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Autobiographical note 24 страница




 

IV

 

In a confused dream of my own of some length, whose central point seemed to be a sea voyage, it appeared that the next stopping place was called ‘Hearsing’ and the next after that ‘Fliess.’ This last word was the name of my friend, who has often been the goal of my travels. ‘Hearsing’ was a compound. One part of it was derived from the names of places on the suburban railway near Vienna, which so often end in ‘ing’: Hietzing, Liesing, Mödling (Medelitz, ‘meae deliciae’, was its old name - that is ‘meine Freud’ [‘my delight’]). The other part was derived from the English word ‘hearsay.’ This suggested slander and established the dream’s connection with its indifferent instigator of the previous day: a poem in the periodical Fliegende Blätter about a slanderous dwarf called ‘Sagter Hatergesagt’ [‘He-says Says-he’]. If the syllable ‘ing’ were to be added to the name ‘Fliess’ we should get ‘Vlissingen’, which was in fact the stopping-place on the sea voyage made by my brother whenever he visited us from England. But the English name for Vlissingen is ‘Flushing’, which in English means ‘blushing’ and reminded me of the patients I have treated for ereutophobia, and also of a recent paper on that neurosis by Bechterew which had caused me some annoyance.

 

V

 

On another occasion I had a dream which consisted of two separate pieces. The first piece was the word ‘Autodidasker’, which I recalled vividly. The second piece was an exact reproduction of a short and harmless phantasy which I had produced some days before. This phantasy was to the effect that when I next saw Professor N. I must say to him: ‘The patient about whose condition I consulted you recently is in fact only suffering from a neurosis, just as you suspected.’ Thus the neologism ‘Autodidasker’ must satisfy two conditions: firstly, it must bear or represent a composite meaning; and secondly, that meaning must be solidly related to the intention I had reproduced from waking life of making amends to Professor N.

 

The word ‘Autodidasker’ could easily be analysed into ‘Autor’ [author], ‘Autodidakt’ [self-taught] and ‘Lasker’, with which I also associated the name of Lassalle. The first of these words led to the precipitating cause of the dream - this time a significant one. I had given my wife several volumes by a well-known writer who was a friend of my brother’s, and who, as I have learnt, was a native of my own birthplace: J. J. David. One evening she had told me of the deep impression that had been made on her by the tragic story in one of David’s books of how a man of talent went to the bad; and our conversation had turned to a discussion of the gifts of which we saw signs in our own children. Under the impact of what she had been reading, my wife expressed concern about the children, and I consoled her with the remark that those were the very dangers which could be kept at bay by a good upbringing. My train of thought was carried further during the night; I took up my wife’s concern and wove all kinds of other things into it. A remark made by the author to my brother on the subject of marriage showed my thoughts a by-path along which they might come to be represented in the dream. This path led to Breslau, where a lady with whom we were very friendly had gone to be married and settle down. The concern I felt over the danger of coming to grief over a woman - for that was the kernel of my dream-thoughts - found an example in Breslau in the cases of Lasker and Lassalle which made it possible to give a simultaneous picture of the two ways in which this fatal influence can be exercised. ‘Cherchez la femme’, the phrase in which these thoughts could be summarized, led me, taken in another sense, to my still unmarried brother, whose name is Alexander. I now perceived that ‘Alex’, the shortened form of the name by which we call him, has almost the same sound as an anagram of ‘Lasker’, and that this factor must have had a share in leading my thoughts along the by-path by way of Breslau.

 

¹ Lasker died of tabes, that is, as a result of an infection (syphilis) contracted from a woman; Lassalle, as everyone knows, fell in a duel on account of a woman.

 

The play which I was making here upon names and syllables had a still further sense, however. It expressed a wish that my brother might have a happy domestic life, and it did so in this way. In Zola’s novel of an artist’s life, L’oevre, the subject of which must have been close to my dream-thoughts, its author, as is well known, introduced himself and his own domestic happiness as an episode. He appears under the name of ‘Sandoz.’ The transformation was probably arrived at as follows. If ‘Zola’ is written backwards (the sort of thing children are so fond of doing), we arrive at ‘Aloz.’ No doubt this seemed too undisguised. He therefore replaced ‘Al’, which is the first syllable of ‘Alexander’ by ‘Sand’, which is the third syllable of the same name; and in this way ‘Sandoz’ came into being. My own ‘Autodidasker’ arose in much the same fashion.

 

I must now explain how my phantasy of telling Professor N. that the patient we had both examined was only suffering from a neurosis made its way into the dream. Shortly before the end of my working year, I began the treatment of a new patient who quite baffled my powers of diagnosis. The presence of a grave organic disease - perhaps some degeneration of the spinal cord - strongly suggested itself but could not be established. It would have been tempting to diagnose a neurosis (which would have solved every difficulty), if only the patient had not repudiated with so much energy the sexual history without which I refuse to recognize the presence of a neurosis. In my embarrassment I sought help from the physician whom I, like many other people, respect more than any as a man and before whose authority I am readiest to bow. He listened to my doubts, told me they were justified, and then gave his opinion: ‘Keep the man under observation; it must be a neurosis.’ Since I knew he did not share my views on the aetiology of the neuroses, I did not produce my counter-argument, but I made no concealment of my scepticism. A few days later I informed the patient that I could do nothing for him and recommended him to seek other advice. Whereupon, to my intense astonishment, he started apologizing for having lied to me. He had been too much ashamed of himself, he said, and went on to reveal precisely the piece of sexual aetiology which I had been expecting and without which I had been unable to accept his illness as a neurosis. I was relieved but at the same time humiliated. I had to admit that my consultant, not being led astray by considering the anamnesis, had seen more clearly than I had. And I proposed to tell him as much when I next met him - to tell him that he had been right and I wrong.

