CHAPTER SIX (Continued...)
G. Absurd Dreams- Intellectual Performances in Dreams
I.
Hitherto, in our interpretation of dreams, we have come
upon the element of absurdity in the dream-content so frequently that we
must no longer postpone the investigation of its cause and its meaning. We
remember, of course, that the absurdity of dreams has furnished the
opponents of dream-interpretation with their chief argument for regarding
the dream as merely the meaningless product of an attenuated and
fragmentary activity of the psyche.
I will begin with a few examples in which the absurdity
of the dream-content is apparent only, disappearing when the dream is more
thoroughly examined. These are certain dreams which- accidently, one
begins by thinking- are concerned with the dreamer's dead father.
1. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his
father six years before the date of the dream:
His father had been involved in a terrible accident. He
was traveling by the night express when the train was derailed, the seats
were telescoped, and his head was crushed from side to side. The dreamer
sees him lying on his bed; from his left eyebrow a wound runs vertically
upwards. The dreamer is surprised that his father should have met with an
accident (since he is dead already, as the dreamer adds in relating his
dream). His father's eyes are so clear.
According to the prevailing standards of
dream-criticism, this dream-content would be explained as follows: At
first, while the dreamer is picturing his father's accident, he has
forgotten that his father has already been many years in his grave; in the
course of the dream this memory awakens, so that he is surprised at his
own dream even while he is dreaming it. Analysis, however, tells us that
it is quite superfluous to seek for such explanations. The dreamer had
commissioned a sculptor to make a bust of his father, and he had inspected
the bust two days before the dream. It is this which seems to him to have
come to grief (the German word means gone wrong or met with an accident).
The sculptor has never seen his father, and has had to work from
photographs. On the very day before the dream the son had sent an old
family servant to the studio in order to see whether he, too, would pass
the some judgment upon the marble bust- namely, that it was too narrow
between the temples. And now follows the memory- material which has
contributed to the formation of the dream: The dreamer's father had a
habit, whenever he was harassed by business cares or domestic
difficulties, of pressing his temples between his hands, as though his
head was growing too large and be was trying to compress it. When the
dreamer was four years old, he was present when a pistol was accidentally
discharged, and his father's eyes were blackened (his eyes are so clear).
When his father was thoughtful or depressed, he had a deep furrow in his
forehead just where the dream shows his wound. The fact that in the dream
this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to the second occasion for the
dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter; the
plate had fallen from his hand, and when he picked it up it revealed a
crack which ran like a vertical furrow across the child's forehead,
extending as far as the eyebrow. He could not help feeling a superstitious
foreboding, for on the day before his mother's death the negative of her
portrait had been cracked.
Thus, the absurdity of this dream is simply the result
of a carelessness of verbal expression, which does not distinguish between
the bust or the photograph and the original. We are all accustomed to
making remarks like: "Don't you think it's exactly your father?" The
appearance of absurdity in this dream might, of course, have been easily
avoided. If it were permissible to form an opinion on the strength of a
single case, one might be tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity
is admitted or even desired.
II.
Here is another example of the same kind from my own
dreams (I lost my father in the year 1896):
After his death, my father has played a part in the
political life of the Magyars, and has united them into a political whole;
and here I see, indistinctly, a little picture: a number of men, as though
in the Reichstag; a man is standing on one or two chairs; there are others
round about him. I remember that on his deathbed he looked so like
Garibaldi, and I am glad that this promise has really come true.
Certainly this is absurd enough. It was dreamed at the
time when the Hungarians were in a state of anarchy, owing to
Parliamentary obstruction, and were passing through the crisis from which
Koloman Szell subsequently delivered them. The trivial circumstance that
the scenes beheld in dreams consist of such little pictures is not without
significance for the elucidation of this element. The customary visual
dream-representations of our thoughts present images that impress us as
being life-size; my dream-picture, however, is the reproduction of a
wood-cut inserted in the text of an illustrated history of Austria,
representing Maria Theresa in the Reichstag of Pressburg- the famous scene
of Moriamur pro rege nostro. * Like Maria Theresa, my father, in my dream,
is surrounded by the multitude; but he is standing on one or two chairs
(Stuhlen), and is thus, like a Stuhlrichter (presiding judge). (He has
united them; here the intermediary is the phrase: "We shall need no
judge.") Those of us who stood about my father's death-bed did actually
notice that he looked very like Garibaldi. He had a post-mortem rise of
temperature; his cheeks shone redder and redder... involuntarily we
continue: "And behind him, in unsubstantial (radiance), lay that which
subdues us all- the common fate."
* [We die for our king.] I have forgotten in what
author I found a reference to a dream which was overrun with unusually
small figures, the source of which proved to be one of the engravings of
Jacques Callot, which the dreamer had examined during the day. These
engravings contain an enormous number of very small figures; a whole
series of them deals with the horrors of the Thirty Years War.
This uplifting of our thoughts prepares us for the fact
that we shall have to deal with this common fate. The post-mortem rise in
temperature corresponds to the words after his death in the dream-
content. The most agonizing of his afflictions had been a complete
paralysis of the intestines (obstruction) during the last few weeks of his
life. All sorts of disrespectful thoughts associate themselves with this.
One of my contemporaries, who lost his father while still at the
Gymnasium- upon which occasion I was profoundly moved, and tendered him my
friendship- once told me, derisively, of the distress of a relative whose
father had died in the street, and had been brought home, when it
appeared, upon undressing the corpse, that at the moment of death, or
post- mortem, an evacuation of the bowels (Stuhlentleerung) had taken
place. The daughter was deeply distressed by this circumstance, because
this ugly detail would inevitably spoil her memory of her father. We have
now penetrated to the wish that is embodied in this dream. To stand after
one's death before one's children great and undefiled: who would not wish
that? What now has become of the absurdity of this dream? The appearance
of absurdity was due only to the fact that a perfectly permissible figure
of speech, in which we are accustomed to ignore any absurdity that may
exist as between its components, has been faithfully represented in the
dream. Here again we can hardly deny that the appearance of absurdity is
desired and has been purposely produced.
The frequency with which dead persons appear in our
dreams as living and active and associating with us has evoked undue
astonishment, and some curious explanations, which afford conspicuous
proof of our misunderstanding of dreams. And yet the explanation of these
dreams is close at hand. How often it happens that we say to ourselves:
"If my father were still alive, what would he say to this?" The dream can
express this if in no other way than by his presence in a definite
situation. Thus, for instance, a young man whose grandfather has left him
a great inheritance dreams that the old man is alive, and calls his
grandson to account, reproaching him for his lavish expenditure. What we
regard as an objection to the dream on account of our better knowledge
that the man is already dead, is in reality the consoling thought that the
dead man does not need to learn the truth, or satisfaction over the fact
that he can no longer have a say in the matter.
