ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss the cause of the discomfort felt by people when somebody looks over their shoulder. Their approach is analogous to that of E. L. Freud when he delimited the category of "typical dreams." The authors assume that the relative uniformity of the conscious content of a "typical experience" in a "typical situation" is regularly bound up with and explained by a specific unconscious content, analogous to the connection between uniform manifest content and unconscious meaning in the "typical dream." There can be no objections to following the methodological philosophy by which the authors were guided if people remain alert to the possible discovery of unsuspected specific meanings in the material. The physical closeness of specific instances of somebody looking over one's shoulder may also evoke unconscious fantasies of a symbolic castration threat, and that there are some people who are particularly prone to experiencing the situation in this sense.
