Autobiographical note 14 страница

On the other hand I do not feel convinced that there is any regular interval of biological significance between the instigating daytime impression and its recurrence in the dream. (Swoboda, 1904, has mentioned an initial period of eighteen hours in this connection.)¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] As I have mentioned in a postscript to my first chapter (p. 599 f.), Hermann Swoboda has made a far-reaching application to the mental field of the biological periodic intervals of 23 and 28 days discovered by Wilhelm Fliess. He has asserted in particular that these periods determine the emergence of the elements which appear in dreams. No essential modification in dream-interpretation would be involved if this fact were to be established; it would merely provide a fresh source of origin of dream-material. I have, however, recently made some investigations upon my own dreams, to test now far the ‘theory of periodicity’ is applicable to them. For this purpose I chose some specially outstanding dream-elements the time of whose appearance in real life could be determined with certainty.I. DREAM OF OCTOBER 1ST-2ND, 1910

(Fragment)... Somewhere in Italy. Three daughters were showing me some small curios, as though we were in an antique shop, and were sitting on my lap. I commented on one of the objects: ‘Why, you got that from me’, and saw plainly before me a small profile relief with the clear-cut features of Savonarola.

When had I last seen a portrait of Savonarola? My travel-diary proved that I had been in Florence on September 4th and 5th. While I was there I thought I would show my travelling companion the medallion bearing the fanatical monk’s features, let into the pavement of the Piazza della Signoria, which marks the place where he was burned. I pointed it out to him, I believe, on the morning of the 3rd. Between this impression and its reappearance in the dream 27 + 1 days elapsed - Fliess’s ‘female period’. Unluckily for the conclusiveness of this example, however, I must add that on the actual ‘dream-day’ I had a visit (for the first time since my return) from a capable but gloomy-looking medical colleague of mine whom I had many years before nick-named ‘Rabbi Savonarola’. He introduced a patient to me who was suffering from the effects of an accident to the Pontebba express, in which I myself had travelled a week earlier, and my thoughts were thus led back to my recent visit to Italy. The appearance in the content of the dream of the outstanding element ‘Savonarola’ is thus accounted for by my colleague’s visit on the dream-day; and the interval of 28 days is deprived of its significance.II. DREAM OF OCTOBER 10TH-11TH, 1910

I was once more working at chemistry in the University laboratory. Hofrat L. invited me to come somewhere and walked in front of me in the corridor, holding a lamp or some other instrument before him in his uplifted hand and with his head stretched forward in a peculiar attitude, with a clear-sighted (? far-sighted) look about him. Then we crossed an open space.... (The remainder was forgotten.)

The most outstanding point in the content of this dream was the way in which Hofrat L. held the lamp (or magnifying glass) before him, with his eyes peering into the distance. It was many years since I had last seen him; but I knew at once that he was only a substitute figure in the place of someone else, someone greater than he - Archimedes, whose statue stands near the Fountain of Arethusa at Syracuse in that very attitude, holding up his burning-glass and peering out towards the besieging army of the Romans. When did I see that statue for the first (and last) time? According to my diary it was on the evening of September 17th; and between then and the time of the dream 13 + 10 = 23 days had elapsed - Fliess’s ‘male period’.

Unfortunately, when we go into the interpretation of this dream in greater detail, we once again find that the coincidence loses some of its conclusiveness. The exciting cause of the dream was the news I received on the dream-day that the clinic, in whose lecture room I was able by courtesy to deliver my lectures, was shortly to be removed to another locality. I took it for granted that its new situation would be very out of the way and told myself that in that case I might just as well not have a lecture room at my disposal at all. From that point my thoughts must have gone back to the beginning of my career as University Lecturer when I in fact had no lecture room and when my efforts to get hold of one met with little response from the powerfully placed Hofrats and Professors. In those circumstances I had gone to L., who at that time held the office of Dean of the Faculty and who I believed was friendlily disposed to me, to complain of my troubles. He promised to help me, but I beard nothing more from him. In the dream he was Archimedes, giving me a [footing] and himself leading me to the new locality. Anyone who is an adept at interpretation will guess that the dream-thoughts were not exactly free from ideas of vengeance and self-importance. It seems clear, in any case, that without this exciting cause Archimedes would scarcely have found his way into my dream that night; nor am I convinced that the powerful and still recent impression made on me by the statue in Syracuse might not have produced its effect after some different interval of time.III. DREAM OF OCTOBER 2ND-3rd, 1910

(Fragment)... Something about Professor Oser, who had drawn up the menu for me himself, which had a very soothing effect.... (Some more that was forgotten.)