Another form of absurdity found in dreams of deceased
relatives does not express scorn and derision; it serves to express the
extremest repudiation, the representation of a suppressed thought which
one would like to believe the very last thing one would think of. Dreams
of this kind appear to be capable of solution only if we remember that a
dream makes no distinction between desire and reality. For example, a man
who nursed his father during his last illness, and who felt his death very
keenly, dreamed some time afterwards the following senseless dream: His
father was again living, and conversing with him as usual, but (and this
was the remarkable thing) he had nevertheless died, though he did not know
it. This dream is intelligible if, after he had nevertheless died, we
insert in consequence of the dreamer's wish, and if after but he did not
know it, we add that the dreamer had entertained this wish. While nursing
him, the son had often wished that his father was dead; that is, he had
had the really compassionate thought that it would be a good thing if
death would at last put an end to his sufferings. While he was mourning
his father's death, even this compassionate wish became an unconscious
reproach, as though it had really contributed to shorten the sick man's
life. By the awakening of the earliest infantile feelings against his
father, it became possible to express this reproach as a dream; and it was
precisely because of the extreme antithesis between the dream-instigator
and the day- thoughts that this dream had to assume so absurd a form. *
* Cf. "Formulations regarding the Two Principles in
Mental Functioning," Collected Papers, IV.
As a general thing, the dreams of a deceased person of
whom the dreamer has been fond confront the interpreter with difficult
problems, the solution of which is not always satisfying. The reason for
this may be sought in the especially pronounced ambivalence of feeling
which controls the relation of the dreamer to the dead person. In such
dreams it is quite usual for the deceased person to be treated at first as
living; then it suddenly appears that he is dead; and in the continuation
of the dream he is once more living. This has a confusing effect. I at
last divined that this alternation of death and life is intended to
represent the indifference of the dreamer ("It is all one to me whether he
is alive or dead"). This indifference, of course, is not real, but wished;
its purpose is to help the dreamer to deny his very intense and often
contradictory emotional attitudes, and so it becomes the
dream-representation of his ambivalence. For other dreams in which one
meets with deceased persons the following rule will often be a guide: If
in the dream the dreamer is not reminded that the dead person is dead, he
sets himself on a par with the dead; he dreams of his own death. The
sudden realization or astonishment in the dream ("but he has long been
dead!") is a protest against this identification, and rejects the meaning
that the dreamer is dead. But I will admit that I feel that
dream-interpretation is far from having elicited all the secrets of dreams
having this content.
III.
In the example which I shall now cite, I can detect the
dream- work in the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which
there is no occasion whatever in the dream-material. It is taken from the
dream which I had as a result of meeting Count Thun just before going away
on a holiday. I am driving in a cab, and I tell the driver to drive to a
railway station. "Of course, I can't drive with you on the railway track
itself," I say, after the driver had reproached me, as though I had worn
him out; at the same time, it seems as though I had already made with him
a journey that one usually makes by train. Of this confused and senseless
story analysis gives the following explanation: During the day I had hired
a cab to take me to a remote street in Dornbach. The driver, however, did
not know the way, and simply kept on driving, in the manner of such worthy
people, until I became aware of the fact and showed him the way, indulging
in a few derisive remarks. From this driver a train of thought led to the
aristocratic personage whom I was to meet later on. For the present, I
will only remark that one thing that strikes us middle- class plebeians
about the aristocracy is that they like to put themselves in the driver's
seat. Does not Count Thun guide the Austrian car of State? The next
sentence in the dream, however, refers to my brother, whom I thus also
identify with the cab- driver. I had refused to go to Italy with him this
year (Of course, I can't drive with you on the railway track itself), and
this refusal was a sort of punishment for his accustomed complaint that I
usually wear him out on this tour (this finds its way into the dream
unchanged) by rushing him too quickly from place to place, and making him
see too many beautiful things in a single day. That evening my brother had
accompanied me to the railway station, but shortly before the carriage had
reached the Western station of the Metropolitan Railway he had jumped out
in order to take the train to Purkersdorf. I suggested to him that he
might remain with me a little longer, as he did not travel to Purkersdorf
by the Metropolitan but by the Western Railway. This is why, in my dream,
I made in the cab a journey which one usually makes by train. In reality,
however, it was the other way about: what I told my brother was: "The
distance which you travel on the Metropolitan Railway you could travel in
my company on the Western Railway" The whole confusion of the dream is
therefore due to the fact that in my dream I replace "Metropolitan
Railway" by cab, which, to be sure, does good service in bringing the
driver and my brother into conjunction. I then elicit from the dream some
nonsense which is hardly disentangled by elucidation, and which almost
constitutes a contradiction of my earlier speech (of course, I cannot
drive with you on the railway track itself). But as I have no excuse
whatever for confronting the Metropolitan Railway with the cab, I must
intentionally have given the whole enigmatical story this peculiar form in
my dream.
But with what intention? We shall now learn what the
absurdity in the dream signifies, and the motives which admitted it or
created it. In this case the solution of the mystery is as follows: In the
dream I need an absurdity, and something incomprehensible, in connection
with driving (Fahren = riding, driving) because in the dream-thoughts I
have a certain opinion that demands representation. One evening, at the
house of the witty and hospitable lady who appears, in another scene of
the same dream, as the housekeeper, I heard two riddles which I could not
solve: As they were known to the other members of the party, I presented a
somewhat ludicrous figure in my unsuccessful attempts to find the
solutions. They were two puns turning on the words Nachkommen (to obey
orders- offspring) and Vorfahren (to drive- forefathers, ancestry). They
ran, I believe, as follows:
The coachman does it
At the master's behests;
Everyone has it;
In the grave it rests.
(Vorfahren)
A confusing detail was that the first halves of the two
riddles were identical:
The coachman does it
At the master's behests;
Not everyone has it,
In the cradle it rests.
(Nachkommen)
When I saw Count Thun drive up (vorfahren) in state,
and fell into the Figaro-like mood, in which one finds that the sole merit
of such aristocratic gentlemen is that they have taken the trouble to be
born (to become Nachkommen), these two riddles became intermediary
thoughts for the dream-work. As aristocrats may readily be replaced by
coachmen, and since it was once the custom to call a coachman Herr
Schwager (brother-in-law), the work of condensation could involve my
brother in the same representation. But the dream-thought at work in the
background is as follows: It is nonsense to be proud of one's ancestors
(Vorfahren). I would rather be an ancestor (Vorfahr) myself. On account of
this opinion, it is nonsense, we have the nonsense in the dream. And now
the last riddle in this obscure passage of the dream is solved- namely
that I have driven before (vorher gefahren, vorgefaltren) with this
driver.
Thus, a dream is made absurd if there occurs in the
dream- thoughts, as one of the elements of the contents, the opinion:
"That is nonsense"; and, in general, if criticism and derision are the
motives of one of the dreamer's unconscious trains of thought. Hence,
absurdity is one of the means by which the dream- work represents
contradiction; another means is the inversion of material relation between
the dream-thoughts and the dream- content; another is the employment of
the feeling of motor inhibition. But the absurdity of a dream is not to be
translated by a simple no; it is intended to reproduce the tendency of the
dream-thoughts to express laughter or derision simultaneously with the
contradiction. Only with this intention does the dream- work produce
anything ridiculous. Here again it transforms a part of the latent content
into a manifest form. *
* Here the dream-work parodies the thought which it
qualifies as ridiculous, in that it creates something ridiculous in
relation to it. Heine does the same thing when he wishes to deride the bad
rhymes of the King of Bavaria. He does it by using even worse rhymes:
Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet
Und singt er, so sturzt Apollo
Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht,
Halt ein, ich werde sonst toll, oh!
