Page:WishfulfillmentAndSymbolism.djvu/55

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SYMBOLISM OF THE FAIRY TALE
45

neighbors called his attention to what was going on and he only feigned to drink this potion on the third evening, and at night, as he hears the moans and story of suffering of his true bride lying near him, his memory returns to him, he is delivered, and the witch's power is broken.

This tale, whose single motive in similar connection often recurs, shows us again, that the spell was cast on the hero by a hostile power, the reason being that he was to marry a rival of the heroine (i. e., in the dream of the dreamer) and was unwilling to do so. That compares well with the delusions of certain patients, that their loved one is misled by others and taken away from them. The sexual rivals in the fairy tales are usually sorcerers and witches, who at the conclusion, through the wish-fulfillment of the fairy-tale dream, are very severely punished.

We do quite the same at night in similar circumstances with our own rivals in dreams.

An acquaintance had it in mind to woo a maiden. In the house of his admired he met other young people one of whom he suspected might also have intentions. After an invitation he dreamt, among other things, that he killed his adversary, with whom in waking life he was pleasantly related socially. Finally he shoved him under the piano (he himself is a good piano player) so that only the head projected, namely in the spot where otherwise the pedals would be found. Now in playing he tread upon the head of the poor rival with his feet!

As is fully represented in Amor and Psyche the heroine also here in the fairy tale of the brown dog is sensible of the embraces of a man with whom she sleeps but who she cannot see.

One is thereby reminded in the liveliest manner of fully analogous hallucinatory perceptions which our patients frequently relate.

One such patient experienced this connubial embrace clearly every night at two o'clock and had to answer it. That this automatism had always to appear when the clock struck two, as the symbol for the existence of two loved ones, depends upon a similar comical association, as that which accounts for the association of lark (Löweneckerchen) and lion (Löwe).

That the dog appears here as a sexual symbol in condensation with witchcraft as a double being appears, after the former ex-