Note on an 'Ambivalent' Dream

The day after I read Dr. Bergler's paper, Three Tributaries to the Development of Ambivalence,1 a male patient, a fairly severe compulsive character, reported a dream which seemed to me to confirm directly one of the constructions set forth in Bergler's paper. In this, it will be recalled, Dr. Bergler states inter alia that the anal regression evidenced in the wish to be anally penetrated by the father is an expression not only (as is well known) of the escape from the threat of castration connected with the positive Oedipus into the passivity of the negative Oedipus, but also of 'the old fantasy of being orally penetrated' by the mother's breast—nursing, Bergler has concluded, having been experienced by some persons as an act of maternal aggression: 'some children perceive breast or bottle feeding as acts of maternal aggression—for some children, at least, something like being pierced'. My patient's dream is noteworthy because it expresses the fantasy of anal penetration as including at the same time the fantasy of being orally penetrated, as though these two were the same and indistinguishable from each other.

I was riding as a passenger in what used to be called the tonneau of an automobile, when a dickeybird flew in the rear window. It then began to sing in two parts. Its name was Amelia.

Passing over as self-evident the dreamer's passive rôle as a passenger, to say nothing of the rather gratuitous introduction of a French word in this connection, it may be remarked that while the symbolism of a bird is familiar enough in psychoanalysis, the dreamer's own associations arrived at the same result: 'Dickeybird, dickey, dick (isn't that a slang word for penis?), prick, penis … In two parts [the patient is a musicologist]: an impossibility, of course—you can't sing in two parts any more than you can play a chord on a flute; being both masculine and feminine at the same time; I'd love to be able to do it; but we have a lot of collateral evidence also that "two"