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Autobiographical note 23 страница




 

His difficulty in walking up the rise was so distinct that after waking up he was for some time in doubt whether it was a dream or reality.

We should not think very highly of this dream, judging by its manifest content. In defiance of the rules, I shall begin its interpretation with the portion which the dreamer described as being the most distinct.

 

The difficulty which he dreamt of and probably actually experienced during the dream - the laborious climbing up the rise accompanied by dyspnoea - was one of the symptoms which the patient had in fact exhibited years before and which had at that time been attributed, along with certain other symptoms, to tuberculosis. (The probability is that this was hysterically simulated.) The peculiar sensation of inhibited movement that occurs in this dream is already familiar to us from dreams of exhibiting and we see once more that it is material available at any time for any other representational purpose. The piece of the dream-content which described how the climb began by being difficult and became easy at the end of the rise reminded me, when I heard it, of the masterly introduction to Alphonse Daudet’s Sappho. That well known passage describes how a young man carries his mistress upstairs in his arms; at first she is as light as a feather, but the higher he climbs the heavier grows her weight. The whole scene foreshadows the course of their love-affair, which was intended by Daudet as a warning to young men not to allow their affections to be seriously engaged by girls of humble origin and a dubious past.¹ Though I knew that my patient had been involved in a love-affair which he had recently broken off with a lady on the stage, I did not expect to find my guess at an interpretation justified. Moreover the situation in Sappho was the reverse of what it had been in the dream. In the dream the climbing had been difficult to begin with and had afterwards become easy; whereas the symbolism in the novel only made sense if something that had been begun lightly ended by becoming a heavy burden. But to my astonishment my patient replied that my interpretation fitted in very well with a piece he had seen at the theatre the evening before. It was called Rund um Wien [

Round Vienna] and gave a picture of the career of a girl who began by being respectable, who then became a demi-mondaine and had liaisons with men in high positions and so ‘went up in the world’, but who ended by ‘coming down in the world.’ The piece had moreover reminded him of another, which he had seen some years earlier, called Von Stufe zu Stufe [Step by Step], and which had been advertised by a poster showing a staircase with a flight of steps.

 

To continue with the interpretation. The actress with whom he had had this latest, eventful liaison had lived in X Street. There is nothing in the nature of an inn in that street. But when he was spending part of the summer in Vienna on the lady’s account he had put up at a small hotel in the neighbourhood. When he left the hotel he had said to his cab-driver: ‘Anyhow I’m lucky not to have picked up any vermin.’ (This, incidentally, was another of his phobias.) To this the driver had replied: ‘How could any one put up at such a place! It’s not a hotel, it’s only an inn.’

 

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] What I have written below in the section on symbolism about the significance of dreams of climbing throws light upon the imagery chosen by the novelist.

 

The idea of an inn at once recalled a quotation to his mind:

 

Bei einem Wirte wundermild,

Da war ich jüngst zu Gaste.¹

 

The host in Uhland’s poem was an apple tree; and a second quotation now carried on his train of thought:

 

FAUST (mit der Jungend tanzend):

Einst hatt’ ich einen schönen Traum;

Da sah ich einen Apfelbaum,

Zwei schöne Äpfel glänzten dran,

Sie reizten mich, ich stieg hinan.

 

DIE SCHÖNE:

Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr,

Und schon vom Paradiese her.

Von Freuden fühl’ ich mich bewegt,

Dass auch mein Garten solche trägt.²

 

There cannot be the faintest doubt what the apple-tree and the apples stood for. Moreover, lovely breasts had been among the charms which had attracted the dreamer to his actress.

The context of the analysis gave us every ground for supposing that the dream went back to an impression in childhood. If so, it must have referred to the wet-nurse of the dreamer, who was by now a man almost thirty years old. For an infant the breasts of his wet-nurse are nothing more nor less than an inn. The wet-nurse, as well as Daudet’s Sappho, seem to have been allusions to the mistress whom the patient had recently dropped.

 

The patient’s (elder) brother also appeared in the content of the dream, the brother being up above and the patient himself down below. This was once again the reverse of the actual situation; for, as I knew, the brother had lost his social position while the patient had maintained his. In repeating the content of the dream to me, the dreamer had avoided saying that his brother was up above and he himself ‘on the ground floor’. That would have put the position too clearly, since here in Vienna if we say someone is ‘on the ground floor’ we mean that he has lost his money and his position - in other words, that he has ‘come down in the world.’. Now there must have been a reason for some of this part of the dream being represented by its reverse. Further, the reversal must hold good of some other relation between dream-thoughts and dream-content as well; and we have a hint of where to look for this reversal. It must evidently be at the end of the dream, where once again there was a reversal of the difficulty in going upstairs as described in Sappho. We can then easily see what reversal is intended. In Sappho the man carried a woman who was in a sexual relation to him; in the dream-thoughts the position was reversed, and a woman was carrying a man. And since this can only happen in childhood, the reference was once more to the wet-nurse bearing the weight of the infant in her arms. Thus the end of the dream made a simultaneous reference to Sappho and to the wet-nurse.

