CHAPTER FIVE (Continued...)
D. Typical Dreams
Generally speaking, we are not in a position to
interpret another person's dream if he is unwilling to furnish us with the
unconscious thoughts which lie behind the dream-content, and for this
reason the practical applicability of our method of dream- interpretation
is often seriously restricted. * But there are dreams which exhibit a
complete contrast to the individual's customary liberty to endow his
dream-world with a special individuality, thereby making it inaccessible
to an alien understanding: there are a number of dreams which almost every
one has dreamed in the same manner, and of which we are accustomed to
assume that they have the same significance in the case of every dreamer.
A peculiar interest attaches to these typical dreams, because, no matter
who dreams them, they presumably all derive from the same sources, so that
they would seem to be particularly fitted to provide us with information
as to the sources of dreams.
* The statement that our method of dream-interpretation
is inapplicable when we have not at our disposal the dreamer's
association-material must be qualified. In one case our work of
interpretation is independent of these associations: namely, when the
dreamer make use of symbolic elements in his dream. We then employ what
is, strictly speaking, a second auxiliary method of dream-interpretation.
(See below).
With quite special expectations, therefore, we shall
proceed to test our technique of dream-interpretation on these typical
dreams, and only with extreme reluctance shall we admit that precisely in
respect of this material our method is not fully verified. In the
interpretation of typical dreams we as a rule fail to obtain those
associations from the dreamer which in other cases have led us to
comprehension of the dream, or else these associations are confused and
inadequate, so that they do not help us to solve our problem.
Why this is the case, and how we can remedy this defect
in our technique, are points which will be discussed in a later chapter.
The reader will then understand why I can deal with only a few of the
group of typical dreams in this chapter, and why I have postponed the
discussion of the others.
(a) THE EMBARRASSMENT-DREAM OF NAKEDNESS
In a dream in which one is naked or scantily clad in
the presence of strangers, it sometimes happens that one is not in the
least ashamed of one's condition. But the dream of nakedness demands our
attention only when shame and embarrassment are felt in it, when one
wishes to escape or to hide, and when one feels the strange inhibition of
being unable to stir from the spot, and of being utterly powerless to
alter the painful situation. It is only in this connection that the dream
is typical; otherwise the nucleus of its content may be involved in all
sorts of other connections, or may be replaced by individual
amplifications. The essential point is that one has a painful feeling of
shame, and is anxious to hide one's nakedness, usually by means of
locomotion, but is absolutely unable to do so. I believe that the great
majority of my readers will at some time have found themselves in this
situation in a dream.
The nature and manner of the exposure is usually rather
vague. The dreamer will say, perhaps, "I was in my chemise," but this is
rarely a clear image; in most cases the lack of clothing is so
indeterminate that it is described in narrating the dream by an
alternative: "I was in my chemise or my petticoat." As a rule the
deficiency in clothing is not serious enough to justify the feeling of
shame attached to it. For a man who has served in the army, nakedness is
often replaced by a manner of dressing that is contrary to regulations. "I
was in the street without my sabre, and I saw some officers approaching,"
or "I had no collar," or "I was wearing checked civilian trousers," etc.
The persons before whom one is ashamed are almost
always strangers, whose faces remain indeterminate. It never happens, in
the typical dream, that one is reproved or even noticed on account of the
lack of clothing which causes one such embarrassment. On the contrary, the
people in the dream appear to be quite indifferent; or, as I was able to
note in one particularly vivid dream, they have stiff and solemn
expressions. This gives us food for thought.
The dreamer's embarrassment and the spectator's
indifference constitute a contradiction such as often occurs in dreams. It
would be more in keeping with the dreamer's feelings if the strangers were
to look at him in astonishment, or were to laugh at him, or be outraged. I
think, however, that this obnoxious feature has been displaced by wish-fulfillment,
while the embarrassment is for some reason retained, so that the two
components are not in agreement. We have an interesting proof that the
dream which is partially distorted by wish-fulfillment has not been
properly understood; for it has been made the basis of a fairy-tale
familiar to us all in Andersen's version of The Emperor's New Clothes, and
it has more recently received poetical treatment by Fulda in The Talisman.
In Andersen's fairy-tale we are told of two impostors who weave a costly
garment for the Emperor, which shall, however, be visible only to the good
and true. The Emperor goes forth clad to this invisible garment, and since
the imaginary fabric serves as a sort of touchstone, the people are
frightened into behaving as though they did not notice the Emperor's
nakedness.
But this is really the situation in our dream. It is
not very venturesome to assume that the unintelligible dream-content has
provided an incentive to invent a state of undress which gives meaning to
the situation present in the memory. This situation is thereby robbed of
its original meaning, and made to serve alien ends. But we shall see that
such a misunderstanding of the dream- content often occurs through the
conscious activity of a second psychic system, and is to be recognized as
a factor of the final form of the dream; and further, that in the
development of obsessions and phobias similar misunderstandings- still, of
course, within the same psychic personality- play a decisive part. It is
even possible to specify whence the material for the fresh interpretation
of the dream is taken. The impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the
dreamer himself, and the moralizing tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of
the fact that there is a question, in the latent dream-content, of
forbidden wishes, victims of repression. The connection in which such
dreams appear during my analysis of neurotics proves beyond a doubt that a
memory of the dreamer's earliest childhood lies at the foundation of the
dream. Only in our childhood was there a time when we were seen by our
relatives, as well as by strange nurses, servants and visitors, in a state
of insufficient clothing, and at that time we were not ashamed of our
nakedness. * In the case of many rather older children it may be observed
that being undressed has an exciting effect upon them, instead of making
them feel ashamed. They laugh, leap about, slap or thump their own bodies;
the mother, or whoever is present, scolds them, saying: "Fie, that is
shameful- you mustn't do that!" Children often show a desire to display
themselves; it is hardly possible to pass through a village in country
districts without meeting a two-or three-year-old child who lifts up his
or her blouse or frock before the traveler, possibly in his honor. One
of my patients has retained in his conscious memory a scene from his
eighth year, in which, after undressing for bed, he wanted to dance into
his little sister's room in his shirt, but was prevented by the servant.
In the history of the childhood of neurotics, exposure before children of
the opposite sex plays a prominent part; in paranoia, the delusion of
being observed while dressing and undressing may be directly traced to
these experiences; and among those who have remained perverse, there is a
class in whom the childish impulse is accentuated into a symptom: the
class of exhibitionists.
* The child appears in the fairy-tale also, for there a
little child suddenly cries out: "But he hasn't anything on at all!" -
This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is
unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it later, and paradise
itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the
individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the
moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual
life and cultural development begin. Into this paradise dreams can take us
back every night; we have already ventured the conjecture that the
impressions of our earliest childhood (from the prehistoric period until
about the end of the third year) crave reproduction for their own sake,
perhaps without further reference to their content, so that their
repetition is a wish-fulfillment. Dreams of nakedness, then, are
exhibition-dreams. *
* Ferenczi has recorded a number of interesting dreams
of nakedness in women which were without difficulty traced to the
infantile delight in exhibitionism, but which differ in many features from
the typical dream of nakedness discussed above.
