Spleen in a dream: what does it mean?
An organ that filters blood and stores it, and which a person can live without, and which English named a mood after anyway.
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 survival of the word. Venting the spleen persists as an expression long after the organ was cleared of any role in temper, and he would treat the language as the more durable record.
After Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Brill trans., 1913), public domain.How did Jung read this symbol?
A Jungian reading might note that the spleen was where the humoral scheme put melancholy, and that a whole disposition was located in an organ nobody could observe working.
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?
Internal bodily states are incorporated into dreams less reliably than external stimuli, and the incorporation literature finds organ sensation reported far less often than sound, touch or temperature.
Our summary of the incorporation literature. See Schredl and Hofmann, Continuity between waking activities and dream activities (2003).What do myth and folklore say?
Runners were once told a stitch was the spleen contracting, and the humoral tradition made it the seat of anger and of melancholy at different periods, sometimes both at once.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis (after Brewer).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?
It was the seat of anger and of melancholy in the same tradition, at the same time, and nobody found that a problem.
Rosmerta Publishing editorial synthesis. Our own words; no quoted text.What does it do in a story?
The organ you can live without that got a mood named after it.
What are the genre conventions?
A stitch in the side, and an old explanation for it.
How to subvert it
Write someone who has had it removed and is unchanged in temper.
Try this
Two hundred words about a part of the body that a language decided was responsible for a feeling.
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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