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A young man, a patient of mine, had been aware from childhood that his mother had intimate relations with another man besides her husband; and he wove around this fact regular phantasies of the Hamlet type, in which his mother and her friend murdered his father. I analysed these day-dreams which he had had for years, and they left him as soon as he realized that his own repressed wish was to put away his father with his mother's help. One day, after we had analysed his hostile phantasies against his father fairly extensively, he told me a curious thing that had happened. At dinner, where the whole family was assembled, his mother had said that she had had a queer dream the night before. She had dreamed that a strange man had laughed at her and had made contemptuous remarks about her character and capacities. Then she had turned him out with the help of her friend, Herr X.
My patient went on to say that he had listened attentively to what his mother was saying, and had at once understood that the strange man could only be his father, and that his mother and her friend had 'turned him out', that is, done away with him. He inferred from this, quite correctly, that in her phantasy his mother was contemplating the same crime as he had formerly done in his. The coincidence of the two phantasies was even more exact. For the patient had often reproached his father in imagination for not being able to appreciate his wife's good qualities. And now she herself had used the same argument to justify the removal of her husband.
The example given shows to what an extent the day-dreams of one person can coincide with the phantasies of another.