This dream was a reaction to a digestive disturbance that day, which made me consider whether I should go to one of my colleagues to have a dietary prescribed for me. My reason for choosing Oser for that purpose, who had died in the course of the summer, went back to the death of another University teacher whom I greatly admired, which had occurred shortly before (on October 1st). When had Oser died? and when had I heard of his death? According to a paragraph in the papers he had died on August 22nd. I had been in Holland at that time and had my Vienna newspaper sent on to me regularly; so that I must have read of his death on August 24th or 25th. But here the interval no longer corresponds to either period. It amounts to 7 + 30 + 2 = 39 days or possibly 40 days. I could not recall having spoken or thought of Oser in the meantime.

Intervals such as this one, which cannot be fitted into the theory of periodicity without further manipulation, occur far more frequently in my dreams than intervals which can be so fitted. The only relation which I find occurs with regularity is the relation which I have insisted upon in the text and which connects the dream with some impression of the dream-day.

Havelock Ellis, who has also given some attention to this point, declares that he was unable to find any such periodicity in his dreams in spite of looking for it. He records a dream of being in Spain and of wanting to go to a place called Daraus, Varaus or Zaraus. On waking he could not recall any such place-name, and put the dream on one side. A few months later he discovered that Zaraus was in fact the name of a station on the line between San Sebastian and Bilbao, through which his train had passed 250 days before he had the dream.

I believe, then, that the instigating agent of every dream is to be found among the experiences which one has not yet ‘slept on’. Thus the relations of a dream’s content to impressions of the most recent past (with the single exception of the day immediately preceding the night of the dream) differ in no respect from its relations to impressions dating from any remoter period. Dreams can select their material from any part of the dreamer’s life, provided only that there is a train of thought linking the experience of the dream-day (the ‘recent’ impressions) with the earlier ones.

But why this preference for recent impressions? We shall form some notion on this point, if we submit one of the dreams in the series I have just quoted to a fuller analysis. For this purpose I shall choose the

DREAM OF THE BOTANICAL MONOGRAPH

I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium.

ANALYSIS

That morning I had seen a new book in the window of a book-shop, bearing the title The Genus Cyclamen - evidently a monograph on that plant.

Cyclamens, I reflected, were my wife’s favourite flowers and I reproached myself for so rarely remembering to bring her flowers, which was what she liked. - The subject of ‘bringing flowers’ recalled an anecdote which I had recently repeated to a circle of friends and which I had used as evidence in favour of my theory that forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and that it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets. A young woman was accustomed to receiving a bouquet of flowers from her husband on her birthday. One year this token of his affection failed to appear, and she burst into tears. Her husband came in and had no idea why she was crying till she told him that to-day was her birthday. He clasped his hand to his head and exclaimed: ‘I’m so sorry, but I’d quite forgotten. I’ll go out at once and fetch your flowers.’ But she was not to be consoled; for she recognized that her husband’s forgetfulness was a proof that she no longer had the same place in his thoughts as she had formerly. - This lady, Frau L., had met my wife two days before I had the dream, had told her that she was feeling quite well and enquired after me. Some years ago she had come to me for treatment.

I now made a fresh start. Once, I recalled, I really had written something in the nature of a monograph on a plant, namely a dissertation on the coca-plant, which had drawn Karl Koller’s attention to the anaesthetic properties of cocaine. I had myself indicated this application of the alkaloid in my published paper, but I had not been thorough enough to pursue the matter further. This reminded me that on the morning of the day after the dream - I had not found time to interpret it till the evening - I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream. If ever I got glaucoma, I had thought, I should travel to Berlin and get myself operated on, incognito, in my friend’s house, by a surgeon recommended by him. The operating surgeon, who would have no idea of my identity, would boast once again of how easily such operations could be per formed since the introduction of cocaine; and I should not give the slightest hint that I myself had had a share in the discovery. This phantasy had led on to reflections of how awkward it is, when all is said and done, for a physician to ask for medical treatment for himself from his professional colleagues. The Berlin eye-surgeon would not know me, and I should be able to pay his fees like anyone else. It was not until I had recalled this day-dream that I realized that the recollection of a specific event lay behind it. Shortly after Koller’s discovery, my father had in fact been attacked by glaucoma; my friend Dr. Königstein, the ophthalmic surgeon, had operated on him; while Dr. Koller had been in charge of the cocaine anaesthesia and had commented on the fact that this case had brought together all of the three men who had had a share in the introduction of cocaine.

