Autobiographical note 15 страница

The following observations may help us towards clearing up this point. If in the course of a single day we have two or more experiences suitable for provoking a dream, the dream will make a combined reference to them as a single whole; it is under a necessity to combine them into a unity. Here is an instance. One afternoon during the summer I entered a railway compartment in which I found two acquaintances who were strangers to each other. One of them was an eminent medical colleague and the other was a member of a distinguished family with which I had professional relations. I introduced the two gentlemen to each other, but all through the long journey they conducted their conversation with me as a go-between, so that I presently found myself discussing various topics alternately, first with the one and then with the other. I asked my doctor friend to use his influence on behalf of a common acquaintance of ours who was just starting a medical practice. The doctor replied that he was convinced of the young man’s capacity, but that his homely appearance would make it hard for him to make his way in families of the better class; to which I replied that that was the very reason why he needed influential assistance. Turning to my other fellow-traveller, I enquired after the health of his aunt - the mother of one of my patients - who was lying seriously ill at the time. During the night following the journey I had a dream that the young friend on whose behalf I had pleaded was sitting in a fashionable drawing-room in a select company composed of all the distinguished and wealthy people of my acquaintance and, with the easy bearing of a man of the world, was delivering a funeral oration on the old lady (who was already dead so far as my dream was concerned), the aunt of my second fellow-traveller. (I must confess that I had not been on good terms with that lady.) Thus my dream had, once again, worked out connections between the two sets of impressions of the previous day and had combined them into a single situation.

Many experiences such as this lead me to assert that the dream-work is under some kind of necessity to combine all the sources which have acted as stimuli for the dream into a single unity in the dream itself.¹

¹ The tendency of the dream-work to fuse into a single action all events of interest which occur simultaneously has already been remarked on by several writers; e.g. Delage (1891, 41) and Delboeuf (1885, 237), who speaks of ‘

rapprochement forcé' [‘enforced convergence’].

I will now proceed to the question of whether the instigating source of a dream, revealed by analysis, must invariably be a recent (and significant) event or whether an internal experience, that is, the recollection of a psychically important event - a train of thought - can assume the role of a dream-instigator. The answer, based upon a large number of analyses, is most definitely in favour of the latter alternative. A dream can be instigated by an internal process which has, as it were, become a recent event, owing to thought-activity during the previous day. This seems to be the appropriate moment for tabulating the different conditions to which we find that the sources of dreams are subject. The source of a dream may be either -

(a) a recent and psychically significant experience which is represented in the dream directly,¹ or

(b) several recent and significant experiences which are combined into a single unity by the dream,² or

(c) one or more recent and significant experiences which are represented in the content of the dream by a mention of a contemporary but indifferent experience,³ or

(d) an internal significant experience (e.g. a memory or a train of thought), which is in that case invariably represented in the dream by a mention of a recent but indifferent impression.4

It will be seen that in interpreting dreams we find one condition always fulfilled: one component of the content of the dream is a repetition of a recent impression of the previous day. This impression that is to be represented in the dream may either itself belong to the circle of ideas surrounding the actual instigator of the dream - whether as an essential or as a trivial portion of it - or it may be derived from the field of an indifferent impression which has been brought into connection with the ideas surrounding the dream-instigator by more or less numerous links. The apparent multiplicity of governing conditions is in fact merely dependent upon the two alternatives of whether a displacement has or has not taken place; and it is worth pointing out that we are enabled by these alternatives to explain the range of contrast between different dreams just as easily as the medical theory is enabled to do by its hypothesis of brain-cells ranging from partial to total wakefulness. (See above, p. 583 ff.)

¹ As in the dream of Irma’s injection and in the dream of my uncle with the yellow beard.

² As in the young doctor’s funeral oration.

³ As in the dream of the botanical monograph.

4 Most of my patient’s dreams during analysis are of this kind.

It will further be observed, if we consider these four possible cases, that a psychical element which is significant but not recent (e.g. a train of thought or a memory) can be replaced, for the purpose of forming a dream, by an element which is recent but indifferent, provided only that two conditions are fulfilled: (1) the content of the dream must be connected with a recent experience, and (2) the instigator of the dream must remain a psychically significant process. Only in one case - case (a) - are both of these conditions fulfilled by one and the same impression. It is to be noticed, moreover, that indifferent impressions which are capable of being used for constructing a dream so long as they are recent lose that capacity as soon as they are a day (or at the most a few days) older. From this we must conclude that the freshness of an impression gives it some kind of psychical value for purposes of dream-construction equivalent in some way to the value of emotionally coloured memories or trains of thought. The basis of the value which thus attaches to recent impressions in connection with the construction of dreams will only become evident in the course of our subsequent psychological discussions.¹

