Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess i Berlin om hvordan han gjennom arbeidet med å analysere en mannlig pasient har kommet på sporet av hvorfor han selv alltid har vært så redd for å reise med tog

Sigmund Freud skriver til sin venn Wilhelm Fliess i Berlin (her gjengitt på engelsk - -originalen er på tysk):

"I am not without one happy prospect. You are familiar with my dream which obstinately promises the end of E.'s treatment [among the absurd dreams], and you can well imagine how important this one persistent patient has become to me.

It now appears that this dream will be fulfilled. I cautiously say "appears," but I am really quite certain. Buried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period [before twenty-two months] which meets all the requirements and in which all the remaining puzzles converge. It is everything at the same time -- sexual, innocent, natural, and the rest. I scarcely dare believe it yet.

It is as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy, which had hitherto been deemed a fable. At the same time the fellow is doing outrageously well. He demonstrated the reality of my theory in my own case, providing me in a surprising reversal with the solution, which I had overlooked, to my former railroad phobia.

For this piece of work I even made him the present of a picture of Oedipus and the Sphinx. My phobia, then, was a fantasy of impoverishment, or rather a hunger phobia, determined by my infantile greediness and evoked by my wife's lack of a dowry (of which I am so proud). You will hear more about this at our next congress."

(Masson, 1985, s. 391-392).