to conquer. All the women in the house worship the father: the mother, the aunt, the French teacher, the secretary. He suspects the father of relations grossly sexual - perhaps justifiedly. The holes in the walls are to be taken in KleinpauTs literal sense.

We began with the general neutral symbolisms the sheafs in the field 9 and already we find ourselves in the midst of erotic symbolism. That is inevitable in the case of dream interpretation. Whoever takes up the subject must be prepared to meet the issue.

I may mention here another forerunner of Freud's, - the well-known investigator of dreams, Scherner,10 who has conceived the hypothesis that all dreams are generated by bodily sensations. That theory has proven altogether untenable. Nevertheless its founder formulated a fairly correct view of sexual symbolism. Some details may appear ridiculous. But facts lose none of their significance merely because they seem ridiculous.

Regarding sexual symbolism Scherner writes:

"Sexual excitation is symbolized by representations of the erect organ itself or by pictures and phantasy actions which aroused desire for sexual gratification. But here, too, we meet the masked formulations as preserved by the plastic art of the phantasy. For instance, one finds on the street while on the way to a particular spot, the stem of a clarinet, near by, the similar portion of a pipe, a penny whistle, or a piece of fur. (The stem of clarinet or whistle represents unmistakably the form of the male organ, the stem-like configuration of the found object corresponding to the similar form of the external male sexual organ; but the found objects are always double, on account of the character of the excitation of the double organ of vision, which is primarily involved in the act of finding the respective objects. Finally the fur piece in question stands for the pubic hairs, just as the brush stands for eyebrows and eyelashes, instead of the symbolically more fitting bush; finding the three pictures together means the conjunction of the objects represented through them.) Or as the result of bladder stimuli one finds a curiously crumpled up short stem or cigarette holder which portrays the collapse of the whole male external apparatus. More clearly delineated appears to be the symbolism denoting states of sexual tension, such as usually follow urinary stimuli, the clearer symbolic expression corresponding to the sharper degree of stimulation. For instance, one sees through a clump of trees under which one is standing a near-by tower of great height, and one wonders that the highest peak of the familiar tower (an object known in reality) is crumpled up, and observing the round cupola below, the impression is gained that a second peak (nothing corresponding to reality) must have flattened out down there; while thus watching attentively, the dreamer sees himself standing under women, or he sees them step over him. The high tower represents the tension of the active organ, its peak seems crumpled or flattened, corresponding to the uppermost portion of the sexual apparatus; phantasy seeks forcefully to find two towers where only one exists in reality, in order thus to express the parity of the lower organ; it suggests the vision of a high tower through the undergrowth, because the active organ in erection stands forth in the midst of the surrounding pubic hair (underbrush). Tower, peak, double ball, cupola, underbrush, together express a composite thought, because phantasy fuses all pictures in one. . . . (Das Leben des Traumes, p. 197.)

9Joseph's dream may also lend itself to another, - an erotic interpretation. Dreams of "greatness" and the wish for extraordinary potence often go hand in hand. Paranoiacs with delusions of grandeur often claim they have a thousand wives, a thousand sons, etc.

10Das Leben des Traumes (Berlin, Heinrich Schindler, 1861).

The next dream is that of an unmarried thirty-year-old woman: