Notes on the Analytic Discovery of a Primal Scene

A forty-two-year-old woman is undergoing analysis. In the fourth week of her analysis the patient one night dreams that she is in a small cot on the grassy slopes of a park, near a lake, looking intently at a married couple whom she knows lying quite near in their bed. The analyst asserts that she must have seen sexual scenes in her childhood, that the dream must derive from an unconscious reminiscence of what she saw. She must not only have heard those scenes in the dark, as is so often the case with children, but she must have seen them in full daylight. The patient did not at first accept this interpretation of her dream, she even reacted violently against it, but the analyst persisted in his assertion. The patient's mother had died when the little girl was born but she had had a wet nurse, and the analyst suggested that she must have observed scenes between that nurse and some sexual partner.

I shall now report the first memory of the childhood of this patient.

She is sitting very low, on a small chair or a small box, in her nurse's room. The nurse is standing in front of the looking-glass of the chimney, in which the fire burns; the child is looking at her intently. The nurse is smearing her own black hair with pomade. The pomade, in a little white pot, is on the marble of the chimney; that pomade is black. The child finds that disgusting. The nurse has a long yellowish face and looks like a horse.

Rumors had been going about in the household, rumors which the patient had heard, that her nurse had had a lover, the master of her father's horses. The screen-memory confirmed these rumors. For the nurse had in no way had a face resembling that of a horse: on the contrary, an old photograph showed her with a sound and pleasant face. So the horsy look of the woman must have expressed some real function of hers; she had been ridden as a horse by some