Today's Stichomancy for Sigmund Freud

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac:

kill yourself?--Very well, then, it is not Dr. Poulain, it is Remonencq, good soul, so anxious that he has come to ask after you!-- Everybody is so fond of you that the whole house is in a flutter. So what is there to fear?"

"It seems to me that there are several of you," said Pons.

"Several? that is good! What next! Are you dreaming!--You will go off your head before you have done, upon my word!--Here, look!"--and La Cibot flung open the door, signed to Magus to go, and beckoned to Remonencq.

"Well, my dear sir," said the Auvergnat, now supplied with something to say, "I just came to ask after you, for the whole house is alarmed

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy:

"But there was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you! I don't reproach you, for even now I feel that the ignorant and cold darkness that I should have lived in if you had not attracted me by that letter -- valentine you call it -- would have been worse than my knowledge of you, though it has brought this misery. But, I say, there was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing for you, and yet you drew me on. And if you say you gave me no en- couragement, I cannot but contradict you." "What you call encouragement was the childish

Far From the Madding Crowd

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil:

Nor pow'rs above, nor destinies below Oppress our arms: with equal strength we go, With mortal hands to meet a mortal foe. See on what foot we stand: a scanty shore, The sea behind, our enemies before; No passage left, unless we swim the main; Or, forcing these, the Trojan trenches gain." This said, he strode with eager haste along, And bore amidst the thickest of the throng. Lagus, the first he met, with fate to foe, Had heav'd a stone of mighty weight, to throw:

Aeneid

The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

in the forest. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings and put them on the figure's legs, where they showed as unsubstantial as a dream, with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself miserably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead husband's wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin, and surmounted the whole with a dusty three-cornered hat, in which was stuck the longest tail feather of a rooster.

Then the old dame stood the figure up in a corner of her cottage and chuckled to behold its yellow semblance of a visage, with its nobby little nose thrust into the air. It had a strangely self-satisfied aspect, and seemed to say, "Come look at me!"

Mosses From An Old Manse