Autobiographical note 19 страница

¹ Cf. the passage in Griesinger and my remarks in my second paper on the neuro-psychoses of defence (Freud, 1896b). In another dream I similarly succeeded in warding off a threatened interruption of my sleep which came this time from a sensory stimulus. In this case it was only by chance, however, that I was able to discover the link between the dream and its accidental stimulus and thus to understand the dream. One morning at the height of summer, while I was staying at a mountain resort in the Tyrol, I woke up knowing I had had a dream that the Pope was dead. I failed to interpret this dream - a non-visual one - and only remembered as part of its basis that I had read in a newspaper a short time before that his Holiness was suffering from a slight indisposition. In the course of the morning, however, my wife asked me if I had heard the frightful noise made by the pealing of bells that morning. I had been quite unaware of them, but I now understood my dream. It had been a reaction on the part of my need for sleep to the noise with which the pious Tyrolese had been trying to wake me. I had taken my revenge on them by drawing the inference which formed the content of the dream, and I had then continued my sleep without paying any more attention to the noise.

The dreams quoted in earlier chapters included several which might serve as instances of the working-over of such so-called nervous stimuli. My dream of drinking water in great gulps is an example. The somatic stimulus was apparently its only source, and the wish derived from the sensation (the thirst, that is) was apparently its only motive. The case is similar with other simple dreams in which a somatic stimulus seems able by itself to construct a wish. The dream of the woman patient who threw off the cooling apparatus from her cheek during the night presents an unusual method of reacting to a painful stimulus with a wish-fulfilment: it appears as though the patient succeeded temporarily in making herself analgesic, while ascribing her pains to someone else.

My dream of the three Fates was clearly a hunger dream. But it succeeded in shifting the craving for nourishment back to a child’s longing for his mother’s breast, and it made use of an innocent desire as a screen for a more serious one which could not be so openly displayed. My dream about Count Thun showed how an accidental physical need can be linked up with the most intense (but at the same time the most intensely suppressed) mental impulses. And a case such as that related by Garnier (1872, 1, 476) of how the First Consul wove the noise of an exploding bomb into a battle dream before he woke up from it reveals with quite special clarity the nature of the sole motive that leads mental activity to concern itself with sensations during sleep. A young barrister, fresh from his first important bankruptcy proceedings, who dropped asleep one afternoon, behaved in just the same way as the great Napoleon. He had a dream of a certain G. Reich of Husyatin whom he had come across during a bankruptcy case; the name ‘Husyatin’ kept on forcing itself on his notice, till he woke up and found that his wife (who was suffering from a bronchial catarrh) was having a violent fit of coughing [in German ‘husten’].

Let us compare this dream of the first Napoleon (who, incidentally, was an extremely sound sleeper) with that of the sleepy student who was roused by his landlady and told that it was time to go to the hospital, and who proceeded to dream that he was in bed at the hospital and then slept on, under the pretext that as he was already in the hospital there was no need for him to get up and go there. This latter dream was clearly a dream of convenience. The dreamer admitted his motive for dreaming without any disguise; but at the same time he gave away one of the secrets of dreaming in general. All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience: they serve the purpose of prolonging sleep instead of waking up. Dreams are the GUARDIANS of sleep and not its disturbers. We shall have occasion elsewhere to justify this view of them in relation to awakening factors of a psychical kind; but we are already in a position to show that it is applicable to the part played by objective external stimuli. Either the mind pays no attention at all to occasions for sensation during sleep - if it is able to do this despite the intensity of the stimuli and the significance which it knows attaches to them; or it makes use of a dream in order to deny the stimuli; or, thirdly, if it is obliged to recognize them, it seeks for an interpretation of them which will make the currently active sensation into a component part of a situation which is wished for and which is consistent with sleeping. The currently active sensation is woven into a dream in order to rob it of reality. Napoleon could sleep on - with a conviction that what was trying to disturb him was only a dream-memory of the thunder of the guns at Arcole.¹

¹ The two sources from which I know this dream do not agree in their account of it.