 

¹ [Literally: ‘I was lately a guest at an inn with a most gentle host.’]

² [FAUST (dancing with the Young Witch):

A lovely dream once came to me,

And I beheld an apple-tree,

On which two lovely apples shone;

They charmed me so, I climbed thereon.

 

THE LOVELY WITCH:

Apples have been desired by you,

Since first in Paradise they grew;

And I am moved with joy to know

 

That much within my garden grow.]

 

Just as the author of the novel, in choosing the name ‘Sappho’, had in mind an allusion to Lesbian practices, so too the pieces of the dream that spoke of people ‘up above’ and ‘down below’ alluded to phantasies of a sexual nature which occupied the patient’s mind and, as suppressed desires, were not without a bearing on his neurosis. (The interpretation of the dream did not itself show us that what were thus represented in the dream were phantasies and not recollections of real events; an analysis only gives us the content of a thought and leaves it to us to determine its reality. Real and imaginary events appear in dreams at first sight as of equal validity; and that is so not only in dreams but in the production of more important psychical structures.)

 

A ‘large party’ meant, as we already know, a secret. His brother was simply the representative (introduced into the childhood scene by a ‘retrospective phantasy’) of all his later rivals for a woman’s affection. The episode of the gentleman who abused the King of Italy related once again, via the medium of a recent and in itself indifferent experience, to people of lower rank pushing their way into higher society. It was just as though the child at the breast was being given a warning parallel to the one which Daudet had given to young men.¹

 

¹ The imaginary nature of the situation relating to the dreamer’s wet-nurse was proved by the objectively established fact that in his case the wet-nurse had been his mother. I may recall in this connection the anecdote, which I repeated on p. 688, of the young man who regretted that he had not made better use of his opportunities with his wet-nurse. A regret of the same kind was no doubt the source of the present dream.

 

To provide a third opportunity for studying condensation in the formation of dreams, I will give part of the analysis of another dream, which I owe to an elderly lady undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. As was to be expected from the severe anxiety-states from which the patient suffered, her dreams contained a very large number of sexual thoughts, the first realization of which both surprised and alarmed her. Since I shall not be able to pursue the interpretation of the dream to the end, its material will appear to fall into several groups without any visible connection.III‘THE MAY-BEETLE DREAM’

 

CONTENT OF THE DREAM. - She called to mind that she had two may-beetles in a box and that she must set them free or they would suffocate. She opened the box and the may-beetles were in an exhausted state. One of them flew out of the open window; but the other was crushed by the casement while she was shutting it at someone’s request. (Signs of disgust.)

ANALYSIS. - Her husband was temporarily away from home, and her fourteen-year-old daughter was sleeping in the bed beside her. The evening before, the girl had drawn her attention to a moth which had fallen into her tumbler of water; but she had not taken it out and felt sorry for the poor creature next morning. The book she had been reading during the evening had told how some boys had thrown a cat into boiling water, and had described the animal’s convulsions. These were the two precipitating causes of the dream - in themselves indifferent. She then pursued the subject of cruelty to animals further. Some years before, while they were spending the summer at a particular place, her daughter had been very cruel to animals. She was collecting butterflies and asked the patient for some arsenic to kill them with. On one occasion a moth with a pin through its body had gone on flying about the room for a long time; another time some caterpillars which the child was keeping to turn into chrysalises starved to death. At a still more tender age the same child used to tear the wings off beetles and butterflies. But to-day she would be horrified at all these cruel actions she had grown so kind-hearted.

 

The patient reflected over this contradiction. It reminded her of another contradiction, between appearance and character, as George Eliot displays it in Adam Bede: one girl who was pretty, but vain and stupid, and another who was ugly, but of high character; a nobleman who seduced the silly girl, and a working man who felt and acted with true nobility. How impossible it was, she remarked, to recognize that sort of thing in people! Who would have guessed, to look at her, that she was tormented by sensual desires?