As a matter of fact, we have already cited a convincing
example of this significance of an absurd dream. The dream (interpreted
without analysis) of the Wagnerian performance which lasted until 7.45
a.m., and in which the orchestra is conducted from a tower, etc. (see this
chapter, D.), is obviously saving: It is a crazy world and an insane
society. He who deserves a thing doesn't get it, and he who doesn't care
for it does get it. In this way the dreamer compares her fate with that of
her cousin. The fact that dreams of a dead father were the first to
furnish us with examples of absurdity in dreams is by no means accidental.
The conditions for the creation of absurd dreams are here grouped together
in a typical fashion. The authority proper to the father has at an early
age evoked the criticism of the child, and the strict demands which he has
made have caused the child, in self- defense, to pay particularly close
attention to every weakness of his father's; but the piety with which the
father's personality is surrounded in our thoughts, especially after his
death, intensifies the censorship which prevents the expression of this
criticism from becoming conscious.
IV.
Here is another absurd dream of a deceased father:
I receive a communication from the town council of my
native city concerning the cost of accommodation in the hospital in the
year 1851. This was necessitated by a seizure from which I was suffering.
I make fun of the matter for, in the first place, I was not yet born in
1851, and in the second place, my father, to whom the communication might
refer, is already dead. I go to him in the adjoining room, where he is
lying in bed, and tell him about it. To my surprise he remembers that in
the year 1851 he was once drink and had to be locked up or confined. It
was when he was working for the firm of T. "Then you, too, used to drink?"
I ask. "You married soon after?" I reckon that I was born in 1856, which
seems to me to be immediately afterwards.
In the light of the foregoing exposition, we shall
translate the insistence with which this dream exhibits its absurdities as
a sure sign of a particularly embittered and passionate polemic in the
dream-thoughts. All the greater, then, is our astonishment when we
perceive that in this dream the polemic is waged openly, and that my
father is denoted as the person who is made a laughing-stock. Such
frankness seems to contradict our assumption of a censorship controlling
the dream-work. The explanation is that here the father is only an
interposed figure, while the quarrel is really with another person, who
appears in the dream only in a single allusion. Whereas a dream usually
treats of revolt against other persons, behind whom the father is
concealed, here it is the other way about: the father serves as the man of
straw to represent another, and hence the dream dares to concern itself
openly with a person who is usually hallowed, because there is present the
certain knowledge that he is not in reality intended. We learn of this
condition of affairs by considering the occasion of the dream. It was
dreamed after I had heard that an older colleague, whose judgment was
considered infallible, had expressed disapproval and astonishment on
hearing that one of my patients had already been undergoing psychoanalytic
treatment at my hands for five years. The introductory sentences of the
dream allude in a transparently disguised manner to the fact that this
colleague had for a time taken over the duties which my father could no
longer perform (statement of expenses, accommodation in the hospital); and
when our friendly relations began to alter for the worse I was thrown into
the same emotional conflict as that which arises in the case of a
misunderstanding between father and son (by reason of the part played by
the father, and his earlier functions). The dream- thoughts now bitterly
resent the reproach that I am not making better progress, which extends
itself from the treatment of this patient to other things. Does my
colleague know anyone who can get on any faster? Does he not know that
conditions of this sort are usually incurable and last for life? What are
four or five years in comparison to a whole lifetime, especially when life
has been made so much easier for the patient during the treatment?
The impression of absurdity in this dream is brought
about largely by the fact that sentences from different divisions of the
dream-thoughts are strung together without any reconciling transition.
Thus, the sentence, I go to him it the adjoining room, etc., leaves the
subject from which the preceding sentences are taken, and faithfully
reproduces the circumstances under which I told my father that I was
engaged to be married. Thus the dream is trying to remind me of the noble
disinterestedness which the old man showed at that time, and to contrast
this with the conduct of another newly-introduced person. I now perceive
that the dream is allowed to make fun of my father because in the
dream-thoughts, in the full recognition of his merits, he is held up as an
example to others. It is in the nature of every censorship that one is
permitted to tell untruths about forbidden things rather than the truth.
The next sentence, to the effect that my father remembers that he was once
drink, and was locked up in consequence, contains nothing that really
relates to my father any more. The person who is screened by him is here a
no less important personage than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I
followed with such veneration, and whose attitude towards me, after a
short period of favoritism, changed into one of undisguised hostility.
The dream recalls to me his own statement that in his youth he had at one
time formed the habit of intoxicating himself with chloroform, with the
result that he had to enter a sanatorium; and also my second experience
with him, shortly before his death. I had an embittered literary
controversy with him in reference to masculine hysteria, the existence of
which he denied, and when I visited him during his last illness, and asked
him how he felt, he described his condition at some length, and concluded
with the words: "You know, I have always been one of the prettiest cases
of masculine hysteria." Thus, to my satisfaction, and to my astonishment,
he admitted what he so long and so stubbornly denied. But the fact that in
this scene of my dream I can use my father to screen Meynert is explained
not by any discovered analogy between the two persons, but by the fact
that it is the brief yet perfectly adequate representation of a
conditional sentence in the dream- thoughts which, if fully expanded,
would read as follows: "Of course, if I belonged to the second generation,
if I were the son of a professor or a privy councilor, I should have
progressed more rapidly." In my dream I make my father a professor and a
privy councilor. The most obvious and most annoying absurdity of the
dream lies in the treatment of the date 1851, which seems to me to be
indistinguishable from 1856, as though a difference of five years meant
nothing whatever. But it is just this one of the dream-thoughts that
requires expression. Four or five years- that is precisely the length of
time during which I enjoyed the support of the colleague mentioned at the
outset; but it is also the duration of time I kept my fiancé waiting
before I married her; and by a coincidence that is eagerly exploited by
the dream- thoughts, it is also the time I have kept my oldest patient
waiting for a complete cure. "What are five years?" ask the dream-
thoughts. "That is no time at all to me, that isn't worth consideration. I
have time enough ahead of me, and just as what you wouldn't believe came
true at last, so I shall accomplish this also." Moreover, the number 51,
when considered apart from the number of the century, is determined in yet
another manner and in an opposite sense; for which reason it occurs
several times over in the dream. It is the age at which man seems
particularly exposed to danger; the age at which I have seen colleagues
die suddenly, among them one who had been appointed a few days earlier to
a professorship for which he had long been waiting.
V.
Another absurd dream which plays with figures:
An acquaintance of mine, Herr M, has been attacked in
an essay by no less a person than Goethe and, as we all think, with
unjustifiable vehemence. Herr M is, of course, crushed by this attack. He
complains of it bitterly at a dinner-party; but his veneration for Goethe
has not suffered as a result of this personal experience. I try to
elucidate the temporal relations a little, as they seem improbable to me.
Goethe died in 1832; since his attack upon M must, of course, have taken
place earlier, M was at the time quite a young man. It seems plausible to
me that he was 18 years old. But I do not know exactly what the date of
the present year is, and so the whole calculation lapses into obscurity.
The attack, by the way, is contained in Goethe's well- known essay on
"Nature."
