Autobiographical note 13 страница

I have ventured to interpret - without any analysis, but only by a guess - a small episode which occurred to a friend of mine who was in the same class as I was all through our career at a secondary school. One day he listened to a lecture which I gave before a small audience on the novel idea that dreams were wish-fulfilments. He went home and dreamt that he had lost all his cases (he was a barrister) and afterwards arraigned me on the subject. I evaded the issue by telling him that after all one can’t win all one’s cases. But to myself I thought: ‘Considering that for eight whole years I sat on the front bench as top of the class while he drifted about somewhere in the middle, he can hardly fail to nourish a wish, left over from his school-days, that some day or other I may come a complete cropper.’

A dream of a gloomier kind was also brought up against me by a patient as an objection to the theory of wishful dreams.

The patient, who was a young girl, began thus: ‘As you will remember, my sister has only one boy left now - Karl; she lost his elder brother, Otto, while I was still living with her. Otto was my favourite; I more or less brought him up. I’m fond of the little one too, but of course not nearly so fond as I was of the one who died. Last night, then, I dreamt that I saw Karl lying before me dead. He was lying in his little coffin with his hands folded and with candles all around - in fact just like little Otto, whose death was such a blow to me. Now tell me, what can that mean? You know me. Am I such a wicked person that I can wish my sister to lose the one child she still has? Or does the dream mean that I would rather Karl were dead than Otto whom I was so much fonder of?

I assured her that this last interpretation was out of question. And after reflecting a little I was able to give her the correct interpretation of the dream, which she afterwards confirmed. I was able to do so because I was familiar with the whole of the dreamer’s previous history.

The girl had early been left an orphan and had been brought up in the house of a much older sister. Among the friends who visited at the house was a man who made a lasting impression on her heart. For a time it had seemed as though her scarcely acknowledged relations with him would lead to marriage; but this happy outcome was brought to nothing by her sister, whose motives were never fully explained. After the breach the man ceased to visit the house; and shortly after the death of little Otto, on to whom she had meanwhile turned her affection, my patient herself set up on her own. She did not succeed, however, in freeing herself from her attachment to her sister’s friend. Her pride bade her avoid him; but she was unable to transfer her love to any of the other admirers who presented themselves later. Whenever it was announced that the object of her affections, who was by profession a literary man, was to give a lecture anywhere, she was invariably in the audience; and she took every possible opportunity of seeing him from a distance on neutral ground. I remembered that she had told me the day before that the Professor was going to a particular concert and that she intended to go to it as well so as to enjoy a glimpse of him once more. That had been on the day before the dream, and the concert was to take place on the day on which she told me the dream. It was therefore easy for me to construct the correct interpretation, and I asked her whether she could think of anything that happened after little Otto’s death. She answered at once: ‘Of course! the Professor came to see us again after a long absence, and I saw him once more beside little Otto’s coffin.’ This was exactly what I had expected, and I interpreted the dream in this way: ‘If now the other boy were to die, the same thing would happen. You would spend the day with your sister and the Professor would be certain to come to offer his condolences, so that you would see him again under the same conditions as the other time. The dream means no more than your wish to see him once more, a wish which you are inwardly struggling against. I know you have a ticket for to-day’s concert in your pocket. Your dream was a dream of impatience: it anticipated the glimpse you are to have of him to-day by a few hours.’

In order to conceal her wish, she had evidently chosen a situation in which such wishes are usually suppressed, a situation in which one is so much filled with grief that one has no thought of love. Yet it is quite possible that even in the real situation of which the dream was an exact replica, beside the coffin of the elder boy whom she had loved still more, she may have been unable to suppress her tender feelings for the visitor who had been absent so long. A similar dream of another woman patient had a different explanation. When she was young the had been remarkable for her ready wit and cheerful disposition; and these characteristics were still to be seen, at all events in the ideas that occurred to her during the treatment. In the course of a longish dream, this lady imagined that she saw her only, fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead ‘in a case.’ She had half a mind to use the scene as an objection to the wish-fulfilment theory, though she herself suspected that the detail of the ‘case’ must point the way to another view of the dream.¹ In the course of the analysis she recalled that at a party the evening before there had been some talk about the English word ‘box’ and the various ways in which it could be translated into German - such as ‘Schachtel’, ‘Loge’, ‘Kasten’, ‘Ohrfeige’, and so on. Other portions of the same dream enabled us to discover further that she had guessed that the English ‘box’ was related to the German ‘Büchse’, and that she had then been plagued by a recollection that ‘Büchse’ is used as a vulgar term for the female genitals. If some allowance was made for the limits of her knowledge of topographical anatomy, it might be presumed, therefore, that the child lying in the case meant an embryo in the womb. After being enlightened up to this point, she no longer denied that the dream-picture corresponded to a wish of hers. Like so many young married women, she had been far from pleased when she became pregnant; and more than once she had allowed herself to wish that the child in her womb might die. Indeed, in a fit of rage after a violent scene with her husband, she had beaten with her fists on her body so as to hit the child inside it. Thus the dead child was in fact the fulfilment of a wish, but of a wish that had been put aside fifteen years earlier. It is scarcely to be wondered at if a wish that was fulfilled after such a long delay was not recognized. Too much had changed in the interval.

