indicates, the sexual union of both. Even the rest of the fairy tale
prizes are not lacking--kingdoms, riches, happiness. And if they are not
dead they are still living.... The narrative has yielded a complete
fulfillment of wishes; the longing for love and power has attained its
end. That the wanderer does not experience the acquired happiness
immediately in his own person, but that the representation of happy love
is in the most illustrative manner developed in the union of two other
persons, is naturally a peculiarity of the narration. It is found often
enough in dreams. The ego of the dreamer is in such a case replaced by a
"split-off" person, through whom the dream evokes its dramatic pageantry.
It is as if the parable tried to say the hero has won his happy love
through struggle; two are, however, needful for love, a man and a woman,
so let us quickly create a pair. Apart from the fact that the reward must
evidently fall to the hero who has won it, the identity of the wanderer
with the king in the parable is abundantly demonstrated, even if somewhat
paraphrased. The secret of the dramatizing craft of the narrative is most
clearly exposed in the conclusion of Sec. 11, where the elders, with the
letter of the faculty in their hands, reveal to the wanderer that he must
marry the woman he has taken, which he furthermore cheerfully promises
them to do.

So far all would be regular and we might think, on superficial
examination, that the psychoanalytic solution of the parable was ended.
How far from being the case! We have interpreted only the upper stratum
and will see a problem show itself that invites us to press on into the
deeper layers of the phantasy fabric before us.

We have noticed that in the parable much, even the most important, is
communicated only by symbols and by means of allusions. Its previously
ascertained latent content [corresponding to the latent dream thoughts]
will in the manifest form be transcribed in different and gradually
diminishing disguises. Also a displacement (dream displacement) has taken
place. Now the dream or the imagination working in dreams does nothing
without purpose and even though according to its nature (out of "regard
for presentability") it has to favor the visual in all cases, the tendency
toward the pictorial does not explain such a systematic series of
disguises and such a determinate tendency as that just observed by us. The
representation of the union of man and woma