Autobiographical note 34 страница

Vorfahren’ and, I believe, ran as follows:

Der Herr befiehlt’s,

Der Kutscher tut’s.

Ein jeder hat’s,

Im Grabe ruht’s.

[With the master’s request

The driver complies:

By all men possessed

In the graveyard it lies.]

(Answer: ‘Vorfahren’ [‘Drive up’ and ‘Ancestry’; more literally ‘go in front’ and ‘predecessors’].)

It was particularly confusing that the first half of the second riddle was identical with that of the first:

Der Herr befiehlt’s,

Der Kutscher tut’s.

Nicht jeder hat’s,

In der Wiege ruht’s.

[With the master’s request

The driver complies:

Not by all men possessed

In the cradle it lies.]

(Answer: ‘Nachkommen’ [‘Follow after’ and ‘Progeny’; more literally ‘come after’ and ‘successors’].)

¹ [The German word ‘fahren’’, which has already been used repeatedly in the dream and the analysis, is used for the English ‘drive’ (in a cab) and ‘travel’ (in a train) and has had to be translated by both of those words in different contexts.]

When I saw Count Thun drive up so impressively and when I thereupon fell into the mood of Figaro, with his remarks on the goodness of great gentlemen in having taken the trouble to be born (to become progeny

), these two riddles were adopted by the dream-work as intermediate thoughts. Since aristocrats could easily be confused with drivers and since there was a time in our part of the world when a driver was spoken of as ‘Schwager’ [‘coachman’ and ‘brother-in-law’], the work of condensation was able to introduce my brother into the same picture. The dream-thought, however, which was operating behind all this ran as follows: ‘It is absurd to be proud of one’s ancestry; it is better to be an ancestor oneself.’ This judgement, that something ‘is absurd’, was what produced the absurdity in the dream. And this also clears up the remaining enigma in this obscure region of the dream, namely why it was that I thought I had already driven with the driver before [vorhergefahren (‘driven before’) - vorgefahren (‘driven up’) -’Vorfahren’ (‘ancestry’)].

A dream is made absurd, then, if a judgement that something ‘is absurd’ is among the elements included in the dream thoughts - that is to say, if any one of the dreamer’s unconscious trains of thought has criticism or ridicule as its motive. Absurdity is accordingly one of the methods by which the dream-work represents a contradiction - alongside such other methods as the reversal in the dream-content of some material relation in the dream-thoughts, or the exploitation of the sensation of motor inhibition. Absurdity in a dream, however, is not to be translated by a simple ‘no’; it is intended to reproduce the mood of the dream-thoughts, which combines derision or laughter with the contradiction. It is only with such an aim in view that the dream-work produces anything ridiculous. Here once again it is a giving a manifest form to a portion of the latent content.¹

Actually we have already come across a convincing example of an absurd dream with this kind of meaning: the dream - I interpreted it without any analysis - of the performance of a Wagner opera which lasted till a quarter to eight in the morning and in which the orchestra was conducted from a tower, and so on (see p. 811 f.). It evidently meant to say: ‘This is a topsy-turvy world and a crazy society; the person who deserves something doesn’t get it, and the person who doesn’t care about something does get it’ - and there the dreamer was comparing her fate with her cousin’s. - Nor is it by any means a matter of chance that our first examples of absurdity in dreams related to a dead father. In such cases, the conditions for creating absurd dreams are found together in characteristic fashion. The authority wielded by a father provokes criticism from his children at an early age, and the severity of the demands he makes upon them leads them, for their own relief, to keep their eyes open to any weakness of their father’s; but the filial piety called up in our minds by the figure of a father, particularly after his death, tightens the censorship which prohibits any such criticism from being consciously expressed.

¹ The dream-work is thus parodying the thought that has been presented to it as something ridiculous, by the method of creating something ridiculous in connection with that thought. Heine adopted the same line when he wanted to ridicule some wretched verses written by the King of Bavaria. He did so in still more wretched ones:

Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet,

Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo

Vor ihm auf die Kniee und bittet und fleht,

‘Halt ein! ich werde sonst toll, o!’

[Sir Ludwig is a magnificent bard

And, as soon as he utters, Apollo

Goes down on his knees and begs him: ‘Hold hard!

Or I’II shortly become a clod-poll oh!’