¹ Like the smoked salmon in the dream of the abandoned supper party. I shall have to return to the group of dreams to which the last two examples belong (dreams dealing with the death of relatives of whom the dreamer is fond) when I come to consider ‘typical’ dreams. I shall then be able to show from further instances that, in spite of their unwished for contents, all such dreams must be interpreted as wish-fulfilments.

I owe the following dream, not to a patient, but to an intelligent jurist of my acquaintance. He told it to me, once again, in order to restrain me from rash generalizing on the theory of wishful dreams. ‘I dreamt’, said my informant, ‘that I came up to my house with a lady on my arm. A closed carriage was standing in front of it and a man came up to me, showed me his credentials as a police officer and requested me to follow him. I asked him to allow me a little time to put my affairs in order. Can you suppose that I have a wish to be arrested?’ - Of course not, I could only agree. Do you happen to know the charge on which you were arrested? - ‘Yes, for infanticide, I believe.’ - Infanticide? But surely you’re aware that that’s a crime that can only be committed by a mother on a new-born child? - ‘Quite true.’¹ - And what were the circumstances in which you had the dream? What happened on the previous evening? - ‘I would prefer not to tell you. It’s a delicate matter.’ - Nevertheless I shall have to hear it; otherwise we shall have to give up the idea of interpreting the dream. - ‘Very well then, listen. I didn’t spend last night at home but with a lady who means a great deal to me. When we woke up in the morning there was a further passage between us, after which I went to sleep again and had the dream I described to you.’ - Is she a married woman? - ‘Yes.’ - And you don’t want to have a child by her? - ‘Oh, no; that might give us away.’ - So you don’t practice normal intercourse? - ‘I take the precaution of withdrawing before ejaculation.’ - I think I may assume that you had used this device several times during the night, and that after repeating it in the morning you felt a little uncertain whether you had carried it out success fully. - ‘That’s possible, no doubt.’ - In that case your dream was the fulfilment of a wish. It gave you a reassurance that you had not procreated a child, or, what amounts to the same thing, that you had killed a child. The intermediate links are easily indicated. You remember that a few days ago we were talking about marriage difficulties and how inconsistent it is that there should be no objection to carrying out intercourse in such a way that no fertilization takes place, whereas any interference when once the ovum and semen have come together and a foetus has been formed is punished as a crime. We went on to recall the mediaeval controversy over the exact point of time at which the soul enters the foetus, since it is not until after that that the concept of murder becomes applicable. No doubt, too, you know Lenau’s gruesome poem in which child murder and child prevention are equated. - ‘Oddly enough I happened to think of Lenau this morning, quite by chance, as it seemed.’ - An after-echo of your dream. And now I can show you another incidental wish-fulfilment contained in your dream. You came up to your house with the lady on your arm. Thus you were bringing her home, instead of spending the night in her house as you did in reality. There may be more than one reason why the wish-fulfilment which constitutes the core of the dream was disguised in such a disagreeable form. Perhaps you have learned from my paper on the aetiology of anxiety neurosis that I regard coitus interruptus as one of the aetiological factors in the development of neurotic anxiety? It would tally with this if, after carrying out sexual intercourse in this way several times, you were left in an uneasy mood which afterwards became an element in the construction of your dream. Moreover, you made use of this moodiness to help disguise the wish-fulfilment. Incidentally, your reference to infanticide has not been explained. How did you come to light on this specifically feminine crime? - ‘I must admit that some years ago I became involved in an occurrence of that kind. I was responsible for a girl’s trying to avoid the consequence of a love-affair with me by means of an abortion. I had nothing to do with her carrying out her intention, but for a long time I naturally felt very nervous in case the business came out.’ - I quite understand that. This recollection provides a second reason why you must have been worried by your suspicion that your device might have gone wrong.