Thus the wish to sleep (which the conscious ego is concentrated upon, and which, together with the dream-censorship and the ‘secondary revision’ which I shall mention later, constitute the conscious ego’s share in dreaming) must in every case be reckoned as one of the motives for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfilment of that wish. We shall discuss elsewhere the relations subsisting between this universal, invariably present and unchanging wish to sleep and the other wishes, of which now one and now another is fulfilled by the content of the dream. But we have found in the wish to sleep the factor that is able to fill the gap in the theory of Strümpell and Wundt and to explain the perverse and capricious manner in which external stimuli are interpreted. The correct interpretation, which the sleeping mind is perfectly capable of making, would involve an active interest and would require that sleep should be brought to an end; for that reason, of all the possible interpretations, only those are admitted which are consistent with the absolute censorship exercised by the wish to sleep. ‘It is the nightingale and not the lark.’ For if it were the lark it would mean the end of the lovers’ night. Among the interpretations of the stimulus which are accordingly admissible, that one is then selected which can provide the best link with the wishful impulses lurking in the mind. Thus everything is unambiguously determined and nothing is left to arbitrary decision. The misinterpretation is not an illusion but, as one might say, an evasion. Here once again, however, just as when, in obedience to the dream-censorship, a substitution is effected by displacement, we have to admit that we are faced by an act which deviates from normal psychical processes.

When external nervous stimuli and internal somatic stimuli are intense enough to force psychical attention to themselves, then - provided that their outcome is dreaming and not waking up - they serve as a fixed point for the formation of a dream, a nucleus in its material; a wish-fulfilment is then looked for that shall correspond to this nucleus, just as (see above) intermediate ideas are looked for between two psychical dream stimuli. To that extent it is true that in a number of dreams the content of the dream is dictated by the somatic element. In this extreme instance it may even happen that a wish which is not actually a currently active one is called up for the sake of constructing a dream. A dream, however, has no alternative but to represent a wish in the situation of having been fulfilled; it is, as it were, faced with the problem of looking for a wish which can be represented as fulfilled by the currently active sensation. If this immediate material is of a painful or distressing kind, that does not necessarily mean that it cannot be used for the construction of a dream. The mind has wishes at its disposal whose fulfilment produces unpleasure. This seems self-contradictory; but it becomes intelligible when we take into account the presence of two psychical agencies and a censorship between them.

As we have seen, there are ‘repressed’ wishes in the mind, which belong to the first system and whose fulfilment is opposed by the second system. In saying that there are such wishes I am not making a historical statement to the effect that they once existed and were later abolished. The theory of repression, which is essential to the study of the psychoneuroses, asserts that these repressed wishes still exist - though there is a simultaneous inhibition which holds them down. Linguistic usage hits the mark in speaking of the ‘suppression’ of these impulses. The psychical arrangements that make it possible for such impulses to force their way to realization remain in being and in working order. Should it happen, however, that a suppressed wish of this kind is carried into effect, and that its inhibition by the second system (the system that is admissible to consciousness) is defeated, this defeat finds expression as unpleasure. In conclusion: if sensations of an unpleasurable nature arising from somatic sources occur during sleep, the dream-work makes use of that event in order to represent - subject to the continuance of the censorship to a greater or less degree - the fulfilment of some wish which is normally suppressed.

This state of affairs is what makes possible one group of anxiety-dreams - dream-structures unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory. A second group of them reveal a different mechanism; for anxiety in dreams may be psychoneurotic anxiety: it may originate from psychosexual excitations - in which case the anxiety corresponds to repressed libido. Where this is so, the anxiety, like the whole anxiety-dream, has the significance of a neurotic symptom, and we come near the limit at which the wish-fulfilling purpose of dreams breaks down. But there are some anxiety dreams in which the feeling of anxiety is determined somatically - where, for instance, there happens to be difficulty in breathing owing to disease of the lungs or heart - and in such cases the anxiety is exploited in order to assist the fulfilment in the form of dreams of energetically suppressed wishes which, if they had been dreamt about for psychical reasons, would have led to a similar release of anxiety. But there is no difficulty in reconciling these two apparently different groups. In both groups of dreams two psychical factors are involved: an inclination towards an affect and an ideational content; and these are intimately related to each other. If one of them is currently active, it calls up the other even in a dream; in the one case the somatically determined anxiety calls up the suppressed ideational content, and in the other the ideational content with its accompanying sexual excitation, having been set free from repression, calls up a release of anxiety. We can put it that in the first case a somatically determined affect is given a psychical interpretation; while in the other case, though the whole is psychically determined, the content which had been suppressed is easily replaced by a somatic interpretation appropriate to anxiety. The difficulties which all this offers to our understanding have little to do with dreams: they arise from the fact that we are here touching on the problem of the generation of anxiety and on the problem of repression.

There can be no doubt that physical coenaesthesia is among the internal somatic stimuli which can dictate the content of dreams. It can do so, not in the sense that it can provide the dream’s content, but in the sense that it can force upon the dream-thoughts a choice of the material to be represented in the content by putting forward one part of the material as being appropriate to its own character and by holding back another part. Apart from this, the coenaesthetic feelings left over from the preceding day link themselves up, no doubt, with the psychical residues which have such an important influence on dreams. This general mood may persist unchanged in the dream or it may be mastered, and thus, if it is unpleasurable, may be changed into its opposite.

