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This brief clinical note illustrates the technical advantage of treating a patient's recall of a passage from a novel, read in his youth, as though it were a dream. It also demonstrates the congruence between this remembered excerpt and an unconscious memory.
A patient, several years into an analysis, recalled a story that had made a vivid impression upon him. He had read it at the age of nine. It was a scene from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. Twain's novel is about a man who goes back into the past and brings about changes, much as the patient was trying to do in his analysis. The episode he had kept in his mind was cruel and bloody, but the feelings that the nine year old had had while reading it had been sexual excitement and pleasure.
The scene, as he described it, took place in a throne room. A young page carrying a goblet of wine on a serving tray inadvertently brushed against Morgan Le Fay, a sorceress who was dressed in a black silken gown; a drop of wine spilled on her. Without a word, she pulled out a dirk and plunged it between his ribs. As the young page fell to the floor, blood spurted from his wound and his body gave a few spasmodic jerks and then was still. An old man hovered in the background. Morgan then gave orders for the page to be dragged out and for the blood to be wiped up from the floor with towels; it was removed to the last drop. The patient responded to his telling the story with, again, excitement and pleasure. In contrast, the analyst reacted with mild anxiety.
The patient's account differed somewhat from what Clemens (1889) had written. He introduced Morgan Le Fay, a sister of King Arthur and a queen in her own right, as evil incarnate: "All her ways were wicked, her instincts devilish … and