Crutch in a dream: what does it mean?
A support that transfers weight from a leg to an arm, and which does damage if the weight is taken under the arm.
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 load being moved rather than removed. Support that shifts a burden to somewhere else does not lighten it, and he would ask who was carrying what the dreamer had put down.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the word became an insult. Calling something a crutch means a dependency somebody ought to be without, which is a hard thing to have happened to a medical device.
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?
Impeded movement recurs in dream reports, and content analysis records difficulty walking among the more frequently described impediments in dream narratives.
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?
Resting the armpit on the top pad compresses nerves and can cause lasting weakness, so the pad is meant to brace the ribcage while the hands take the load.
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?
The top pad is not meant to be leant on. Doing it compresses the nerves, and the hands are supposed to take the weight.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
A burden moved rather than lightened.
What are the genre conventions?
A pad against the ribs, hands taking it, and a leg not touching down.
How to subvert it
Write it used wrongly for a year.
Try this
Two hundred words about a help that harms if it is used the way it obviously looks like it should be.
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.
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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.
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Man and His Symbols
The accessible Jung, and the honest place to start for the archetype material our Jung readings summarise.
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