Handprint in a dream: what does it mean?
A child's hand pressed in paint or clay and kept, which is a record of a size rather than of a face, and works because the size is what goes.
How do the four traditions read it?
Each reading below comes from a named tradition and a cited source, so you can see where it came from and decide what fits your dream. The four often disagree, and that is the point: a symbol rarely means one fixed thing, and the distance between Freud, Jung, modern research and myth tells you more than any single verdict could.
How did Freud read this symbol?
Freud would attend to what is being preserved. Not a likeness but a measurement, and he would ask what the dreamer kept the size of.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note why it works. A face is remembered and a hand's size is not, so the print holds the thing that memory does not keep.
Our summary of a Jungian reading, in our own words, not Jung's. See Jung, ed., Man and His Symbols (1964).What does modern dream research say?
Hands and children appear in dream reports, and content analysis records hands among frequent reported dream content.
Our summary of the content-analysis findings. See Hall and Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams (1966).What do myth and folklore say?
Ancient hand stencils on cave walls, made by blowing pigment round a hand, are among the oldest human images there are, and the impulse is recognisably the same.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.How can writers use this symbol?
The same symbol, read as craft material rather than as a dream. What it does on the page, how genres use it differently, and what happens when you turn it inside out. Written for novelists, screenwriters and poets who need the symbol to actually work, and it ends with something to try.
Where does this appear in literature?
People were doing this on cave walls forty thousand years ago, by blowing paint round a hand. Nothing about the impulse has changed.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
Keeping a size rather than a likeness.
What are the genre conventions?
A plaster disc on a shelf, and an adult putting their hand over it.
How to subvert it
Write the handprint of somebody fully grown.
Try this
Two hundred words about the oldest thing anybody has ever wanted to keep.
Only the first of these names a source. What a symbol does in a story, how genres treat it, how to invert it and what to try are our editorial judgement as writers and editors, not findings from a body of research. They are offered as craft opinion and should be argued with.
The books behind these readings
These are the books this entry actually draws on, not a general reading list. Where a text is in the public domain we link the free copy first, because you should not have to pay for something you can read for nothing. Every edition listed has been checked to exist and to be the right one.
-
The Interpretation of Dreams
The source behind every Freud reading in the dictionary. This is the 1913 Brill translation we adapt from, and it is free to read online.
-
Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
Rosmerta Publishing is a member of the Bookshop.org and Amazon Associates affiliate programs. If you buy a book through these links we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. The public-domain texts are always free to read online.