In this connection it will be noticed, incidentally, that modifications in our mnemic and ideational material may take place during the night unobserved by our consciousness. We are often advised that before coming to a final decision on some subject we should ‘sleep on it’, and this advice is evidently justified. But here we have passed from the psychology of dreams to that of sleep, and this is not the last occasion on which we shall be tempted to do so.²

¹ See the passage on ‘transference’ in Chapter VII.

² [Footnote added 1919:] An important contribution to the part played by recent material in the construction of dreams has been made by Pötzl (1917) in a paper which carries a wealth of implications. In a series of experiments Pötzl required the subjects to make a drawing of what they had consciously noted of a picture exposed to their view in a tachistoscope. He then turned his attention to the dreams dreamt by the subjects during the following night and required them once more to make drawings of appropriate portions of these dreams. It was shown unmistakably that those details of the exposed picture which had not been noted by the subject provided material for the construction of the dream, whereas those details which had been consciously perceived and recorded in the drawing made after the exposure did not recur in the manifest content of the dream manifest content of the dream. The material that was taken over by the dream-work was modified by it for the purposes of dream-construction in its familiar ‘arbitrary’ (or, more properly, ‘autocratic’) manner. The questions raised by Pötzl’s experiment go far beyond the sphere of dream-interpretation as dealt with in the present volume. In passing, it is worth remarking on the contrast between this new method of studying the formation of dreams experimentally and the earlier, crude technique for introducing into the dream stimuli which interrupted the subject’s sleep.

An objection, however, may be raised which threatens to upset these last conclusions. If indifferent impressions can only find their way into a dream provided they are recent, how does it happen that the content of dreams also includes elements from an earlier period of life which at the time when they were recent possessed, to use Strümpell’s words, no psychical value, and should therefore have been long since forgotten - elements, that is to say, which are neither fresh nor psychically significant?

This objection can be completely dealt with by a reference to the findings of the psycho-analysis of neurotics. The explanation is that the displacement which replaces psychically important by indifferent material (alike in dreaming and in thinking) has in these cases already taken place at the early period of life in question and since then become fixed in the memory. These particular elements which were originally indifferent are indifferent no longer, since taking over (by means of displacement) the value of psychically significant material. Nothing that has really remained indifferent can be reproduced in a dream.

The reader will rightly conclude from the foregoing arguments that I am asserting that there are no indifferent dream-instigators - and consequently no ‘innocent’ dreams. Those are, in the strictest and most absolute sense, my opinions - if I leave on one side the dreams of children and perhaps brief reactions in dreams to sensations felt during the night. Apart from this, what we dream is either manifestly recognizable as psychically significant, or it is distorted and cannot be judged till the dream has been interpreted, after which it will once more be found to be significant. Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles.¹ The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyse them. They are, if I may say so, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Since this is another point upon which I may expect to be contradicted, and since I am glad of an opportunity of showing dream-distortion at work, I will select a number of ‘innocent’ dreams from my records and submit them to analysis.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Havelock Ellis, a friendly critic of this book, writes (1911, 166): ‘This is the point at which many of us are no longer able to follow Freud.’ Havelock Ellis has not, however, carried out any analyses of dreams and refuses to believe how impossible it is to base one’s judgement on their manifest content.

I

An intelligent and cultivated young woman, reserved and undemonstrative in her behaviour, reported as follows: I dreamt that I arrived too late at the market and could get nothing either from the butcher or from the woman who sells vegetables. An innocent dream, no doubt; but dreams are not as simple as that, so I asked to be told it in greater detail. She thereupon gave me the following account. She dreamt she was going to the market with her cook, who was carrying the basket. After she had asked for something, the butcher said to her: ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’, and offered her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’ She rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it.’

The dream’s connection with the previous day was quite straightforward. She had actually gone to the market too late and had got nothing. The situation seemed to shape itself into the phrase ‘Die Flieschbank war schon gescholossen’. I pulled myself up: was not that, or rather its opposite, a vulgar description of a certain sort of slovenliness in a man’s dress? However, the dreamer herself did not use the phrase; she may perhaps have avoided using it. Let us endeavour, then, to arrive at an interpretation of the details of the dream.