The nucleus of an exhibition-dream is furnished by
one's own person, which is seen not as that of a child, but as it exists
in the present, and by the idea of scanty clothing which emerges
indistinctly, owing to the superimposition of so many later situations of
being partially clothed, or out of consideration for the censorship; to
these elements are added the persons in whose presence one is ashamed. I
know of no example in which the actual spectators of these infantile
exhibitions reappear in a dream; for a dream is hardly ever a simple
recollection. Strangely enough, those persons who are the objects of our
sexual interest in childhood are omitted from all reproductions, in
dreams, in hysteria or in obsessional neurosis; paranoia alone restores
the spectators, and is fanatically convinced of their presence, although
they remain unseen. The substitute for these persons offered by the dream,
the number of strangers who take no notice of the spectacle offered them,
is precisely the counter- wish to that single intimately-known person for
whom the exposure was intended. "A number of strangers," moreover, often
occur in dreams in all sorts of other connections; as a counter-wish they
always signify a secret. * It will be seen that even that restitution of
the old state of affairs that occurs in paranoia complies with this
counter-tendency. One is no longer alone; one is quite positively being
watched; but the spectators are a number of strange, curiously
indeterminate people.
* For obvious reasons the presence of the whole family
in the dream has the same significance.
Furthermore, repression finds a place in the
exhibition-dream. For the disagreeable sensation of the dream is, of
course, the reaction on the part of the second psychic instance to the
fact that the exhibitionistic scene which has been condemned by the
censorship has nevertheless succeeded in presenting itself. The only way
to avoid this sensation would be to refrain from reviving the scene.
In a later chapter we shall deal once again with the
feeling of inhibition. In our dreams it represents to perfection a
conflict of the will, a denial. According to our unconscious purpose, the
exhibition is to proceed; according to the demands of the censorship, it
is to come to an end.
The relation of our typical dreams to fairy-tales and
other fiction and poetry is neither sporadic nor accidental. Sometimes the
penetrating insight of the poet has analytically recognized the process of
transformation of which the poet is otherwise the instrument, and has
followed it up in the reverse direction; that is to say, has traced a poem
to a dream. A friend has called my attention to the following passage in
G. Keller's Der Grune Heinrich: "I do not wish, dear Lee, that you should
ever come to realize from experience the exquisite and piquant truth in
the situation of Odysseus, when he appears, naked and covered with mud,
before Nausicaa and her playmates! Would you like to know what it means?
Let us for a moment consider the incident closely. If you are ever parted
from your home, and from all that is dear to you, and wander about in a
strange country; if you have seen much and experienced much; if you have
cares and sorrows, and are, perhaps, utterly wretched and forlorn, you
will some night inevitably dream that you are approaching your home; you
will see it shining and glittering in the loveliest colors; lovely and
gracious figures will come to meet you; and then you will suddenly
discover that you are ragged, naked, and covered with dust. An
indescribable feeling of shame and fear overcomes you; you try to cover
yourself, to hide, and you wake up bathed in sweat. As long as humanity
exists, this will be the dream of the care-laden, tempest-tossed man, and
thus Homer has drawn this situation from the profoundest depths of the
eternal nature of humanity."
What are the profoundest depths of the eternal nature
of humanity, which the poet commonly hopes to awaken in his listeners, but
these stirrings of the psychic life which are rooted in that age of
childhood, which subsequently becomes prehistoric? Childish wishes, now
suppressed and forbidden, break into the dream behind the unobjectionable
and permissibly conscious wishes of the homeless man, and it is for this
reason that the dream which is objectified in the legend of Nausicaa
regularly develops into an anxiety-dream.
My own dream of hurrying upstairs, which presently
changed into being glued to the stairs, is likewise an exhibition-dream,
for it reveals the essential ingredients of such a dream. It must
therefore be possible to trace it back to experiences in my childhood, and
the knowledge of these should enable us to conclude how far the servant's
behaviour to me (i.e., her reproach that I had soiled the carpet) helped
her to secure the position which she occupies in the dream. Now I am
actually able to furnish the desired explanation. One learns in a psycho-
analysis to interpret temporal proximity by material connection; two ideas
which are apparently without connection, but which occur in immediate
succession, belong to a unity which has to be deciphered; just as an a and
a b, when written in succession, must be pronounced as one syllable, ab.
It is just the same with the interrelations of dreams. The dream of the
stairs has been taken from a series of dreams with whose other members I
am familiar, having interpreted them. A dream included in this series must
belong to the same context. Now, the other dreams of the series are based
on the memory of a nurse to whom I was entrusted for a season, from the
time when I was still at the breast to the age of two and a half, and of
whom a hazy recollection has remained in my consciousness. According to
information which I recently obtained from my mother, she was old and
ugly, but very intelligent and thorough; according to the inferences which
I am justified in drawing from my dreams, she did not always treat me
quite kindly, but spoke harshly to me when I showed insufficient
understanding of the necessity for cleanliness. Inasmuch as the maid
endeavored to continue my education in this respect, she is entitled to
be treated, in my dream, as an incarnation of the prehistoric old woman.
It is to be assumed, of course, that the child was fond of his teacher in
spite of her harsh behaviour. *
* A supplementary interpretation of this dream: To spit
(spucken) on the stairs, since spuken (to haunt) is the occupation of
spirits (cf. English, "spook"), led me by a free translation to espirit
d'escalier. "Stairwit" means unreadiness at repartee, (Schlagfertigkeit =
literally: "readiness to hit out") with which I really have to reproach
myself. But was the nurse deficient in Schlagfertigkeit?
(b) DREAMS OF THE DEATH OF BELOVED PERSONS
Another series of dreams which may be called typical
are those whose content is that a beloved relative, a parent, brother,
sister, child, or the like, has died. We must at once distinguish two
classes of such dreams: those in which the dreamer remains unmoved, and
those in which he feels profoundly grieved by the death of the beloved
person, even expressing this grief by shedding tears in his sleep.
We may ignore the dreams of the first group; they have
no claim to be reckoned as typical. If they are analyzed, it is found that
they signify something that is not contained in them, that they are
intended to mask another wish of some kind. This is the case in the dream
of the aunt who sees the only son of her sister lying on a bier (chapter
IV). The dream does not mean that she desires the death of her little
nephew; as we have learned, it merely conceals the wish to see a certain
beloved person again after a long separation- the same person whom she had
seen after as long an interval at the funeral of another nephew. This
wish, which is the real content of the dream, gives no cause for sorrow,
and for that reason no sorrow is felt in the dream. We see here that the
feeling contained in the dream does not belong to the manifest, but to the
latent dream-content, and that the affective content has remained free
from the distortion which has befallen the conceptual content.
It is otherwise with those dreams in which the death of
a beloved relative is imagined, and in which a painful affect is felt.
These signify, as their content tells us, the wish that the person in
question might die; and since I may here expect that the feelings of all
my readers and of all who have had such dreams will lead them to reject my
explanation, I must endeavor to rest my proof on the broadest possible
basis.
We have already cited a dream from which we could see
that the wishes represented as fulfilled in dreams are not always current
wishes. They may also be bygone, discarded, buried and repressed wishes,
which we must nevertheless credit with a sort of continued existence,
merely on account of their reappearance in a dream. They are not dead,
like persons who have died, in the sense that we know death, but are
rather like the shades in the Odyssey which awaken to a certain degree of
life so soon as they have drunk blood. The dream of the dead child in the
box (chapter IV) contained a wish that had been present fifteen years
earlier, and which had at that time been frankly admitted as real.
Further- and this, perhaps, is not unimportant from the standpoint of the
theory of dreams- a recollection from the dreamer's earliest childhood was
at the root of this wish also. When the dreamer was a little child- but
exactly when cannot be definitely determined- she heard that her mother,
during the pregnancy of which she was the outcome, had fallen into a
profound emotional depression, and had passionately wished for the death
of the child in her womb. Having herself grown up and become pregnant, she
was only following the example of her mother.
