Page:The theory of psychoanalysis (IA theoryofpsychoan00jungiala).pdf/138

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It would be difficult to pretend here that this second example, which accentuates the meaning of the first, has been suggested by the explanation given. The fact that the little girl brought up the story of little Snow-White, as another example of the senselessness of fairy-tales, proves that she did not understand her identification with little Snow-White and the Sleeping Beauty. Therefore we may expect that little Snow-White arose from the same unconscious sources as the Sleeping Beauty, that is, a complex consisting of the expectation of coming events, which are altogether comparable with the deliverance of the earth from the prison of winter and its fertilization through the sunbeams of spring.

As may, perhaps, be known, the symbol of the bull has been given from time immemorial to the fertile spring sun, as the bull embodies the mightiest procreative power. Although without further consideration, it is not easy to find any relation between the insight indirectly gained and the dream, we will hold to what we have found and proceed with the dream. The next part described by the little girl is receiving the doll in her apron. The first association given tells us that her attitude and the whole situation in the dream is like a picture very well known to her, representing a stork flying above a village; children are in the street, holding their aprons, looking up and shouting to him; the stork must bring them a little baby. The little patient adds the observation that several times she wished to have a little brother or sister herself. This material, given spontaneously by the child, stands in a clear and valuable relationship to the motive of the myths. We notice here that the dream is indeed concerned with the problem of the awakening instinct of generation. Nothing of this has been said to the little girl. After a little pause, she brings, abruptly, this association: "Once, when I was five years old, I thought I was in the street and that a bicyclist passed over my stomach." This highly improbable story proved to be, as it might be expected, a phantasy, which had become a paramnesia. Nothing of this kind had ever happened, but we came to know that at school the little girls lay cross-wise over each other's bodies, and trampled with their legs.

Whoever has read the analyses of children published by Freud and myself will observe the same "leit-motif" of tramp-