Autobiographical note 37 страница

We have already come across an excellent example of a reversal of affect of this kind carried out in a dream on behalf of the dream-censorship. In the dream of ‘my uncle with the yellow beard’ I felt the greatest affection for my friend R., whereas and because the dream-thoughts called him a simpleton. It was from this example of reversal of affect that we derived our first hint of the existence of a dream-censorship. Nor is it necessary to assume, in such cases either, that the dream-work creates contrary affects of this kind out of nothing; it finds them as a rule lying ready to hand in the material of the dream-thoughts, and merely intensifies them with the psychical force arising from a motive of defence, till they can predominate for the purposes of dream-formation. In the dream of my uncle which I have just mentioned, the antithetical, affectionate affect probably arose from an infantile source (as was suggested by the later part of the dream), for the uncle-nephew relationship, owing to the peculiar nature of the earliest experiences of my childhood (cf. the analysis on p. 876 f.) had become the source of all my friendships and all my hatreds.

An excellent example of a reversal of affect of this kind will be found in a dream recorded by Ferenczi (1916): ‘An elderly gentleman was awakened one night by his wife, who had become alarmed because he was laughing so loudly and unrestrainedly in his sleep. Subsequently the man reported that he had had the following dream: I was lying in bed and a gentleman who was known to me entered the room; I tried to turn on the light but was unable to: I tried over and over again, but in vain. Thereupon my wife got out of bed to help me, but she could not manage it either. But as she felt awkward in front of the gentleman owing to being "en négligé", she finally gave it up and went back to bed. All of this was so funny that I couldn’t help roaring with laughter at it. My wife said, ‘Why are you laughing? why are you laughing?’ but I went on laughing till I woke up. - Next day the gentleman was very depressed and had a headache: so much laughing had upset him, he thought.

‘The dream seems less amusing when it is considered analytically. The "gentleman known to him" who entered the room was, in the latent dream-thoughts, the picture of Death as the "great Unknown" - a picture which had been called up in his mind during the previous day. The old gentleman, who suffered from arterio-sclerosis, had had good reason the day before for thinking of dying. The unrestrained laughter took the place of sobbing and weeping at the idea that he must die. It was the light of life that he could no longer turn on. This gloomy thought may have been connected with attempts at copulation which he had made shortly before but which had failed even with the help of his wife en négligé. He realized that he was already going down hill. The dream-work succeeded in transforming the gloomy idea of impotence and death into a comic scene, and his sobs into laughter.’

There is one class of dreams which have a particular claim to be described as ‘hypocritical’ and which offer a hard test to the theory of wish-fulfilment. My attention was drawn to them when Frau Dr. M. Hilferding brought up the following record of a dream of Peter Rosegger’s for discussion by the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society.

Rosegger writes in his story ‘Fremd gemacht!’ [‘Dismissed!’]¹ ‘As a rule I am a sound sleeper but many a night I have lost my rest - for, along with my modest career as a student and man of letters, I have for many years dragged around with me, like a ghost from which I could not set myself free, the shadow of a tailor’s life.

‘It is not as though in the day-time I had reflected very often or very intensely on my past. One who had cast off the skin of a Philistine and was seeking to conquer Earth and Heaven had other things to do. Nor would I, when I was a dashing young fellow, have given more than a thought to my nightly dreams. Only later, when the habit had come to me of reflecting upon everything, or when the Philistine within me began to stir a trifle, did I ask myself why it should be that, if I dreamt at all, I was always a journeyman tailor and that I spent so long a time as such with my master and worked without pay in his workshop. I knew well enough, as I sat like that beside him, sewing and ironing, that my right place was no longer there and that as a townsman I had other things to occupy me. But I was always on vacation, I was always having summer holidays, and so it was that I sat beside my master as his assistant. It often irked me and I felt sad at the loss of time in which I might well have found better and more useful things to do. Now and then, when something went awry, I had to put up with a scolding from my master, though there was never any talk of wages. Often, as I sat there with bent back in the dark workshop, I thought of giving notice and taking my leave. Once I even did so; but my master paid no heed and I was soon sitting beside him again and sewing.

¹ In the second volume of Waldheimat, p. 303.

‘After such tedious hours, what a joy it was to wake! And I determined that if this persistent dream should come again I would throw it from me with energy and call aloud: "This is mere hocus-pocus, I am lying in bed and want to sleep...." But next night I was once more sitting in the tailor’s workshop.

