ABSTRACT
Material gained in the way from dreams, although most interesting and illuminating to the psychologist, has unfortunately, at least at the time when it first emerges, practically no therapeutic effect upon the patient. It is straight from the horse’s mouth all right, and in a sense the patient may have learned the horse’s language, but the bridge between this unconscious-level horse and his thinking mind, his ego, is not complete. Nevertheless, the analyst, and in some instances (though these are rare) the patient, may realize that what previously seemed an insoluble riddle now gives at least an inkling that it is not insoluble at all. He himself has revealed it as an unconscious phantasy, having its inception in earliest infancy of the preposterous conviction that within the woman’s body (originally mother’s) there lurks a most horrible monster, a monster endowed with all the savage aggression of the biting stage of libidinal (and racial) development.
