Now, I just offered a specific example of an unconscious act of a person in the waking state. It's known that dreams are also elaborated by unconscious processes, and that in certain cases they are easily deciphered. Take the case of the woman who recurrently dreamed of hanging white clothes on a line. Jake had learned from W. Stekel's book that such dream refers to diapers --that is, to newly born babies. So when a young friend of his said to Jake, "I've heard that you interpret dreams; can you tell me why my aunt frequently dreams that she hangs white cloths," Jake said to her, "Your aunt is childless; she despairs of becoming pregnant, which appears to be a medical impossibility."
Jake could not convince his friend that since hanging white cloths refers to babies, and that her aunt was most probably married for quite a few years, the repeated dream strongly suggested a long-lasting unsolved problem of infertility.
At any rate, the point is, why hanging cloths is symbolic of a newborn? It is easy to explain that a number of white cloths being hung on a clothes-line brings to mind the idea of lots of diapers being in use --but, is this mental image unconsciously learned? Or have newborn babies been draped in white cloths for so many millennia that such image became finally imprinted in the brain of all women, and they are born with it? As if eventually a given 'potential gene' from a pool of 'blank' genes (a 'protogene') was imprinted by such image and it then became inheritable-an integral part of the female gene makeup.

Consider also the case of the girl who arrived in Cali with a group of youngsters on their way from Argentina to Israel. She was referred to Jake because of the sudden manifestation of several vague symptoms, but mainly feelings of mental depression. I t was clear that she was suffering from acute emotional stress.
Jake asked her to tell any dream she could remember, expecting to rapidly obtain a clue to her acute, situational reaction. She said that the night before she had dreamed of ironing a white dress; to her horror, the iron had burned out a hole. Very delicately, Jake told her that the white dress represented her 'purity' --that is, her virginity, that the hot iron stood for sexual passion and that the hole represented the deflowering. Her depression and associated symptoms indicated that she regretted having yielded, perhaps because the partner did not share her love for him, so that her 'sacrifice' had not been emotionally justified. The girl wept and agreed with the interpretation of the dream and with the clarification of her symptoms' cause.
Now, the point is: whiteness, a well-known symbol of purity, is acquired, or is it an inherited mental image?