My thoughts then went on to the occasion when I had last been reminded of this business of the cocaine. It had been a few days earlier, when I had been looking at a copy of a Festschrift in which grateful pupils had celebrated the jubilee of their teacher and laboratory director. Among the laboratory’s claims to distinction which were enumerated in this book I had seen a mention of the fact that Koller had made his discovery there of the anaesthetic properties of cocaine. I then suddenly perceived that my dream was connected with an event of the previous evening. I had walked home precisely with Dr. Königstein and had got into conversation with him about a matter which never fails to excite my feelings whenever it is raised. While I was talking to him in the entrance-hall, Professor Gärtner and his wife had joined us; and I could not help congratulating them both on their blooming looks. But Professor Gärtner was one of the authors of the Festschrift I have just mentioned, and may well have reminded me of it. Moreover, the Frau L., whose disappointment on her birthday I described earlier, was mentioned - though only, it is true, in another connection - in my conversation with Dr. Königstein.

I will make an attempt at interpreting the other determinants of the content of the dream as well. There was a dried specimen of the plant included in the monograph, as though it had been a herbarium. This led me to a memory from my secondary school. Our headmaster once called together the boys from the higher forms and handed over the school’s herbarium to them to be looked through and cleaned. Some small worms - book worms - had found their way into it. He does not seem to have had much confidence in my helpfulness, for he handed me only a few sheets. These, as I could still recall, included some Crucifers. I never had a specially intimate contact with botany. In my preliminary examination in botany I was also given a Crucifer to identify - and failed to do so. My prospects would not have been too bright, if I had not been helped out by my theoretical knowledge. I went on from the Cruciferae to the Compositae. It occurred to me that artichokes were Compositae, and indeed I might fairly have called them my favourite flowers. Being more generous than I am, my wife often brought me back these favourite flowers of mine from the market.

I saw the monograph which I had written lying before me. This again led me back to something. I had had a letter from my friend in Berlin the day before in which he had shown his power of visualization: ‘I am very much occupied with your dream-book. I see it lying finished before me and I see myself turning over its pages. How much I envied him his gift as a seer! If only I could have seen it lying finished before me!

The folded coloured plate. While I was a medical student I was the constant victim of an impulse only to learn things out of monographs. In spite of my limited means, I succeeded in getting hold of a number of volumes of the proceedings of medical societies and was enthralled by their coloured plates. I was proud of my hankering for thoroughness. When I myself had begun to publish papers, I had been obliged to make my own drawings to illustrate them and I remembered that one of them had been so wretched that a friendly colleague had jeered at me over it. There followed, I could not quite make out how, a recollection from very early youth. It had once amused my father to hand over a book with coloured plates (an account of a journey through Persia) for me and my eldest sister to destroy. Not easy to justify from the educational point of view! I had been five years old at the time and my sister not yet three; and the picture of the two of us blissfully pulling the book to pieces (leaf by leaf, like an artichoke, I found myself saying) was almost the only plastic memory that I retained from that period of my life. Then, when I became a student, I had developed a passion for collecting and owning books, which was analogous to my liking for learning out of monographs: a favourite hobby. (The idea of ‘favourite’ had already appeared in connection with cyclamens and artichokes.) I had become a book-worm. I had always, from the time I first began to think about myself, referred this first passion of mine back to the childhood memory I have mentioned. Or rather, I had recognized that the childhood scene was a ‘screen memory’ for my later bibliophile propensities.¹ And I had early discovered, of course, that passions often lead to sorrow. When I was seventeen I had run up a largish account at the bookseller’s and had nothing to meet it with; and my father had scarcely taken it as an excuse that my inclinations might have chosen a worse outlet. The recollection of this experience from the later years of my youth at once brought back to my mind the conversation with my friend Dr. Königstein. For in the course of it we had discussed the same question of my being blamed for being too much absorbed in my favourite hobbies.

¹ Cf. my paper on screen memories.

