ABSTRACT
In founding psychoanalysis Freud used free association rather than symbols in interpreting dreams. During his close involvement with Jung, however, he added many examples of dream symbols to the 1909 and 1911 edition of his book The Interpretation of Dreams. By the time its 1914 edition was published, he had accumulated so many examples of dream symbols he devoted a whole new section of the book to them. Armed with this increasing willingness to accord symbols an important place in psychoanalysis, Freud reinterpreted Breuer’s account of his patient’s hysterically paralysed arm and its psychologically traumatic cause. To this Freud added attention to what has been described as schizophrenic use of concrete symbols in reducing them to what they symbolize. Pride of place, however, was accorded by Freud to symbols of male sexuality, specifically to symbols of the penis. After all, he insisted, the penis is the ‘more striking and for both sexes the more interesting component of the genitals’.
