Page:WishfulfillmentAndSymbolism.djvu/19

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
WISH STRUCTURES AND THEIR FORMS
9

O-Toyo to become a nun in a little, wee temple with a little altar and small pictures of Buddha so that she would not be among strangers. She agreed gladly and a little temple with all its little parts was built for her in the court of the former temple of Armida. She made garments on a little loom that were much too small for use, but which were bought by certain store keepers who knew her story.

Her greatest joy is the society of children who pass most of their time with her. The children play with her as their equal and she is like a sister to the small ones. And after her death they set up a wee little grave stone.

The tendency to identification with the wish object, which reaches, in this story, a very intensive grade of the wish-fulfilling activities, has been observed by others in the psychoses, namely dementia præcox.

I take the following example from Jung: a woman in the climacterium suffered a condition in which she felt her arms and legs becoming always smaller; she wished to be carried in the arms and felt how she would let herself go. Such patients also coin expressions—"I am" instead of "I would like to have" with relation to the wish object. Compare Jung,[1] "I am the main key," "I am the crown," etc., instead of "the main key belongs to me," etc.

Bleuler, Jung and the author have published in recent times a great number of examples of wish dreams, wish deliria, and permanent symptoms, namely ideas of grandeur in the psychoses, which are conceived as pathological compensation products of unfulfilled and unfulfillable wishes.

The ideas of grandeur of a patient who is Queen Regent, God of Love Semele, Mary, Venus, Ida von Toggenburg, Princess Thorn-Rose, Cinderella, Bundesgerichtsdame Helvetia, von Jung Elfenlieb, Simmenthaler Rassenkalb and many other titles of high social position or great fertility, as well as the mistakes of the persons united in her and of her desired husband Zeus, Helveticus, Märchenprinz, Muneli von Steiermark (a blue ribbon bull), etc., suggest not only the relationship of these wish titles with the wish structure of the fairy tale but also the deeper understanding of

  1. Jung, "Ueber die Psychologie der Dementia praecox," Halle a. S., C. Marhold, 1907. See Monograph Series, No. 3, for translation.