Lobgesänge auf König Ludwig, I]

IV

Here is another absurd dream about a dead father. I received a communication from the town council of my birthplace concerning the fees due for someone’s maintenance in the hospital in the year 1851, which had been necessitated by an attack he had had in my house. I was amused by this since, in the first place, I was not yet alive in 1851 and, in the second place, my father, to whom it might have related, was already dead. I went to him in the next room, where he was lying on his bed, and told him about it. To my surprise, he recollected that in 1851 he had once got drunk and had had to be locked up or detained. It was at a time at which he had been working for the firm of T----. ‘So you used to drink as well?’ I asked; ‘did you get married soon after that?’ I calculated of course, I was born in 1856, which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question.

We should conclude from the preceding discussion that the insistence with which this dream exhibited its absurdities could only be taken as indicating the presence in the dream-thoughts of a particularly embittered and passionate polemic. We shall therefore be all the more astonished to observe that in this dream the polemic was carried on in the open and that my father was the explicit object of the ridicule. Openness of this kind seems to contradict our assumptions as regards the working of the censorship in connection with the dream-work. The position will become clearer, however, when it is realized that in this instance my father was merely put forward as a show figure, and that the dispute was really being carried on with someone else, who only appeared in the dream in a single allusion. Whereas normally a dream deals with rebellion against someone else, behind whom the dreamer’s father is concealed, the opposite was true here. My father was made into a man of straw, in order to screen someone else; and the dream was allowed to handle in this undisguised way a figure who was as a rule treated as sacred, because at the same time I knew with certainty that it was not he who was really meant. That this was so was shown by the exciting cause of the dream. For it occurred after I had heard that a senior colleague of mine, whose judgement was regarded as beyond criticism, had given voice to disapproval and surprise at the fact that the psycho-analytic treatment of one of my patients had already entered its fifth year. The first sentences of the dream alluded under a transparent disguise to the fact that for some time this colleague had taken over the duties which my father could no longer fulfil (’fees due’, ‘maintenance in the hospital’), and that, when our relations began to be less friendly, I became involved in the same kind of emotional conflict which, when a misunderstanding arises between a father and son, is inevitably produced owing to the position occupied by the father and the assistance formerly given by him. The dream-thoughts protested bitterly against the reproach that I was not getting on faster - a reproach which, applying first to my treatment of the patient, extended later to other things. Did he know anyone, I thought, who could get on more quickly? Was he not aware that, apart from my methods of treatment, conditions of that kind are altogether incurable and last a life-time? What were four or five years in comparison with a whole life-time, especially considering that the patient’s existence had been so very much eased during the treatment?

A great part of the impression of absurdity in this dream was brought about by running together sentences from different parts of the dream-thoughts without any transition. Thus the sentence ‘I went to him in the next room’, etc., dropped the subject with which the preceding sentences had been dealing and correctly reproduced the circumstances in which I informed my father of my having become engaged to be married without consulting him. This sentence was therefore reminding me of the admirable unselfishness displayed by the old man on that occasion, and contrasting it with the behaviour of someone else - of yet another person. It is to be observed that the dream was allowed to ridicule my father because in the dream-thoughts he was held up in unqualified admiration as a model to other people. It lies in the very nature of every censorship that of forbidden things it allows those which are untrue to be said rather than those which are true. The next sentence, to the effect that he recollected ‘having once got drunk and been locked up for it

’, was no longer concerned with anything that related to my father in reality. Here the figure for whom he stood was no less a person than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I had trodden with such deep veneration and whose behaviour towards me, after a short period of favour, had turned to undisguised hostility. The dream reminded me that he himself had told me that at one time in his youth he had indulged in the habit of making himself intoxicated with chloroform and that on account of it he had had to go into a home. It also reminded me of another incident with him shortly before his death. I had carried on an embittered controversy with him in writing, on the subject of male hysteria, the existence of which he denied. When I visited him during his fatal illness and asked after his condition, he spoke at some length about his state and ended with these words: ‘You know, I was always one of the clearest cases of male hysteria.’ He was thus admitting, to my satisfaction and astonishment, what he had for so long obstinately contested. But the reason why I was able in this scene of the dream to use my father as a screen for Meynert did not lie in any analogy that I had discovered between the two figures. The scene was a concise but entirely adequate representation of a conditional sentence in the dream-thoughts, which ran in full: ‘If only I had been the second generation, the son of a professor or Hofrat, I should certainly have got on faster.’ In the dream I made my father into a Hofrat and professor. -The most blatant and disturbing absurdity in the dream resides in its treatment of the date 1851, which seemed to me not to differ from 1856, just as though a difference of five years was of no significance whatever. But this last was precisely what the dream-thoughts sought to express. Four or five years was the length of time during which I enjoyed the support of the colleague whom I mentioned earlier in this analysis; but it was also the length of time during which I made my fiancée wait for our marriage; and it was also, by a chance coincidence which was eagerly exploited by the dream-thoughts, the length of time during which I made my patient of longest standing wait for a complete recovery. ‘What are five years?’ asked the dream-thoughts; ‘that’s no time at all, so far as I am concerned; it doesn’t count. I have time enough in front of me. And just as I succeeded in the end in that, though you would not believe it, so I shall achieve this, too.’ Apart from this, however, the number 51 by itself, without the number of the century, was determined in another, and indeed, in an opposite sense; and this, too, is why it appeared in the dream several times. 51 is the age which seems to be a particularly dangerous one to men; I have known colleagues who have died suddenly at that age, and amongst them one who, after long delays, had been appointed to a professorship only a few days before his death.

