The Concurrent Presentation of a Rare Detail in the Dreams of Two Patients1

One morning a middle-aged unmarried woman brought me a dream containing the following elements: A goat with a prominent scrotum was observed eating grass, and the patient—a woman of fifty-odd years—felt suddenly uncomfortable. She awoke tense and anxious. She had no dream associations from the previous day, but did think the dream reminded her of her rural upbringing. She could not bring herself to recall whether or not she had ever seen the scrotum of a goat as a child. She was sure her family had never kept male goats, and she wondered if she had seen them at neighbors' farms. The scrotum itself suggested, interestingly enough (after the expected phallus), the bosom, and the two testes corresponded to the two breasts. The scrotal sac next reminded her of her handbag, a new one, whose shape was vaguely suggestive. The latter had been bought because a gift purse had been disappointing. Purse in turn suggested vagina and vagina her own dissatisfactions with her sexless life. Thus the breasts and vagina appeared ultimately to be concealed in the woman's dream of a goat's scrotum.

I was naturally intrigued by this rare detail, since goats and scrotums are both relatively rare manifest dream symbols, and also because the combination of the two was altogether new to me.

When, later in the day, a younger woman with almost the converse sexual problems (superficially viewed) announced that she had dreamed of a large animal with pendulous testes and horned head, my interest was further aroused. She could not name it at