which on the other hand showed a great similarity with the external formation of the female genitals; his own person as a small man, that entered under this wreathed portal, is a very ingenious dramatization of masculinity. The festive green was co-determined by the sight of the little daughter of another acquaintance whom he had visited on the same day, who had smeared her mouth, in eating, with greens and so looked very funny.
These details suggest how many single elements, all springing from the same ideational sphere, but dispersed, are brought together in the structure of the symbolic dream picture.
The fairy tale also, since it appears as a wish-fulfilling structure, may also often gather its material from widely separate sources, from other fairy tales, from myths, which in their essentials have a different content, in order to arrange the parts into a new whole, with a new content.
"Freud maintains, that our psyche has the tendency to so work over the world picture that it corresponds to our wishes and efforts. This tendency comes to light unhindered in all situations where thoughts, as moulded by external circumstances, are disturbed in their logical relations to reality. That is the case in the dream, then, however, also in all psychic activities of waking, which are not guided by attention."
Proceeding from this position Bleuler[1] shows the occurrence of Freud's mechanisms in the different psychoses.
In order now to show the fairy tale in its relationship with other wish structures I give the following example.
We take Bleuler's own example in his last cited work, which shows the proneness of poetic phantasy to roam into the wish territory.
The poet, whose longings reality can not still, creates for himself, quite unconsciously, in phantasy, what life has denied to him. Many of the most beautiful love songs have been written by those who were unhappy in love. Gottfried Keller had no luck precisely with those women who corresponded to his high ideals; therefore he had the need to commit "the sweetest of poetic sins, to invent lovely women such as are not found on this sad earth." This busying himself with pictures of women is for him the substitute
- ↑ Bleuler, "Freudsche Mechanismen in der Symptomatologie von Psychosen," Psychiatr.-neurol. Wochenschrift, 1906, No. 35 and 36.