¹ It often happens that the account first given of a dream is incomplete and that the memory of the omitted portions only emerges in the course of analysis. These subsequently added portions regularly turn out to provide the key to the dream’s interpretation. Cf. the discussion below on the forgetting of dreams.

A young physician who heard me describe this dream during a course of lectures must have been greatly struck by it, for he promptly re-dreamt it, applying the same pattern of thought to another theme. The day before, he had sent in his income tax return, which he had filled in perfectly honestly, since he had very little to declare. He then had a dream that an acquaintance of his had come to him from a meeting of the tax commissioners and informed him that, while no objection had been raised to any of the other tax returns, general suspicion had been aroused by his and a heavy fine had been imposed on him. The dream was a poorly disguised fulfilment of his wish to be known as a doctor with a large income. It recalls the well-known story of the girl who was advised not to accept a suitor because he had a violent temper and would be sure to beat her if they were married. ‘If only he’d begun beating me already!’ the girl replied. Her wish to be married was so intense that she was ready to take the threatened unpleasantness into the bargain, and even went so far as to turn it into a wish.

The very frequent dreams, which appear to stand in contradiction to my theory because their subject-matter is the frustration of a wish or the occurrence of something clearly unwished-for, may be brought together under the heading of ‘counter-wish dreams’. If these dreams are considered as a whole, it seems to me possible to trace them back to two principles; I have not yet mentioned one of these, although it plays a large part not only in people’s dreams but in their lives as well. One of the two motive forces leading to such dreams is the wish that I may be wrong. These dreams appear regularly in the course of my treatments when a patient is in a state of resistance to me; and I can count almost certainly on provoking one of them after I have explained to a patient for the first time my theory that dreams are fulfilments of wishes.¹ Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] During the last few years similar ‘counter-wish dreams’ have repeatedly been reported to me by people who have heard me lecturing, as a reaction to first making the acquaintance of my ‘wishful’ theory of dreams.

The same point is illustrated by one last dream of the kind which I will quote from a patient under treatment. This was the dream of a girl who had succeeded in her struggle to continue her treatment with me against the will of her relatives and of the authorities whose opinions had been consulted. She dreamt that her people forbade her to go on coming to me. She then reminded me of a promise I had given her that if necessary I would continue the treatment without a fee. To this I replied: ‘I cannot make any allowances in money matters.’ It must be admitted that it was not easy to point to the wish-fulfilment in this instance. But in all such cases one discovers a second riddle, the solution of which helps one to solve the original one. What was the origin of the words she put into my mouth? Of course I had said nothing of the kind to her; but one of her brothers, and the one by whom she was most influenced, had been good enough to attribute this sentiment to me. The dream was thus intended to prove her brother right. And it was not only in her dreams that she insisted on his being right; the same idea dominated her whole life and it was the motive of her illness.

A dream which seems at first sight to put special difficulties in the way of the wish-fulfilment theory was dreamt and interpreted by a physician, and reported by August Stärcke (1911): ‘I saw upon my left index-finger the first indication of syphilis on the terminal phalange.’ The reflection that, apart from the dream’s unwished-for content, it appears to be clear and coherent, might dissuade us from analysing it. If, however, we are prepared to face the trouble involved, we shall find that ‘Primäraffekt’ was equivalent to a ‘prima affectio’ (a first love), and that the repellent ulcer turned out, to quote Stärcke’s words, to ‘stand for wish-fulfilments that were highly charged with emotion’.

The second motive for counter-wish dreams is so obvious that it is easy to overlook it, as I did myself for some considerable time. There is a masochistic component in the sexual constitution of many people, which arises from the reversal of an aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite. Those who find their pleasure, not in having physical pain inflicted on them, but in humiliation and mental torture, may be described as ‘mental masochists’. It will at once be seen that people of this kind can have counter-wish dreams and unpleasurable dreams, which are none the less wish-fulfilments since they satisfy their masochistic inclinations. I will quote one such dream, produced by a young man who in his earlier years had greatly tormented his elder brother, to whom he had a homosexual attachment. His character having undergone a fundamental change, he had the following dream, which was in three pieces: I. His elder brother was chaffing him. II. Two grown men were caressing each other with a homosexual purpose. III. His brother had sold the business of which he himself had looked forward to becoming the director. He awoke from the last dream with the most distressing feelings. Nevertheless it was a masochistic wishful dream, and might be translated thus: ‘It would serve me right if my brother were to confront me with this sale as a punishment for all the torments he had to put up with from me.

