The Interpretation of Certain Symbolisms

I have had the opportunity, during the past few years, to study carefully the case of an unmarried lady, about fifty years of age, a portion of whose history I have recently recorded elsewhere.1 She was the oldest child of hard-working New England parents, typically high-minded, studious, intelligent, and strongly “religious” in their habits and traditions. The other children were two brothers, one of whom had died a good many years before I knew the patient, as had her father also, who played a part of immense importance for the development of her character and temperament. Not long before her coming to me, her mother had likewise passed away, leaving her alone except for her younger brother, who was married and had two children. As a young girl and throughout her adolescence this patient lived in a mental atmosphere strongly charged with ideas of “duty and sin,” “sin and duty,” to such an extent that it became very hard for her to follow her natural instincts—which were (I now believe) those of an affectionate, lively, sociable, pleasure-loving, rather imaginative person, with emotional tendencies which were in part of a somewhat immature type. Everything that, as a child, she did or abstained from doing was done or abstained from intensely, and in conscious obedience to orders—which, although kindly meant, were often ill-chosen as regards her best development—and the emotional reactions that attended her efforts at conformity were marked by strong repressions. Ill health in childhood,