If anyone dreams that his father or mother, his brother
or sister, has died, and his dream expresses grief, I should never adduce
this as proof that he wishes any of them dead now. The theory of dreams
does not go as far as to require this; it is satisfied with concluding
that the dreamer has wished them dead at some time or other during his
childhood. I fear, however, that this limitation will not go far to
appease my critics; probably they will just as energetically deny the
possibility that they ever had such thoughts, as they protest that they do
not harbour them now. I must, therefore, reconstruct a portion of the
submerged infantile psychology on the basis of the evidence of the
present. *
* Cf. also "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old
Boy," Collected Papers, III; and "On the Sexual Theories of Children,"
Ibid., II.
Let us first of all consider the relation of children
to their brothers and sisters. I do not know why we presuppose that it
must be a loving one, since examples of enmity among adult brothers and
sisters are frequent in everyone's experience, and since we are so often
able to verify the fact that this estrangement originated during
childhood, or has always existed. Moreover, many adults who today are
devoted to their brothers and sisters, and support them in adversity,
lived with them in almost continuous enmity during their childhood. The
elder child ill- treated the younger, slandered him, and robbed him of his
toys; the younger was consumed with helpless fury against the elder,
envied and feared him, or his earliest impulse toward liberty and his
first revolt against injustice were directed against his oppressor. The
parents say that the children do not agree, and cannot find the reason for
it. It is not difficult to see that the character even of a well-behaved
child is not the character we should wish to find in an adult. A child is
absolutely egoistical; he feels his wants acutely, and strives
remorselessly to satisfy them, especially against his competitors, other
children, and first of all against his brothers and sisters. And yet we do
not on that account call a child wicked- we call him naughty; he is not
responsible for his misdeeds, either in our own judgment or in the eyes of
the law. And this is as it should be; for we may expect that within the
very period of life which we reckon as childhood, altruistic impulses and
morality will awake in the little egoist, and that, in the words of
Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay and inhibit the primary ego.
Morality, of course, does not develop simultaneously in all its
departments, and furthermore, the duration of the amoral period of
childhood differs in different individuals. Where this morality fails to
develop we are prone to speak of degeneration; but here the case is
obviously one of arrested development. Where the primary character is
already overlaid by the later development it may be at least partially
uncovered again by an attack of hysteria. The correspondence between the
so-called hysterical character and that of a naughty child is positively
striking. The obsessional neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a
super-morality, which develops as a strong reinforcement against the
primary character that is threatening to revive.
Many persons, then, who now love their brothers and
sisters, and who would feel bereaved by their death, harbor in their
unconscious hostile wishes, survivals from an earlier period, wishes which
are able to realize themselves in dreams. It is, however, quite especially
interesting to observe the behaviour of little children up to their third
and fourth year towards their younger brothers or sisters. So far the
child has been the only one; now he is informed that the stork has brought
a new baby. The child inspects the new arrival, and expresses his opinion
with decision: "The stork had better take it back again!" *
* Hans, whose phobia was the subject of the analysis in
the above- mentioned publication, cried out at the age of three and a
half, while feverish, shortly after the birth of a sister: "But I don't
want to have a little sister." In his neurosis, eighteen months later, he
frankly confessed the wish that his mother should drop the child into the
bath while bathing it, in order that it might die. With all this, Hans was
a good-natured, affectionate child, who soon became fond of his sister,
and took her under his special protection.
I seriously declare it as my opinion that a child is
able to estimate the disadvantages which he has to expect on account of a
new-comer. A connection of mine, who now gets on very well with a sister,
who is four years her junior, responded to the news of this sister's
arrival with the reservation: "But I shan't give her my red cap, anyhow."
If the child should come to realize only at a later stage that its
happiness may be prejudiced by a younger brother or sister, its enmity
will be aroused at this period. I know of a case where a girl, not three
years of age, tried to strangle an infant in its cradle, because she
suspected that its continued presence boded her no good. Children at this
time of life are capable of a jealousy that is perfectly evident and
extremely intense. Again, perhaps the little brother or sister really soon
disappears, and the child once more draws to himself the whole affection
of the household; then a new child is sent by the stork; is it not natural
that the favorite should conceive the wish that the new rival may meet
the same fate as the earlier one, in order that he may be as happy as he
was before the birth of the first child, and during the interval after his
death? * Of course, this attitude of the child towards the younger brother
or sister is, under normal circumstances, a mere function of the
difference of age. After a certain interval the maternal instincts of the
older girl will be awakened towards the helpless new-born infant.
* Such cases of death in the experience of children may
soon be forgotten in the family, but psycho-analytical investigation shows
that they are very significant for a later neurosis.
Feelings of hostility towards brothers and sisters must
occur far more frequently in children than is observed by their obtuse
elders. *
* Since the above was written, a great many
observations relating to the originally hostile attitude of children
toward their brothers and sisters, and toward one of their parents, have
been recorded in the literature of psycho-analysis. One writer, Spitteler,
gives the following peculiarly sincere and ingenious description of this
typical childish attitude as he experienced it in his earliest childhood:
"Moreover, there was now a second Adolf. A little creature whom they
declared was my brother, but I could not understand what he could be for,
or why they should pretend he was a being like myself. I was sufficient
unto myself: what did I want with a brother? And he was not only useless,
he was also even troublesome. When I plagued my grandmother, he too wanted
to plague her; when I was wheeled about in the baby- carriage he sat
opposite me, and took up half the room, so that we could not help kicking
one another."
In the case of my own children, who followed one
another rapidly, I missed the opportunity of making such observations, I
am now retrieving it, thanks to my little nephew, whose undisputed
domination was disturbed after fifteen months by the arrival of a feminine
rival. I hear, it is true, that the young man behaves very chivalrously
toward his little sister, that he kisses her hand and strokes her; but in
spite of this I have convinced myself that even before the completion of
his second year he is using his new command of language to criticize this
person, who, to him, after all, seems superfluous. Whenever the
conversation turns upon her he chimes in, and cries angrily: "Too
(l)ittle, too (l)ittle!" During the last few months, since the child has
outgrown this disparagement, owing to her splendid development, he has
found another reason for his insistence that she does not deserve so much
attention. He reminds us, on every suitable pretext: "She hasn't any
teeth." * We all of us recollect the case of the eldest daughter of
another sister of mine. The child, who was then six years of age, spent a
full half-hour in going from one aunt to another with the question: "Lucie
can't understand that yet, can she?" Lucie was her rival- two and a half
years younger.
* The three-and-a-half-year-old Hans embodied his
devastating criticism of his little sister in these identical words (loc.
cit.). He assumed that she was unable to speak on account of her lack of
teeth.
I have never failed to come across this dream of the
death of brothers or sisters, denoting an intense hostility, e.g., I have
met it in all my female patients. I have met with only one exception,
which could easily be interpreted into a confirmation of the rule. Once,
in the course of a sitting, when I was explaining this state of affairs to
a female patient, since it seemed to have some bearing on the symptoms
under consideration that day, she answered, to my astonishment, that she
had never had such dreams. But another dream occurred to her, which
presumably had nothing to do with the case- a dream which she had first
dreamed at the age of four, when she was the youngest child, and had since
then dreamed repeatedly. "A number of children, all her brothers and
sisters with her boy and girl cousins, were romping about in a meadow.