‘And so it went on for years with uncanny regularity. Now it happened once that my master and I were working at Alpelhofer’s (the peasant in whose house I had worked when I was first apprenticed) and my master showed himself quite especially dissatisfied with my work. "I’d like to know where you’re wool-gathering," he said, and looked at me darkly. The most reasonable thing to do, I thought, would be to stand up and tell him that I was only with him to please him and then go off. But I did not do so. I made no objection when my master took on an apprentice and ordered me to make room for him on the bench. I moved into the corner and sewed. The same day another journeyman was taken on as well, a canting hypocrite - he was a Bohemian - who had worked at our place nineteen years before, and had fallen into the brook once on his way back from the inn. When he looked for a seat there was no more room. I turned to my master questioningly, and he said to me: "You’ve no gift for tailoring, you can go! you’re dismissed!" My fright at this was so overpowering that I awoke.

‘The grey light of morning was glimmering through the uncurtained windows into my familiar home. Works of art surrounded me; there in my handsome book-case stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe-all the magnificent immortals. From the next room rang out the clear young voices of the awakening children joking with their mother. I felt as though I had found afresh this idyllically sweet, this peaceful, poetic, spiritual life in which I had so often and so deeply felt a meditative human happiness. Yet it vexed me that I had not been beforehand with my master in giving him notice, but had been dismissed by him.

‘And how astonished I was! From the night on which my master dismissed me, I enjoyed peace; I dreamt no more of the tailoring days which lay so far back in my past-days which had been so cheerfully unassuming but had thrown such a long shadow over my later years.’

In this series of dreams dreamt by an author who had been a journeyman tailor in his youth, it is hard to recognize the dominance of wish-fulfilment. All the dreamer’s enjoyment lay in his day-time existence, whereas in his dreams he was still haunted by the shadow of an unhappy life from which he had at last escaped. Some dreams of my own of a similar kind have enabled me to throw a little light on the subject. As a young doctor I worked for a long time at the Chemical Institute without ever becoming proficient in the skills which that science demands; and for that reason in my waking life I have never liked thinking of this barren and indeed humiliating episode in my apprenticeship. On the other hand I have a regularly recurring dream of working in the laboratory, of carrying out analyses and of having various experiences there. These dreams are disagreeable in the same way as examination dreams and they are never very distinct. While I was interpreting one of them, my attention was eventually attracted by the word ‘analysis’, which gave me a key to their understanding. Since those days I have become an ‘analyst’, and I now carry out analyses which are very highly spoken of, though it is true that they are ‘psycho-analyses’. It was now clear to me: if I have grown proud of carrying out analyses of that kind in my daytime life and feel inclined to boast to myself of how successful I have become, my dreams remind me during the night of those other, unsuccessful analyses of which I have no reason to feel proud. They are the punishment dreams of a parvenu, like the dreams of the journeyman tailor who had grown into a famous author. But how does it become possible for a dream, in the conflict between a parvenu’s pride and his self-criticism, to side with the latter, and choose as its content a sensible warning instead of an unlawful wish-fulfilment? As I have already said, the answer to this question raises difficulties. We may conclude that the foundation of the dream was formed in the first instance by an exaggeratedly ambitious phantasy, but that humiliating thoughts that poured cold water on the phantasy found their way into the dream instead. It may be remembered that there are masochistic impulses in the mind, which may be responsible for a reversal such as this. I should have no objection to this class of dreams being distinguished from ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ under the name of ‘punishment dreams’. I should not regard this as implying any qualification of the theory of dreams which I have hitherto put forward; it would be no more than a linguistic expedient for meeting the difficulties of those who find it strange that opposites should converge. But a closer examination of some of these dreams brings something more to light. In an indistinct part of the background of one of my laboratory dreams I was of an age which placed me precisely in the gloomiest and most unsuccessful year of my medical career. I was still without a post and had no idea how I could earn my living; but at the same time I suddenly discovered that I had a choice open to me between several women whom I might marry! So I was once more young, and, more than everything, she was once more young - the woman who had shared all these difficult years with me. The unconscious instigator of the dream was thus revealed as one of the constantly gnawing wishes of a man who is growing older. The conflict raging in other levels of the mind between vanity and self-criticism had, it is true, determined the content of the dream; but it was only the more deeply-rooted wish for youth that had made it possible for that conflict to appear as a dream. Even when we are awake we sometimes say to ourselves: ‘Things are going very well to-day and times were hard in the old days; all the same, it was lovely then - I was still young.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Since psycho-analysis has divided the personality into an ego and a super-ego (Freud, 1921c), it has become easy to recognize in these punishment dreams fulfilments of the wishes of the super-ego.