 

In the same year in which the little girl had begun collecting butterflies, the district they were in had suffered from a serious plague of may-beetles. The children were furious with the beetles and crushed them unmercifully. At that time my patient had seen a man who tore the wings off may-beetles and then ate their bodies. She herself had been born in May and had been married in May. Three days after her marriage she had written to her parents at home saying how happy she was. But it had been far from true.

 

The evening before the dream she had been rummaging among some old letters and had read some of them - some serious and some comic - aloud to her children. There had been a most amusing letter from a piano-teacher who had courted her when she was a girl, and another from an admirer of noble birth.¹

 

¹ This had been the true instigator of the dream.

 

She blamed herself because one of her daughters had got hold of a ‘bad’ book by Maupassant.¹ The arsenic that the girl had asked for reminded her of the arsenic pills which restored the Duc de Mora’s youthful strength in Le Nabab.

‘Set them free’ made her think of a passage in the Magic Flute:

 

Zur Liebe kann ich dich nicht zwingen,

Doch geb ich dir die Freiheit nicht.²

 

‘May-beetles’ also made her think of Kätchen’s words:

 

Verliebt ja wie ein Käfer bist du mir.³

 

And in the middle of all this came a quotation from Tannhäuser:

 

Weil du von böser Lust beseelt...4

 

She was living in a perpetual worry about her absent husband. Her fear that something might happen to him on his journey was expressed in numerous waking phantasies. A short time before, in the course of her analysis, she had lighted among her unconscious thoughts upon a complaint about her husband ‘growing senile’. The wishful thought concealed by her present dream will perhaps best be conjectured if I mention that, some days before she dreamt it, she was horrified, in the middle of her daily affairs, by a phrase in the imperative mood which came into her head and was aimed at her husband: ‘Go and hang yourself!’ It turned out that a few hours earlier she had read somewhere or other that when a man is hanged he gets a powerful erection. The wish for an erection was what had emerged from repression in this horrifying disguise. ‘Go and hang yourself!’ was equivalent to: ‘Get yourself an erection at any price!’ Dr. Jenkins’s arsenic pills in Le Nabab fitted in here. But my patient was also aware that the most powerful aphrodisiac, cantharides (commonly known as ‘Spanish flies’), was prepared from crushed beetles. This was the drift of the principal part of the dream’s content.

 

The opening and shutting of windows was one of the main subjects of dispute between her and her husband. She herself was aerophilic in her sleeping habits; her husband was aerophobic. Exhaustion was the chief symptom which she complained of at the time of the dream.

 

¹ An interpolation is required at this point: ‘books of that kind are poison to a girl.’ The patient herself had dipped into forbidden books a great deal when she was young.

 

² [Fear not, to love I’II ne’er compel thee;

Yet `tis too soon to set thee free.]

³ [‘You are madly in love with me.’ Literally: `You are in love with me like a beetle.’ ] - A further train of thought led to the same poet’s Penthesilia, and to the idea of cruelty to a lover.

4 [Literally: ‘Because thou wast inspired by such evil pleasure.’] In all three of the dreams which I have just recorded, I have indicated by italics the points at which one of the elements of the dream-content reappears in the dream-thoughts, so as to show clearly the multiplicity of connections arising from the former. Since, however, the analysis of none of these dreams has been traced to its end, it will perhaps be worth while to consider a dream whose analysis has been recorded exhaustively, so as to show how its content is over-determined. For this purpose I will take the dream of Irma’s injection. It will be easy to see from that example that the work of condensation makes use of more than one method in the construction of dreams.

 

The principal figure in the dream-content was my patient Irma. She appeared with the features which were hers in real life, and thus, in the first instance, represented herself. But the position in which I examined her by the window was derived from someone else, the lady for whom, as the dream-thoughts showed, I wanted to exchange my patient. In so far as Irma appeared to have a diphtheritic membrane, which recalled my anxiety about my eldest daughter, she stood for that child and, behind her, through her possession of the same name as my daughter, was hidden the figure of my patient who succumbed to poisoning. In the further course of the dream the figure of Irma acquired still other meanings, without any alteration occurring in the visual picture of her in the dream. She turned into one of the children whom we had examined in the neurological department of the children’s hospital, where my two friends revealed their contrasting characters. The figure of my own child was evidently the stepping-stone towards this transition. The same ‘Irma’s’ recalcitrance over opening her mouth brought an allusion to another lady whom I had once examined, and, through the same connection, to my wife. Moreover, the pathological changes which I discovered in her throat involved allusions to a whole series of other figures.

 

None of these figures whom I lighted upon by following up ‘Irma’ appeared in the dream in bodily shape. They were concealed behind the dream figure of ‘Irma’, which was thus turned into a collective image with, it must be admitted, a number of contradictory characteristics. Irma became the representative of all these other figures which had been sacrificed to the work of condensation, since I passed over to her, point by point, everything that reminded me of them.