For reasons with which we are not concerned, I shall not pursue the interpretation of this dream any further, but will merely indicate the direction in which it lay. In the course of the work of analysis I was reminded of my conversation with Dr. Königstein, and I was brought to it from more than one direction. When I take into account the topics touched upon in that conversation, the meaning of the dream becomes intelligible to me. All the trains of thought starting from the dream - the thoughts about my wife’s and my own favourite flowers, about cocaine, about the awkwardness of medical treatment among colleagues, about my preference for studying monographs and about my neglect of certain branches of science such as botany - all of these trains of thought, when they were further pursued, led ultimately to one or other of the many ramifications of my conversation with Dr. Königstein. Once again the dream, like the one we first analysed - the dream of Irma’s injection - turns out to have been in the nature of a self-justification, a plea on behalf of my own rights. Indeed, it carried the subject that was raised in the earlier dream a stage further and discussed it with reference to fresh material that had arisen in the interval between the two dreams. Even the apparently indifferent form in which the dream was couched turns out to have had significance. What it meant was: ‘After all, I’m the man who wrote the valuable and memorable paper (on cocaine)', just as in the earlier dream I had said on my behalf: ‘I’m a conscientious and hard-working student.’ In both cases what I was insisting was: ‘I may allow myself to do this.’ There is, however, no need for me to carry the interpretation of the dream any further, since my only purpose in reporting it was to illustrate by an example the relation between the content of a dream and the experience of the previous day which provoked it. So long as I was aware only of the dream’s manifest content, it appeared to be related only to a single event of the dream-day. But when the analysis was carried out, a second source of the dream emerged in another experience of the same day. The first of these two impressions with which the dream was connected was an indifferent one, a subsidiary circumstance: I had seen a book in a shop-window whose title attracted my attention for a moment but whose subject-matter could scarcely be of interest to me. The second experience had a high degree of psychical importance: I had had a good hour’s lively conversation with my friend the eye-surgeon; in the course of it I had given him some information which was bound to affect both of us closely, and I had had memories stirred up in me which had drawn my attention to a great variety of internal stresses in my own mind. Moreover, the conversation had been interrupted before its conclusion because we had been joined by acquaintances.

We must now ask what was the relation of the two impressions of the dream-day to each other and to the dream of the subsequent night. In the manifest content of the dream only the indifferent impression was alluded to, which seems to confirm the notion that dreams have a preference for taking up unimportant details of waking life. All the strands of the interpretation, on the other hand, led to the important impression, to the one which had justifiably stirred my feelings. If the sense of the dream is judged, as it can only rightly be, by its latent content as revealed by the analysis, a new and significant fact is unexpectedly brought to light. The conundrum of why dreams are concerned only with worthless fragments of waking life seems to have lost all its meaning; nor can it any longer be maintained that waking life is not pursued further in dreams and that dreams are thus psychical activity wasted upon foolish material. The contrary is true: our dream-thoughts are dominated by the same material that has occupied us during the day and we only bother to dream of things which have given us cause for reflection in the daytime.

Why is it, then, that, though the occasion of my dreaming was a daytime impression by which I had been justifiably stirred, I nevertheless actually dreamt of something indifferent? The most obvious explanation, no doubt, is that we are once more faced by one of the phenomena of dream-distortion, which in my last chapter I traced to a psychical force acting as a censorship. My recollection of the monograph on the genus Cyclamen would thus serve the purpose of being an allusion to the conversation with my friend, just as the ‘smoked salmon’ in the dream of the abandoned supper-party served as an allusion to the dreamer’s thought of her woman friend. The only question is as to the intermediate links which enabled the impression of the monograph to serve as an allusion to the conversation with the eye-surgeon, since at first sight there is no obvious connection between them. In the example of the abandoned supper-party the connection was given at once: ‘smoked salmon’, being the friend’s favourite dish, was an immediate constituent of the group of ideas which were likely to be aroused in the dreamer’s mind by the personality of her friend. In this later example there were two detached impressions which at a first glance only had in common the fact of their having occurred on the same day: I had caught sight of the monograph in the morning and had had the conversation the same evening. The analysis enabled us to solve the problem as follows: connections of this kind, when they are not present in the first instance, are woven retrospectively between the ideational content of one impression and that of the other. I have already drawn attention to the intermediate links in the present case by the words I have italicized in my record of the analysis. If there had been no influences from another quarter, the idea of the monograph on the Cyclamen would only, I imagine, have led to the idea of its being my wife’ s favourite flower, and possibly also to Frau L.’s absent bouquet. I scarcely think that these background thoughts would have sufficed to evoke a dream. As we are told in Hamlet:

There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave

To tell us this.

