ABSTRACT
As far as I know there has been nothing of any practical value written in psycho-analytic literature about the significance of the spider as a symbol, although every analyst must have come across this symbol in the dreams of patients. Freud has once said that a spider represents one aspect of the mother, namely, the angry mother of whom the child is afraid. But it is not clear why it should be precisely the spider that stands for this side of the mother. One might say that it is because spiders catch and kill small animals, and small animals often represent children in dreams. But there are numbers of other creatures who prey on smaller, defenceless ones; why, then, should the spider be singled out to symbolize the wicked mother? The spider is one of those dream symbols whose meaning we know—at least in one aspect—without knowing the reason why it has that meaning.