 

There is another way in which a ‘collective figure’ can be produced for purposes of dream-condensation, namely by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image. It was in this way that the Dr. M. of my dream was constructed. He bore the name of Dr. M., he spoke and acted like him; but his physical characteristics and his malady belonged to someone else, namely to my eldest brother. One single feature, his pale appearance, was doubly determined, since it was common to both of them in real life.

 

Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle with the yellow beard was a similar composite figure. But in his case the dream-image was constructed in yet another way. I did not combine the features of one person with those of another and in the process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family by portraits: namely by projecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred; incidentally, the beard further involved an allusion to my father and myself through the intermediate idea of growing grey.

 

The construction of collective and composite figures is one of the chief methods by which condensation operates in dreams. I shall presently have occasion to deal with them in another context.

The occurrence of the idea of ‘dysentery’ in the dream of Irma’s injection also had a multiple determination: first owing to its phonetic similarity to ‘diphtheria’, and secondly owing to its connection with the patient whom I had sent to the East and whose hysteria was not recognized.

 

Another interesting example of condensation in this dream was the mention in it of ‘propyls’. What was contained in the dream-thoughts was not ‘propyls’ but ‘amyls.’ It might be supposed that a single displacement had taken place at this point in the construction of the dream. This was indeed the case. But the displacement served the purposes of condensation, as is proved by the following addition to the analysis of the dream. When I allowed my attention to dwell for a moment longer on the word ‘propyls’, it occurred to me that it sounded like ‘Propylaea’. But there are Propylaea not only in Athens but in Munich. A year before the dream I had gone to Munich to visit a friend who was seriously ill at the time - the same friend who was unmistakably alluded to in the dream by the word ‘trimethylamin’ which occurred immediately after ‘propyls.’

 

I shall pass over the striking way in which here, as elsewhere in dream-analyses, associations of the most various inherent importance are used for laying down thought-connections as though they were of equal weight, and shall yield to the temptation to give, as it were, a plastic picture of the process by which the amyls in the dream-thoughts were replaced by propyls in the dream-content.

On the one hand we see the group of ideas attached to my friend Otto, who did not understand me, who sided against me, and who made me a present of liqueur with an aroma of amyl. On the other hand we see - linked to the former group by its very contrast - the group of ideas attached to my friend in Berlin, who did understand me, who would take my side, and to whom I owed so much valuable information, dealing, amongst other things, with the chemistry of the sexual processes.

 

The recent exciting causes - the actual instigators of the dream - determined what was to attract my attention in the ‘Otto’ group; the amyl was among these selected elements, which were predestined to form part of the dream-content. The copious ‘ Wilhelm’ group was stirred up precisely through being in contrast to ‘Otto’, and those elements in it were emphasized which echoed those which were already stirred up in ‘Otto’. All though the dream, indeed, I kept on turning from someone who annoyed me to someone else who could be agreeably contrasted with him; point by point, I called up a friend against an opponent. Thus the amyl in the ‘Otto’ group produced memories from the field of chemistry in the other group; in this manner the trimethylamin, which was supported from several directions, found its way into the dream-content. ‘Amyls’ itself might have entered the dream-content unmodified; but it came under the influence of the ‘Wilhelm’ group. For the whole range of memories covered by that name was searched through in order to find some element which could provide a two-sided determination for ‘amyls.’ ‘Propyls’ was closely associated with ‘amyls’, and Munich from the ‘Wilhelm’ group with its ‘propylaea’ came half-way to meet it. The two groups of ideas converged in ‘propyls-propylaea’; and, as though by an act of compromise, this intermediate element was what found its way into the dream-content. Here an intermediate common entity had been constructed which admitted of multiple determination. It is obvious, therefore, that multiple determination must make it easier for an element to force its way into the dream-content. In order to construct an intermediate link of this kind, attention is without hesitation displaced from what is actually intended on to some neighbouring association.

 

Our study of the dream of Irma’s injection has already enabled us to gain some insight into the processes of condensation during the formation of dreams. We have been able to observe certain of their details, such as how preference is given to elements that occur several times over in the dream-thoughts, how new unities are formed (in the shape of collective figures and composite structures), and how intermediate common entities are constructed. The further questions of the purpose of condensation and of the factors which tend to produce it will not be raised till we come to consider the whole question of the psychical processes at work in the formation of dreams. We will be content for the present with recognizing the fact that dream-condensation is a notable characteristic of the relation between dream-thoughts and dream-content.

