Autobiographical note 16 страница

What, then, could have been the origin of the ambitiousness which produced the dream in me? At that point I recalled an anecdote I had often heard repeated in my childhood. At the time of my birth an old peasant-woman had prophesied to my proud mother that with her first-born child she had brought a great man into the world. Prophecies of this kind must be very common: there are so many mothers filled with happy expectations and so many old peasant-women and others of the kind who make up for the loss of their power to control things in the present world by concentrating it on the future. Nor can the prophetess have lost anything by her words. Could this have been the source of my thirst for grandeur? But that reminded me of another experience, dating from my later childhood, which provided a still better explanation. My parents had been n the habit, when I was a boy of eleven or twelve, of taking me with them to the Prater. One evening, while we were sitting in a restaurant there, our attention had been attracted by a man who was moving from one table to another and, for a small consideration, improvising a verse upon any topic presented to him. I was despatched to bring the poet to our table and he showed his gratitude to the messenger. Before enquiring what the chosen topic was to be, he had dedicated a few lines to myself; and he had been inspired to declare that I should probably grow up to be a Cabinet Minister. I still remembered quite well what an impression this second prophecy had made on me. Those were the days of the ‘Bürger’ Ministry. Shortly before, my father had brought home portraits of these middle-class professional men - Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger and the rest - and we had illuminated the house in their honour. There had even been some Jews among them. So henceforth every industrious Jewish schoolboy carried a Cabinet Minister’s portfolio in his satchel. The events of that period no doubt had some bearing on the fact that up to a time shortly before I entered the University it had been my intention to study Law; it was only at the last moment that I changed my mind. A ministerial career is definitely barred to a medical man. But now to return to my dream. It began to dawn on me that my dream had carried me back from the dreary present to the cheerful hopes of the days of the ‘Bürger’ Ministry, and that the wish that it had done its best to fulfil was one dating back to those times. In mishandling my two learned and eminent colleagues because they were Jews, and in treating the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal, I was behaving as though I were the Minister, I had put myself in the Minister’s place. Turning the tables on His Excellency with a vengeance! He had refused to appoint me professor extraordinarius and I had retaliated in the dream by stepping into his shoes.

In another instance it became apparent that, though the wish which instigated the dream was a present-day one, it had received a powerful reinforcement from memories that stretched far back into childhood. What I have in mind is a series of dreams which are based upon a longing to visit Rome. For a long time to come, no doubt, I shall have to continue to satisfy that longing in my dreams: for at the season of the year when it is possible for me to travel, residence in Rome must be avoided for reasons of health.¹ For instance, I dreamt once that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city. The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist; it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of ‘the promised land seen from afar’ was obvious in it. The town which I saw in this way for the first time, shrouded in mist, was - Lübeck, and the prototype of the hill was - at Gleichenberg. In a third dream I had at last got to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an urban character. There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one side of it were black cliffs and on the other meadows with big white flowers. I noticed a Herr Zucker (whom I knew slightly) and determined to ask him the way to the city. I was clearly making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never seen in my waking life. Breaking up the landscape in the dream into its elements, I found that the white flowers took me to Ravenna, which I have visited and which, for a time at least, superseded Rome as capital of Italy. In the marshes round Ravenna we found the loveliest water-lilies growing in black water. Because we had had such difficulty in picking them out of the water, the dream made them grow in meadows like the narcissi at our own Aussee. The dark cliff, so close to the water, reminded me vividly of the valley of the Tepl near Karlsbad. ‘Karlsbad’ enabled me to explain the curious detail of my having asked Herr Zucker the way. The material out of which the dream was woven included at this point two of those facetious Jewish anecdotes which contain so much profound and often bitter worldly wisdom and which we so greatly enjoy quoting in our talk and letters. Here is the first one: the ‘constitution’ story. An impecunious Jew had stowed himself away without a ticket in the fast train to Karlsbad. He was caught, and each time tickets were inspected he was taken out of the train and treated more and more severely. At one of the stations on his via dolorosa he met an acquaintance, who asked him where he was travelling to. ‘To Karlsbad’, was his reply, ‘if my constitution can stand it.’ My memory then passed on to another story: of a Jew who could not speak French and had been recommended when he was in Paris to ask the way to the rue Richelieu. Paris itself had for many long years been another goal of my longings; and the blissful feelings with which I first set foot on its pavement seemed to me a guarantee that others of my wishes would be fulfilled as well. ‘Asking the way’, moreover, was a direct allusion to Rome, since it is well known that all roads lead there. Again, the name Zucker was once more an allusion to Karlsbad; for we are in the habit of prescribing treatment there for anyone suffering from the constitutional complaint of diabetes. The instigation to this dream had been a proposal made by my friend in Berlin that we should meet in Prague at Easter. What we were going to discuss there would have included something with a further connection with ‘sugar’ and ‘diabetes’.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I discovered long since that it only needs a little courage to fulfil wishes which till then have been regarded as unattainable; [added 1925:] and thereafter became a constant pilgrim to Rome.