Thus, in my opinion, somatic sources of stimulation during sleep (that is to say, sensations during sleep), unless they are of unusual intensity, play a similar part in the formation of dreams to that played by recent but indifferent impressions left over from the previous day. I believe, that is, that they are brought in to help in the formation of a dream if they fit in appropriately with the ideational content derived from the dream’s psychical sources, but otherwise not. They are treated like some cheap material always ready to hand, which is employed whenever it is needed, in contrast to a precious material which itself prescribes the way in which it shall be employed. If, to take a simile, a patron of the arts brings an artist some rare stone, such as a piece of onyx, and asks him to create a work of art from it, then the size of the stone, its colour and markings, help to decide what head or what scene shall be represented in it. Whereas in the case of a uniform and plentiful material such as marble or sandstone, the artist merely follows some idea that is present in his own mind. It is only in this way, so it seems to me, that we can explain the fact that dream-content provided by somatic stimuli of no unusual intensity fails to appear in every dream or every night.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Rank has shown in a number of papers that certain arousal dreams produced by organic stimuli (dreams with a urinary stimulus and dreams of emission or orgasm) are especially suited to demonstrate the struggle between the need to sleep and the claims of organic needs, as well as the influence of the latter upon the content of dreams.

I can perhaps best illustrate my meaning by an example, which, moreover, will bring us back to dream-interpretation.

One day I had been trying to discover what might be the meaning of the feelings of being inhibited, of being glued to the spot, of not being able to get something done, and so on, which occur so often in dreams and are so closely akin to feelings of anxiety. That night I had the following dream:

I was very incompletely dressed and was going upstairs from a flat on the ground floor to a higher storey. I was going up three steps at a time and was delighted at my agility. Suddenly I saw a maid-servant coming down the stairs - coming towards me, that is. I felt ashamed and tried to hurry, and at this point the feeling of being inhibited set in: I was glued to the steps and unable to budge from the spot.

ANALYSIS. -The situation in the dream is taken from everyday reality. I occupy two flats in a house in Vienna, which are connected only by the public staircase. My consulting-room and study are on the upper ground floor and my living rooms are one storey higher. When, late in the evening, I have finished my work down below, I go up the stairs to my bedroom. On the evening before I had the dream, I had in fact made this short journey in rather disordered dress - that is to say, I had taken off my collar and tie and cuffs. In the dream this had been turned into a higher degree of undress, but, as usual, an indeterminate one. I usually go upstairs two or three steps at a time; and this was recognized in the dream itself as a wish-fulfilment: the ease with which I achieved it reassured me as to the functioning of my heart. Further, this method of going upstairs was an effective contrast to the inhibition in the second half of the dream. It showed me - what needed no proving - that dreams find no difficulty in representing motor acts carried out to perfection. (One need only recall dreams of flying.)

The staircase up which I was going, however, was not the one in my house. At first I failed to recognize it and it was only the identity of the person who met me that made it clear to me what locality was intended. This person was the maid-servant of the old lady whom I was visiting twice a day in order to give her injections; and the staircase, too, was just like the one in her house which I had to go up twice a day.

Now how did this staircase and this female figure come to be in my dream? The feeling of shame at not being completely dressed is no doubt of a sexual nature; but the maid-servant whom I dreamt about was older than I am, surly and far from attractive. The only answer to the problem that occurred to me was this. When I paid my morning visits to this house I used as a rule to be seized with a desire to clear my throat as I went up the stairs and the product of my expectoration would fall on the staircase. For on neither of these floors was there a spittoon; and the view I took was that the cleanliness of the stairs should not be maintained at my expense but should be made possible by the provision of a spittoon. The concierge, an equally elderly and surly woman (but of cleanly instincts, as I was prepared to admit), looked at the matter in a different light. She would lie in wait for me to see whether I should again make free of the stairs, and, if she found that I did, I used to hear her grumbling audibly; and for several days afterwards she would omit the usual greeting when we met. The day before I had the dream the concierge’s party had received a reinforcement in the shape of the maid-servant. I had, as usual, concluded my hurried visit to the patient, when the servant stopped me in the hall and remarked: ‘You might have wiped your boots, doctor, before you came into the room to-day. You’ve made the red carpet all dirty again with your feet.’ This was the only claim the staircase and the maid-servant had to appearing in my dream.