When anything in a dream has the character of direct speech, that is to say, when it is said or heard and not merely thought (and it is easy as a rule to make the distinction with certainty), then it is derived from something actually spoken in waking life-though, to be sure, this something is merely treated as raw material and may be cut up and slightly altered and, more especially, divorced from its context.¹ In carrying out an interpretation, one method is to start from spoken phrases of this kind. What, then, was the origin of the butcher’s remark ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’? The answer was that it came from me myself. A few days earlier I had explained to the patient that the earliest experiences of childhood were ‘not obtainable any longer as such’, but were replaced in analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams. So I was the butcher and she was rejecting these transferences into the present of old habits of thinking and feeling. -What, again, was the origin of her own remark in the dream ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it’? For the purposes of the analysis this had to be divided up. ‘I don’t recognize that’ was something she had said the day before to her cook, with whom she had had a dispute; but at the time she had gone on: ‘Behave yourself properly!’ At this point there had clearly been a displacement. Of the two phrases that she had used in the dispute with her cook, she had chosen the insignificant one for inclusion in the dream. But it was only the suppressed one, ‘Behave yourself properly!’ that fitted in with the rest of the content of the dream: those would have been the appropriate words to use if someone had ventured to make improper suggestions and had forgotten ‘to close his meat-shop’. The allusions underlying the incident with the vegetable-seller were a further confirmation that our interpretation was on the right track. A vegetable that is sold tied up in bundles (lengthways, as the patient added afterwards) and is also black, could only be a dream-combination of asparagus and black (Spanish) radishes. No knowledgeable person of either sex will ask for an interpretation of asparagus. But the other vegetable - ’Schwarzer Retting’ - can be taken as an exclamation - ‘Schwarzer rett’ dich!’ -, and accordingly it too seems to hint at the same sexual topic which we suspected at the very beginning, when we felt inclined to introduce the phrase about the meat-shop being closed into the original account of the dream. We need not enquire now into the full meaning of the dream. So much is quite clear: it had a meaning and that meaning was far from innocent.²

¹ See my discussion of speeches in dreams in my chapter on the dream-work. Only one writer on the subject seems to have recognized the source of spoken phrases occurring in dreams, namely Delboeuf (1885, 226), who compares them to clichés.

² If anyone is curious to know, I may add that the dream concealed a phantasy of my behaving in an improper and sexually provocative manner, and of the patient putting up a defence against my conduct. If this interpretation seems incredible, I need only point to the numerous instances in which doctors have charges of the same kind brought against them by hysterical women. But in such cases the phantasy emerges into consciousness undisguised and in the form of a delusion, instead of being distorted and appearing only as a dream. - [Added 1909:] This dream occurred at the beginning of the patient’s psycho-analytic treatment. It was not until later that I learnt that she had been repeating in it the initial trauma from which her neurosis had arisen. I have since then come across the same behaviour in other patients; having been exposed to a sexual assault in their childhood, they seek, as it were, to bring about a repetition of it in their dreams.

II

Here is another innocent dream, dreamt by the same patient, and in a sense a counterpart to the last one. Her husband asked her: ‘Don’t you think we ought to have the piano tuned?’ And she replied: ‘It’s not worth while; the hammers need reconditioning in any case.’

Once again this was a repetition of a real event of the previous day. Her husband had asked this question and she had made some such reply. But what was the explanation of her dreaming it? She told me that the piano was a disgusting old box, that it made an ugly noise, that it had been in her husband’s possession before their marriage,¹ and so on. But the key to the solution was only given by her words: ‘It’s not worth while.’ These were derived from a visit she had paid the day before to a woman friend. She had been invited to take off her jacket, but had refused with the words: ‘Thank you, but its not worth while; I can only stop a minute.’ As she was telling me this, I recollected that during the previous day’s analysis she had suddenly caught hold of her jacket, one of the buttons having come undone. Thus it was as though she were saying: ‘Please don’t look; its not worth while.’ In the same way the ‘box’ [‘Kasten’] was a substitute for a ‘chest’ [‘Bruskasten’]; and the interpretation of the dream led us back at once to the time of her physical development at puberty, when she had begun to be dissatisfied by her figure. We can hardly doubt that it led back to still earlier times, if we take the word ‘disgusting’ into account and the ‘ugly noise’, and if we remember how often - both in double entendres and in dreams - the lesser hemispheres of a woman’s body are used, whether as contrasts or as substitutes, for the larger ones.