I hope that the foregoing examples will be enough (till the next objection is raised) to make it seem plausible that even dreams with a distressing content are to be construed as wish-fulfilments. Nor will anyone regard it as a chance coincidence that the interpretation of these dreams has brought us up each time against topics about which people are loth to speak or to think. The distressing feeling aroused by these dreams is no doubt identical with the repugnance which tends (usually with success) to restrain us from discussing or mentioning such topics, and which each of us has to overcome if we nevertheless find ourselves compelled to embark on them. But the unpleasurable feeling which thus recurs in dreams does not disprove the existence of a wish. Everyone has wishes that he would prefer not to disclose to other people, and wishes that he will not admit even to himself. On the other hand, we are justified in linking the unpleasurable character of all these dreams with the fact of dream-distortion. And we are justified in concluding that these dreams are distorted and the wish-fulfilment contained in them disguised to the point of being unrecognizable precisely owing to the repugnance felt for the topic of the dream or for the wish derived from it and to an intention to repress them. The distortion in the dream is thus shown in fact to be an act of the censorship. We shall be taking into account everything that has been brought to light by our analysis of unpleasurable dreams if we make the following modification in the formula in which we have sought to express the nature of dreams: a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A great living writer, who, as I have been told, refuses to hear anything of psycho-analysis or the interpretation of dreams, has independently arrived at an almost identical formula for the nature of dreams. He speaks of a dream as ‘the unauthorized emergence of suppressed desires and wishes, under false features and name’. (Spitteler, 1914, 1.)

[Added 1911:] I shall anticipate questions which will be discussed later by quoting at this point Otto Rank’s enlargement and modification of the above basic formula: ‘On the basis and with the help of repressed, infantile sexual material, dreams regularly represent present-day, and also as a rule erotic, wishes as fulfilled, in a veiled and symbolically disguised shape.’ (Rank, 1910.)

[Added 1925:] I have nowhere stated that I adopted Rank’s formula as my own. The shorter version, as stated in the text above, seems to me adequate. But the mere fact of my having mentioned Rank’s modification has been enough to unleash countless accusations against psycho-analysis of having asserted that ‘all dreams have a sexual content’.

If this sentence is taken in the sense in which it was intended, it merely shows the unconscientious manner in which critics are accustomed to perform their functions, and the readiness with which opponents overlook the clearest statements if they do not give scope to their aggressive inclinations. For only a few pages earlier I had mentioned the variety of the wishes whose fulfilments are to be found in children’s dreams (wishes to take part in an excursion or a sail on a lake, or to make up for a missed meal, and so on); and in other passages I had discussed dreams of hunger, dreams stimulated by thirst or by excretory needs, and dreams of mere convenience. Even Rank himself made no absolute assertion. The words he used were ‘also as a rule erotic wishes’, and what he said can be amply confirmed in the dreams of most adults.

The situation would be different if ‘sexual’ was being used by my critics in the sense in which it is now commonly employed in psycho-analysis - in the sense of ‘Eros’. But my opponents are scarcely likely to have had in mind the interesting problem of whether all dreams are created by ‘libidinal’ instinctual forces as contrasted with ‘destructive’ ones. There remain to be discussed anxiety-dreams as a special sub-species of dreams with a distressing content. The notion of regarding these as wishful dreams will meet with very little sympathy from the unenlightened. Nevertheless I can deal with anxiety-dreams very briefly at this point. They do not present us with a new aspect of the dream-problem; what they face us with is the whole question of neurotic anxiety. The anxiety that we feel in a dream is only apparently explained by the dream’s content. If we submit the content of the dream to analysis, we find that the anxiety in the dream is no better justified by the dream’s content than, let us say, the anxiety in a phobia is justified by the idea to which the phobia relates. No doubt it is true, for instance, that it is possible to fall out of a window and that there is therefore reason for exercising a certain degree of caution in the neighbourhood of a window; but we cannot see why the anxiety felt in a phobia on this subject is so great and pursues the patient far beyond its occasion. We find then that the same thing may be validly asserted both of phobias and of anxiety-dreams: in both cases the anxiety is only superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it; it originates from another source.

Since this intimate connection exists between anxiety in dreams and in neuroses, in discussing the former I must refer to the latter. In a short paper on anxiety-neurosis (Freud, 1895b), I argued some time ago that neurotic anxiety is derived from sexual life and corresponds to libido which has been diverted from its purpose and has found no employment. Since then this formula has met the test of time; and it enables us now to infer from it that anxiety-dreams are dreams with a sexual content, the libido belonging to which has been transformed into anxiety. There will be an opportunity later to support this assertion by the analysis of some neurotic patients’ dreams. In the course, too, of a further attempt to arrive at a theory of dreams, I shall have occasion to discuss once more the determinants of anxiety-dreams and their compatibility with the theory of wish-fulfilment.

