Pushed into a Pit

Your dream will give you some clues about the origin of the issue it deals with. Can you spot what they are in this dream?
The Dream: A difficult aunt who I remember well from my childhood is in charge of two little girls. I expect that when I find them the girls will be crying, since that the effect Aunt A usually had on people. But no, they seem fine.

I'm at a snobby art event in a magnificent old museum. Several pieces of art that I own, and one or two that I painted, are hung in a very long gallery where a crowd is lined up to enter. Inside, the elaborately carved wooden steps and walls make the exhibit look like a medieval recreation.

I hear some admiration aimed in my direction but am disappointed to realize it's directed toward the pieces I own, not the ones I created. As we wind our way around the attractive labyrinth, a woman gets into an altercation with another and pushes her down, off the steps, into a side pit.

Interpretation: The dream tells me that my issue is rooted way back in childhood with several clues. Not only are there some little girls, there are two of them. There are also two kinds of my art on display: one or two (two yet again) that I painted and some that I own. Two women have an altercation. So this issue probably first surfaced during the pre-verbal part of my life, around the time I was two years old.

The medieval decor puts the issue in the distant past (of my life), and the carved wood evokes a pattern being imposed on a malleable surface. The dream dwells on images—paintings--because the child's self-image is being created at this time.

Aunt A was a childhood difficulty, but probably not the cause of this issue since the two little girls are okay with her. So perhaps some of her traits, shared by my parents, are the core of the problem. Both parents had very high expectations—and of course that is a good thing, overall, but I might have gotten the impression at an early age that I would not be able to achieve what they expected. The self I was in the process of creating (in the dream the images I painted) was not what was liked. What was liked were the images I had bought (the imposed persona).

I wander through this labyrinth of created and imposed selves, the various “pieces” of myself, thinking I'm in an attractive place until an abrupt altercation changes the mood. One “self” pushes another into a pit. One of the selves has been pushed aside. I wonder which one?