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In a paper published in this journal (1) on serpentine ornamentations, such as the Indo-American winged or feathered serpents or step-coil, the Greek meander, grotesques and arabesques, I attempted to demonstrate that this ornamentation had a latent, unconscious meaning, viz., the representation of male genital organs, but portrayed with anal regression, i.e., with representations of excrements also intervening in them. In them there happens something similar to what occurs in the symptoms of obsession neuroses in which genital contents take on anal aspects. Thus an obsessive patient's fear of soiling symbolizes regressively a repressed wish for coitus. This conclusion, on serpentine ornamentations may also, be demonstrated from associations obtained in psychoanalytic treatments which are in some way related with ornamentation.
Like every plastic art, ornamentation and its derived forms, such as writing, are sublimations of urinary and anal instincts. Thus it was very difficult for a female patient to write with a pen, because to make movements with her hand and finger reminded her of the time when her fiancé used to caress her anus with his finger, which made her feel humiliated. With the pen she associated the penis. But the nib for her was not “the tip of the penis but the base of the penis, the part attached to the testicles” and the front end of the penholder looked to her like an anus. That is to say, that