We shall soon find the means of justifying the nonsense
of this dream. Herr M, with whom I became acquainted at a dinner-party,
had recently asked me to examine his brother, who showed signs of general
paralysis. The conjecture was right; the painful thing about this visit
was that the patient gave his brother away by alluding to his youthful
pranks, though our conversation gave him no occasion to do so. I had asked
the patient to tell me the year of his birth, and had repeatedly got him
to make trifling calculations in order to show the weakness of his memory-
which tests, by the way, he passed quite well. Now I can see that I behave
like a paralytic in the dream (I do not know exactly what the date of the
present year is). Other material of the dream is drawn from another recent
source. The editor of a medical periodical, a friend of mine, had accepted
for his paper a very unfavorable crushing review of the last book of my
Berlin friend, Fl, the critic being a very youthful reviewer, who was not
very competent to pass judgment. I thought I had a right to interfere, and
called the editor to account; he greatly regretted his acceptance of the
review, but he would not promise any redress. I thereupon broke off my
relations with the periodical, and in my letter of resignation I expressed
the hope that our personal relations would not suffer as a result of the
incident. The third source of this dream is an account given by a female
patient- it was fresh in my memory at the time- of the psychosis of her
brother who had fallen into a frenzy crying "Nature, Nature." The
physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived from a reading
of Goethe's beautiful essay, and that it pointed to the patient's overwork
in the study of natural philosophy. I thought, rather, of the sexual
meaning in which even our less cultured people use the word Nature, and
the fact that the unfortunate man afterwards mutilated his genitals seems
to show that I was not far wrong. Eighteen years was the age of this
patient at the time of this access of frenzy.
If I add, further, that the book of my so severely
criticized friend ("One asks oneself whether the author or oneself is
crazy" had been the opinion of another critic) treats of the temporal
conditions of life, and refers the duration of Goethe's life to the
multiple of a number significant from the biological point of view, it
will readily be admitted that in my dream I am putting myself in my
friend's place. (I try to elucidate the temporal relations a little.) But
I behave like a paretic, and the dream revels in absurdity. This means
that the dream-thoughts say, ironically: "Naturally, he is the fool, the
lunatic, and you are the clever people who know better. Perhaps, however,
it is the other way about?" Now, the other way about is abundantly
represented in my dream, inasmuch as Goethe has attacked the young man,
which is absurd, while it is perfectly possible even today for a young
fellow to attack the immortal Goethe; and inasmuch as I reckon from the
year of Goethe's death, while I made the paretic reckon from the year of
his birth.
But I have further promised to show that no dream is
inspired by other than egoistical motives. Accordingly, I must account for
the fact that in this dream I make my friend's cause my own, and put
myself in his place. My critical conviction in waking life would not
justify my doing so. Now, the story of the eighteen- year-old patient, and
the divergent interpretations of his cry, "Nature," allude to the fact
that I have put myself into opposition to the majority of physicians by
claiming a sexual etiology for the psychoneuroses. I may say to myself:
"You will meet with the same kind of criticism as your friend; indeed you
have already done so to some extent"; so that I may now replace the he in
the dream-thoughts by we. "Yes, you are right; we two are the fools." That
mea res agitur is clearly shown by the mention of the short, incomparably
beautiful essay of Goethe's, for it was a popular lecture on this essay
which induced me to study the natural sciences when I left the Gymnasium,
and was still undecided as to my future.
VI.
I have to show that yet another dream in which my ego
does not appear is none the less egoistic. In chapter V., D., I referred
to a short dream in which Professor M says: "My son, the myopic..."; and I
stated that this was only a preliminary dream, preceding another in which
I play a part. Here is the main dream, previously omitted, which
challenges us to explain its absurd and unintelligible word-formation.
On account of something or other that is happening in
Rome, it is necessary for the children to flee, and this they do. The
scene is then laid before a gate, a double gate in the ancient style (the
Porta Romana in Siena, as I realize while I am dreaming). I am sitting on
the edge of a well, and I am greatly depressed; I am almost weeping. A
woman- a nurse, a nun- brings out the two boys and hands them over to
their father, who is not myself. The elder is distinctly my eldest son,
but I do not see the face of the other boy. The woman asks the eldest boy
for a parting kiss. She is remarkable for a red nose. The boy refuses her
the kiss, but says to her, extending her his hand in parting, "Auf
Geseres," and to both of us (or to one of us) "Auf Ungeseres." I have the
idea that this indicates a preference.
This dream is built upon a tangle of thoughts induced
by a play I saw at the theatre, called Das neue Ghetto (The New Ghetto).
The Jewish question, anxiety as to the future of my children, who cannot
be given a fatherland, anxiety as to educating them so that they may enjoy
the privileges of citizens- all these features may easily be recognized in
the accompanying dream- thoughts.
"By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept." Siena,
like Rome, is famous for its beautiful fountains. In the dream I have to
find some sort of substitute for Rome (cf. chapter V., B.) from among
localities which are known to me. Near the Porta Romana of Siena we saw a
large, brightly-lit building, which we learned was the Manicomio, the
insane asylum. Shortly before the dream I had heard that a co-religionist
had been forced to resign a position, which he had secured with great
effort, in a State asylum.
Our interest is aroused by the speech: "Auf Geseres,"
where one might expect, from the situation continued throughout the dream,
"Auf Wiedersehen" (Au revoir), and by its quite meaningless antithesis:
"Auf Ungeseres." (Un is a prefix meaning "not.")
According to information received from Hebrew scholars,
Geseres is a genuine Hebrew word, derived from the verb goiser, and may
best be rendered by "ordained sufferings, fated disaster." From its
employment in the Jewish jargon one would take it to mean "wailing and
lamentation." Ungeseres is a coinage of my own, and is the first to
attract my attention, but for the present it baffles me. The little
observation at the end of the dream- that Ungeseres indicates an advantage
over Geseres- opens the way to the associations, and therewith to
understanding. This relation holds good in the case of caviar; the
unsalted kind is more highly prized than the salted. "Caviar to the
general"- "noble passions." Herein lies concealed a jesting allusion to a
member of my household, of whom I hope- for she is younger than I- that
she will watch over the future of my children; this, too, agrees with the
fact that another member of my household, our worthy nurse, is clearly
indicated by the nurse (or nun) of the dream. But a connecting-link is
wanting between the pair, salted- unsalted and Geseres- Ungeseres. This is
to be found in gesauert and ungesauert (leavened and unleavened). In their
flight or exodus from Egypt the children of Israel had not time to allow
their dough to become leavened, and in commemoration of this event they
eat unleavened bread at Passover to this day. Here, too, I can find room
for the sudden association which occurred to me in this part of the
analysis. I remembered how we, my friend from Berlin and myself, had
strolled about the streets of Breslau, a city which was strange to us,
during the last days of Easter. A little girl asked me the way to a
certain street; I had to tell her that I did not know it; I then remarked
to my friend, "I hope that later on in life the child will show more
perspicacity in selecting the persons whom she allows to direct her."
Shortly afterwards a sign caught my eye: "Dr. Herod, consulting hours..."