V

Here is yet another absurd dream which plays about with numbers. One of my acquaintances, Herr M., had been attacked in an essay with an unjustifiable degree of violence, as we all thought - by no less a person than Goethe. Herr M. was naturally crushed by the attack. He complained of it bitterly to some company at table; his veneration for Goethe had not been affected, however, by this personal experience. I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me improbable. Goethe died in 1832. Since his attack on Herr M. must naturally have been made earlier than that, Herr M. must have been quite a young man at the time. It seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen. I was not quite sure, however, what year we were actually in, so that my whole calculation melted into obscurity. Incidentally, the attack was contained in Goethe’s well-known essay on ‘Nature’.

We shall quickly find means of justifying the nonsense in this dream. Herr M., whom I had got to know among some company at table, had not long before asked me to examine his brother, who was showing signs of general paralysis. The suspicion was correct; on the occasion of this visit an awkward episode occurred, for in the course of his conversation the patient for no accountable reason gave his brother away by talking of his youthful follies. I had asked the patient the year of his birth and made him do several small sums so as to test the weakness of his memory - though, incidentally, he was still able to meet the tests quite well. I could already see that I myself behaved like a paralytic in the dream. (I was not quite sure what year we were in.) Another part of the material of the dream was derived from another recent source. The editor of a medical journal, with whom I was on friendly terms, had printed a highly unfavourable, a ‘crushing’ criticism of my Berlin friend Fl.’s last book. The criticism had been written by a very youthful reviewer who possessed small judgement. I thought I had a right to intervene and took the editor to task over it. He expressed lively regret at having published the criticism but would not undertake to offer any redress. I therefore severed my connection with the journal, but in my letter of resignation expressed a hope that our personal relations would not be affected by the event. The third source of the dream was an account I had just heard from a woman patient of her brother’s mental illness, and of how he had broken out in a frenzy with cries of ‘Nature! Nature!’ The doctors believed that his exclamation came from his having read Goethe’s striking essay on that subject and that it showed he had been overworking at his studies in natural philosophy. I myself preferred to think of the sexual sense in which the word is used even by the less educated people here. This idea of mine was at least not disproved by the fact that the unfortunate young man subsequently mutilated his own genitals. He was eighteen at the time of his outbreak.

I may add that my friend’s book which had been so severely criticized (‘one wonders whether it is the author or oneself who is crazy’, another reviewer had said) dealt with the chronological data of life and showed that the length of Goethe’s life was a multiple of a number that has a significance in biology. So it is easy to see that in the dream I was putting myself in my friend’s place. (I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data.) But I behaved like a paralytic, and the dream was a mass of absurdities. Thus the dream-thoughts were saying ironically: ‘Naturally, it’s he who is the crazy fool, and it’s you who are the men of genius and know better. Surely it can’t by any chance be the reverse?’ There were plenty of examples of this reversal in the dream. For instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whereas it is still easy for quite a young man to attack Goethe, who is immortal. And again, I calculated from the year of Goethe’s death, whereas I had made the paralytic calculate from the year of his birth.

But I have also undertaken to show that no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones. So I must explain away the fact that in the present dream I made my friend’s cause my own and put myself in his place. The strength of my critical conviction in waking life is not enough to account for this. The story of the eighteen-year-old patient, however, and the different interpretations of his exclaiming ‘Nature!’ were allusions to the opposition in which I found myself to most doctors on account of my belief in the sexual aetiology of the psychoneuroses. I could say to myself: ‘The kind of criticism that has been applied to your friend will be applied to you - indeed, to some extent it already has been.’ The ‘he’ in the dream can therefore be replaced by ‘we’: ‘Yes, you’re quite right, it’s we who are the fools.’ There was a very clear reminder in the dream that ‘

mea resagitur’, in the allusion to Goethe’s short but exquisitely written essay; for when at the end of my school-days I was hesitating in my choice of a career, it was hearing that essay read aloud at a public lecture that decided me to take up the study of natural science.

