Proverbs and psychoanalysis

Proverbs have much to teach the psychoanalyst. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the clinical usefulness of viewing certain proverbs as analogous to typical dreams, to discuss some implications of the affinities between proverbs, riddles, and typical dreams in the context of applied psychoanalysis, and to view the proverb as stemming from the same common matrix as dreams, myths, symptoms, and folklore.