A fourth dream, which occurred soon after the last one, took me to Rome once more. I saw a street-corner before me and was surprised to find so many posters in German stuck up there. I had written to my friend with prophetic foresight the day before to say that I thought Prague might not be an agreeable place for a German to walk about in. Thus the dream expressed at the same time a wish to meet him in Rome instead of in a Bohemian town, and a desire, probably dating back to my student days, that the German language might be better tolerated in Prague. Incidentally, I must have understood Czech in my earliest childhood, for I was born in a small town in Moravia which has a Slav population. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my seventeenth year, printed itself on my memory so easily that I can repeat it to this day, though I have no notion what it means. Thus there was no lack of connections with my early childhood in these dreams either.

It was on my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimene, that finally - after having seen the Tiber and sadly turned back when I was only fifty miles from Rome - I discovered the way in which my longing for the eternal city had been reinforced by impressions from my youth. I was in the act of making a plan to by-pass Rome next year and travel to Naples, when a sentence occurred to me which I must have read in one of our classical authors:¹ ‘Which of the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his study with the greater impatience after he had formed his plan of going to Rome - Winckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the Commander-in-Chief’ I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school days. Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic Wars not with the Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-semitic feelings among the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position, the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church. And the increasing importance of the effects of the anti-semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days. Thus the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with all the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Carthaginian, though their fulfilment seemed at the moment just as little favoured by destiny as was Hannibal’s lifelong wish to enter Rome.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] The author in question must no doubt have been Jean Paul.

At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. ‘When I was a young man’, he said, ‘I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: "Jew! get off the pavement!"' ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap’, was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca,¹ made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.

I believe I can trace my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general a step further back into my childhood; so that once more it would only have been a question of a transference of an already formed emotional relation on to a new object. One of the first books that I got hold of when I had learnt to read was Thiers’ history of the Consulate and Empire. I can still remember sticking labels on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers with the names of Napoleon’s marshals written on them. And at that time my declared favourite was already Massena (or to give the name its Jewish form, Manasseh).² (No doubt this preference was also partly to be explained by the fact that my birthday fell on the same day as his, exactly a hundred years later.) Napoleon himself lines up with Hannibal owing to their both having crossed the Alps. It may even be that the development of this martial ideal is traceable still further back into my childhood: to the times when, at the age of three, I was in a close relation, sometimes friendly but some times warlike, with a boy a year older than myself, and to the wishes which that relation must have stirred up in the weaker of us.

The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences in childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream’s latent content.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] In the first edition the name of Hasdrubal appeared instead: a puzzling mistake, which I have explained in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901b), Chapter X (2).

² [Footnote added 1930:] Incidentally, doubts have been thrown on the Marshal’s Jewish origin.

We have already seen (on p. 534) that a dream very seldom reproduces recollections in such a way that they constitute, without abbreviation or modification, the whole of its manifest content. Nevertheless there are some undoubted instances of this happening: and I can add a few more, relating, once more, to childhood scenes. One of my patients was presented in a dream with an almost undistorted reproduction of a sexual episode, which was at once recognizable as a true recollection. His memory of the event had, in fact, never been completely lost in waking life, though it had become greatly obscured, and its revival was a consequence of work previously done in analysis. At the age of twelve, the dreamer had gone to visit a school friend who was laid up in bed, when the latter, by what was probably an accidental movement, uncovered his body. At the sight of his friend’s genitals, my patient had been overcome by some sort of compulsion and had uncovered himself too and caught hold of the other’s penis. His friend looked at him with indignation and astonishment; where upon, overcome by embarrassment, he let go. This scene was repeated in a dream twenty-three years later, including all the details of his feelings at the time. It was modified, however, to this extent, that the dreamer assumed the passive instead of the active role, while the figure of his school-friend was replaced by someone belonging to his contemporary life.

