Analysis.  This dream belongs to a type of patient which is not favorable from a therapeutic point of view.  They follow in the analysis without offering any resistances whatever up to a certain point, but from that point on they remain almost inaccessible.  This dream he almost analyzed himself.  “The Rotunda,” he said, “is my genital, the captive balloon in front is my penis, about the weakness of which I have worried.”  We must, however, interpret in greater detail; the Rotunda is the buttock which is regularly associated by the child with the genital, the smaller front structure is the scrotum.  In the dream his father asks him what this is all for—­that is, he asks him about the purpose and arrangement of the genitals.  It is quite evident that this state of affairs should be turned around, and that he should be the questioner.  As such a questioning on the side of the father has never taken place in reality, we must conceive the dream thought as a wish, or take it conditionally, as follows:  “If I had only asked my father for sexual enlightenment.”  The continuation of this thought we shall soon find in another place.

The court in which the tin sheet is spread out is not to be conceived symbolically in the first instance, but originates from his father’s place of business.  For discretionary reasons I have inserted the tin for another material in which the father deals, without, however, changing anything in the verbal expression of the dream.  The dreamer had entered his father’s business, and had taken a terrible dislike to the questionable practices upon which profit mainly depends.  Hence the continuation of the above dream thought ("if I had only asked him”) would be:  “He would have deceived me just as he does his customers.”  For the pulling off, which serves to represent commercial dishonesty, the dreamer himself gives a second explanation—­namely, onanism.  This is not only entirely familiar to us, but agrees very well with the fact that the secrecy of onanism is expressed by its opposite ("Why one can do it quite openly").  It, moreover, agrees entirely with our expectations that the onanistic activity is again put off on the father, just as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream.  The shaft he at once interprets as the vagina by referring to the soft upholstering of the walls.  That the act of coition in the vagina is described as a going down instead of in the usual way as a going up, I have also found true in other instances[2].

The details that at the end of the first shaft there is a longer platform and then a new shaft, he himself explains biographically.  He had for some time consorted with women sexually, but had then given it up because of inhibitions and now hopes to be able to take it up again with the aid of the treatment.  The dream, however, becomes indistinct toward the end, and to the experienced interpreter it becomes evident that in the second scene of the dream the influence of another subject has begun to assert itself; in this his father’s business and his dishonest practices signify the first vagina represented as a shaft so that one might think of a reference to the mother.