The work of condensation in dreams is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. It is true in general that words are frequently treated in dreams as though they were things, and for that reason they are apt to be combined in just the same way as are presentations of things. Dreams of this sort offer the most amusing and curious neologisms.

 

I

 

On one occasion a medical colleague had sent me a paper he had written, in which the importance of a recent physiological discovery was, in my opinion, overestimated, and in which, above all, the subject was treated in too emotional a manner. The next night I dreamt a sentence which clearly referred to this paper: ‘Its written in a positively norekdal style.’ The analysis of the word caused me some difficulty at first. There could be no doubt that it was a parody of the superlatives ‘kolossal’ and ‘pyramidal’; but its origin was not so easy to guess. At last I saw that the monstrosity was composed of the two names ‘Nora’ and ‘Ekdal’ - characters in two well-known plays of Ibsen’s. Some time before, I had read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the same author whose latest work I was criticizing in the dream.II

 

One of my women patients told me a short dream which ended in a meaningless verbal compound. She dreamt she was with her husband at a peasant festivity and said: ‘This will end in a general "Maistollmütz."' In the dream she had a vague feeling that it was some kind of pudding made with maize - a sort of polenta. Analysis divided the word into ‘Mais’ [‘maize’], ‘toll’ [‘mad’], ‘mannstoll’ [‘nymphomaniac’ - literally ‘mad for men’] and Olmütz [a town in Moravia]. All these fragments were found to be remnants of a conversation she had had at table with her relatives. The following words lay behind ‘Mais’ (in addition to a reference to the recently opened Jubilee Exhibition): ‘Meissen’ (a Meissen porcelain figure representing a bird); ‘Miss’ (her relatives’ English governess had just gone to Olmütz); and ‘mies’ (a Jewish slang term, used jokingly to mean ‘disgusting’). A long chain of thoughts and associations led off from each syllable of this verbal hotch potch.

 

III

 

A young man, whose door-bell had been rung late one night by an acquaintance who wanted to leave a visiting-card on him, had a dream that night: A man had been working till late in the evening to put his house-telephone in order. After he had gone, it kept on ringing - not continuously, but with detached rings. His servant fetched the man back, and the latter remarked: ‘It’s a funny thing that even people who are "tutelrein" as a rule are quite unable to deal with a thing like this.’

 

It will be seen that the indifferent exciting cause of the dream only covers one element of it. That episode only obtained any importance from the fact that the dreamer put it in the same series as an earlier experience which, though equally indifferent in itself, was given a substitutive meaning by his imagination. When he was a boy, living with his father, he had upset a glass of water over the floor while he was half-asleep. The flex of the house-telephone had been soaked through and its continuous ringing had disturbed his father’s sleep. Since the continuous ringing corresponded to getting wet, the ‘detached rings’ were used to represent drops falling. The word ‘tutelrein’ could be analysed in three directions, and led in that way to three of the subjects represented in the dream-thoughts. ‘Tutel’ is a legal term for ‘guardianship’ [‘tutelage’]. ‘Tutel’ (or possibly ‘Tuttel’) is also a vulgar term for a woman’s breast. The remaining portion of the word, ‘rein’ [‘clean’], combined with the first part of ‘Zimmertelegraph’ [‘house-telephone’], forms ‘

zimmerrein’ [‘house-trained’] - which is closely connected with making the floor wet, and, in addition, sounded very much like the name of a member of the dreamer’s family.¹

 

¹ In waking life this same kind of analysis and synthesis of syllables - a syllabic chemistry, in fact - plays a part in a great number of jokes: ‘What is the cheapest way of obtaining silver? You go down an avenue of silver poplars [Pappeln, which means both "poplars" and "babbling"] and call for silence. The babbling then ceases and the silver is released.’ The first reader and critic of this book - and his successors are likely to follow his example - protested that ‘the dreamer seems to be too ingenious and amusing.’ This is quite true so long as it refers only to the dreamer; it would only be an objection if it were to be extended to the dream-interpreter. In waking reality I have little claim to be regarded as a wit. If my dreams seem amusing, that is not on my account, but on account of the peculiar psychological conditions under which dreams are constructed; and the fact is intimately connected with the theory of jokes and the comic. Dreams become ingenious and amusing because the direct and easiest pathway to the expression of their thoughts is barred: they are forced into being so. The reader can convince himself that my patients’ dreams seem at least as full of jokes and puns as my own, or even fuller. - [Added 1909:] Nevertheless this objection led me to compare the technique of jokes with the dream-work; and the results are to be found in the book which I published on Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905c).




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