Suddenly they all grew wings, flew up, and were gone." She had no idea of
the significance of this dream; but we can hardly fail to recognize it as
a dream of the death of all the brothers and sisters, in its original
form, and but little influenced by the censorship. I will venture to add
the following analysis of it: on the death of one out of this large number
of children- in this case the children of two brothers were brought up
together as brothers and sisters- would not our dreamer, at that time not
yet four years of age, have asked some wise, grown-up person: "What
becomes of children when they are dead?" The answer would probably have
been: "They grow wings and become angels." After this explanation. all the
brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings, like angels
and- this is the important point- they fly away. Our little angel-maker is
left alone: just think, the only one out of such a crowd! That the
children romp about a meadow, from which they fly away, points almost
certainly to butterflies- it is as though the child had been influenced by
the same association of ideas which led the ancients to imagine Psyche,
the soul, with the wings of a butterfly.
Perhaps some readers will now object that the inimical
impulses of children toward their brothers and sisters may perhaps be
admitted, but how does the childish character arrive at such heights of
wickedness as to desire the death of a rival or a stronger playmate, as
though all misdeeds could be atoned for only by death? Those who speak in
this fashion forget that the child's idea of being dead has little but the
word in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of
decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite
Nothing, the thought of which the adult, as all the myths of the hereafter
testify, finds so intolerable. The fear of death is alien to the child;
and so he plays with the horrid word, and threatens another child: "If you
do that again, you will die, just like Francis died"; at which the poor
mother shudders, unable perhaps to forget that the greater proportion of
mortals do not survive beyond the years of childhood. Even at the age of
eight, a child returning from a visit to a natural history museum may say
to her mother: "Mamma, I do love you so; if you ever die, I am going to
have you stuffed and set you up here in the room, so that I can always,
always see you!" So different from our own is the childish conception of
being dead. *
* To my astonishment, I was told that a highly
intelligent boy of ten, after the sudden death of his father, said: "I
understand that father is dead, but I can't see why he does not come home
to supper." Further material relating to this subject will be found in the
section "Kinderseele," edited by Frau Dr. von HugHellmuth, in Imago Vol.
i-v, 1912-18.
Being dead means, for the child, who has been spared
the sight of the suffering that precedes death, much the same as being
gone, and ceasing to annoy the survivors. The child does not distinguish
the means by which this absence is brought about, whether by distance, or
estrangement, or death. * If, during the child's prehistoric years, a
nurse has been dismissed, and if his mother dies a little while later, the
two experiences, as we discover by analysis, form links of a chain in his
memory. The fact that the child does not very intensely miss those who are
absent has been realized, to her sorrow, by many a mother, when she has
returned home from an absence of several weeks, and has been told, upon
inquiry: "The children have not asked for their mother once." But if she
really departs to "that undiscovered country from whose bourne no
traveler returns," the children seem at first to have forgotten her, and
only subsequently do they begin to remember their dead mother.
* The observation of a father trained in
psycho-analysis was able to detect the very moment when his very
intelligent little daughter, age four, realized the difference between
being away and being dead. The child was being troublesome at table, and
noted that one of the waitresses in the pension was looking at her with an
expression of annoyance. "Josephine ought to be dead," she thereupon
remarked to her father. "But why dead?" asked the father, soothingly.
"Wouldn't it be enough if she went away?" "No," replied the child, "then
she would come back again." To the uncurbed self-love (narcissism) of the
child, every inconvenience constitutes the crime of lese majeste, and, as
in the Draconian code, the child's feelings prescribe for all such crimes
the one invariable punishment.
While, therefore, the child has its motives for
desiring the absence of another child, it is lacking in all those
restraints which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form of a
death-wish; and the psychic reaction to dreams of a death-wish proves
that, in spite of all the differences of content, the wish in the case of
the child is after all identical with the corresponding wish in an adult.
If, then, the death-wish of a child in respect of his
brothers and sisters is explained by his childish egoism, which makes him
regard his brothers and sisters as rivals, how are we to account for the
same wish in respect of his parents, who bestow their love on him, and
satisfy his needs, and whose preservation he ought to desire for these
very egoistical reasons?
Towards a solution of this difficulty we may be guided
by our knowledge that the very great majority of dreams of the death of a
parent refer to the parent of the same sex as the dreamer, so that a man
generally dreams of the death of his father, and a woman of the death of
her mother. I do not claim that this happens constantly; but that it
happens in a great majority of cases is so evident that it requires
explanation by some factor of general significance. * Broadly speaking, it
is as though a sexual preference made itself felt at an early age, as
though the boy regarded his father, and the girl her mother, as a rival in
love- by whose removal he or she could but profit.
* The situation is frequently disguised by the
intervention of a tendency to punishment, which, in the form of a moral
reaction, threatens the loss of the beloved parent.
Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader
again consider the actual relations between parents and children. We must
distinguish between the traditional standard of conduct, the filial piety
expected in this relation, and what daily observation shows us to be the
fact. More than one occasion for enmity lies hidden amidst the relations
of parents and children; conditions are present in the greatest abundance
under which wishes which cannot pass the censorship are bound to arise.
Let us first consider the relation between father and son. In my opinion
the sanctity with which we have endorsed the injunctions of the Decalogue
dulls our perception of the reality. Perhaps we hardly dare permit
ourselves to perceive that the greater part of humanity neglects to obey
the fifth commandment. In the lowest as well as in the highest strata of
human society, filial piety towards parents is wont to recede before other
interests. The obscure legends which have been handed down to us from the
primeval ages of human society in mythology and folklore give a deplorable
idea of the despotic power of the father, and the ruthlessness with which
it was exercised. Kronos devours his children, as the wild boar devours
the litter of the sow; Zeus emasculates his father * and takes his place
as ruler. The more tyrannically the father ruled in the ancient family,
the more surely must the son, as his appointed successor, have assumed the
position of an enemy, and the greater must have been his impatience to
attain to supremacy through the death of his father. Even in our own
middle-class families the father commonly fosters the growth of the germ
of hatred which is naturally inherent in the paternal relation, by
refusing to allow the son to be a free agent or by denying him the means
of becoming so. A physician often has occasion to remark that a son's
grief at the loss of his father cannot quench his gratification that he
has at last obtained his freedom. Fathers, as a rule, cling desperately to
as much of the sadly antiquated potestas patris familias *(2) as still
survives in our modern society, and the poet who, like Ibsen, puts the
immemorial strife between father and son in the foreground of his drama is
sure of his effect. The causes of conflict between mother and daughter
arise when the daughter grows up and finds herself watched by her mother
when she longs for real sexual freedom, while the mother is reminded by
the budding beauty of her daughter that for her the time has come to
renounce sexual claims.
* At least in some of the mythological accounts.
According to others, emasculation was inflicted only by Kronos on his
father Uranos.
With regard to the mythological significance of this
motive, cf. Otto Rank's Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden, in No. v of
Schriften zur angew. Seelen-kunde (1909), and Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung
und Sage (1912), chap. ix, 2.
*(2) Authority of the father.
All these circumstances are obvious to everyone, but
they do not help us to explain dreams of the death of their parents in
persons for whom filial piety has long since come to be unquestionable. We
are, however, prepared by the foregoing discussion to look for the origin
of a death-wish in the earliest years of childhood.