It is true that as a rule the childhood scene is only represented in the dream’s manifest content by an allusion, and has to be arrived at by an interpretation of the dream. Such instances when they are recorded, cannot carry much conviction, since as a rule there is no other evidence of these childhood experiences having occurred: if they date back to a very early age they are no longer recognized as memories. The general justification for inferring the occurrence of these childhood experiences from dreams is provided by a whole number of factors in psycho-analytic work, which are mutually consistent and thus seem sufficiently trustworthy. If I record some of these inferred childhood experiences torn from their context for the purposes of dream-interpretation, they may perhaps create little impression, especially as I shall not even be able to quote all the material on which the interpretations were based. Nevertheless I shall not allow this to deter me from relating them.

I

All the dreams of one of my women patients were characterized by her being ‘rushed’: she would be in a violent rush to get somewhere in time not to miss a train, and so on. In one dream she was going to call on a woman friend; her mother told her to take a cab and not to walk; but she ran instead and kept on falling down. -The material which came up in analysis led to memories of rushing about and romping as a child. One particular dream recalled the favourite children’s game of saying a sentence ‘Die Kuh rannte, bies sie fiel’ [‘The cow ran till it fell’] so quickly that it sounds as though it were a single word - another rush in fact. All these innocent rushings-about with little girl friends were remembered because they took the place of other, less innocent ones.

II

Here is another woman patient’s dream: She was in a big room in which all sorts of machines were standing, like what she imagined an orthopaedic institute to be. She was told I had no time and that she must have her treatment at the same time as five others. She refused, however, and would not lie down in the bed - or whatever it was - that was meant for her. She stood in the corner and waited for me to say it wasn’t true. Meanwhile the others were laughing at her and saying it was just her way of ‘carrying on.’ - Simultaneously, it was as though she was making a lot of small squares.

The first part of the content of this dream related to the treatment and was a transference on to me. The second part contained an allusion to a scene in childhood. The two parts were linked together by the mention of the bed.

The orthopaedic institute referred back to a remark I had made in which I had compared the treatment, alike in its length and in its nature, to an orthopaedic one. When I started her treatment I had been obliged to tell her that for the time being I had not much time for her, though later I should be able to give her a whole hour daily. This had stirred up her old sensitiveness, which is a principal trait in the character of children inclined to hysteria: they are insatiable for love. My patient had been the youngest of a family of six children (hence: at the same time as five others) and had therefore been her father’s favourite; but even so she seems to have felt that her adored father devoted too little of his time and attention to her. -Her waiting for me to say it wasn’t true had the following origin. A young tailor’s apprentice had brought her a dress and she had given him the money for it. Afterwards she had asked her husband whether if the boy lost the money she would have to pay it over again. Her husband, to tease her, had said that was so. (The teasing in the dream.) She kept on asking over and over again and waited for him to say after all it wasn’t true. It was then possible to infer that in the latent content of the dream she had had a thought of whether she would have to pay me twice as much if I gave her twice as much time - a thought which she felt was avaricious or filthy. (Uncleanliness in childhood is often replaced in dreams by avariciousness for money; the link between the two is the word ‘filthy’.) If the whole passage about waiting for me to say, etc., was intended in the dream as a circumlocution for the word ‘filthy’, then her ‘standing in the corner’ and ‘not lying down in the bed’ would fit in with it as constituents of a scene from her childhood: a scene in which she had dirtied her bed and been punished by being made to stand in the corner, with a threat that her father would not love her any more and her brothers and sisters would laugh at her, and so on. -The small squares related to her little niece, who had shown her the arithmetical trick of arranging the digits in nine squares (I believe this is correct) so that they add up in all directions to fifteen.

III

A man dreamt as follows: He saw two boys struggling - barrel-maker’s boys, to judge by the implements lying around. One of the boys threw the other down; the boy on the ground had earrings with blue stones. He hurried towards the offender with his stick raised, to chastise him. The latter fled for protection to a woman, who was standing by a wooden fence, as though she was his mother. She was a woman of the working classes and her back was turned to the dreamer. At last she turned around and gave him a terrible look so that he ran off in terror. The red flesh of the lower lids of her eyes could be seen standing out.