I said to myself: "I hope this colleague does not happen to be a
children's specialist." Meanwhile, my friend had been developing his views
on the biological significance of bilateral symmetry, and had begun a
sentence with the words: "If we had only one eye in the middle of the
forehead, like Cyclops..." This leads us to the speech of the professor in
the preliminary dream: "My son, the myopic." And now I have been led to
the chief source for Geseres. Many years ago, when this son of Professor
M's, who is today an independent thinker, was still sitting on his
school-bench, he contracted an affection of the eye which, according to
the doctor, gave some cause for anxiety. He expressed the opinion that so
long as it was confined to one eye it was of no great significance, but
that if it should extend to the other eye it would be serious. The
affection subsided in the one eye without leaving any ill effects; shortly
afterwards, however, the same symptoms did actually appear in the other
eye. The boy's terrified mother immediately summoned the physician to her
distant home in the country. But the doctor was now of a different opinion
(took the other side). "What sort of 'Geseres' is this you are making?" he
asked the mother, impatiently. "If one side got well, the other will,
too." And so it turned out.
And now as to the connection between this and myself
and my family. The school-bench upon which Professor M's son learned his
first lessons has become the property of my eldest son; it was given to
him by the boy's mother, and it is into his mouth that I put the words of
farewell in the dream. One of the wishes that may be connected with this
transference may now be readily guessed. This school-bench is intended by
its construction to guard the child from becoming shortsighted and
one-sided. Hence myopia (and behind it the Cyclops), and the discussion
about bilateralism. The fear of one-sidedness has a twofold significance;
it might mean not only physical one-sidedness, but intellectual
one-sidedness also. Does it not seem as though the scene in the dream,
with all its craziness, were contradicting precisely this anxiety? When on
the one hand the boy has spoken his words of farewell, on the other hand
he calls out the very opposite, as though to establish an equilibrium. He
is acting, as it were, in obedience to bilateral symmetry!
Thus, a dream frequently has the profoundest meaning in
the places where it seems most absurd. In all ages those who have had
something to say and have been unable to say it without danger to
themselves have gladly donned the cap and bells. He for whom the forbidden
saying was intended was more likely to tolerate it if he was able to laugh
at it, and to flatter himself with the comment that what he disliked was
obviously absurd. Dreams behave in real life as does the prince in the
play who is obliged to pretend to be a madman, and hence we may say of
dreams what Hamlet said of himself, substituting an unintelligible jest
for the actual truth: "I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is
southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (Act II. sc. ii). *
* This dream furnishes a good example in support of the
universally valid doctrine that dreams of the same night, even though they
are separated in the memory, spring from the same thought-material. The
dream-situation in which I am rescuing my children from the city of Rome,
moreover, is distorted by a reference back to an episode of my childhood.
The meaning is that I envy certain relatives who years ago had occasion to
transplant their children to the soil of another country.
Thus, my solution of the problem of absurdity in dreams
is that the dream-thoughts are never absurd- at least, not those of the
dreams of sane persons- and that the dream-work produces absurd dreams,
and dreams with individually absurd elements, when the dream-thoughts
contain criticism, ridicule, and derision, which have to be given
expression. My next concern is to show that the dream-work is exhausted by
the co-operation of the three factors enumerated- and of a fourth which
has still to be mentioned- that it does no more than translate the
dream-thoughts, observing the four conditions prescribed, and that the
question whether the mind goes to work in dreams with all its intellectual
faculties, or with only part of them, is wrongly stated, and does not meet
the actual state of affairs. But since there are plenty of dreams in which
judgments are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognized in which
astonishment at some individual element of the dream appears, and
explanations are attempted, and arguments adduced, I must meet the
objections deriving from these occurrences by the citation of selected
examples.
My answer is as follows: Everything in dreams which
occurs as the apparent functioning of the critical faculty is to be
regarded, not as the intellectual performance of the dream-work, but as
belonging to the substance of the dream-thoughts, and it has found its way
from these, as a completed structure, into the manifest dream-content. I
may go even farther than this! I may even say that the judgments which are
passed upon the dream as it is remembered after waking, and the feelings
which are aroused by the reproduction of the dream, belong largely to the
latent dream- content, and must be fitted into place in the interpretation
of the dream.
1. One striking example of this has already been given.
A female patient does not wish to relate her dream because it was too
vague. She saw a person in the dream, and does not know whether it was her
husband or her father. Then follows a second dream- fragment, in which
there occurs a manure-pail, with which the following reminiscence is
associated. As a young housewife she once declared jestingly, in the
presence of a young male relative who frequented the house, that her next
business would be to procure a new manure-pail. Next morning one was sent
to her, but it was filled with lilies of the valley. This part of the
dream served to represent the phrase, "Not grown on my own manure." * If
we complete the analysis, we find in the dream-thoughts the after-effect
of a story heard in youth; namely, that a girl had given birth to a child,
and that it was not clear who was the father. The dream-representation
here overlaps into the waking thought, and allows one of the elements of
the dream-thoughts to be represented by a judgment, formed in the waking
state, of the whole dream.
* This German expression is equivalent to our saying:
"I am not responsible for that," "That's not my funeral," or "That's not
due to my own efforts."- TR.
2. A similar case: One of my patients has a dream which
strikes him as being an interesting one, for he says to himself,
immediately after waking: "I must tell that to the doctor." The dream is
analyzed, and shows the most distinct allusion to an affair in which he
had become involved during the treatment, and of which he had decided to
tell me nothing. *
* The injunction or resolve already contained in the
dream: "I must tell that to the doctor," when it occurs in dreams during
psycho-analytic treatment, is constantly accompanied by a great resistance
to confessing the dream, and is not infrequently followed by the
forgetting of the dream.
3. Here is a third example from my own experience:
I go to the hospital with P, through a neighborhood in
which there are houses and gardens. Thereupon I have an idea that I have
already seen this locality several times in my dreams. I do not know my
way very well; P shows me a way which leads round a corner to a restaurant
(indoor); here I ask for Frau Doni, and I hear that she is living at the
back of the house, in a small room, with three children. I go there, and
on the way I meet an undefined person with my two little girls. After I
have been with them for a while, I take them with me. A sort of reproach
against my wife for having left them there.
On waking I am conscious of a great satisfaction, whose
motive seems to be the fact that I shall now learn from the analysis what
is meant by I have already dreamed of this. * But the analysis of the
dream tells me nothing about this; it shows me only that the satisfaction
belongs to the latent dream-content, and not to a judgment of the dream.
It is satisfaction concerning the fact that I have had children by my
marriage. P's path through life and my own ran parallel for a time; now he
has outstripped me both socially and financially, but his marriage has
remained childless. Of this the two occasions of the dream give proof on
complete analysis. On the previous day I had read in the newspaper the
obituary notice of a certain Frau Dona A- y (which I turn into Doni), who
had died in childbirth; I was told by my wife that the dead woman had been
nursed by the same midwife whom she herself had employed at the birth of
our two youngest boys. The name Dona had caught my attention, for I had
recently met with it for the first time in an English novel. The other
occasion for the dream may be found in the date on which it was dreamed;
this was the night before the birthday of my eldest boy, who, it seems, is
poetically gifted.