In the case of psychoneurotics, analysis confirms this
conjecture beyond all doubt. For analysis tells us that the sexual wishes
of the child- in so far as they deserve this designation in their nascent
state- awaken at a very early age, and that the earliest affection of the
girl-child is lavished on the father, while the earliest infantile desires
of the boy are directed upon the mother. For the boy the father, and for
the girl the mother, becomes an obnoxious rival, and we have already
shown, in the case of brothers and sisters, how readily in children this
feeling leads to the death-wish. As a general rule, sexual selection soon
makes its appearance in the parents; it is a natural tendency for the
father to spoil his little daughters, and for the mother to take the part
of the sons, while both, so long as the glamour of sex does not prejudice
their judgment, are strict in training the children. The child is
perfectly conscious of this partiality, and offers resistance to the
parent who opposes it. To find love in an adult is for the child not
merely the satisfaction of a special need; it means also that the child's
will is indulged in all other respects. Thus the child is obeying its own
sexual instinct, and at the same time reinforcing the stimulus proceeding
from the parents, when its choice between the parents corresponds with
their own.
The signs of these infantile tendencies are for the
most part over-looked; and yet some of them may be observed even after the
early years of childhood. An eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance,
whenever her mother is called away from the table, takes advantage of her
absence to proclaim herself her successor. "Now I shall be Mamma; Karl, do
you want some more vegetables? Have some more, do," etc. A particularly
clever and lively little girl, not yet four years of age, in whom this
trait of child psychology is unusually transparent, says frankly: "Now
mummy can go away; then daddy must marry me, and I will be his wife." Nor
does this wish by any means exclude the possibility that the child may
most tenderly love its mother. If the little boy is allowed to sleep at
his mother's side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his
father's return he has to go back to the nursery, to a person whom he
likes far less, the wish may readily arise that his father might always be
absent, so that he might keep his place beside his dear, beautiful mamma;
and the father's death is obviously a means for the attainment of this
wish; for the child's experience has taught him that dead folks, like
grandpapa, for example, are always absent; they never come back.
While such observations of young children readily
accommodate themselves to the interpretation suggested, they do not, it is
true, carry the complete conviction which is forced upon a physician by
the psycho-analysis of adult neurotics. The dreams of neurotic patients
are communicated with preliminaries of such a nature that their
interpretation as wish-dreams becomes inevitable. One day I find a lady
depressed and weeping. She says: "I do not want to see my relatives any
more; they must shudder at me." Thereupon, almost without any transition,
she tells me that she has remembered a dream, whose significance, of
course, she does not understand. She dreamed it when she was four years
old, and it was this: A fox or a lynx is walking about the roof; then
something falls down, or she falls down, and after that, her mother is
carried out of the house- dead; whereat the dreamer weeps bitterly. I have
no sooner informed her that this dream must signify a childish wish to see
her mother dead, and that it is because of this dream that she thinks that
her relatives must shudder at her, than she furnishes material in
explanation of the dream. "Lynx-eye" is an opprobrious epithet which a
street boy once bestowed on her when she was a very small child; and when
she was three years old a brick or tile fell on her mother's head, so that
she bled profusely.
I once had occasion to make a thorough study of a young
girl who was passing through various psychic states. In the state of
frenzied confusion with which her illness began, the patient manifested a
quite peculiar aversion for her mother; she struck her and abused her
whenever she approached the bed, while at the same period she was
affectionate and submissive to a much older sister. Then there followed a
lucid but rather apathetic condition, with badly disturbed sleep. It was
in this phase that I began to treat her and to analyse her dreams. An
enormous number of these dealt, in a more or less veiled fashion, with the
death of the girl's mother; now she was present at the funeral of an old
woman, now she saw herself and her sister sitting at a table, dressed in
mourning; the meaning of the dreams could not be doubted. During her
progressive improvement hysterical phobias made their appearance, the most
distressing of which was the fear that something had happened to her
mother. Wherever she might be at the time, she had then to hurry home in
order to convince herself that her mother was still alive. Now this case,
considered in conjunction with the rest of my experience. was very
instructive; it showed, in polyglot translations, as it were, the
different ways in which the psychic apparatus reacts to the same exciting
idea. In the state of confusion, which I regard as an overthrow of the
second psychic instance by the first instance, at other times suppressed,
the unconscious enmity towards the mother gained the upper hand, and found
physical expression; then, when the patient became calmer, the
insurrection was suppressed, and the domination of the censorship
restored, and this enmity had access only to the realms of dreams, in
which it realized the wish that the mother might die; and, after the
normal condition had been still further strengthened, it created the
excessive concern for the mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and
defensive phenomenon. In the light of these considerations, it is no
longer inexplicable why hysterical girls are so often extravagantly
attached to their mothers.
On another occasion I had an opportunity of obtaining a
profound insight into the unconscious psychic life of a young man for whom
an obsessional neurosis made life almost unendurable, so that he could not
go into the streets, because he was tormented by the fear that he would
kill everyone he met. He spent his days in contriving evidence of an alibi
in case he should be accused of any murder that might have been committed
in the city. It goes without saying that this man was as moral as he was
highly cultured. The analysis- which, by the way, led to a cure- revealed,
as the basis of this distressing obsession, murderous impulses in respect
of his rather overstrict father- impulses which, to his astonishment, had
consciously expressed themselves when he was seven years old, but which,
of course, had originated in a much earlier period of his childhood. After
the painful illness and death of his father, when the young man was in his
thirty-first year, the obsessive reproach made its appearance, which
transferred itself to strangers in the form of this phobia. Anyone capable
of wishing to push his own father from a mountain- top into an abyss
cannot be trusted to spare the lives of persons less closely related to
him; he therefore does well to lock himself into his room.
According to my already extensive experience, parents
play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all persons who
subsequently become psychoneurotics. Falling in love with one parent and
hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulses
which arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material
of the subsequent neurosis. But I do not believe that psychoneurotics are
to be sharply distinguished in this respect from other persons who remain
normal- that is, I do not believe that they are capable of creating
something absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far more
probable- and this is confirmed by incidental observations of normal
children- that in their amorous or hostile attitude toward their parents,
psychoneurotics do no more than reveal to us, by magnification, something
that occurs less markedly and intensively in the minds of the majority of
children. Antiquity has furnished us with legendary matter which
corroborates this belief, and the profound and universal validity of the
old legends is explicable only by an equally universal validity of the
above-mentioned hypothesis of infantile psychology.
I am referring to the legend of King Oedipus and the
Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and
Jocasta, is exposed as a suckling, because an oracle had informed the
father that his son, who was still unborn, would be his murderer. He is
rescued, and grows up as a king's son at a foreign court, until, being
uncertain of his origin, he, too, consults the oracle, and is warned to
avoid his native place, for he is destined to become the murderer of his
father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading away from his
supposed home he meets King Laius, and in a sudden quarrel strikes him
dead. He comes to Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, who is
barring the way to the city, whereupon he is elected king by the grateful
Thebans, and is rewarded with the hand of Jocasta. He reigns for many
years in peace and honor, and begets two sons and two daughters upon his
unknown mother, until at last a plague breaks out- which causes the
Thebians to consult the oracle anew. Here Sophocles' tragedy begins. The
messengers bring the reply that the plague will stop as soon as the
murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But where is he?
Where shall be found,
Faint, and hard to be known, the trace of the ancient
guilt?
The action of the play consists simply in the
disclosure, approached step by step and artistically delayed (and
comparable to the work of a psycho-analysis) that Oedipus himself is the
murderer of Laius, and that he is the son of the murdered man and Jocasta.
Shocked by the abominable crime which he has unwittingly committed,
Oedipus blinds himself, and departs from his native city. The prophecy of
the oracle has been fulfilled.