¹ This last was a substitute for the opposite idea, as the course of the analysis will make clear.

III

I will interrupt this series for a moment and insert a short innocent dream produced by a young man. He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat once more, which was a dreadful thing. The ostensible reason for this dream was a sudden return of cold weather. If we look more closely, however, we shall notice that the two short pieces that make up the dream are not in complete harmony. For what could there be ‘dreadful’ about putting on a heavy or thick overcoat in cold weather? Moreover, the innocence of the dream was decidedly upset by the first association that occurred to the dreamer in the analysis. He recalled that a lady confided to him the day before that her youngest child owed its existence to a torn condom. On that basis he was able to reconstruct his thoughts. A thin condom was dangerous, but a thick one was bad. The condom was suitably represented as an overcoat, since one slips into both of them. But an occurrence such as the lady described to him would certainly be ‘dreadful’ for an unmarried man.

And now let us return to our innocent lady dreamer.

IV

She was putting a candle into a candlestick; but the candle broke so that it wouldn’t stand up properly. The girls at her school said she was clumsy; but the mistress said it was not her fault.

Yet again the occasion for the dream was a real event. The day before she had actually put a candle into a candlestick, though it did not break. Some transparent symbolism was being used in this dream. A candle is an object which can excite the female genitals; and, if it is broken, so that it cannot stand up properly, it means that the man is impotent. (‘It was not her fault.’) But could a carefully brought-up young woman, who had been screened from the impact of anything ugly, have known that a candle might be put to such a use? As it happened, she was able to indicate how it was that she obtained this piece of knowledge. Once when they were in a rowing boat on the Rhine, another boat had passed them with some students in it. They were in high spirits and were singing, or rather shouting, a song:

Wenn die Königin von Schweden,

Bei geschlossenen Fensterläden

Mit Apollokerzen...¹

She either failed to hear or did not understand the last word and had to get her husband to give her the necessary explanation. The verse was replaced in the content of the dream by an innocent recollection of some job she had done clumsily when she was at school, and the replacement was made possible owing to the common element of closed shutters. The connection between the topics of masturbation and impotence is obvious enough. The ‘Apollo’ in the latent content of this dream linked it with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured. Altogether far from innocent.

¹ [‘When the Queen of Sweden, behind closed shutters,... with Apollo candles.’ The missing word is ‘onaniert’ (‘masturbates’).]V

In order that we may not be tempted to draw conclusions too easily from dreams as to the dreamer’s actual life, I will add one more dream of the same patient’s, which once more has an innocent appearance. ‘I dreamt,’ she said, ‘of what I really did yesterday: I filled a small trunk so full of books that I really had difficulty in shutting it and I dreamt what really happened.’ In this instance the narrator herself laid the chief emphasis on the agreement between the dream and reality. All such judgements on a dream and comments upon it, though they have made themselves a place in waking thought, invariably form in fact part of the latent content of the dream, as we shall find confirmed by other examples later on. What we were being told, then, was that what the dream described had really happened the day before. It would take up too much space to explain how it was that the idea occurred to me of making use of the English language in the interpretation. It is enough to say that once again what was in question was a little ‘box’ (cf. the dream of the dead child in the ‘case’, p. 649 f.) which was so full that nothing more could get into it. Anyhow, nothing bad this time.

In all of these ‘innocent’ dreams the motive for the censorship is obviously the sexual factor. This, however, is a subject of prime importance which I must leave on one side.

(B)INFANTILE MATERIAL AS A SOURCE OF DREAMS

Like every other writer on the subject, with the exception of Robert, I have pointed out as a third peculiarity of the content of dreams that it may include impressions which date back to earliest childhood, and which seem not to be accessible to waking memory. It is naturally hard to determine how rarely or how frequently this occurs, since the origin of the dream elements in question is not recognized after waking. Proof that what we are dealing with are impressions from childhood must therefore be established by external evidence and there is seldom an opportunity for doing this. A particularly convincing example is that given by Maury of the man who determined one day to revisit his old home after an absence of more than twenty years. During the night before his departure he dreamt that he was in a totally unknown place and there met an unknown man in the street and had a conversation with him. When he reached his home, he found that the unknown place was a real one in the immediate neighbourhood of his native town, and the unknown man in the dream turned out to be a friend of his dead father’s who was still living there. This was conclusive evidence that he had seen both the man and the place in his childhood. This dream is also to be interpreted as a dream of impatience like that of the girl with the concert-ticket in her pocket (p. 647 f.), that of the child whose father had promised to take her on an excursion to the Hameau (cf. p. 628 f.), and similar ones. The motives which led the dreamers to reproduce one particular impression from their childhood rather than any other cannot, of course, be discovered without an analysis.