* A subject which has been extensively discussed in
recent volumes If the Revue Philosophique (paramnesia in dreams).
4. The same satisfaction remained with me after waking
from the absurd dream that my father, after his death, had played a
political role among the Magyars. It is motivated by the persistence of
the feeling which accompanied the last sentence of the dream: I remember
that on his deathbed he looked so like Garibaldi, and I am glad that it
has really come true... (Followed by a forgotten continuation.) I can now
supply from the analysis what should fill this gap. It is the mention of
my second boy, to whom I have given the baptismal name of an eminent
historical personage who attracted me greatly during my boyhood,
especially during my stay in England. I had to wait for a year before I
could fulfill my intention of using this name if the next child should be a
son, and with great satisfaction I greeted him by this name as soon as he
was born. It is easy to see how the father's suppressed desire for
greatness is, in his thoughts, transferred to his children; one is
inclined to believe that this is one of the ways by which the suppression
of this desire (which becomes necessary in the course of life) is
effected. The little fellow won his right to inclusion in the text of this
dream by virtue of the fact that the same accident- that of soiling his
clothes (quite pardonable in either a child or in a dying person)- had
occurred to him. Compare with this the allusion Stuhlrichter (presiding
judge) and the wish of the dream: to stand before one's children great and
undefiled.
5. If I should now have to look for examples of
judgments or expressions of opinion which remain in the dream itself, and
are not continued in, or transferred to, our waking thoughts, my task
would be greatly facilitated were I to take my examples from dreams which
have already been cited for other purposes. The dream of Goethe's attack
on Herr M appears to contain quite a number of acts of judgment. I try to
elucidate the temporal relations a little, as they seem improbable to me.
Does not this look like a critical impulse directed against the
nonsensical idea that Goethe should have made a literary attack upon a
young man of my acquaintance? It seems plausible to me that he was 18
years old. That sounds quite like the result of a calculation, though a
silly one; and the I do not know exactly what is the date of the present
year would be an example of uncertainty or doubt in dreams.
But I know from analysis that these acts of judgment,
which seem to have been performed in the dream for the first time, admit
of a different construction, in the light of which they become
indispensable for interpreting the dream, while at the same time all
absurdity is avoided. With the sentence I try to elucidate the temporal
relations a little, I put myself in the place of my friend, who is
actually trying to elucidate the temporal relations of life. The sentence
then loses its significance as a judgment which objects to the nonsense of
the previous sentences. The interposition, Which seems improbable to me,
belongs to the following: It seems plausible to me. With almost these
identical words I replied to the lady who told me of her brother's
illness: "It seems improbable to me" that the cry of "Nature, Nature," was
in any way connected with Goethe; it seems much more plausible to me that
it has the sexual significance which is known to you. In this case, it is
true, a judgment was expressed, but in reality, not in a dream, and on an
occasion which is remembered and utilized by the dream-thoughts. The
dream-content appropriates this judgment like any other fragment of the
dream-thoughts.
The number 18 with which the judgment in the dream is
meaninglessly connected still retains a trace of the context from which
the real judgment was taken. Lastly, the I do not know exactly what is the
date of the present year is intended for no other purpose than that of my
identification with the paralytic, in examining whom this particular fact
was established.
In the solution of these apparent acts of judgment in
dreams, it will be well to keep in mind the above-mentioned rule of
interpretation, which tells us that we must disregard the coherence which
is established in the dream between its constituent parts as an
unessential phenomenon, and that every dream-element must be taken
separately and traced back to its source. The dream is a compound, which
for the purposes of investigation must be broken up into its elements. On
the other hand, we become alive to the fact that there is a psychic force
which expresses itself in our dreams and establishes this apparent
coherence; that is, the material obtained by the dream- work undergoes a
secondary elaboration. Here we have the manifestations of that psychic
force which we shall presently take into consideration as the fourth of
the factors which co- operate in dream-formation.
6. Let us now look for other examples of acts of
judgment in the dreams which have already been cited. In the absurd dream
about the communication from the town council, I ask the question, "You
married soon after?" I reckon that I was born in 1856, which seems to me
to be directly afterwards. This certainly takes the form of an inference.
My father married shortly after his attack, in the year 1851. I am the
eldest son, born in 1856; so this is correct. We know that this inference
has in fact been falsified by the wish-fulfillment, and that the sentence
which dominates the dream-thoughts is as follows: Four or five years- that
is no time at all- that need not be counted. But every part of this chain
of reasoning may be seen to be otherwise determined from the dream-
thoughts, as regards both its content and its form. It is the patient of
whose patience my colleague complains who intends to marry immediately the
treatment is ended. The manner in which I converse with my father in this
dream reminds me of an examination or cross-examination, and thus of a
university professor who was in the habit of compiling a complete docket
of personal data when entering his pupils' names: You were born when?-
1856.- Patre?- Then the applicant gave the Latin form of the baptismal
name of the father and we students assumed that the Hofrat drew inferences
from the father's name which the baptismal name of the candidate would not
always have justified. Hence, the drawing of inferences in the dream would
be merely the repetition of the drawing of inferences which appears as a
scrap of material in the dream-thoughts. From this we learn something new.
If an inference occurs in the dream-content, it assuredly comes from the
dream-thoughts; but it may be contained in these as a fragment of
remembered material, or it may serve as the logical connective of a series
of dream-thoughts. In any case, an inference in the dream represents an
inference taken from the dream-thoughts. *
* These results correct at several points my earlier
statements concerning the representation of logical relations (chapter
VI., C.). These described the general procedure of the dream-work, but
overlooked its most delicate and most careful operations.
It will be well to continue the analysis of this dream
at this point. With the inquisition of the professor is associated the
recollection of an index (in my time published in Latin) of the university
students; and further, the recollection of my own course of study. The
five years allowed for the study of medicine were, as usual, too little
for me. I worked unconcernedly for some years longer; my acquaintances
regarded me as a loafer, and doubted whether I should get through. Then,
suddenly, I decided to take my examinations, and I got through in spite of
the postponement. A fresh confirmation of the dream-thoughts with which I
defiantly meet my critics: "Even though you won't believe it, because I am
taking my time, I shall reach the conclusion (German, Schluss = end,
conclusion, inference). It has often happened like that."
