ABSTRACT
Freud’s railroad phobia blinded him to train symbols in Dora’s dreams. At thirteen when Herr K molested her, she was “entirely and completely hysterical” which her disgust with his kiss proved. Freud decided the flood of hysteria in Vienna wasn’t caused by molestation but seduction as the wish of the child—but he traces Dora’s recurrent chest pressure to Herr K’s assault, upward displacement of the memory of his erect penis. The crux of the case is Freud’s neglect of her mother. Years later, he realized he’d failed to see the bedrock, Dora’s “gynaecophilic” love for Frau K: The thick woods in her dream wereFrau K’s pubic hair. Freud suffered from a phobia of trains, which he cured by self analysis. But he failed to connect Bahnhof, in her dream, train station, to sexuality. Melanie Klein took Freud literally—the unconscious thinks in symbols: To deal with object relationships, people cope by symbols. Hamlet fits her “manic defense” and “defensive disintegration.” Dream work does “secondary revision” to transform dream thoughts to visuals. Symbolization of wishes by serial images is what poets and artists do. Symbols are a property of the unconscious, already there in how it thinks. Klein thought symbols are the basis of all talents, how we tame life and death. Infantile rage at the frustrating “bad breast” and guilt toward “the good breast” promote symbolization, while splitting them preserves the good object in memory.