But, lo and behold, I was reminded in the analysis that the man who interrupted our conversation was called Gärtner and that I had thought his wife looked blooming. And even as I write these words I recall that one of my patients, who bore the charming name of Flora, was for a time the pivot of our discussion. These must have been the intermediate links, arising from the botanical group of ideas, which formed the bridge between the two experiences of that day, the indifferent and the stirring one. A further set of connections was then established - those surrounding the idea of cocaine, which had every right to serve as a link between the figure of Dr. Königstein and a botanical monograph which I had written; and these connections strengthened the fusion between the two groups of ideas so that it became possible for a portion of the one experience to serve as an allusion to the other one.

I am prepared to find this explanation attacked on the ground of its being arbitrary or artificial. What, it may be asked, would have happened if Professor Gärtner and his wife with her blooming looks had not come up to us or if the patient we were talking about had been called Anna instead of Flora? The answer is simple. If these chains of thought had been absent others would no doubt have been selected. It is easy enough to construct such chains, as is shown by the puns and riddles that people make every day for their entertainment. The realm of jokes knows no boundaries. Or, to go a stage further, if there had been no possibility of forging enough intermediate links between the two impressions, the dream would simply have been different. Another indifferent impression of the same day - for crowds of such impressions enter our minds and are then forgotten - would have taken the place of the ‘monograph’ in the dream, would have linked up with the subject of the conversation and would have represented it in the content of the dream. Since it was in fact the monograph and not any other idea that was chosen to serve this function, we must suppose that it was the best adapted for the connection. There is no need for us to emulate Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau and feel astonished that ‘only the rich people own the most money’.

A psychological process by which, according to our account, indifferent experiences take the place of psychically significant ones, cannot fail to arouse suspicion and bewilderment. It will be our task in a later chapter to make the peculiarities of this apparently irrational operation more intelligible. At this point we are only concerned with the effects of a process whose reality I have been driven to assume by innumerable and regularly recurrent observations made in analysing dreams. What takes place would seem to be something in the nature of a ‘displacement’ - of psychical emphasis, shall we say? - by means of intermediate links; in this way, ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were originally intensely cathected and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness. Displacements of this kind are no surprise to us where it is a question of dealing with quantities of affect or with motor activities in general. When a lonely old maid transfers her affection to animals, or a bachelor becomes an enthusiastic collector, when a soldier defends a scrap of coloured cloth - a flag - with his life’s blood, when a few seconds’ extra pressure in a hand-shake means bliss to a lover, or when, in Othello

, a lost handkerchief precipitates an outburst of rage - all of these are instances of psychical displacements to which we raise no objection. But when we hear that a decision as to what shall reach our consciousness and what shall be kept out of it - what we shall think, in short - has been arrived at in the same manner and on the same principles, we have an impression of a pathological event and, if such things happen in waking life, we describe them as errors in thought. I will anticipate the conclusions to which we shall later be led, and suggest that the psychical process which we have found at work in dream-displacement, though it cannot be described as a pathological disturbance, nevertheless differs from the normal and is to be regarded as a process of a more primary nature.

Thus the fact that the content of dreams includes remnants of trivial experiences is to be explained as a manifestation of dream-distortion (by displacement); and it will be recalled that we came to the conclusion that dream-distortion was the product of a censorship operating in the passage-way between two psychical agencies. It is to be expected that the analysis of a dream will regularly reveal its true, psychically significant source in waking life, though the emphasis has been displaced from the recollection of that source on to that of an indifferent one. This explanation brings us into complete conflict with Robert’s theory, which ceases to be of any service to us. For the fact which Robert sets out to explain is a non-existent one. His acceptance of it rests on a misunderstanding, on his failure to replace the apparent content of dreams by their real meaning. And there is another objection that can be raised to Robert’s theory. If it were really the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ of daytime recollections by a special psychical activity, our sleep would be more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake. For the number of indifferent impressions from which our memory would need to be protected is clearly immensely large: the night would not be long enough to cope with such a mass. It is far more likely that the process of forgetting indifferent impressions goes forward without the active intervention of our psychical forces.

Nevertheless we must not be in a hurry to take leave of Robert’s ideas without further consideration. We have still not explained the fact that one of the indifferent impressions of waking life, one, moreover, dating from the day preceding the dream, invariably contributes towards the dream’s content. The connections between this impression and the true source of the dream in the unconscious are not always there ready-made; as we have seen, they may only be established retrospectively, in the course of the dream-work, with a view, as it were, to making the intended displacement feasible. There must therefore be some compelling force in the direction of establishing connections precisely with a recent, though indifferent, impression; and the latter must possess some attribute which makes it especially suitable for this purpose. For if that were not so, it would be just as easy for the dream-thoughts to displace their emphasis on to an unimportant component in their own circle of ideas.

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