In order to disguise her wish she had obviously selected a situation in which wishes of that sort are commonly suppressed—­a situation which is so filled with sorrow that love is not thought of.  And yet, it is very easily probable that even in the actual situation at the bier of the second, more dearly loved boy, which the dream copied faithfully, she had not been able to suppress her feelings of affection for the visitor whom she had missed for so long a time.

A different explanation was found in the case of a similar dream of another female patient, who was distinguished in her earlier years by her quick wit and her cheerful demeanors and who still showed these qualities at least in the notion, which occurred to her in the course of treatment.  In connection with a longer dream, it seemed to this lady that she saw her fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead before her in a box.  She was strongly inclined to convert this dream-image into an objection to the theory of wish-fulfillment, but herself suspected that the detail of the box must lead to a different conception of the dream.[3] In the course of the analysis it occurred to her that on the evening before, the conversation of the company had turned upon the English word “box,” and upon the numerous translations of it into German, such as box, theater box, chest, box on the ear, &c.  From other components of the same dream it is now possible to add that the lady had guessed the relationship between the English word “box” and the German Buechse, and had then been haunted by the memory that Buechse (as well as “box”) is used in vulgar speech to designate the female genital organ.  It was therefore possible, making a certain allowance for her notions on the subject of topographical anatomy, to assume that the child in the box signified a child in the womb of the mother.  At this stage of the explanation she no longer denied that the picture of the dream really corresponded to one of her wishes.  Like so many other young women, she was by no means happy when she became pregnant, and admitted to me more than once the wish that her child might die before its birth; in a fit of anger following a violent scene with her husband she had even struck her abdomen with her fists in order to hit the child within.  The dead child was, therefore, really the fulfillment of a wish, but a wish which had been put aside for fifteen years, and it is not surprising that the fulfillment of the wish was no longer recognized after so long an interval.  For there had been many changes meanwhile.

The group of dreams to which the two last mentioned belong, having as content the death of beloved relatives, will be considered again under the head of “Typical Dreams.”  I shall there be able to show by new examples that in spite of their undesirable content, all these dreams must be interpreted as wish-fulfillments.  For the following dream, which again was told me in order to deter me from a hasty generalization of the