Bataille's father is paralyzed, blind, and syphilitic according to Georges' writing. Georges and his mother abandon him to the Germans in November 1915 when they approach Reims. The father is not religious, but later goes insane and refuses to see a priest when he dies. The father is significant to Bataille's writing as a cause of his pathology. Bataille undergoes psychoanalysis and remembers a dream with mixed feelings of "the most horrible and the most magnificent" memories of his father pulling down his pants and spanking him with a bloody toad looking like a vulture sinking his beak at the age of three and punished for playing with a hoop. His father is a main character in "Visions" to the extent Georges Bataille acts out rebellion to his father as a youth by converting to and then rejecting Catholicism. He expresses pathological themes in writing that seem to originate in the events of his early youth most directly expressed in "[Dream]."
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