There was an internal connection between my running up the stairs and my spitting on the stairs. Pharyngitis as well as heart trouble are both regarded as punishments for the vice of smoking. And on account of that habit my reputation for tidiness was not of the highest with the authorities in my own house any more than in the other; so that the two were fused into one in the dream.

I must postpone my further interpretation of this dream till I can explain the origin of the typical dream of being incompletely dressed. I will only point out as a provisional conclusion to be drawn from the present dream that a sensation of inhibited movement in dreams is produced whenever the particular context requires it. The cause of this part of the dream’s content cannot have been that some special modification in my powers of movement had occurred during my sleep, since only a moment earlier I had seen myself (almost as though to confirm this fact) running nimbly up the stairs.

(D)TYPICAL DREAMS

We are not in general in a position to interpret another person’s dream unless he is prepared to communicate to us the unconscious thoughts that lie behind its content. The practical applicability of our method of interpreting dreams is in consequence severely restricted.¹ We have seen that, as a general rule, each person is at liberty to construct his dream-world according to his individual peculiarities and so to make it unintelligible to other people. It now appears, however, that, in complete contrast to this, there are a certain number of dreams which almost everyone has dreamt alike and which we are accustomed to assume must have the same meaning for everyone. A special interest attaches, moreover, to these typical dreams because they presumably arise from the same sources in every case and thus seem particularly well qualified to throw light on the sources of dreams.

It is therefore with quite particular anticipations that we shall attempt to apply our technique of dream-interpretation to these typical dreams; and it is with great reluctance that we shall have to confess that our art disappoints our expectations precisely in relation to this material. If we attempt to interpret a typical dream, the dreamer fails as a rule to produce the associations which would in other cases have led us to understand it, or else his associations become obscure and insufficient so that we cannot solve our problem with their help. We shall learn in a later portion of this work why this is so and how we can make up for this defect in our technique. My readers will also discover why it is that at the present point I am able to deal only with a few members of the group of typical dreams and must postpone my consideration of the rest until this later point in my discussion.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] This assertion that our method of interpreting dreams cannot be applied unless we have access to the dreamer’s associative material requires supplementing: our interpretative activity is in one instance independent of these associations - if, namely, the dreamer has employed symbolic elements in the content of the dream. In such case we make use of what is, strictly speaking, a second and auxiliary method of dream-interpretation. (See below.)

() EMBARRASING DREAMS OF BEING NAKED

Dreams of being naked or insufficiently dressed in the presence of strangers sometimes occur with the additional feature of there being a complete absence of any such feeling as shame on the dreamer’s part. We are only concerned here, however, with those dreams of being naked in which one does feel shame and embarrassment and tries to escape or hide, and is then overcome by a strange inhibition which prevents one from moving and makes one feel incapable of altering one’s distressing situation. It is only with this accompaniment that the dream is typical; without it, the gist of its subject-matter may be included in every variety of context or may be ornamented with individual trimmings. Its essence lies in a distressing feeling in the nature of shame and in the fact that one wishes to hide one’s nakedness, as a rule by locomotion, but finds one is unable to do so. I believe the great majority of my readers will have found themselves in this situation in dreams.

The nature of the undress involved is customarily far from clear. The dreamer may say ‘I was in my chemise’, but this is rarely a distinct picture. The kind of undress is usually so vague that the description is expressed as an alternative: ‘I was in my chemise or petticoat.’ As a rule the defect in the dreamer’s toilet is not so grave as to appear to justify the shame to which it gives rise. In the case of a man who has worn the Emperor’s uniform, nakedness is often replaced by some breach of the dress regulations: ‘I was walking in the street without my sabre and saw some officers coming up’, or ‘I was without my necktie’, or ‘I was wearing civilian check trousers’, and so on.

The people in whose presence one feels ashamed are almost always strangers, with their features left indeterminate. In the typical dream it never happens that the clothing which causes one so much embarrassment is objected to or so much as noticed by the onlookers. On the contrary, they adopt indifferent or (as I observed in one particularly clear dream) solemn and stiff expressions of face. This is a suggestive point.

The embarrassment of the dreamer and the indifference of the onlookers offer us, when taken together, a contradiction of the kind that is so common in dreams. It would after all be more in keeping with the dreamer’s feelings if strangers looked at him in astonishment and derision or with indignation. But this objectionable feature of the situation has, I believe, been got rid of by wish-fulfilment, whereas some force has led to the retention of the other features; and the two portions of the dream are consequently out of harmony with each other. We possess an interesting piece of evidence that the dream in the form in which it appears - partly distorted by wish-fulfilment - has not been rightly understood. For it has become the basis of a fairy tale which is familiar to us all in Hans Andersen’s version, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and which has quite recently been put into verse by Ludwig Fulda in his Der Talisman. Hans Andersen’s fairy tale tells us how two impostors weave the Emperor a costly garment which, they say, will be visible only to persons of virtue and loyalty. The Emperor walks out in this invisible garment, and all the spectators, intimidated by the fabric’s power to act as a touchstone, pretend not to notice the Emperor’s nakedness.