VI

Earlier in this volume I undertook to show that another dream in which my own ego did not appear was nevertheless egoistic. On p. 746 I reported a short dream to the effect that Professor M. said: ‘My son, the Myops...’, and I explained that the dream was only an introductory one, preliminary to another in which I did play a part. Here is the missing main dream, which introduces an absurd and unintelligible verbal form which requires an explanation.

On account of certain events which had occurred in the city of Rome, it had become necessary to remove the children to safety, and this was done. The scene was then in front of a gateway, double doors in the ancient style (the ‘Porta Romana’ at Siena, as I was aware during the dream itself). I was sitting on the edge of a fountain and was greatly depressed and almost in tears. A female figure - an attendant or nun - brought two boys out and handed them over to their father, who was not myself. The elder of the two was clearly my eldest son; I did not see other one’s face. The woman who brought out the boy asked him to kiss her good-bye. She was noticeable for having a red nose. The boy refused to kiss her, but, holding out his hand in farewell, said ‘AUF GESERES’ to her, and then ‘AUF UNGESERES’ to the two of us (or to one of us). I had a notion that this last phrase denoted a preference.¹

¹ [The words ‘Geseres’ and ‘Ungeseres’, neither of them German, are discussed below.]

This dream was constructed on a tangle of thoughts provoke by a play which I had seen, called Das neue Ghetto. The Jewish problem, concern about the future of one’s children, to whom one cannot give a country of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they can move freely across frontiers - all of this was easily recognizable among the relevant dream-thoughts.

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.’ Siena, like Rome, is famous for its beautiful fountains. If Rome occurred in one of my dreams, it was necessary for me to find a substitute for it from some locality known to me (see p. 679 f.). Near the Port Romana in Siena we had seen a large and brightly lighted building. We learned that it was the Manicomio, the insane asylum. Shortly before I had the dream I had heard that a man of the same religious persuasion as myself had been obliged to resign the position which he had painfully achieved in a State asylum.

Our interest is aroused by the phrase ‘Auf geseres’ (at a point at which the situation in the dream would have led one to expect ‘Auf Wiedersehen’) as well as its quite meaningless opposite ‘Auf Ungeseres.’ According to information I have received from philologists, ‘Geseres’ is a genuine Hebrew word derived from a verb ‘goiser’, and is best translated by ‘imposed sufferings’ or ‘doom.’ The use of the word in slang would incline one to suppose that it meant ‘weeping and wailing.’ ‘Ungeseres’ was a private neologism of my own and was the first word to catch my attention, but to begin with I could make nothing of it. But the short remark at the end of the dream to the effect that ‘Ungeseres’ denoted a preference over ‘Geseres’ opened the door to associations and at the same time to an elucidation of the word. An analogous relationship occurs in the case of caviare; unsalted [‘ungesalzen’] caviare is esteemed more highly that salted [‘gesalzen’]. ‘Caviare to the general’, aristocratic pretensions; behind this lay a joking allusion to a member of my household who, since she was younger than I, would, I hoped look after my children in the future. This tallied with the fact that another member of my household, our excellent nurse, was recognizably portrayed in the female attendant or nun in the dream. There was still, however, no transitional idea between ‘salted - unsalted’ and ‘Geseres - Ungeseres.’ This was provided by ‘leavened - unleavened’ [‘gesäuert - ungesäuert’]. In their flight out of Egypt the Children of Israel had not time to allow their dough to rise and, in memory of this, they eat unleavened bread to this day at Easter. At this point I may insert a sudden association that occurred to me during this portion of the analysis. I remembered how, during the previous Easter, my Berlin friend and I had been walking through the streets of Breslau, a town in which we were strangers. A little girl asked me the way to a particular street, and I was obliged to confess that I did not know; and I remarked to my friend: ‘It is to be hoped that when she grows up that little girl will show more discrimination in her choice of the people whom she gets to direct her.’ Shortly afterwards, I caught sight of a door-plate bearing the words ‘Dr. Herodes. Consulting hours:...’ ‘Let us hope’, I remarked, ‘that our colleague does not happen to be a children’s doctor.’ At this same time my friend had been telling me his views on the biological significance of bilateral symmetry and had begun a sentence with the words ‘If we had an eye in the middle of our foreheads like a Cyclops...’ This led to the Professor’s remark in the introductory dream, ‘My son, the Myops...’¹ and I had now been led to the principal source of ‘Geseres’. Many years before, when this son of Professor M.’s, to-day an independent thinker, was still sitting at his school-desk, he was attacked by a disease of the eyes which, the doctor declared, gave cause for anxiety. He explained that so long as it remained on one side it was of no importance, but that if it passed over to the other eye it would be a serious matter. The affection cleared up completely in the one eye; but shortly afterwards signs in fact appeared of the other one being affected. The boy’s mother, terrified, at once sent for the doctor to the remote spot in the country where they were staying. The doctor, however, now went over to the other side. ‘Why are you making such a "Geseres"?’ he shouted at the mother, ‘if one side has got well, so will the other.’ And he was right.