The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of fate; its tragic effect
depends on the conflict between the all-powerful will of the gods and the
vain efforts of human beings threatened with disaster; resignation to the
divine will, and the perception of one's own impotence is the lesson which
the deeply moved spectator is supposed to learn from the tragedy. Modern
authors have therefore sought to achieve a similar tragic effect by
expressing the same conflict in stories of their own invention. But the
playgoers have looked on unmoved at the unavailing efforts of guiltless
men to avert the fulfillment of curse or oracle; the modern tragedies of
destiny have failed of their effect.
If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader
or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the
only possible explanation is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not
depend upon the conflict between fate and human will, but upon the
peculiar nature of the material by which this conflict is revealed. There
must be a voice within us which is prepared to acknowledge the compelling
power of fate in the Oedipus, while we are able to condemn the situations
occurring in Die Ahnfrau or other tragedies of fate as arbitrary
inventions. And there actually is a motive in the story of King Oedipus
which explains the verdict of this inner voice. His fate moves us only
because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before
our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all
destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our
first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams
convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and
wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfillment-
the fulfillment of the wish of our childhood. But we, more fortunate than
he, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, have since our
childhood succeeded in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers,
and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. We recoil from the person
for whom this primitive wish of our childhood has been fulfilled with all
the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone in our minds
since childhood. As the poet brings the guilt of Oedipus to light by his
investigation, he forces us to become aware of our own inner selves, in
which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed.
The antithesis with which the chorus departs:
...Behold, this is Oedipus,
Who unraveled the great riddle, and was first in
power,
Whose fortune all the townsmen praised and envied;
See in what dread adversity he sank!
-this admonition touches us and our own pride, we who,
since the years of our childhood, have grown so wise and so powerful in
our own estimation. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the desires that
offend morality, the desires that nature has forced upon us and after
their unveiling we may well prefer to avert our gaze from the scenes of
our childhood. *
* None of the discoveries of psycho-analytical research
has evoked such embittered contradiction, such furious opposition, and
also such entertaining acrobatics of criticism, as this indication of the
incestuous impulses of childhood which survive in the unconscious. An
attempt has even been made recently, in defiance of all experience, to
assign only a symbolic significance to incest. Ferenczi has given an
ingenious reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth, based on a passage in one
of Schopenhauer's letters, in Imago, i, (1912). The Oedipus complex, which
was first alluded to here in The Interpretation of Dreams, has through
further study of the subject, acquired an unexpected significance for the
understanding of human history and the evolution of religion and morality.
See Toten and Taboo. -
In the very text of Sophocles' tragedy there is an
unmistakable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend had its source
in dream-material of immemorial antiquity, the content of which was the
painful disturbance of the child's relations to its parents caused by the
first impulses of sexuality. Jocasta comforts Oedipus- who is not yet
enlightened, but is troubled by the recollection of the oracle- by an
allusion to a dream which is often dreamed, though it cannot, in her
opinion, mean anything: -
For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's
mate, but he who gives no heed To suchlike matters bears the easier life.
-
The dream of having sexual intercourse with one's
mother was as common then as it is today with many people, who tell it
with indignation and astonishment. As may well be imagined, it is the key
to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father.
The Oedipus fable is the reaction of phantasy to these two typical dreams,
and just as such a dream, when occurring to an adult, is experienced with
feelings of aversion, so the content of the fable must include terror and
self- chastisement. The form which it subsequently assumed was the result
of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration of the material, which sought
to make it serve a theological intention. * The attempt to reconcile
divine omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail with
this material as with any other.
* Cf. the dream-material of exhibitionism, earlier in
this chapter.
Another of the great poetic tragedies, Shakespeare's
Hamlet, is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the whole
difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of
civilization, and the progress, during the course of time, of repression
in the emotional life of humanity, is manifested in the differing
treatment of the same material. In Oedipus Rex the basic wish-phantasy of
the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams; in Hamlet
it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover the
relevant facts in a neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which
proceed from it. In the more modern drama, the curious fact that it is
possible to remain in complete uncertainty as to the character of the hero
has proved to be quite consistent with the over-powering effect of the
tragedy. The play is based upon Hamlet's hesitation in accomplishing the
task of revenge assigned to him; the text does not give the cause or the
motive of this hesitation, nor have the manifold attempts at
interpretation succeeded in doing so. According to the still prevailing
conception, a conception for which Goethe was first responsible. Hamlet
represents the type of man whose active energy is paralyzed by excessive
intellectual activity: "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
According to another conception. the poet has endeavored to portray a
morbid, irresolute character, on the verge of neurasthenia. The plot of
the drama, however, shows us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear
as a character wholly incapable of action. On two separate occasions we
see him assert himself: once in a sudden outburst of rage, when he stabs
the eavesdropper behind the arras, and on the other occasion when he
deliberately, and even craftily, with the complete unscrupulousness of a
prince of the Renaissance, sends the two courtiers to the death which was
intended for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing
the task which his father's ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation
offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able
to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his
father and has taken his father's place with his mother- the man who shows
him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood. The
loathing which should have driven him to revenge is thus replaced by
self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell him that he himself
is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish. I have here
translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind
of the hero; if anyone wishes to call Hamlet an hysterical subject I
cannot but admit that this is the deduction to be drawn from my
interpretation. The sexual aversion which Hamlet expresses in conversation
with Ophelia is perfectly consistent with this deduction- the same sexual
aversion which during the next few years was increasingly to take
possession of the poet's soul, until it found its supreme utterance in
Timon of Athens. It can, of course, be only the poet's own psychology with
which we are confronted in Hamlet; and in a work on Shakespeare by Georg
Brandes (1896) I find the statement that the drama was composed
immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (1601)- that is to
say, when he was still mourning his loss, and during a revival, as we may
fairly assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father. It
is known, too, that Shakespeare's son, who died in childhood, bore the
name of Hamnet (identical with Hamlet). Just as Hamlet treats of the
relation of the son to his parents, so Macbeth, which was written about
the same period, is based upon the theme of childlessness. Just as all
neurotic symptoms, like dreams themselves, are capable of
hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation before
they become perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation
must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in
the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. I
have here attempted to interpret only the deepest stratum of impulses in
the mind of the creative poet. *
* These indications in the direction of an analytical
understanding of Hamlet were subsequently developed by Dr. Ernest Jones,
who defended the above conception against others which have been put
forward in the literature of the subject (The Problem of Hamlet and the
Oedipus Complex, [1911]). The relation of the material of Hamlet to the
myth of the birth of the hero has been demonstrated by O. Rank. Further
attempts at an analysis of Macbeth will be found in my essay on "Some
Character Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work," Collected Papers, IV.,
in L. Jeckel's "Shakespeare's Macbeth," in Imago, V. (1918) and in "The
Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: a Study in Motive"
(American Journal of Psycology [1910], vol. xxi).
With regard to typical dreams of the death of
relatives, I must add a few words upon their significance from the point
of view of the theory of dreams in general. These dreams show us the
occurrence of a very unusual state of things; they show us that the
dream-thought created by the repressed wish completely escapes the
censorship, and is transferred to the dream without alteration. Special
conditions must obtain in order to make this possible. The following two
factors favor the production of these dreams: first, this is the last
wish that we could credit ourselves with harboring; we believe such a
wish "would never occur to us even in a dream"; the dream-censorship is
therefore unprepared for this monstrosity, just as the laws of Solon did
not foresee the necessity of establishing a penalty for patricide.
