out of a Spring in the forest; in this spring were two trouts, one black and one white. She must swallow the white trout, but only that one and not the black one.
In spite of every care the two fish both slipped into the queen's mouth. After nine months she gave birth to a very beautiful girl and to a black cat.
The black cat, at first chased away, is then the assistant of the princess against a giant with whom she does not want to go and who thereupon cuts off her legs (abasia dream-motive?) and wishes to kill her. She heals her legs with the grass of life and kills the giant. At the marriage of the princess, Kisa again becomes a beautiful princess. A wicked stepmother has changed her and the princess into trout, she, however, from especial hate, she makes a cat at her new birth, which only after laying at the floor of the bridal bed of the princess on the wedding night, can be delivered.
Besides the sexual transposition and the motive of reincarnation the tale is full of sexual, dream-like symbolisms.
In a fairy story of Straparola (cited from Rittershaus, p. 76) a marchioness gives birth to a daughter and also an adder at the same time. In an analogous Norwegian tale (cited from Rittershaus, p. 76) a childless queen bathes one evening, on the advice of an old beggar woman, and sets the bath water under her bed.
In the morning two flowers have grown in it, one ugly and the other beautiful. As the flowers taste so good to her the queen eats them both contrary to the advice of the old woman. Then she bears two daughters, the first a true monster riding on a goat and then a lovely little girl, etc.
The flowers, which stand here in the place of the fishes, are also employed as male sexual symbols in pathology. Namely flower stems and lily stalks play this role in the delusions or dreams of dementia præcox as shown by association experiments. May not the lilies which Mary, Joseph and the Angel of the Annunciation often carry have a similar meaning instead of that usually accepted?
The bath water under the bed is throughout a sexual component of the dream-like fairy story.
The Freudian upward transposition is given in the eating of the flowers.
