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The number nine is well known to us from neurotic phantasies. It is the number of the months of pregnancy, and wherever it appears it directs our attention to a phantasy of pregnancy. In our painter’s case, to be sure, the number refers to years, not months; and it will be objected that nine is a significant number in other ways as well. But who knows whether it may not in general owe a good deal of its sanctity to the part it plays in pregnancy? Nor need we be disconcerted by the change from nine months to nine years. We know from dreams what liberties ‘unconscious mental activity’ takes with numbers. If, for instance, the number five occurs in a dream, this can invariably be traced back to a five that is important in waking life; but whereas in waking life the five was a five years’ difference in age or a company of five people, it appeared in the dream as five bank-notes or five fruits. That is to say, the number is kept, but its denominator is changed according to the requirements of condensation and displacement. Nine years in a dream could thus easily correspond to nine months in real life. The dream-work plays about with the numbers of waking life in another way, too, for it shows a sovereign disregard for noughts and does not treat them as numbers at all. Five dollars in a dream can stand for fifty or five hundred or five thousand dollars in reality.

Another detail in the painter’s relations to the Devil has once more a sexual reference. On the first occasion, as I have mentioned, he saw the Evil One in the shape of an honest citizen. But already on the second occasion the Devil was naked and misshapen, and had two pairs of female breasts. In none of his subsequent apparitions are the breasts absent, either as a single or a double pair. Only in one of them does the Devil exhibit, in addition to the breasts, a large penis ending in a snake. This stressing of the female sexual character by introducing large pendulous breasts (there is never any indication of the female genitals) is bound to appear to us as a striking contradiction of our hypothesis that the Devil had the meaning of a father-substitute for the painter. And, indeed, such a way of representing the Devil is in itself unusual. Where ‘devil is thought of in a generic sense, and devils appear in numbers, there is nothing strange about depicting female devils; but that the Devil, who is a great individuality, the Lord of Hell and the Adversary of God, should be represented otherwise than as a male, and, indeed, as a super-male, with horns, tail and a big penis-snake - this, I believe, is never found.