Secondly, the repressed and unsuspected wish is, in this special case,
frequently met half-way by a residue from the day's experience, in the
form of some concern for the life of the beloved person. This anxiety
cannot enter into the dream otherwise than by taking advantage of the
corresponding wish; but the wish is able to mask itself behind the concern
which has been aroused during the day. If one is inclined to think that
all this is really a very much simpler process, and to imagine that one
merely continues during the night, and in one's dream, what was begun
during the day, one removes the dreams of the death of those dear to us
out of all connection with the general explanation of dreams, and a
problem that may very well be solved remains a problem needlessly.
It is instructive to trace the relation of these dreams
to anxiety-dreams. In dreams of the death of those dear to us the
repressed wish has found a way of avoiding the censorship- and the
distortion for which the censorship is responsible. An invariable
concomitant phenomenon then, is that painful emotions are felt in the
dream. Similarly, an anxiety-dream occurs only when the censorship is
entirely or partially overpowered, and on the other hand, the overpowering
of the censorship is facilitated when the actual sensation of anxiety is
already present from somatic sources. It thus becomes obvious for what
purpose the censorship performs its office and practices dream-distortion;
it does so in order to prevent the development of anxiety or other forms
of painful affect.
I have spoken in the foregoing sections of the egoism
of the child's psyche, and I now emphasize this peculiarity in order to
suggest a connection, for dreams too have retained this characteristic.
All dreams are absolutely egoistical; in every dream the beloved ego
appears, even though in a disguised form. The wishes that are realized in
dreams are invariably the wishes of this ego; it is only a deceptive
appearance if interest in another person is believed to have evoked a
dream. I will now analyse a few examples which appear to contradict this
assertion. -
I.
A boy not yet four years of age relates the following
dream: He saw a large garnished dish, on which was a large joint of roast
meat; and the joint was suddenly- not carved- but eaten up. He did not see
the person who ate it. *
* Even the large, over-abundant, immoderate and
exaggerated things occurring in dreams may be a childish characteristic. A
child wants nothing more intensely than to grow big, and to eat as much of
everything as grown-ups do; a child is hard to satisfy; he knows no such
word as enough and insatiably demands the repetition of whatever has
pleased him or tasted good to him. He learns to practice moderation, to be
modest and resigned, only through training. As we know, the neurotic also
is inclined to immoderation and excess.
Who can he be, this strange person, of whose luxurious
repast the little fellow dreams? The experience of the day must supply the
answer. For some days past the boy, in accordance with the doctor's
orders, had been living on a milk diet; but on the evening of the
dream-day he had been naughty, and, as a punishment, had been deprived of
his supper. He had already undergone one such hunger-cure, and had borne
his deprivation bravely. He knew that he would get nothing, but he did not
even allude to the fact that he was hungry. Training was beginning to
produce its effect; this is demonstrated even by the dream, which reveals
the beginnings of dream-distortion. There is no doubt that he himself is
the person whose desires are directed toward this abundant meal, and a
meal of roast meat at that. But since he knows that this is forbidden him,
he does not dare, as hungry children do in dreams (cf. my little Anna's
dream about strawberries, chapter III), to sit down to the meal himself.
The person remains anonymous.
II.
One night I dream that I see on a bookseller's counter
a new volume of one of those collectors' series, which I am in the habit
of buying (monographs on artistic subjects, history, famous artistic
centers, etc.). The new collection is entitled "Famous Orators" (or
Orations), and the first number bears the name of Dr. Lecher.
On analysis it seems to me improbable that the fame of
Dr. Lecher, the long-winded speaker of the German Opposition, should
occupy my thoughts while I am dreaming. The fact is that a few days ago I
undertook the psychological treatment of some new patients, and am now
forced to talk for ten to twelve hours a day. Thus I myself am a
long-winded speaker.
III.
On another occasion I dream that a university lecturer
of my acquaintance says to me: "My son, the myopic." Then follows a
dialogue of brief observations and replies. A third portion of the dream
follows, in which I and my sons appear, and so far as the latent
dream-content is concerned, the father, the son, and Professor M, are
merely lay figures, representing myself and my eldest son. Later on I
shall examine this dream again, on account of another peculiarity.
IV.
The following dream gives an example of really base,
egoistical feelings, which conceal themselves behind an affectionate
concern:
My friend Otto looks ill; his face is brown and his
eyes protrude.
Otto is my family physician, to whom I owe a debt
greater than I can ever hope to repay, since he has watched for years over
the health of my children, has treated them successfully when they have
been ill, and, moreover, has given them presents whenever he could find
any excuse for doing so. He paid us a visit on the day of the dream, and
my wife noticed that he looked tired and exhausted. At night I dream of
him, and my dream attributes to him certain of the symptoms of Basedow's
disease. If you were to disregard my rules for dream-interpretation you
would understand this dream to mean that I am concerned about the health
of my friend, and that this concern is realized in the dream. It would
thus constitute a contradiction not only of the assertion that a dream is
a wish-fulfillment, but also of the assertion that it is accessible only to
egoistical impulses. But will those who thus interpret my dream explain
why I should fear that Otto has Basedow's disease, for which diagnosis his
appearance does not afford the slightest justification? My analysis, on
the other hand, furnishes the following material, deriving from an
incident which had occurred six years earlier. We were driving- a small
party of us, including Professor R- in the dark through the forest of N,
which lies at a distance of some hours from where we were staying in the
country. The driver, who was not quite sober, overthrew us and the
carriage down a bank, and it was only by good fortune that we all escaped
unhurt. But we were forced to spend the night at the nearest inn, where
the news of our mishap aroused great sympathy. A certain gentleman, who
showed unmistakable symptoms of morbus Basedowii- the brownish colour of
the skin of the face and the protruding eyes, but no goiter- placed
himself entirely at our disposal, and asked what he could do for us.
Professor R answered in his decisive way, "Nothing, except lend me a
nightshirt." Whereupon our generous friend replied: "I am sorry, but I
cannot do that," and left us.
In continuing the analysis, it occurs to me that
Basedow is the name not only of a physician but also of a famous
pedagogue. (Now that I am wide awake, I do not feel quite sure of this
fact.) My friend Otto is the person whom I have asked to take charge of
the physical education of my children- especially during the age of
puberty (hence the nightshirt) in case anything should happen to me. By
seeing Otto in my dream with the morbid symptoms of our above-mentioned
generous helper, I clearly mean to say: "If anything happens to me, he
will do just as little for my children as Baron L did for us, in spite of
his amiable offers." The egoistical flavor of this dream should now
be obvious enough. *
* While Dr. Ernest Jones was delivering a lecture
before an American scientific society, and was speaking of egoism in
dreams, a learned lady took exception to this unscientific generalization.
She thought the lecturer was entitled to pronounce such a verdict only on
the dreams of Austrians, but had no right to include the dreams of
Americans. As for herself, she was sure that all her dreams were strictly
altruistic.
In justice to this lady with her national pride it may,
however, be remarked that the dogma: "the dream is wholly egoistic" must
not be misunderstood. For inasmuch as everything that occurs in
preconscious inking may appear in dreams (in the content as well as the
latent dream-thoughts) the altruistic feelings may possibly occur.
Similarly, affectionate or amorous feelings for another person, if they
exist in the unconscious, may occur in dreams. The truth of the assertion
is therefore restricted to the fact that among the unconscious stimuli of
dreams one very often finds egoistical tendencies which seem to have been
overcome in the waking state.
But where is the wish-fulfillment to be found in this?
