A Case of Number Phobia

One of the most persistent academic criticisms of the psycho-analytical theory of symbols has been, and still is, that the Freudian school 'arbitrarily' imputes to certain symbols (in dreams, e.g. snakes, stairs, tight openings, etc.) an underlying sexual significance which has no association basis in the everyday life of the patient.

While lack of clinical acquaintance with cases is the essential reason for this academic inability to penetrate the 'façon de penser' of the unconscious other factors also determine this insistence on experiential association as the determining element in the stream of thought. Chief among these is the average academic psychologist's acquaintance with tests of free and controlled association and only a superficial type of psychopathology. From these he can, e.g. see how adult phobias may be based on some childhood experience which might be forgotten while the effects of the emotional trauma persist, spreading an aura, as it were, which surrounds the core of the 'complex.' His experience being limited to rather obvious cases of this sort he is opposed to 'far-fetched' theories.

It was in connection with this emphasis on experiential association as opposed to a 'language of the unconscious, ' which by homology figures in folklore and supersitition, that the writer's interest was aroused by Jeffreys' note1 on the unconscious significance of numbers. He states that 'the interest in odd numbers and especially in primes, is originally phallic, while even numbers and especially those with a large number of factors are associated with ambivalent attitudes to the mother.'

In the case of a patient, H. K., this was exactly what was to be found except that the sensitiveness to numbers seemed manifoldly determined, some having rather the consciously recallable experiential basis stressed by academic psychologists while the others were founded on an unconscious type of reasoning which with extreme difficulty was brought to the surface.

H. K., an obs