When one has familiarized oneself with the extensive employment of symbolism for the representation of sexual material in dreams, one naturally asks oneself whether many of these symbols have not a permanently established meaning, like the signs in shorthand and one even thinks of attempting to compile a new dream-book on the lines of the cipher method.
But this did not prove to be the case it is simply a question of a personal gift or idiosyncrasy without perceptible pathological significance. Many of these patients suffered from dementia praecox, so that for a time there was an inclination to suspect that all dreamers with such an understanding of symbols were suffering from that disorder.
The progressive experience of psycho-analysis has enabled us to discover patients who have displayed in a surprising degree this immediate understanding of dream-symbolism. It is as though one were to base one's diagnosis of infectious diseases on the olfactory impressions received beside the sick-bed, although of course there have been clinicians to whom the sense of smell- atrophied in most people- has been of greater service than to others, and who really have been able to diagnose a case of abdominal typhus by their sense of smell. But such an art cannot be generally assumed its efficiency is immune from criticism, and its results have therefore no claim to credibility. Stekel found his symbolic meanings by way of intuition, by virtue of his individual faculty of immediately understanding the symbols. For the examples upon which he based his interpretations were often unconvincing, and, moreover, he employed a method which must be rejected as scientifically unreliable. Stekel's services are in no way belittled by the remark that the sceptical reserve with which these symbols were received was not unjustified. This author, who has perhaps injured psychoanalysis as much as he has benefited it, produced a large number of novel symbolic translations, to which no credence was given at first, but most of which were later confirmed and had to be accepted. Stekel, concerning which I may here fittingly say something. But it was only little by little that I arrived at a full appreciation of its extent and significance, as the result of increasing experience, and under the influence of the works of W. Representation in Dreams by Symbols: Some Further Typical Dreams - The analysis of the last biographical dream shows that I recognized the symbolism in dreams from the very outset.
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