Not in the vengeance wreaked on my friend Otto (who seems to be fated to
be badly treated in my dreams), but in the following circumstance:
Inasmuch as in my dream I represented Otto as Baron L, I likewise
identified myself with another person, namely, with Professor R; for I
have asked something of Otto, just as R asked something of Baron L at the
time of the incident I have described. And this is the point. For
Professor R has gone his way independently, outside academic circles, just
as I myself have done, and has only in his later years received the title
which he had earned before. Once more, then, I want to be a professor! The
very phrase in his later years is a wish-fulfillment, for it means that I
shall live long enough to steer my boys through the age of puberty myself.
Of other typical dreams, in which one flies with a
feeling of ease or falls in terror, I know nothing from my own experience,
and whatever I have to say about them I owe to my psychoanalyses. From the
information thus obtained one must conclude that these dreams also
reproduce impressions made in childhood- that is, that they refer to the
games involving rapid motion which have such an extraordinary attraction
for children. Where is the uncle who has never made a child fly by running
with it across the room with outstretched arms, or has never played at
falling with it by rocking it on his knee and then suddenly straightening
his leg, or by lifting it above his head and suddenly pretending to
withdraw his supporting hand? At such moments children shout with joy, and
insatiably demand a repetition of the performance, especially if a little
fright and dizziness are involved in the game; in after years they repeat
their sensations in dreams. but in dreams they omit the hands that held
them, so that now they are free to float or fall. We know that all small
children have a fondness for such games as rocking and see-sawing; and if
they see gymnastic performances at the circus their recollection of such
games is refreshed. * In some boys a hysterical attack will consist simply
in the reproduction of such performances, which they accomplish with great
dexterity. Not infrequently sexual sensations are excited by these games
of movement, which are quite neutral in themselves. *(2) To express the
matter in a few words: the exciting games of childhood are repeated in
dreams of flying, falling, reeling and the like, but the voluptuous
feelings are now transformed into anxiety. But, as every mother knows, the
excited play of children often enough culminates in quarrelling and tears.
* Psycho-analytic investigation has enabled us to
conclude that in the predilection shown by children for gymnastic
performances, and in the repetition of these in hysterical attacks, there
is, besides the pleasure felt in the organ, yet another factor at work
(often unconscious): namely, a memory-picture of sexual intercourse
observed in human beings or animals.
*(2) A young colleague, who is entirely free from
nervousness, tells me, in this connection: "I know from my own experience
that while swinging, and at the moment at which the downward movement was
at its maximum, I used to have a curious feeling in my genitals, which,
although it was not really pleasing to me, I must describe as a voluptuous
feeling." I have often heard from patients that the first erections with
voluptuous sensations which they can remember to have had in boyhood
occurred while they were climbing. It is established with complete
certainty by psycho-analysis that the first sexual sensations often have
their origin in the scufflings and wrestlings of childhood.
I have therefore good reason for rejecting the
explanation that it is the state of our dermal sensations during sleep,
the sensation of the movements of the lungs, etc., that evokes dreams of
flying and falling. I see that these very sensations have been reproduced
from the memory to which the dream refers- and that they are, therefore,
dream-content and not dream-sources.
I do not for a moment deny, however, that I am unable
to furnish a full explanation of this series of typical dreams. Precisely
here my material leaves me in the lurch. I must adhere to the general
opinion that all the dermal and kinetic sensations of these typical dreams
are awakened as soon as any psychic motive of whatever kind has need of
them, and that they are neglected when there is no such need of them. The
relation to infantile experiences seems to be confirmed by the indications
which I have obtained from the analyses of psychoneurotics. But I am
unable to say what other meanings might, in the course of the dreamer's
life, have become attached to the memory of these sensations- different,
perhaps, in each individual, despite the typical appearance of these
dreams- and I should very much like to be in a position to fill this gap
with careful analyses of good examples. To those who wonder why I complain
of a lack of material, despite the frequency of these dreams of flying,
falling, tooth-drawing, etc., I must explain that I myself have never
experienced any such dreams since I have turned my attention to the
subject of dream-interpretation. The dreams of neurotics which are at my
disposal, however, are not all capable of interpretation, and very often
it is impossible to penetrate to the farthest point of their hidden
intention; a certain psychic force which participated in the building up
of the neurosis, and which again becomes active during its dissolution,
opposes interpretation of the final problem.
(c) The Examination-Dream
Everyone who has received his certificate of
matriculation after passing his final examination at school complains of
the persistence with which he is plagued by anxiety-dreams in which he has
failed, or must go through his course again, etc. For the holder of a
university degree this typical dream is replaced by another, which
represents that he has not taken his doctor's degree, to which he vainly
objects, while still asleep, that he has already been practising for
years, or is already a university lecturer or the senior partner of a firm
of lawyers, and so on. These are the ineradicable memories of the
punishments we suffered as children for misdeeds which we had committed-
memories which were revived in us on the dies irae, dies illa * of the
gruelling examination at the two critical junctures in our careers as
students. The examination-anxiety of neurotics is likewise intensified by
this childish fear. When our student days are over, it is no longer our
parents or teachers who see to our punishment; the inexorable chain of
cause and effect of later life has taken over our further education. Now
we dream of our matriculation, or the examination for the doctor's degree-
and who has not been faint-hearted on such occasions?- whenever we fear
that we may be punished by some unpleasant result because we have done
something carelessly or wrongly, because we have not been as thorough as
we might have been- in short, whenever we feel the burden of
responsibility.
* Day of wrath.
For a further explanation of examination-dreams I have
to thank a remark made by a colleague who had studied this subject, who
once stated, in the course of a scientific discussion, that in his
experience the examination-dream occurred only to persons who had passed
the examination, never to those who had flunked. We have had increasing
confirmation of the fact that the anxiety-dream of examination occurs when
the dreamer is anticipating a responsible task on the following day, with
the possibility of disgrace; recourse will then be had to an occasion in
the past on which a great anxiety proved to have been without real
justification, having, indeed, been refuted by the outcome. Such a dream
would be a very striking example of the way in which the dream-content is
misunderstood by the waking instance. The exclamation which is regarded as
a protest against the dream: "But I am already a doctor," etc., would in
reality be the consolation offered by the dream, and should, therefore, be
worded as follows: "Do not be afraid of the morrow; think of the anxiety
which you felt before your matriculation; yet nothing happened to justify
it, for now you are a doctor," etc. But the anxiety which we attribute to
the dream really has its origin in the residues of the dream-day.
The tests of this interpretation which I have been able
to make in my own case, and in that of others, although by no means
exhaustive, were entirely in its favor. * For example, I failed in my
examination for the doctor's degree in medical jurisprudence; never once
has the matter worried me in my dreams, while I have often enough been
examined in botany, zoology, and chemistry, and I sat for the examinations
in these subjects with well-justified anxiety, but escaped disaster,
through the clemency of fate, or of the examiner. In my dreams of school
examinations, I am always examined in history, a subject in which I passed
brilliantly at the time, but only, I must admit, because my good-natured
professor- my one-eyed benefactor in another dream- did not overlook the
fact that on the examination-paper which I returned to him I had crossed
out with my fingernail the second of three questions, as a hint that he
should not insist on it. One of my patients, who withdrew before the
matriculation examination. only to pass it later, but failed in the
officer's examination, so that he did not become an officer, tells me that
he often dreams of the former examination, but never of the latter.
* See also chapter VI., A.
W. Stekel, who was the first to interpret the
matriculation dream, maintains that this dream invariably refers to sexual
experiences and sexual maturity. This has frequently been confirmed in my
experience. |