The dream had made copious use of trivial events of the previous day. He had in fact seen two boys in the street, one of whom threw the other down. When he hurried up to stop the fight they had both taken to their heels. -Barrel-maker’s boys. This was only explained by a subsequent dream in which he used the phrase ‘knocking the bottom out of a barrel’. -From his experience he believed that earrings with blue stones were mostly worn by prostitutes. A line from a well-known piece of doggerel about two boys then occurred to him: ‘The other boy was called Marie’ (i.e. was a girl). -The woman standing. After the scene with the two boys he had gone for a walk along the bank of the Danube and had profited by the loneliness of the spot to micturate against a wooden fence. Further on, a respectably dressed elderly lady had smiled at him in a very friendly manner and had wanted to give him her visiting-card. Since the woman in the dream was standing in the same position as he had been in when he was micturating, it must have been a question of a micturating woman. This tallies with her terrible look and the red flesh standing out, which could only relate to the gaping of the genitals caused by stooping. This, seen in his childhood, reappeared in later memory as ‘proud flesh’ - as a wound.

The dream combined two opportunities he had had as a little boy of seeing little girls’ genitals: when they were thrown down and when they were micturating. And from the other part of the context it emerged that he had a recollection of being chastised or threatened by his father for the sexual curiosity he had evinced on these occasions.

IV

Behind the following dream (dreamt by an elderly lady) there lay a whole quantity of childhood memories, combined, as best they might be, into a single phantasy.

She went out in a violent rush to do some commissions. In the Graben she sank down on her knees, as though she was quite broken-down. A large number of people collected round her, especially cab-drivers; but no one helped her up. She made several vain attempts, and she must at last have succeeded, for she was put into a cab which was to take her home. Someone threw a big, heavily-laden basket (like a shopping-basket) in through the window after her.

This was the same lady who always felt ‘rushed’ in her dreams, just as she had rushed and romped about when she was a child. The first scene in the dream was evidently derived from the sight of a horse fallen down; in the same way the word ‘broken-down’ referred to horse-racing. In her youth she had ridden horses, and no doubt when she was still younger she had actually been a horse. The falling down was related to a memory from very early childhood of the seventeen year-old son of the house-porter who had fallen down in the street in an epileptic fit and been brought home in a carriage. She had of course only heard about this, but the idea of epileptic fits (of the ‘falling sickness’) had obtained a hold on her imagination and had later influenced the form taken by her own hysterical attacks. - If a woman dreams of falling, it almost invariably has a sexual sense: she is imagining herself as a ‘fallen woman’. The present dream in particular scarcely left any room for doubt, since the place where my patient fell was the Graben, a part of Vienna notorious as a promenade for prostitutes. The shopping-basket [Korb] led to more than one interpretation. It reminded her of the numerous rebuffs [Körbe] which she had dealt out to her suitors, as well as of those which she complained of having later received herself. This also connected with the fact that no one helped her up, which she herself explained as a rebuff. The shopping-basket further reminded her of phantasies which had already come up in her analysis, in which she was married far beneath her and had to go marketing herself. And lastly it might serve as the mark of a servant. At this point further childhood recollections emerged. First, of a cook who had been dismissed for stealing, and who had fallen on her knees and begged to be forgiven. She herself had been twelve at the time. Then, of a housemaid who had been dismissed on account of a love-affair with the family coachman (who incidentally married her subsequently). Thus this memory was also one of the sources of the coachmen (drivers) in the dream (who, in contradistinction to the actual coachman, failed to raise the fallen woman). There remained to be explained the fact of the basket being thrown in after her and through the window. This reminded her of handing in luggage to be sent off by rail, of the country custom of lovers climbing in through their sweethearts’ window and of other little episodes from her life in the country: how a gentleman had thrown some blue plums to a lady through the window of her room, and how her own younger sister had been scared by the village idiot looking in through her window. An obscure memory from her tenth year then began to emerge, of a nurse in the country who had had love-scenes (which the girl might have seen something of) with one of the servants in the house and who, along with her lover, had been sent off, thrown out (the opposite of the dream-image ‘thrown in) - a story that we had already approached from several other directions. A servant’s luggage or trunk is referred to contemptuously in Vienna as ‘seven plums: ‘pack up your seven plums and out you go!’