In its introductory portion, this dream contains
several sentences which, we can hardly deny, are of the nature of an
argument. And this argument is not at all absurd; it might just as well
occur in my waking thoughts. In my dream I make fun of the communication
from the town council, for in the first place I was not yet born in 1851,
and in the second place my father, to whom it might refer, is already
dead. Not only is each of these statements perfectly correct in itself,
but they are the very arguments that I should employ if I received such a
communication. We know from the foregoing analysis that this dream has
sprung from the soil of deeply embittered and scornful dream-thoughts; and
if we may also assume that the motive of the censorship is a very powerful
one, we shall understand that the dream-thought has every occasion to
create a flawless refutation of an unreasonable demand, in accordance with
the pattern contained in the dream-thoughts. But the analysis shows that
in this case the dream-work has not been required to make a free
imitation, but that material taken from the dream-thoughts had to be
employed for the purpose. It is as though in an algebraic equation there
should occur, besides the figures, plus and minus signs, and symbols of
powers and of roots, and as though someone, in copying this equation,
without understanding it, should copy both the symbols and the figures,
and mix them all up together. The two arguments may be traced to the
following material: It is painful to me to think that many of the
hypotheses upon which I base my psychological solution of the
psychoneuroses which will arouse skepticism and ridicule when they first
become known. For instance, I shall have to assert that impressions of the
second year of life, and even the first, leave an enduring trace upon the
emotional life of subsequent neuropaths, and that these impressions-
although greatly distorted and exaggerated by the memory- may furnish the
earliest and profoundest basis of a hysterical symptom. Patients to whom I
explain this at a suitable moment are wont to parody my explanation by
offering to search for reminiscences of the period when they were not yet
born. My disclosure of the unsuspected part played by the father in the
earliest sexual impulses of female patients may well have a similar
reception. (Cf. the discussion in chapter V., D). Nevertheless, it is my
well-founded conviction that both doctrines are true. In confirmation of
this I recall certain examples in which the death of the father occurred
when the child was very young, and subsequent incidents, otherwise
inexplicable, proved that the child had unconsciously reserved
recollections of the person who had so early gone out of its life. I know
that both my assertions are based upon inferences whose validity will be
attacked. It is the doing of the wish-fulfillment that precisely the
material of those inferences, which I fear will be contested, should be
utilized by the dream-work for establishing incontestable conclusions.
7. In one dream, which I have hitherto only touched
upon, astonishment at the subject emerging is distinctly expressed at the
outset.
The elder Brucke must have set me some task or other;
strangely enough, it relates to the preparation of the lower part of my
own body, the pelvis and legs, which I see before me as though in the
dissecting-room, but without feeling the absence of part of my body, and
without a trace of horror. Louise N is standing beside me, and helps me in
the work. The pelvis is eviscerated; now the upper, now the lower aspect
is visible, and the two aspects are commingled. Large fleshy red tubercles
are visible (which, even in the dream, make me think of hemorrhoids).
Also something lying over them had to be carefully picked off; it looked
like crumpled tinfoil. * Then I was once more in possession of my legs,
and I made a journey through the city, but I took a cab (as I was tired).
To my astonishment, the cab drove into the front door of a house, which
opened and allowed it to pass into a corridor, which was broken off at the
end, and eventually led on into the open. *(2) Finally I wandered through
changing landscapes, with an Alpine guide, who carried my things. He
carried me for some distance, out of consideration for my tired legs. The
ground was swampy; we went along the edge; people were sitting on the
ground, like Red Indians or gypsies; among them a girl. Until then I had
made my way along on the slippery ground, in constant astonishment that I
was so well able to do so after making the preparation. At last we came to
a small wooden house with an open window at one end. Here the guide set me
down, and laid two planks, which stood in readiness, on the window-sill so
as to bridge the chasm which had to be crossed from the window. Now I grew
really alarmed about my legs. Instead of the expected crossing, I saw two
grown-up men lying upon wooden benches which were fixed on the walls of
the hut, and something like two sleeping children next to them; as though
not the planks but the children were intended to make the crossing
possible. I awoke with terrified thoughts.
* Stanniol, allusion to Stannius; the nervous system of
fishes; cf chapter VI., F.
*(2) The place in the corridor of my apartment-house
where the perambulators of the other tenants stand; it is also otherwise
hyper-determined several times over.
Anyone who his been duly impressed by the extensive
nature of dream-condensation will readily imagine what a number of pages
the exhaustive analysis of this dream would fill. Fortunately for the
context, I shall make this dream only the one example of astonishment in
dreams, which makes its appearance in the parenthetical remark, strangely
enough. Let us consider the occasion of the dream. It is a visit of this
lady, Louise N, who helps me with my work in the dream. She says: "Lend me
something to read." I offer her She, by Rider Haggard. A strange book, but
full of hidden meaning," I try to explain; "the eternal feminine, the
immortality of our emotions-" Here she interrupts me: "I know that book
already. Haven't you something of your own?" "No, my own immortal works
are still unwritten." "Well, when are you going to publish your so-called
'latest revelations,' which, you promised us, even we should be able to
read?" she asks, rather sarcastically. I now perceive that she is a
mouthpiece for someone else, and I am silent. I think of the effort it
cost me to make public even my work on dreams, in which I had to surrender
so much of my own intimate nature. ("The best that you know you can't tell
the boys.") The preparation of my own body which I am ordered to make in
my dream is thus the self-analysis involved in the communication of my
dreams. The elder Brucke very properly finds a place here; in the first
years of my scientific work it so happened that I neglected the
publication of a certain discovery until his insistence forced me to
publish it. But the further trains of thought, proceeding from my
conversation with Louise N, go too deep to become conscious; they are
side-tracked by way of the material which has been incidentally awakened
in me by the mention of Rider Haggard's She. The comment strangely enough
applies to this book, and to another by the same author, The Heart of the
World; and numerous elements of the dream are taken from these two
fantastic romances. The swampy ground over which the dreamer is carried,
the chasm which has to be crossed by means of planks, come from She; the
Red Indians, the girl, and the wooden house, from The Heart of the World.
In both novels a woman is the leader, and both treat of perilous
wanderings; She has to do with an adventurous journey to an undiscovered
country, a place almost untrodden by the foot of man. According to a note
which I find in my record of the dream, the fatigue in my legs was a real
sensation from those days. Probably a weary mood corresponded with this
fatigue, and the doubting question: "How much farther will my legs carry
me?" In She, the end of the adventure is that the heroine meets her death
in the mysterious central fire, instead of winning immortality for herself
and for others. Some related anxiety has mistakably arisen in the dream-
thoughts. The wooden house is assuredly also a coffin- that is, the grave.
But in representing this most unwished-for of all thoughts by means of a
wish-fulfillment, the dream-work has achieved its masterpiece. I was once
in a grave, but it was an empty Etruscan grave near Orvieto- a narrow
chamber with two stone benches on the walls, upon which were lying the
skeletons of two adults. The interior of the wooden house in the dream
looks exactly like this grave, except that stone has been replaced by
wood. The dream seems to say: "If you must already sojourn in your grave,
let it be this Etruscan grave," and by means of this interpolation it
transforms the most mournful expectation into one that is really to be
desired. Unfortunately, as we shall learn, the dream is able to change
into its opposite only the idea accompanying an affect, but not always the
affect itself. Hence, I awake with thoughts of terror, even after the idea
that perhaps my children will achieve what has been denied to their father
has forced its way to representation: a fresh allusion to the strange
romance in which the identity of a character is preserved through a series
of generations covering two thousand years.