CHAPTER V THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS

When the analysis of the dream of Irma’s injection showed us that a dream could be the fulfilment of a wish, our interest was at first wholly absorbed by the question of whether we had come upon a universal characteristic of dreams, and for the time being we stifled our curiosity about any other scientific problems that may have arisen during the work of the interpretation. Having followed one path to its end, we may now retrace our steps and choose another starting-point for our rambles through the problems of dream-life: for the time being, we may leave the topic of wish-fulfilment on one side, though we are still far from having exhausted it.

Now that the application of our procedure for interpreting dreams enables us to disclose a latent content in them which is of far greater significance than their manifest one, the pressing task at once arises of re-examining one by one the various problems raised by dreams, to see whether we may not now be in a position to find satisfactory solutions for the conundrums and contradictions which seemed intractable so long as we were only acquainted with the manifest content.

In the first chapter I have given a detailed account of the views of the authorities on the relation of dreams with waking life and on the origin of the material of dreams. No doubt, too, my readers will recall the three characteristics of memory in dreams, which have been so often remarked on but which have never been explained:

(1) Dreams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days. Cf. Robert, Strümpell, Hildebrandt and Hallam and Weed.

(2) They make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed.

(3) They have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.¹

All these peculiarities shown by dreams in their choice of material have, of course, only been studied by earlier writers in connection with their manifest content.

¹ The view adopted by Robert that the purpose of dreams is to unburden our memory of the useless impressions of daytime is plainly no longer tenable if indifferent memory images from our childhood appear at all frequently in dreams. Otherwise we could only conclude that dreams perform their function most inadequately.

(A) RECENT AND INDIFFERENT MATERIAL IN DREAMS

If I examine my own experience on the subject of the origin of the elements included in the content of dreams, I must begin with an assertion that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous day. This view is confirmed by every dream that I look into, whether my own or anyone else’s. Bearing this fact in mind, I am able, on occasion, to begin a dream’s interpretation by looking for the event of the previous day which set it in motion; in many instances, indeed, this is the easiest method. In the two dreams which I have analysed in detail in my last chapters (the dream of Irma’s injection and the dream of my uncle with a yellow beard) the connection with the previous day is so obvious as to require no further comment. But in order to show the regularity with which such a connection can be traced, I will go through the records of my own dreams and give some instances. I shall only quote enough of the dream to indicate the source we are looking for:

(1) I was visiting a house into which I had difficulty in gaining admittance...; in the meantime I kept a lady WAITING.

Source: I had had a conversation with a female relative the evening before in which I had told her that she would have to wait for a purchase she wanted to make till... etc.

(2) I had written a MONOGRAPH on certain (indistinct) species of plant.

Source: That morning I had seen a monograph on the genus Cyclamen in the window of a book-shop.

(3) I saw two women in the street, A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, the latter of whom was a patient of mine.

Source: One of my patients had explained to me the previous evening the difficulties her mother was putting in the way of her continuing her treatment.

(4) I took out a subscription in S. and R.’s bookshop for a periodical costing TWENTY FLORINS a year.

Source: My wife had reminded me the day before that I still owed her twenty florins for the weekly household expenses.

(5) I received a COMMUNICATION from the Social Democratic COMMITTEE, treating me as though I were a MEMBER.

Source: I had received communications simultaneously from the Liberal Election Committee and from the Council of the Humanitarian League, of which latter body I was in fact a member.

(6) A man standing on A CLIFF IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA, IN THE STYLE OF BÖCKLIN.

Source: Dreyfus on the Ile di Diable; I had had news at the same time from my relatives in England, etc.

The question may be raised whether the point of contact with the dream is invariably the events of the immediately preceding day or whether it may go back to impressions derived from a rather more extensive period of the most recent past. It is unlikely that this question involves any matter of theoretical importance; nevertheless I am inclined to decide in favour of the exclusiveness of the claims of the day immediately preceding the dream - which I shall speak of as the ‘dream-day’. Whenever it has seemed at first that the source of a dream was an impression two or three days earlier, closer enquiry has convinced me that the impression had been recalled on the previous day and thus that it was possible to show that a reproduction of the impression, occurring on the previous day, could be inserted between the day of the original event and the time of the dream; moreover it has been possible to indicate the contingency on the previous day which may have led to the recalling of the older impression.

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