You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The claims that Freud appears as a person and specifically as an analyst in his own dreams and that wild beasts in dreams symbolize passionate impulses are well documented in this very good paper.
My primary interest in Dr. Lehmann's thesis received an additional stimulus because, in a paper on “Anxiety and Orgasm,”1 I commented on Marie Bonaparte's paper “A Lion Hunter's Dream” in which a lion attacks the hunter, the lion representing the father who attacks his son. Before my personal analysis I had recurring dreams in which a lion attacked me, or intended to do so. The lion represented my aggressive impulses.
Dr. Lehmann recalls for us the grave transgression of the biblical Reuben who dared to make love to his father's concubine. Reuben's father was Jacob the Patriarch. Freud's father, who was very much displeased that his son, at the age of seven, soiled himself in his parents' bedroom, was also a patriarch named Jacob. As a punishment, the biblical Jacob disinherited Reuben but praised his son Judah, calling him a “lion's whelp.”
In a paper “The Sin of Reuben, First-Born Son of Jacob,”2 I proposed that Reuben's sexual deed, close to incest, shocked his father to the degree that he became sexually impotent and could not beget more children (sons).