¹ [The German ‘Myop’ is an ad hoc form constructed on the pattern of ‘Zyklop’.]

And now we must consider the relation of all this to me and my family. The school-desk at which Professor M.’s son took his first steps in knowledge was handed over by his mother as a gift to my eldest son, into whose mouth I put the farewell phrases in the dream. It is easy to guess one of the wishes to which this transference gave rise. But the construction of the desk was also intended to save the child from being short-sighted and one-sided. Hence the appearance in the dream of ‘Myops’ (and, behind it, ‘Cyclops’) and the reference to bilaterality. My concern about one-sidedness had more than one meaning: it would refer not only to physical one-sidedness but also to one sidedness of intellectual development. May it not even be that it was precisely this concern which, in its crazy way, the scene in the dream was contradicting? After the child had turned to one side to say farewell words, he turned to the other side to say the contrary, as though to restore the balance. It was as though he was acting with due attention to bilateral symmetry!

Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical. The Prince in the play, who had to disguise himself as a madman, was behaving just as dreams do in reality; so that we can say of dreams what Hamlet said of himself, concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility: ‘I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a hand-saw!’¹

Thus I have solved the problem of absurdity in dreams by showing that the dream-thoughts are never absurd - never, at all events, in the dreams of sane people - and that the dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be present in the dream-thoughts.

¹ This dream also provides a good example of the generally valid truth that dreams which occur during the same night, even though they are recollected as separate, spring from the ground-work of the same thoughts. Incidentally, the situation in the dream of my removing my children to safety from the City of Rome was distorted by being related back to an analogous event that occurred in my own childhood: I was envying some relatives who, many years earlier, had had an opportunity of removing their children to another country.

My next task is to show that the dream-work consists in nothing more than a combination of the three factors I have mentioned - and of a fourth which I have still to mention; that it carries out no other function than the translation of dream-thoughts in accordance with the four conditions to which it is subject; and that the question whether the mind operates in dreams with all its intellectual faculties or with only a part of them is wrongly framed and disregards the facts. Since, however, there are plenty of dreams in whose content judgements are passed, criticisms made, and appreciations expressed, in which surprise is felt at some particular element of the dream, in which explanations are attempted and argumentations embarked upon, I must now proceed to meet the objections arising from facts of this kind by producing some chosen examples.

My reply is as follows: Everything that appears in dreams as the ostensible activity of the function of judgement is to be regarded not as an intellectual achievement of the dream-work but as belonging to the material of the dream-thoughts and as having been lifted from them into the manifest content of the dream as a ready-made structure. I can even carry this assertion further. Even the judgements made after waking upon a dream that has been remembered, and the feelings called up in us by the reproduction of such a dream, form part, to a great extent, of the latent content of the dream and are to be included in its interpretation.

I

I have already quoted a striking example of this. A woman patient refused to tell me a dream of hers because ‘it was not clear enough.’ She had seen someone in the dream but did not know whether it was her husband or her father. There then followed a second piece of dream in which a dust-bin [Misttrügerl] appeared, and this gave rise to the following recollection. When she had first set up house she had jokingly remarked on one occasion in the presence of a young relative who was visiting in the house that her next job was to get hold of a new dust-bin. The next morning one arrived for her, but it was filled with lilies of the valley. This piece of the dream served to represent a common phrase ‘not grown on my own manure’.¹ When the analysis was completed, it turned out that the dream-thoughts were concerned with the after-effects of a story, which the dreamer had heard when she was young, of how a girl had had a baby and of how it was not clear who the father really was. Here, then, the dream-representation had overflowed into the waking thoughts: one of the elements of the dream-thoughts had found representation in a waking judgement passed upon the dream as a whole.II

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