This is just the situation in our dream. It is hardly rash to assume that the unintelligibility of the dream’s content, as it exists in the memory has led to its being recast in a form designed to make sense of the situation. That situation, however, is in the process deprived of its original meaning and put to extraneous uses. But, as we shall see later, it is a common thing for the conscious thought-activity of a second psychical system to misunderstand the content of a dream in this way, and this misunderstanding must be regarded as one of the factors in determining the final form assumed by dreams. Moreover we shall learn that similar misunderstandings (taking place, once again, within one and the same psychical personality) play a major part in the construction of obsessions and phobias.

In the case of our dream we are in a position to indicate the material upon which the misinterpretation is based. The impostor is the dream and the Emperor is the dreamer himself; the moralizing purpose of the dream reveals an obscure knowledge of the fact that the latent dream-content is concerned with forbidden wishes that have fallen victim to repression. For the context in which dreams of this sort appear during my analyses of neurotics leaves no doubt that they are based upon memories from earliest childhood. It is only in our childhood that we are seen in inadequate clothing both by members of our family and by strangers - nurses, maid-servants, and visitors; and it is only then that we feel no shame at our nakedness.¹ We can observe how undressing has an almost intoxicating effect on many children even in their later years, instead of making them feel ashamed. They laugh and jump about and slap themselves, while their mother, or whoever else may be there, reproves them and says: ‘Ugh! Shocking! You mustn’t ever do that!’ Children frequently manifest a desire to exhibit. One can scarcely pass through a country village in our part of the world without meeting some child of two or three who lifts up his little shirt in front of one - in one’s honour, perhaps. One of my patients has a conscious memory of a scene in his eighth year, when at bed-time he wanted to dance into the next room where his little sister slept, dressed in his night-shirt, but was prevented by his nurse. In the early history of neurotics an important part is played by exposure to children of the opposite sex; in paranoia delusions of being observed while dressing and undressing are to be traced back to experiences of this kind; while among persons who have remained at the stage of perversion there is one class in which this infantile impulse has reached the pitch of a symptom - the class of ‘exhibitionists’.

¹ A child plays a part in the fairy tale as well; for it was a small child who suddenly exclaimed: ‘But he has nothing on!’

When we look back at this unashamed period of childhood it seems to us a Paradise; and Paradise itself is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood of the individual. That is why mankind were naked in Paradise and were without shame in one another’s presence; till a moment arrived when shame and anxiety awoke, expulsion followed, and sexual life and the tasks of cultural activity began. But we can regain this Paradise every night in our dreams. I have already expressed a suspicion that impressions of earliest childhood (that is, from the prehistoric epoch until about the end of the third year of life) strive to achieve reproduction, from their very nature and irrespectively perhaps of their actual content, and that their repetition constitutes the fulfilment of a wish. Thus dreams of being naked are dreams of exhibiting.¹

The core of a dream of exhibiting lies in the figure of the dreamer himself (not as he was as a child but as he appears at the present time) and his inadequate clothing (which emerges indistinctly, whether owing to superimposed layers of innumerable later memories of being in undress or as a result of the censorship). Added to these are the figures of the people in whose presence the dreamer feels ashamed. I know of no instance in which the actual spectators of the infantile scene of exhibiting have appeared in the dream; a dream is scarcely ever a simple memory. Curiously enough, the people upon whom our sexual interest was directed in childhood are omitted in all the reproductions which occur in dreams, in hysteria and in obsessional neurosis. It is only in paranoia that these spectators reappear and, though they remain invisible, their presence is inferred with fanatical conviction. What takes their place in dreams - ‘a lot of strangers’ who take no notice of the spectacle that is offered - is nothing more nor less than the wishful contrary of the single familiar individual before whom the dreamer exposed himself. Incidentally, ‘a lot of strangers’ frequently appear in dreams in many other connections, and they always stand as the wishful contrary of ‘secrecy’. It is to be noticed that even in paranoia, where the original state of things is restored, this reversal into a contrary is observed. The subject feels that he is no longer alone, he has no doubt that he is being observed, but the observers are ‘a lot of strangers’ whose identity is left curiously vague.

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