Tonsil in a dream: what does it mean?
A piece of tissue at the back of the throat that was removed from a great many children as a matter of routine and now mostly is not.
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 the reversal of policy. An organ removed as standard in one generation and left alone in the next was the same organ throughout, and he would ask what the dreamer had been sure about and stopped being.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that it sits at an entrance. Whatever comes in through the mouth passes it, so its position is at the threshold rather than anywhere inside.
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?
Illness and medical settings appear in dream reports, and continuity research finds health content following waking experience of treatment rather than carrying independent meaning.
Our summary of the continuity hypothesis, named by Calvin Hall and Vernon Nordby, The Individual and His Dreams (1972). Its correct scope is disputed; see Domhoff (2017) and the replies to him.What do myth and folklore say?
Removal was routine for a period and the indications were later narrowed considerably, so a great many people of one generation have no tonsils and most of the next generation do.
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?
One generation had them taken out as a matter of course and the next did not. The organ never changed; the opinion did.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The same thing, treated oppositely by two generations.
What are the genre conventions?
A hospital ward, ice cream promised, and a decision made for you.
How to subvert it
Write the operation refused.
Try this
Two hundred words about something everybody was certain about that quietly stopped being true.
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.