Notes on Theory-Making, on Scotoma of the Nipples and on the Bee as Nipple

The title reverses the order in which this paper was written and states the writer's view of the relative importance of the topics, which emerged sequentially with the adoption of increasingly broader standpoints that were unconsciously defensive.

In a note on Freud's 'Leonardo' (1910) I incidentally reported the dream of a male homosexual analysand which ended with his flight from a swarm of bees (Bradley, 1965). The dream began with his watching the stage performance of a Polynesian dance by a man and two women. The women were bare-breasted but their backs were turned to him. He was in the prompter's box. The man suddenly crawled towards him with open mouth and their teeth interlocked. The scene changed to his looking intently at a tick embedded in the neck of his beloved female dog and again changed to his being chased by a swarm of bees. He dived into the swimming pool at his and his parents' home in order to escape them and awoke at the point when he was unable to hold his breath any longer underwater.

The dance was associated with the double marriage of his sister and her girl-friend when he was ten and unconsciously with his parents' intercourse, whose bedroom he had shared until he was three. (His sister seems to have had the same experience, since she repeated the pattern; her adopted four-year-old son was still not talking and was said to laugh when his parents copulated.) Thus one of the women was also himself, as was indicated by a screen memory of his dancing in a hula skirt. Bees reminded him that he had been stung a few times as a boy and that he had watched them with fascination as they entered flowers.1 Around the age of puberty he and his friends had used the word 'bee-stings' to refer to the small developing breasts of a pubertal girl. Her breasts were imagined as the swellings resulting from bee-stings and her nipples as being themselves bee-stings.

For the present purpose I would note that he first displaced his wish