Someone who attended a course of lectures of mine and boasted that his dreams very seldom underwent distortion reported to me that not long before he had dreamt of seeing his former tutor in bed with the nurse who had been with his family till his eleventh year. In the dream he had identified the locality where the scene occurred. His interest had been aroused and he had reported the dream to his elder brother, who had laughingly confirmed the truth of what he had dreamt. His brother remembered it very well, as he had been six years old at the time. The lovers had been in the habit of making the elder boy drunk with beer, whenever circumstances were favourable for intercourse during the night. The younger boy - the dreamer - who was then three years old and slept in the room with the nurse, was not regarded as an impediment.

There is another way in which it can be established with certainty without the assistance of interpretation that a dream contains elements from childhood. This is where the dream is of what has been called the ‘recurrent’ type: that is to say, where a dream was first dreamt in childhood and then constantly reappears from time to time during adult sleep. I am able to add to the familiar examples of such dreams a few from my own records, though I have never myself experienced one. A physician in his thirties told me that from the earliest days of his childhood to the present time a yellow lion frequently appeared in his dreams; he was able to give a minute description of it. This lion out of his dreams made its appearance one day in bodily form, as a china ornament that had long disappeared. The young man then learnt from his mother that this object had been his favourite toy during his early childhood, though he himself had forgotten the fact.

If we turn now from the manifest content of dreams to the dream-thoughts which only analysis uncovers, we find to our astonishment that experiences from childhood also play a part in dreams whose content would never have led one to suppose it. I owe a particularly agreeable and instructive example of a dream of this kind to my respected colleague of the yellow lion. After reading Nansen’s narrative of his polar expedition, he had a dream of being in a field of ice and of giving the gallant explorer galvanic treatment for an attack of sciatica from which he was suffering. In the course of analysing the dream, he thought of a story dating from his childhood, which alone, incidentally, made the dream intelligible. One day, when he was a child of three or four, he had heard the grown-ups talking of voyages of discovery and had asked his father whether that was a serious illness. He had evidently confused ‘Reisen’ [‘voyages’] with ‘Reissen’ [‘gripes’], and his brothers and sisters saw to it that he never forgot this embarrassing mistake.

There was a similar instance of this when, in the course of my analysis of the dream of the monograph on the genus Cyclamen, I stumbled upon the childhood memory of my father, when I was a boy of five, giving me a book illustrated with coloured plates to destroy. It may perhaps be doubted whether this memory really had any share in determining the form taken by the content of the dream or whether it was not rather that the process of analysis built up the connection subsequently. But the copious and intertwined associative links warrant our accepting the former alternative: cyclamen - favourite flower - favourite food - artichokes; pulling to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase constantly ringing in our ears in relation to the piecemeal dismemberment of the Chinese Empire) - herbarium - book-worms, whose favourite food is books. Moreover I can assure my readers that the ultimate meaning of the dream, which I have not disclosed, is intimately related to the subject of the childhood scene.

In the case of another group of dreams, analysis shows us that the actual wish which instigated the dream, and the fulfilment of which is represented by the dream, is derived from childhood; so that, to our surprise, we find the child and the child’s impulses still living on in the dream.

At this point I shall once more take up the interpretation of a dream which we have already found instructive - the dream of my friend R. being my uncle. We have followed its interpretation to the point of recognizing clearly as one of its motives my wish to be appointed to a professorship; and we explained the affection I felt in the dream for my friend R. as a product of opposition and revolt against the slanders upon my two colleagues which were contained in the dream-thoughts. The dream was one of my own; I may therefore continue its analysis by saying that my feelings were not yet satisfied by the solution that had so far been reached. I knew that my waking judgement upon the colleagues who were so ill-used in the dream-thoughts would have been a very different one; and the force of my wish not to share their fate in the matter of the appointment struck me as insufficient to explain the contradiction between my waking and dreaming estimates of them. If it was indeed true that my craving to be addressed with a different title was as strong as all that, it showed a pathological ambition which I did not recognize in myself and which I believed was alien to me. I could not tell how other people who believed they knew me would judge me in this respect. It might be that I was really ambitious; but, if so, my ambition had long ago been transferred to objects quite other than the title and rank of professor extraordinarius.

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