The Dragon and the Hero

The first paper I published in my pre-psychanalytic period was about the myth of the dragon and the dragonkiller. Since then I have had the curious piece of luck to analyse a case of dragon-phobia. The patient, a lawyer of thirty-five came to be analyzed because of difficulties in his marital life and profession. The first thing he spoke about in his analysis was his peculiar interest in everything that concerned China. He was interested in Chinese art and politics and was liable to fall in love with women who had slanting eyes. China meant to him the Land of the Dragon. The analysis of an obsessional repetition of the name of a town in China revealed phantasies of a severe and haughty lady who would whip him if he did not obey her. His dragon phobia was partly a kind of playing at having a phobia. In some parts of the town where he lived there actually were carved dragons as ornaments on buildings and he either avoided these streets altogether or could only pass the carved dragons with a feeling of dread and sometimes even panic. The play element in the phobia was that he would go to the Museum of Oriential Art just to find out whether he was still afraid of the dragons. In the same Museum there were also various representations of the Hindu goddess Kali or Durga, the woman who kills the giants and dances on them, He looked at these pictures with exactly the same feelings he felt when he saw the dragon. In his dreams and phantasies the dragon occurred both as representative of the mother, of the father and of the “combined parent” concept. The dragon as mother was essentially the swallower, the dragon as father was a serpent as representing the penis in erection. In the group of phantasies that were evolved in connection with the dragon, the mother sometimes appeared as remerging from the inside of the dragon in the shape of faeces