My records naturally include a large collection of patients’ dreams the analysis of which led to obscure or entirely forgotten impressions of childhood, often going back to the first three years of life. But it would be unsafe to apply any conclusions drawn from them to dreams in general. The persons concerned were in every instance neurotics and in particular hysterics; and it is possible that the part played by childhood scenes in their dreams might be determined by the nature of their neurosis and not by the nature of dreams. Nevertheless, in analysing my own dreams - and, after all, I am not doing so on account of any gross pathological symptoms - it happens no less frequently that in the latent content of a dream I come unexpectedly upon a scene from childhood, and that all at once a whole series of my dreams link up with the associations branching out from some experience of my childhood. I have already given some instances of this, and I shall have others to give in a variety of connections. I cannot, perhaps, bring this section to a better close than by reporting one or two dreams of mine in which recent occasions and long-forgotten experiences of childhood came together as sources of the dream.I

Tired and hungry after a journey, I went to bed, and the major vital needs began to announce their presence in my sleep; I dreamt as follows:

I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing in it; one of them was the hostess of the inn and was twisting something about in her hands, as though she were making Knödel. She answered that I must wait until she was ready. (These were not definite spoken words.) I felt impatient and went off with a sense of injury. I put on an overcoat. But the first I tried on was too long for me. I took it off, rather surprised to find it was trimmed with fur. A second one that I put on had had a long strip with a Turkish design let into it. A stranger with a long face and a short pointed beard came up and tried to prevent my putting it on, saying it was his. I showed him then that it was embroidered all over with a Turkish pattern. He asked: ‘What have the Turkish (designs, stripes...) to do with you?’ But then we became quite friendly with each other.

When I began analysing this dream, I thought quite unexpectedly of the first novel I ever read (when I was thirteen, perhaps); as a matter of fact I began at the end of the first volume. I have never known the name of the novel or of its author; but I have a vivid memory of its ending. The hero went mad and kept calling out the names of the three women who had brought the greatest happiness and sorrow into his life. One of these names was Pélagie. I still had no notion what this recollection was going to lead to in the analysis. In connection with the three women I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man, and I knew that one of the three women - the inn-hostess in the dream - was the mother who gives life, and furthermore (as in my own case) gives the living creature its first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman’s breast. A young man who was a great admirer of feminine beauty was talking once - so the story went - of the good-looking wet-nurse who had suckled him when he was a baby: ‘I’m sorry’, he remarked, ‘that I didn’t make a better use of my opportunity.’ I was in the habit of quoting this anecdote to explain the factor of ‘deferred action’ in the mechanism of the psychoneuroses. - One of the Fates, then, was rubbing the palms of her hands together as though she was making dumplings: a queer occupation for a Fate, and one that cried out for an explanation. This was provided by another and earlier memory of my childhood. When I was six years old and was given my first lessons by my mother, I was expected to believe that we were all made of earth and must therefore return to earth. This did not suit me and I expressed doubts of the doctrine. My mother thereupon rubbed the palms of her hands together - just as she did in making dumplings, except that there was no dough between them - and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis produced by the friction as a proof that we were made of earth. My astonishment at this ocular demonstration knew no bounds and I acquiesced in the belief which I was later to hear expressed in the words: ‘Du bist der Natur einen Tod schuldig.’ [‘Thou owest Nature a death.’]¹ So they really were Fates that I found in the kitchen when I went into it - as I had so often done in my childhood when I was hungry, while my mother, standing by the fire, had admonished me that I must wait till dinner was ready. - And now for the dumplings - the Knödel! One at least of my teachers at the University - and precisely the one to whom I owe my histological knowledge (for instance of the epidermis) - would infallibly be reminded by the name Knödl of a person against whom he had been obliged to take legal action for plagiarizing his writings. The idea of plagiarizing - of appropriating whatever one can, even though it belongs to someone else - clearly led on to the second part of the dream, in which I was treated as though I were the thief who had for some time carried on his business of stealing overcoats in the lecture-rooms. I had written down the word ‘plagiarizing’, without thinking about it, because it occurred to me; but now I noticed that it could form a bridge [

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23