Another group of dreams, which I have often come across in myself and recognized as hypocritical, have as their content a reconciliation with people with whom friendly relations have long since ceased. In such cases analysis habitually reveals some occasion which might urge me to abandon the last remnant of consideration for these former friends and to treat them as strangers or enemies. The dream, however, prefers to depict the opposite relationship.

In forming any judgement upon dreams recorded by an imaginative writer it is reasonable to suppose that he may have omitted from his account details in the content of the dream which he regards as unessential or distracting. His dreams will in that case raise problems which would be quickly solved if their content were reported in full.

Otto Rank has pointed out to me that the Grimms’ fairy tale of ‘The Little Tailor, or Seven at a Blow’ contains an exactly similar dream of a parvenu. The tailor, who has become a hero and the son-in-law of the King, dreams one night of his former handicraft, as he lies beside his wife, the Princess. She, becoming suspicious, posts armed guards the next night to listen to the dreamer’s words and to arrest him. But the little tailor is warned, and sees to it that his dream is corrected.

The complicated process of elimination, diminution and reversal, by means of which the affects in the dream-thoughts are eventually turned into those in the dream, can be satisfactorily followed in suitable syntheses of dreams that have been completely analysed. I will quote a few more examples of affects in dreams where some of the possibilities I have enumerated will be found realized.

V

If we turn back to the dream about the strange task set me by old Brücke of making a dissection of my own pelvis, it will be recalled that in the dream itself I missed the gruesome feeling [‘Grauen’] appropriate to it. Now this was a wish-fulfilment in more than one sense. The dissection meant the self-analysis which I was carrying out, as it were, in the publication of this present book about dreams - a process which had been so distressing to me in reality that I had postponed the printing of the finished manuscript for more than a year. A wish then arose that I might get over this feeling of distaste; hence it was that I had no gruesome feeling [‘Grauen’] in the dream. But I should also have been very glad to miss growing grey - ‘Grauen’ in the other sense of the word. I was already growing quite grey, and the grey of my hair was another reminder that I must not delay any longer. And, as we have seen, the thought that I should have to leave it to my children to reach the goal of my difficult journey forced its way through to representation at the end of the dream.

Let us next consider the two dreams in which an expression of satisfaction was transposed to the moment after waking. In the one case the reason given for the satisfaction was an expectation that I should now discover what was meant by ‘I’ve dreamt of that before’, while the satisfaction really referred to the birth of my first children. In the other case the ostensible reason was my conviction that something that had been ‘prognosticated’ was now coming true, while the real reference was similar to that in the former dream: it was the satisfaction with which I greeted the birth of my second son. Here the affects which dominated the dream-thoughts persisted in the dreams; but it is safe to say that in no dream can things be as simple as all that. If we go a little more deeply into the two analyses we find that this satisfaction which had escaped censorship had received an accession from another source. This other source had grounds for fearing the censorship, and its affect would undoubtedly have aroused opposition if it had not covered itself by the similar, legitimate affect of satisfaction, arising from the permissible source, and slipped in, as it were, under its wing.

Unfortunately, I cannot demonstrate this in the actual case of these dreams, but an instance taken from another department of life will make my meaning clear. Let us suppose the following case. There is a person of my acquaintance whom I hate, so that I have a lively inclination to feel glad if anything goes wrong with him. But the moral side of my nature will not give way to this impulse. I do not dare to express a wish that he should be unlucky, and if he meets with some undeserved misfortune, I suppress my satisfaction at it and force myself to manifestations and thoughts of regret. Everyone must have found himself in this situation at some time or other. What now happens, however, is that the hated person, by a piece of misconduct of his own, involves himself in some well-deserved unpleasantness; when that happens, I may give free rein to my satisfaction that he has met with a just punishment and in this I find myself in agreement with many other people who are impartial. I may observe, however, that my satisfaction seems more intense than that of these other people; it has received an accession from the source of my hatred, which till then has been prevented from producing its affect, but in the altered circumstances is no longer hindered from doing so. In social life this occurs in general wherever antipathetic people or members of an unpopular minority put themselves in the wrong. Their punishment does not as a rule correspond to their wrongdoing but to their wrongdoings plus the ill-feeling directed against them which has previously been without any consequences. It is no doubt true that those who inflict the punishment are committing an injustice in this; but they are prevented from perceiving it by the satisfaction resulting from the removal of a suppression which has long been maintained within them. In cases such as this the affect is justified in its quality but not in its quantity; and self-criticism which is set at rest on the one point is only too apt to neglect examination of the second one. When once a door has been opened, it is easy for more people to push their way through it than there had originally been any intention of letting in.

A striking feature in neurotic characters - the fact that a cause capable of releasing an affect is apt to produce in them a result which is qualitatively justified but quantitatively excessive is to be explained along these same lines, in so far as it admits of any psychological explanation at all. The excess arises from sources of affect which had previously remained unconscious and suppressed. These sources have succeeded in setting up an associative link with the real releasing cause, and the desired path from the release of their own affect has been opened by the other source of affect, which is unobjectionable and legitimate. Our attention is thus drawn to the fact that in considering the suppressed and suppressing agencies, we must not regard their relation as being exclusively one of mutual inhibition. Just as much regard must be paid to cases in which the two agencies bring about a pathological effect by working side by side and by intensifying each other.

Let us now apply these hints upon psychical mechanisms to an understanding of the expressions of affect in dreams. A satisfaction which is exhibited in a dream and can, of course, be immediately referred to its proper place in the dream-thoughts is not always completely elucidated by this reference alone. It is as a rule necessary to look for another source of it in the dream-thoughts, a source which is under the pressure of the censorship. As a result of that pressure, this source would normally have produced, not satisfaction, but the contrary affect. Owing to the presence of the first source of affect, however, the second source is enabled to withdraw its affect of satisfaction from repression and allow it to act as an intensification of the satisfaction from the first source. Thus it appears that affects in dreams are fed from a confluence of several sources and are over-determined in their reference to the material of the dream-thoughts. During the dream-work, sources of affect which are capable of producing the same affect come together in generating it.¹

We can gain a little insight into these complications from the analysis of that fine specimen of a dream of which the words ‘Non Vixit’ formed the centre-point. (See p. 874 ff.) In that dream manifestations of affect of various qualities were brought together at two points in its manifest content. Hostile and distressing feelings - ‘overcome by strange emotions’ were the words used in the dream itself - were piled up at the point at which I annihilated my opponent and friend with two words. And again, at the end of the dream, I was highly delighted, and I went on to approve the possibility, which in waking life I knew was absurd, of there being revenants who could be eliminated by a mere wish.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I have given an analogous explanation of the extraordinarily powerful pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes.

I have not yet related the exciting cause of the dream. It was of great importance and led deep into an understanding of the dream. I had heard from my friend in Berlin, whom I have referred to as ‘Fl.’, that he was about to undergo an operation and that I should get further news of his condition from some of his relatives in Vienna. The first reports I received after the operation were not reassuring and made me feel anxious. I should have much preferred to go to him myself, but just at that time I was the victim of a painful complaint which made movement of any kind a torture to me. The dream-thoughts now informed me that I feared for my friend’s life. His only sister, whom I had never known, had, as I was aware, died in early youth after a very brief illness. (In the dream Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead.) I must have imagined that his constitution was not much more resistant than his sister’s and that, after getting some much worse news of him, I should make the journey after all - and arrive too late, for which I might never cease to reproach myself.¹ This reproach for coming too late became the central point of the dream but was represented by a scene in which Brücke, the honoured teacher of my student years, levelled this reproach at me with a terrible look from his blue eyes. It will soon appear what it was that caused the situation to be switched on to these lines. The scene itself could not be reproduced by the dream in the form in which I experienced it. The other figure in the dream was allowed to keep the blue eyes, but the annihilating role was allotted to me - a reversal which was obviously the work of wish-fulfilment. My anxiety about my friend’s recovery, my self-reproaches for not going to see him, the shame I felt about this - he had come to Vienna (to see me) ‘unobtrusively’ - the need I felt to consider that I was excused by my illness - all of this combined to produce the emotional storm which was clearly perceived in my sleep and which raged in this region of the dream-thoughts.

¹ It was this phantasy, forming part of the unconscious dream-thoughts, which so insistently demanded ‘Non vivit’ instead of ‘Non vixit’: ‘You have come too late, he is no longer alive’. I have already explained on pp. 874-875 that ‘

Non vivit’ was also required by the manifest situation in the dream.

But there was something else in the exciting cause of the dream, which had a quite opposite effect upon me. Along with the unfavourable reports during the first few days after the operation, I was given a warning not to discuss the matter with anyone. I had felt offended by this because it implied an unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I was quite aware that these instructions had not emanated from my friend but were due to tactlessness or over-anxiety on the part of the intermediary, but I was very disagreeably affected by the veiled reproach because it was - not wholly without justification. As we all know, it is only reproaches which have something in them that ‘stick’; it is only they that upset us. What I have in mind does not relate, it is true, to this friend, but to a much earlier period of my life. On that occasion I caused trouble between two friends (both of whom had chosen to honour me, too, with that name) by quite unnecessarily telling one of them, in the course of conversation, what the other had said about him. At that time, too, reproaches had been levelled at me, and they were still in my memory. One of the two friends concerned was Professor Fleischl; I may describe the other by his first name of ‘Josef’ - which was also that of P., my friend and opponent in the dream.

The reproach of being unable to keep anything to myself was attested in the dream by the element ‘unobtrusive’ and by Fl.’s question as to how much I had told P. about his affairs. But it was the intervention of this memory that transported the reproach against me for coming too late from the present time to the period at which I had worked in Brücke’s laboratory. And, by turning the second person in the scene of annihilation in the dream into a Josef, I made the scene represent not only the reproach against me for coming too late but also the far more strongly repressed reproach that I was unable to keep a secret. Here the processes of condensation and displacement at work in the dream, as well as the reasons for them, are strikingly visible.

My present-day anger, which was only slight, over the warning I had been given not to give anything away received reinforcements from sources in the depth of my mind and thus swelled into a current of hostile feelings against persons of whom I was in reality fond. The source of this reinforcement flowed from my childhood. I have already shown how my warm friendships as well as my enmities with contemporaries went back to my relations in childhood with a nephew who was a year my senior; how he was my superior, how I early learned to defend myself against him, how we were inseparable friends, and how, according to the testimony of our elders, we sometimes fought with each other and - made complaints to them about each other. All my friends have in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who ‘früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt’¹: they have been revenants. My nephew himself re-appeared in my boyhood, and at that time we acted the parts of Caesar and Brutus together. My emotional life has always insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come together in a single individual - though not, of course, both at once or with constant oscillations, as may have been the case in my early childhood.

I do not propose at this point to discuss how it is that in such circumstances as these a recent occasion for the generation of an affect can hark back to an infantile situation and be replaced by that situation as far as the production of affect is concerned. This question forms part of the psychology of unconscious thinking, and would find its proper place in a psychological elucidation of the neuroses. For the purposes of dream-interpretation let us assume that a childhood memory arose, or was constructed in phantasy, with some such content as the following. The two children had a dispute about some object. (What the object was may be left an open question, though the memory or pseudo-memory had a quite specific one in view.) Each of them claimed to have got there before the other and therefore to have a better right to it. They came to blows and might prevailed over right. On the evidence of the dream, I may myself have been aware that I was in the wrong (‘I myself noticed the mistake’). However, this time I was the stronger and remained in possession of the field. The vanquished party hurried to his grandfather - my father - and complained about me, and I defended myself in the words which I know from my father’s account: ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me.’ This memory, or more probably phantasy, which came into my mind while I was analysing the dream - without further evidence I myself could not tell how - constituted an intermediate element in the dream-thoughts, which gathered up the emotions raging in them as a well collects the water that flows into it. From this point the dream-thoughts proceeded along some such lines as these: ‘It serves you right if you had to make way for me. Why did you try to push me out of the way? I don’t need you, I can easily find someone else to play with’, and so on. These thoughts now entered upon the paths which led to their representation in the dream. There had been a time when I had had to reproach my friend Josef for an attitude of this same kind: ‘Ôte-toi que je m’y mette!’ He had followed in my footsteps as demonstrator in Brücke’s laboratory, but promotion there was slow and tedious. Neither of Brücke’s two assistants was inclined to budge from his place, and youth was impatient. My friend, who knew that he could not expect to live long, and whom no bonds of intimacy attached to his immediate superior, sometimes gave loud expression to his impatience, and, since this superior was seriously ill, P.’s wish to have him out of the way might have an uglier meaning than the mere hope for the man’s promotion. Not unnaturally, a few years earlier, I myself had nourished a still livelier wish to fill a vacancy. Wherever there is rank and promotion the way lies open for wishes that call for suppression. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal could not, even at his father’s sick-bed, resist the temptation of trying on the crown. But, as was to be expected, the dream punished my friend, and not me, for this callous wish.²

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