Two dreams depicting response to a threat of castration

 A man in his thirties came to the session puzzled that his fiance with whom he is going to have a child  in a few months, and whom he loves and treats with great consideration and the latter behaves in the same manner towards him,  in his dream the relationship was anything but that. Instead of being welcoming, she was moving away from him. The more he tried to approach her, the further away she got. The scowl of disapproval on her face was frightening. Most noticeably she was completely silent throughout the dream which was surprisingly incongruent with her real life behavior.   

"If dreams are wish fulfillment why would I dream that my fiance is rejecting me? My wish would be for her to move towards, not away from me." 

"Tell me the whole dream."

The dreams starts with I being outside in cold and snow. Then I see this cabin house. I enter and take off my coat and boots and relax. My finance is there and I move towards her. But more I  try to approach her  the further away she gets.  She looks angry and a noticeable silence characterizes her presence. Not a word comes out of her. Her face is scrunched up, which is not at all like her.    

 As to why he is out in the cold and snow it reminded him of the gravest period of his life, when he was lonely, sad, forlorn, and miserable in the months following his breakup with his previous girlfriend, with whom he has a child, and who was making his life hell in whichever way she could in the aftermath of the separation. Those miserable days ended on his meeting the current girlfriend.  

The log cabin house  reminded him of the fact that his fiance lives in a log cabin house as do most of her relatives, and the house he declared symbolizes his fiance. 

Taking off the coat and boots was equivalent of decompressing in the presence of his girlfriend who is his stress reliever. .  

For a little while we were puzzled as to why his fiance was behaving just the opposite of how she does in reality. Then when I threw out the construction that her being eerily silent was symbol of her being dead, while he rejected the interpretation on grounds that he could never think of such a thing for his fiance, he did associate the conjecture with the fact that he often fears that his anger and  destructiveness may become the death of his relationship with his fiance. He also confirmed the accuracy of  the interpretation by stating that he would have never thought of what I said by himself. 

As to why she was moving away and as to why she was scowling we made no headway, and so we moved on to his next dream. 

It was vivid but short one. I am driving a car. I am  by myself. My hands are on the steering wheel. I notice blood  in my hand. I have either got a cut or injured it in some other manner.  I bring myself to look at whatever traumatic is happening and notice that the the skin on my hand is peeling. The more I try to stop the bleeding,greater becomes the loss of the skin, even the underlying tissue. Surprisingly I feel no pain. As the skin peels the insides of the hand are exposed. I notice the blood vessels are like cords. 

Such losing of skin and especially upon the hand on theoretical grounds was interpreted as punishment of castration for masturbation. Punishing the hand that manipulated the forbidden touching of the penis. The latter being symbolized  by the steering wheel. 

The patient did not disagree with the interpretation but wondered why blood vessels look like cords. 

At that point I discovered that the two dreams had been dreamt on the same night. 

This was a useful discovery. As a rule all dreams on the same night are manifestations of the same complex or the same complex being represented in different parts. Usually one depicting the cause and the other the effect. Often the order is reversed the cause being shown at the end to bring distortion and satisfy the censorship.

 So the two dreams were related but how? 

"Was the scowl on your fiance's face a threat of castration too?"

This made the patient recall that on the day before the dream the patient and his fiance had a long discussion over his undergoing vasectomy. Now that she is pregnant and already has a child from before and he has a child from before too and they will have another one together, she argued there was no need for them to have any more and to avoid the possibility of it altogether for him to have vasectomy.  

The patient who wants to be agreeable to everyone had seen the logic of her reasoning and had not objected. But apparently his unconscious was not all that sanguine about the idea. He suddenly remembered that the cords in his hands were taken from the pictures of vas deferens that he had seen on the Internet while they were reading about vasectomy.  So the peeling of the skin was not just depiction of castration for masturbation, but also depiction of the surgery by which they will reach his vas deferens (the tube that they would cut to get vasectomy done) and make him sterile. 

And while during the day he had agreed with his fiance without a hitch, in sleep and dreams he was opposing the imposition by seeing her dead and chasing her away.  The aggressive and destructive side of his nature having taken the upper hand, it being a dream. In his unconscious mind he was equating vasectomy with castration. 

The scowl on her face was threat of castration too - like Medusa's head - if he dared to not undergo vasectomy.

An example of a composite structure in dream formation which throws light upon the origin of Indian deities having multiple heads and arms

 A young man, barely 21, who is extraordinarily shy and therefore does not approach girls at all and lives an isolated work-oriented life, had the following dream:

I am lying in my bed. It is very dark. There is no light at all. He later modified this and said there was some street light, but almost negligible.  Suddenly a frightening figure starts coming towards my bed. It has four eyes and four arms. In fright, I run out into the street.  As I am making my escape, I run into a friend. He takes his shirt off, which I find hilarious. and I take off my shirt too. But unlike my friend, I am not as comfortable doing.  Then we reach a mall, where there are walls and next to them stairs. I try to raise myself up by my hands and arms on one of them but cannot get to the top of it.  Then I frolic up and down the stairs as I used to do in school.    

The background darkness symbolized the extent of the repression of his libidinal impulses.  There was some street light was allusion to the therapy lifting this repression and  his taking courage to come out of his isolation. The strongest component instinct of his sexuality is that of scopophilia. To look at others and to show himself. As a child he loved climbing on trees. It was a sublimation of the instinct to look at other people from a high vantage point without getting noticed. His current extraordinary shyness and isolation is a reaction formation to this overdeveloped scopophilic instinct.  His friend's taking off the shirt was influence of the therapy to take courage in showing off himself. Failure to hoist  himself up reflected his lack of confidence in being sexually potent. A fear of performance. The climbing up and down the stairs was seeking sexual satisfaction through the fantasy of actually going back to school and showing himself off as he did while he was in school. 

However, the most interesting finding was the frightening figure of four eyes and four arms. It of course symbolized the repressive agency, the superego, the fear of conscience. I first interpreted it as the punitive aspect of his father prohibiting his sexuality. But patient wanted to know why it had four eyes and four hands and then it dawned upon us, simultaneously, that it was a composite figure of both the parents. His mother and grandmother have played much greater part in his upbringing than his father - parents being divorced at an early age.

So conscience is not just made up of the fear of father, but fear of the mother as well. It also occurred to me that Indian deities who often have multiple arms and sometimes multiple heads are composite figures - condensation of multiple authority figures from childhood.  

The multiplicity of the heads and arms also represented denial of the fear of castration - reversal of the loss of penis through showing an abundance of it; both the head and arm being typical phallic symbols.