8. in the context of another dream there is a similar
expression of astonishment at what is experienced in the dream. This,
however, is connected with such a striking, far-fetched, and almost
intellectual attempt at explanation that if only on this account I should
have to subject the whole dream to analysis, even if it did not possess
two other interesting features. On the night of the eighteenth of July I
was traveling on the Southern Railway, and in my sleep I heard someone
call out: "Hollthurn, 10 minutes." I immediately think of Holothuria- of a
natural history museum- that here is a place where valiant men have vainly
resisted the domination of their overlord.- Yes, the counter- reformation
in Austria!- As though it were a place in Styria or the Tyrol. Now I see
indistinctly a small museum, in which the relics of the acquisitions of
these men are preserved. I should like to leave the train, but I hesitate
to do so. There are women with fruit on the platform; they squat on the
ground, and in that position invitingly hold up their baskets.- I
hesitated, in doubt as to whether we have time, but here we are still
stationary.- I am suddenly in another compartment in which the leather and
the seats are so narrow that one's spine directly touches the back. * I am
surprised at this, but I may have changed carriages while asleep. Several
people, among them an English brother and sister; a row of books plainly
on a shelf on the wall.- I see The Wealth of Nations, and Matter and
Motion (by Maxwell), thick books bound in brown linen. The man asks his
sister about a book of Schiller's, whether she has forgotten it. These
books seem to belong now to me, now to them. At this point I wish to join
in the conversation in order to confirm or support what is being said. I
wake sweating all over, because all the windows are shut, The train stops
at Marburg.
* This description is not intelligible even to myself,
but I follow the principle of reproducing the dream in those words which
occur to me while I am writing it down. The wording itself is a part of
the dream-representation.
While writing down the dream, a part of it occurs to me
which my memory wished to pass over. I tell the brother and sister (in
English), referring to a certain book: "It is from..." but I correct
myself: "It is by..." The man remarks to his sister: "He said it
correctly."
The dream begins with the name of a station, which
seems to have almost waked me. For this name, which was Marburg, I
substitute Hollthurn. The fact that I heard Marburg the first, or perhaps
the second time it was called out, is proved by the mention of Schiller in
the dream; he was born in Marburg, though not the Styrian Marburg. * Now
on this occasion, although I was traveling first class, I was doing so
under very disagreeable circumstances. The train was overcrowded; in my
compartment I had come upon a lady and gentleman who seemed very fine
people, and had not the good breeding, or did not think it worth while, to
conceal their displeasure at my intrusion. My polite greeting was not
returned, and although they were sitting side by side (with their backs to
the engine), the woman before my eyes hastened to pre-empt the seat
opposite her, and next to the window, with her umbrella; the door was
immediately closed, and pointed remarks about the opening of windows were
exchanged. Probably I was quickly recognized as a person hungry for fresh
air. It was a hot night, and the atmosphere of the compartment, closed on
both sides, was almost suffocating. My experience as a traveler leads me
to believe that such inconsiderate and overbearing conduct marks people
who have paid for their tickets only partly, or not at all. When the
conductor came round, and I presented my dearly bought ticket, the lady
exclaimed haughtily and almost threateningly: "My husband has a pass." She
was an imposing- looking person, with a discontented expression, in age
not far removed from the autumn of feminine beauty; the man had no chance
to say anything; he sat there motionless. I tried to sleep. In my dream I
take a terrible revenge on my disagreeable traveling companions; no one
would suspect what insults and humiliations are concealed behind the
disjointed fragments of the first half of the dream. After this need has
been satisfied, the second wish, to exchange my compartment for another,
makes itself felt. The dream changes its scene so often, and without
making the slightest objection to such changes, that it would not have
seemed at all remarkable had I at once, from my memories, replaced my
traveling companions by more agreeable persons. But here was a case where
something or other opposes the change of scene, and finds it necessary to
explain it. How did I suddenly get into another compartment? I could not
positively remember having changed carriages. So there was only one
explanation. I must have left the carriage while asleep- an unusual
occurrence, examples of which, however, are known to neuropathologists. We
know of persons who undertake railway journeys in a crepuscular state,
without betraying their abnormal condition by any sign whatever, until at
some stage of their journey they come to themselves, and are surprised by
the gap in their memory. Thus, while I am still dreaming, I declare my own
case to be such a case of automatisme ambulatoire.
* Schiller was not born in one of the Marbergs, but in
Marbach, as every German schoolboy knows, and I myself knew. This again is
one of those errors (Cf. chapter VI., B) which creep in as substitutes for
an intentional falsification in another place and which I have endeavored
to explain in The Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life.
Analysis permits of another solution. The attempt at
explanation, which so surprises me if I am to attribute it to the
dream-work, is not original, but is copied from the neurosis of one of my
patients. I have already spoken in another chapter of a highly cultured
and kindly man who began, shortly after the death of his parents, to
accuse himself of murderous tendencies, and who was distressed by the
precautionary measures which he had to take to secure himself against
these tendencies. His was a case of severe obsessional ideas with full
insight. To begin with, it was painful to him to walk through the streets,
as he was obsessed by the necessity of accounting for all the persons he
met; he had to know whither they had disappeared; if one of them suddenly
eluded his pursuing glance, he was left with a feeling of distress and the
idea that he might possibly have made away with the man. Behind this
obsessive idea was concealed, among other things, a Cain-phantasy, for
"all men are brothers." Owing to the impossibility of accomplishing this
task, he gave up going for walks, and spent his life imprisoned within his
four walls. But reports of murders which had been committed in the world
outside were constantly reaching his room by way of the newspapers, and
his conscience tormented him with the doubt that he might be the murderer
for whom the police were looking. The certainty that he had not left the
house for weeks protected him for a time against these accusations, until
one day there dawned upon him the possibility that he might have left his
house while in an unconscious state, and might thus have committed murder
without knowing anything about it. From that time onwards he locked his
front door, and gave the key to his old housekeeper, strictly forbidding
her to give it into his hands, even if he demanded it.
This, then, is the origin of the attempted explanation
that I may have changed carriages while in an unconscious state; it has
been taken into the dream ready-made, from the material of the dream-
thoughts, and is evidently intended to identify me with the person of my
patient. My memory of this patient was awakened by natural association. My
last night journey had been made a few weeks earlier in his company. He
was cured, and we were going into the country together to his relatives,
who had sent for me; as we had a compartment to ourselves, we left all the
windows open throughout the night, and for as long as I remained awake we
had a most interesting conversation. I knew that hostile impulses towards
his father in childhood, in a sexual connection, had been at the root of
his illness. By identifying myself with him, I wanted to make an analogous
confession to myself. The second scene of the dream really resolves itself
into a wanton phantasy to the effect that my two elderly traveling
companions had acted so uncivilly towards me because my arrival on the
scene had prevented them from exchanging kisses and embraces during the
night, as they had intended. This phantasy, however, goes back to an early
incident of my childhood when, probably impelled by sexual curiosity, I
had intruded into my parents' bedroom, and was driven thence by my
father's emphatic command.
I think it would be superfluous to multiply such
examples. They would all confirm what we have learned from those already
cited: namely, that an act of judgment in a dream is merely the repetition
of an original act of judgment in the dream-thoughts. In most cases it is
an unsuitable repetition, fitted into an inappropriate context;
occasionally, however, as in our last example, it is so artfully applied
that it may almost give one the impression of independent intellectual
activity in the dream. At this point we might turn our attention to that
psychic activity which, though it does not appear to co-operate constantly
in the formation of dreams, yet endeavors to fuse the dream-elements of
different origin into a flawless and significant whole. We consider it
necessary, however, first of all to consider the expressions of affect
which appear in dreams, and to compare these with the affects which
analysis discovers in the dream-thoughts. |
