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The first to call attention to the significance and symbolic meaning of bridges in the dreams of neurotic patients was Ferenczi. In a paper published in 19211 he reported the analysis of a man suffering from ejaculatio retardata who manifested a fear of bridges. The analysis revealed a specific traumatizing event, dating back to his ninth year of life, connected with the birth of a sister. It had been a very difficult birth, lasting four hours, during which the boy had become aware of the fact that the infant repeatedly appeared and then withdrew again into the mother's body. 'This to and fro', states Ferenczi, 'this isthmus between life and what is not yet (or no longer) life, thus gave the special form of bridge anxiety to the patient's anxiety hysteria'. Moreover, Ferenczi discovered a forerunner of this trauma that seemed to have prepared the ground for the later neurosis: the patient remembered having been told by his mother that he himself had come half-dead into the world after a difficult birth. Ferenczi induced the patient to cross a bridge in his company and observed that the anxiety became greatly heightened as they approached the center and increasingly so on the distal half. On the return journey the symptoms appeared in reverse sequence. When the proximal bank was reached again, the patient relaxed; his anxiety had vanished.
The analysis of this patient, as well as other observations of bridge dreams, led Ferenczi to the conclusion that there are four levels of meaning in the symbol of the bridge: