PARAPRAXES 11 страница

The breasts must be reckoned with the genitals, and these, like the larger hemispheres of the female body, are represented by apples, peaches, and fruit in general. The pubic hair of both sexes is depicted in dreams as woods and bushes. The complicated topography of the female genital parts makes one understand how it is that they are often represented as landscapes, with rocks, woods and water, while the imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus explains why all kinds of complicated machinery which is hard to describe serve as symbols for it.

Another symbol of the female genitals which deserves mention is a jewel-case. Jewel and treasure are used in dreams as well as in waking life to describe someone who is loved. Sweets frequently represent sexual enjoyment. Satisfaction obtained from a person’s own genitals is indicated by all kinds of playing, including piano-playing. Symbolic representations par excellence of masturbation are gliding or sliding and pulling off a branch.(The falling out of a tooth or the pulling out of a tooth is a particularly notable dream-symbol. Its first meaning is undoubtedly castration as a punishment for masturbating. We come across special representations of sexual intercourse less often than might be expected from what has been said so far. Rhythmical activities such as dancing, riding and climbing must be mentioned here, as well as violent experiences such as being run over; so, too, certain manual crafts, and, of course, threatening with weapons.

You must not picture the use or the translation of these symbols as something quite simple. In the course of them all kinds of things happen which are contrary to our expectations. It seems almost incredible, for instance, that in these symbolic representations the differences between the sexes are often not clearly observed. Some symbols signify genitals in general, irrespective of whether they are male or female: for instance, a small child, a small son or a small daughter. Or again, a predominantly male symbol may be used for the female genitals or vice versa. We cannot understand this till we have obtained some insight into the development of sexual ideas in human beings. In some instances the ambiguity of the symbols may only be an apparent one; and the most marked symbols, such as weapons, pockets and chests are excluded from this bisexual use.

I will now go on to make a survey, starting not from the thing represented but from the symbol, of the fields from which sexual symbols are mostly derived, and I will make a few additional remarks, with special reference to the symbols where the common element in the comparison is not understood. The hat is an obscure symbol of this kind - perhaps, too, head-coverings in general - with a male significance as a rule, but also capable of a female one. In the same way an overcoat or cloak means a man, perhaps not always with a genital reference; it is open to you to ask why. Neckties, which hang down and are not worn by women, are a definitely male symbol. Underclothing and linen in general are female. Clothes and uniforms, as we have already seen, are a substitute for nakedness or bodily shapes. Shoes and slippers are female genitals. Tables and wood have already been mentioned as puzzling but certainly female symbols. Ladders, steps, and staircases, or, more precisely, walking on them, are clear symbols of sexual intercourse. On reflection, it will occur to us that the common element here is the rhythm of walking up them - perhaps, too, the increasing excitement and breathlessness the higher one climbs.

We have earlier referred to landscapes as representing the female genitals. Hills and rocks are symbols of the male organ. Gardens are common symbols of the female genitals. Fruit stands, not for children, but for the breasts. Wild animals mean people in an excited sensual state, and further, evil instincts or passions. Blossoms and flowers indicate women’s genitals, or, in particular, virginity. Do not forget that blossoms are actually the genitals of plants.

We are acquainted already with rooms as a symbol. The representation can be carried further, for windows, and doors in and out of rooms, take over the meaning of orifices in the body. And the question of the room being open or locked fits in with this symbolism, and the key that opens it is a decidedly male symbol.

Here, then, is material used for symbolism in dreams. It is not complete and could be carried deeper as well as further. But I fancy it will seem to you more than enough and may even have exasperated you. ‘Do I really live in the thick of sexual symbols?’ you may ask. ‘Are all the objects around me, all the clothes I put on, all the things I pick up, all of them sexual symbols and nothing else?’ There is really ground enough for raising astonished questions, and, as a first one, we may enquire how we in fact come to know the meaning of these dream symbols, upon which the dreamer himself gives us insufficient information or none at all.

My reply is that we learn it from very different sources from fairy tales and myths, from buffoonery and jokes, from folklore (that is, from knowledge about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage. In all these directions we come upon the same symbolism, and in some of them we can understand it without further instruction. If we go into these sources in detail, we shall find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we cannot fail to be convinced of our interpretations.

According to Scherner, as we have said, the human body is often represented in dreams by the symbol of a house. Carrying this representation further, we found that windows, doors and gates stood for openings in the body and that façades of houses were either smooth or provided with balconies and projections to hold on to. But the same symbolism is found in our linguistic usage - when we greet an acquaintance familiarly as an ‘altes haus’ [‘old house’], when we speak of giving someone ‘eins aufs Dachl’ [a knock on the head, literally, ‘one on the roof’], or when we say of someone else that ‘he’s not quite right in the upper storey’. In anatomy the orifices of the body are in so many words termed ‘Leibespforten’ [literally, ‘portals of the body’].

It seems surprising at first to find one’s parents in dreams as an imperial or royal couple. But it has its parallel in fairy tales. It begins to dawn on us that the many fairy tales which begin ‘Once upon a time there were a King and Queen’ only mean to say that there were once a father and mother. In a family the children are jokingly called ‘princes’ and the eldest ‘crown prince’. The King himself calls himself the father of his country. We speak of small children jokingly as ‘Würmer’ [‘worms’] and speak sympathetically of a child as ‘der areme Wurm’ [‘the poor worm’].

Let us go back to house-symbolism. When in a dream we make use of the projections on houses for catching hold of, we may be reminded of a common vulgar expression for well developed breasts: ‘She’s got something to catch hold of.’ There is another popular expression in such cases: ‘She’s got plenty of wood in front of the house’, which seems to confirm our interpretation of wood as a female, maternal symbol.4

And, speaking of wood, it is hard to understand how that material came to represent what is maternal and female. But here comparative philology may come to our help. Our German word –‘Holz’ seems to come from the same root as the Greek ‘ýëç [hule]’, meaning ‘stuff ’ ‘raw material’. This seems to be an instance of the not uncommon event of the general name of a material eventually coming to be reserved for some particular material. Now there is an island in the Atlantic named ‘Madeira’. This name was given to it by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it was covered all over with woods. For in the Portuguese language ‘madeira’ means ‘wood’. You will notice, however, that ‘madeira’ is only a slightly modified form of the Latin word ‘materia’, which once more means ‘material’ in general. But ‘materia’ is derived from ‘mater’, ‘mother’: the material out of which anything is made is, as it were, a mother to it. This ancient view of the thing survives, therefore, in the symbolic use of wood for ‘woman’ or ‘mother’.

Birth is regularly expressed in dreams by some connection with water: one falls into the water or one comes out of the water - one gives birth or one is born. We must not forget that this symbol is able to appeal in two ways to evolutionary truth. Not only are all terrestrial mammals, including man’s ancestors, descended from aquatic creatures (this is the more remote of the two facts), but every individual mammal, every human being, spent the first phase of its existence in water - namely as an embryo in the amniotic fluid in its mother’s uterus, and came out of that water when it was born. I do not say that the dreamer knows this; on the other hand, I maintain that he need not know it. There is something else that the dreamer probably knows from having been told it in his childhood; and I even maintain of that too that his knowledge of it contributed nothing to the construction of the symbol. He was told in his nursery that the stork brings the babies. But where does it fetch them from? From the pond, or from the stream - once again, then, from the water. One of my patients after he had been given this information - he was a little Count at the time - disappeared for a whole afternoon. He was found at last lying by the edge of the castle pool, with his little face bending over the surface of the water eagerly peering down to try and see the babies at the bottom.

In myths about the birth of heroes - to which Otto Rank has devoted a comparative study, the oldest being that of King Sargon of Agade (about 2800 B.C.) - a predominant part is played by exposure in the water and rescue from the water. Rank has perceived that these are representations of birth, analogous to those that are usual in dreams. If one rescues someone from the water in a dream, one is making one self into his mother, or simply into a mother. In myths a person who rescues a baby from the water is admitting that she is the baby’s true mother. There is a well-known comic anecdote according to which an intelligent Jewish boy was asked who the mother of Moses was. He replied without hesitation: ‘The Princess.’ ‘No’, he was told, ‘she only took him out of the water.’ ‘That’s what she says’, he replied, and so proved that he had found the correct interpretation of the myth.

Departure in dreams means dying. So, too, if a child asks where someone is who has died and whom he misses, it is common nursery usage to reply that he has gone on a journey. Once more I should like to contradict the belief that the dream symbol is derived from this evasion. The dramatist is using the same symbolic connection when he speaks of the after-life as ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. Even in ordinary life it is common to speak of ‘the last journey’. Every one acquainted with ancient rituals is aware of how seriously (in the religion of Ancient Egypt, for instance) the idea is taken of a journey to the land of the dead. Many copies have survived of The Book of the Dead, which was supplied to the mummy like a Baedeker to take with him on the journey. Ever since burial-places have been separated from dwelling-places the dead person’s last journey has indeed become a reality.

It is just as little the case that genital symbolism is something that is found only in dreams. Every one of you has probably at one time or another spoken impolitely of a woman as an ‘alte Schachtel’ [‘old box’], perhaps without knowing that you were using a genital symbol. In the New Testament we find woman referred to as ‘the weaker vessel’. The Hebrew scriptures, written in a style that comes close to poetry, are full of sexually symbolic expressions, which have not always been correctly understood and whose exegesis (for instance, in the case of the Song of Solomon) has led to some misunderstandings. In later Hebrew literature it is very common to find a woman represented by a house, whose door stands for the sexual orifice. A man complains, for instance, in a case of lost virginity, that he has ‘found the door open’. So, too, the symbol of a table for a woman in these writings. Thus, a woman says of her husband: ‘I laid the table for him, but he turned it round.’ Lame children are said to come about through the man’s ‘turning the table round’. I take these examples from a paper by Dr. L. Levy of Brünn.

The fact that ships, too, in dreams stand for women is made credible by the etymologists, who tell us that ‘Schiff [ship]’ was originally the name of an earthenware vessel and is the same word as ‘Schaff’ [a dialect word meaning ‘tub’]. That ovens represent women and the uterus is confirmed by the Greek legend of Periander of Corinth and his wife Melissa. The tyrant, according to Herodotus, conjured up the shade of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had murdered out of jealousy, to obtain some information from her. The dead woman proved her identity by saying that he (Periander) had pushed his bread into a cold oven’, as a disguise for an event which no one else could know of. In the periodical Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Krauss, an invaluable source of knowledge of sexual anthropology, we learn that in a particular part of Germany they say of a woman who has given birth to a child that ‘her oven has come to pieces’. Kindling fire, and everything to do with it, is intimately interwoven with sexual symbolism. Flame is always a male genital, and the fireplace, the hearth is its female counterpart.

If you may have felt surprised at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to represent the female genitals, you can learn from mythology the part played by Mother Earth in the concepts and cults of the peoples of antiquity and how their view of agriculture was determined by this symbolism. You will perhaps be inclined to trace the fact that in dreams a room represents a woman to the common usage in our language by which ‘Frau’ is replaced by ‘Frauenzimmer’¹ - the human being is replaced by the apartment allotted to her. Similarly we speak of the ‘Sublime Porte’, meaning the Sultan and his government. So too the title of the Ancient Egyptian ruler, ‘Pharaoh’, means simply ‘Great Courtyard’. (In the Ancient East the courts between the double gateways of a city were public meeting-places like the market-places of the classical world.) This derivation, however, appears to be too superficial. It seems to me more likely that a room became the symbol of a woman as being the space which encloses human beings. We have already found ‘house’ used in a similar sense; and mythology and poetical language enable us to add ‘city’, ‘citadel’, ‘castle’ and ‘fortress’ as further symbols for ‘woman’. The question could be easily settled from the dreams of people who do not speak or understand German. During the last few years I have mainly treated foreign-speaking patients, and I seem to remember that in their dreams too ‘Zimmer’ [‘room’] meant ‘

Frauenzimmer’, though they had no similar usage in their languages. There are other indications that the symbolic relation can go beyond the limits of language - which, incidentally was asserted long ago by an old investigator of dreams, Schubert. However, none of my dreamers were completely ignorant of German, so the decision must be left to psycho-analysts who can collect data from unilingual people in other countries.

¹ [Literally ‘woman’s apartment’. The word is very often used in German as a slightly derogatory synonym for ‘woman’.]7

There is scarcely one of the symbolic representations of the male genitals which does not recur in joking, vulgar or poetic usage, especially in the ancient classical dramatists. But here we meet not only the symbols which appear in dreams, but others besides - for instance tools employed in various operations, and particularly the plough. Moreover, the symbolic representation of masculinity leads us to a very extensive and much disputed region, which, on grounds of economy, we shall avoid. I should like, however, to devote a few words to one symbol, which, as it were, falls outside this class - the number 3. Whether this number owes its sacred character to this symbolic connection remains undecided. But what seems certain is that a number of tripartite things that occur in nature - the clover leaf, for instance - owe their use for coats of arms and emblems to this symbolic meaning. Similarly, the tripartite lily - the so-called fleur-de-lis - and the remarkable heraldic device of two islands so far apart as Sicily and the Isle of Man - the triskeles (three bent legs radiating from a centre) - seem to be stylized versions of the male genitals. Likenesses of the male organ were regarded in antiquity as the most powerful apotropaic (means of defence) against evil influences, and, in conformity with this, the lucky charms of our own day can all be easily recognized as genital or sexual symbols. Let us consider a collection of such things - as they are worn, for instance, in the form of small silver hanging trinkets: a four-leaved clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horse-shoe, a ladder, a chimney-sweep. The four-leaved clover has taken the place of the three-leaved one which is really suited to be a symbol. The pig is an ancient fertility symbol. The mushroom is an undoubted penis-symbol: there are mushrooms which owe their systematic name (Phallus impudicus) to their unmistakable resemblance to the male organ. The horseshoe copies the outline of the female genital orifice, while the chimney-sweep, who carries the ladder, appears in this company on account of his activities, with which sexual intercourse is vulgarly compared. (Cf. Anthropophyteia.) We have made the acquaintance of his ladder in dreams as a sexual symbol; here German linguistic usage comes to our help and shows us how the word ‘steigen’ [‘to climb’, or ‘to mount’] is used in what is par excellence a sexual sense. We say ‘den Frauen nachsteigen [‘to run’ (literally ‘climb’) ‘after women’], and ‘ein alter Steiger’ [‘an old rake’ (literally ‘climber’)]. In French, in which the word for steps on a staircase is ‘marches’, we find a precisely analogous term ‘un vieux marcheur’. The fact that in many large animals climbing or ‘mounting’ on the female is a necessary preliminary to sexual intercourse probably fits into this context.

‘Pulling off a branch’ as a symbolic representation of masturbation is not merely in harmony with vulgar descriptions of the act but has far-reaching mythological parallels. But that masturbation, or rather the punishment for it - castration -, should be represented by the falling out or pulling out of teeth is especially remarkable, since there is a counterpart to it in anthropology which can be known to only a very small number of dreamers. There seems to me no doubt that the circumcision practised by so many peoples is an equivalent and substitute for castration. And we now learn that certain primitive tribes in Australia carry out circumcision as a puberty rite (at the festival to celebrate a boy’s attaining sexual maturity), while other tribes, their near neighbours, have replaced this act by the knocking out of a tooth.

Here I bring my account of these specimens to an end. They are only specimens. We know more on the subject; but you may imagine how much richer and more interesting a collection like this would be if it were brought together, not by amateurs like us, but by real professionals in mythology, anthropology, philology and folklore.

A few consequences force themselves on our notice; they cannot be exhaustive, but they offer us food for reflection.

In the first place we are faced by the fact that the dreamer has a symbolic mode of expression at his disposal which he does not know in waking life and does not recognize. This is as extraordinary as if you were to discover that your housemaid understood Sanskrit, though you know that she was born in a Bohemian village and never learnt it. It is not easy to account for this fact by the help of our psychological views. We can only say that the knowledge of symbolism is unconscious to the dreamer, that it belongs to his unconscious mental life. But even with this assumption we do not meet the point. Hitherto it has only been necessary for us to assume the existence of unconscious endeavours - endeavours, that is, of which, temporarily or permanently, we know nothing. Now, however, it is a question of more than this, of unconscious pieces of knowledge, of connections of thought, of comparisons between different objects which result in its being possible for one of them to be regularly put in place of the other. These comparisons are not freshly made on each occasion; they lie ready to hand and are complete, once and for all. This is implied by the fact of their agreeing in the case of different individuals - possibly, indeed, agreeing in spite of differences of language. What can be the origin of these symbolic relations? Linguistic usage covers only a small part of them. The multiplicity of parallels in other spheres of knowledge are mostly unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves have been obliged to collect them laboriously.

Secondly, these symbolic relations are not something peculiar to dreamers or to the dream-work through which they come to expression. This same symbolism, as we have seen, is employed by myths and fairy tales, by the people in their sayings and songs, by colloquial linguistic usage and by the poetic imagination. The field of symbolism is immensely wide, and dream symbolism is only a small part of it: indeed, it serves no useful purpose to attack the whole problem from the direction of dreams. Many symbols which are commonly used elsewhere appear in dreams very seldom or not at all. Some dream symbols are not to be found in all other fields but only, as you have seen, here and there. One gets an impression that what we are faced with here is an ancient but extinct mode of expression, of which different pieces have survived indifferent fields, one piece only here, another only there, a third, perhaps, in slightly modified forms in several fields. And here I recall the phantasy of an interesting psychotic patient, who imagined a ‘basic language’ of which all these symbolic relations would be residues.

Thirdly, it must strike you that the symbolism in the other fields I have mentioned is by no means solely sexual symbolism, whereas in dreams symbols are used almost exclusively for the expression of sexual objects and relations. This is not easily explained either. Are we to suppose that symbols which originally had a sexual significance later acquired another application and that, furthermore, the toning-down of representation by symbols into other kinds of representation may be connected with this? These questions can evidently not be answered so long as we have considered dream-symbolism alone. We can only hold firmly to the suspicion that there is a specially intimate relation between true symbols and sexuality.

In this connection we have been given an important hint during the last few years. A philologist, Hans Sperber, of Uppsala, who works independently of psycho-analysis, has put forward the argument that sexual needs have played the biggest part in the origin and development of speech. According to him, the original sounds of speech served for communication, and summoned the speaker’s sexual partner; the further development of linguistic roots accompanied the working activities of primal man. These activities, he goes on, were performed in common and were accompanied by rhythmically repeated utterances. In this way a sexual interest became attached to work. Primal man made work acceptable, as it were, by treating it as an equivalent and substitute for sexual activity. The words enunciated during work in common thus had two meanings; they denoted sexual acts as well as the working activity equated with them. As time went on, the words became detached from the sexual meaning and fixed to the work. In later generations the same thing happened with new words, which had a sexual meaning and were applied to new forms of work. In this way a number of verbal roots would have been formed, all of which were of sexual origin and had subsequently lost their sexual meaning. If the hypothesis I have here sketched out is correct, it would give us a possibility of understanding dream symbolism. We should understand why dreams, which preserve something of the earliest conditions, have such an extraordinarily large number of sexual symbols, and why, in general, weapons and tools always stand for what is male, while materials and things that are worked upon stand for what is female. The symbolic relation would be the residue of an ancient verbal identity; things which were once called by the same name as the genitals could now serve as symbols for them in dreams.

The parallels we have found to dream-symbolism also allow us to form an estimate of the characteristic of psycho-analysis which enables it to attract general interest in a way in which neither psychology nor psychiatry has succeeded in doing. In the work of psycho-analysis links are formed with numbers of other mental sciences, the investigation of which promises results of the greatest value: links with mythology and philology, with folklore, with social psychology and the theory of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a periodical has grown up on psycho-analytic soil whose sole aim is to foster these links. This periodical is known as Imago, founded in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In all these links the share of psycho-analysis is in the first instance that of giver and only to a less extent that of receiver. It is true that this brings it an advantage in the fact that its strange findings become more familiar when they are met with again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis which provides the technical methods and the points of view whose application in these other fields should prove fruitful. The mental life of human individuals, when subjected to psycho-analytic investigation, offers us the explanations with the help of which we are able to solve a number of riddles in the life of human communities or at least to set them in a true light.

Incidentally, I have said nothing at all to you yet as to the circumstances in which we can obtain our deepest insight into the hypothetical ‘primal language’ and as to the field in which most of it has survived. Until you know this you cannot form an opinion of its whole significance. For this field is that of the neuroses and its material is the symptoms and other manifestations of neurotic patients, for the explanation and treatment of which psycho-analysis was, indeed, created.

The fourth of my reflections takes us back to the beginning and directs us along our prescribed path. I have said that even if there were no dream-censorship dreams would still not be easily intelligible to us, for we should still be faced with the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into that of our waking thought. Thus symbolism is a second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams, alongside of the dream-censorship. It is plausible to suppose, however, that the dream-censorship finds it convenient to make use of symbolism, since it leads towards the same end - the strangeness and incomprehensibility of dreams.

It will shortly become clear whether a further study of dreams may not bring us up against yet another factor that contributes to the distortion of dreams. But I should not like to leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching on the problem of how it can meet with such violent resistance in educated people when the wide diffusion of symbolism in myths, religion, art and language is so unquestionable. May it not be that what is responsible is once again its connection with sexuality?

LECTURE XI THE DREAM-WORK

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - When you have thoroughly grasped the dream-censorship and representation by symbols, you will not yet, it is true, have completely mastered the distortion in, dreams, but you will nevertheless be in a position to understand most dreams. In doing so you will make use of both of the two complementary techniques: calling up ideas that occur to the dreamer till you have penetrated from the substitute to the genuine thing and, on the ground of your own knowledge, replacing the symbols by what they mean. Later on we shall discuss some uncertainties that arise in this connection.

We can now take up once more a task that we tried to carry out previously with inadequate means, when we were studying the relations between the elements of dreams and the genuine things they stood for. We laid down four main relations of the kind: the relation of a part to a whole, approximation or allusion, the symbolic relation and the plastic representation of words. We now propose to undertake the same thing on a larger scale, by comparing the manifest content of a dream as a whole with the latent dream as it is revealed by interpretation.

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