 

This was precisely what I did in the dream. But what sort of a wish-fulfilment can there have been in confessing that I was wrong?. To be wrong was, however, just what I did wish. I wanted to be wrong in my fears, or, more precisely, I wanted my wife, whose fears I had adopted in the dream-thoughts, to be wrong. The subject round which the question of right or wrong revolved in the dream was not far removed from what the dream-thoughts were really concerned with. There was the same alternative between organic and functional damage caused by a woman, or, more properly, by sexuality: tabetic paralysis or neurosis? (The manner of Lassalle’s death could be loosely classed in the latter category.)

 

In this closely knit and, when it was carefully interpreted, very transparent dream, Professor N. played a part not only on account of this analogy and of my wish to be wrong, and on account of his incidental connections with Breslau and with the family of our friend who had settled there after her marriage but also on account of the following episode which occurred at the end of our consultation. When he had given his opinion and so concluded our medical discussion, he turned to more personal subjects: ‘How many children have you got now?’ - ‘Six.’ - He made a gesture of admiration and concern. - ‘Girls or boys?’ - ‘Three and three: they are my pride and my treasure.’ - ‘Well, now, be on your guard! Girls are safe enough, but bringing up boys leads to difficulties later on.’ - I protested that mine had been very well behaved so far. Evidently this second diagnosis, on the future of my boys, pleased me no more than the earlier one, according to which my patient was suffering from a neurosis. Thus these two impressions were bound up together by their contiguity, by the fact of their having been experienced both at once; and in taking the story of the neurosis into my dream, I was substituting it for the conversation about upbringing, which had more connection with the dream-thoughts, since it touched so closely upon the worries later expressed by my wife. So even my fear that N. might be right in what he said about the difficulty of bringing up boys had found a place in the dream, for it lay concealed behind the representation of my wish that I myself might be wrong in harbouring such fears. The same phantasy served unaltered to represent both of the opposing alternatives.

 

VI

 

‘Early this morning,¹ between dreaming and waking, I experienced a very nice example of verbal condensation. In the course of a mass of dream-fragments that I could scarcely remember, I was brought up short, as it were, by a word which I saw before me as though it were half written and half printed. The word was "erzefilisch", and it formed part of a sentence which slipped into my conscious memory apart from any context and in complete isolation: "That has an erzefilisch influence on the sexual emotions." I knew at once that the word ought really to have been "erzieherisch" ["educational"]. And I was in doubt for some time whether the second "e" in "erzefilisch" should not have been an "i". In that connection the word "syphilis" occurred to me and, starting to analyse the dream while I was still half asleep, I racked my brains in an effort to make out how that word could have got into my dream, since I had nothing to do with the disease either personally or professionally. I then thought of "erzehlerisch [another nonsense word], and this explained the "e" of the second syllable of "erzefilisch" by reminding me that the evening before I had been asked by our governess [Erzieherin] to say something to her on the problem of prostitution, and had given her Hesse’s book on prostitution in order to influence her emotional life - for this had not developed quite normally; after which I had talked [erzählt] a lot to her on the problem. I then saw all at once that the word "syphilis" was not to be taken literally, but stood for "poison" - of course in relation to sexual life. When translated, therefore, the sentence in the dream ran quite logically: "My talk [Erzählung] was intended to have an educational [erzieherisch] influence on the emotional life of our governess [Erzieherin]; but I fear it may at the same time have had a poisonous effect." "Erzefilisch" was compounded from "erzäh-" and "erzieh-".’

 

¹ Quoted from Marcinowski. The verbal malformations in dreams greatly resemble those which are familiar in paranoia but which are also present in hysteria and obsessions. The linguistic tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and artificial syntactic forms, are the common source of these things in dreams and psychoneuroses alike.

The analysis of the nonsensical verbal forms that occur in dreams is particularly well calculated to exhibit the dream work’s achievements in the way of condensation. The reader should not conclude from the paucity of the instances which I have given that material of this kind is rare or observed at all exceptionally. On the contrary, it is very common. But as a result of the fact that dream-interpretation is dependent upon psycho-analytic treatment, only a very small number of instances are observed and recorded and the analyses of such instances are as a rule only intelligible to experts in the pathology of the neuroses. Thus a dream of this kind was reported by Dr. von Karpinska (1914) containing the nonsensical verbal form: ‘Svingnum elvi.’ It is also worth mentioning those cases in which a word appears in a dream which is not in itself meaningless but which has lost its proper meaning and combines a number of other meanings to which it is related in just the same way as a ‘meaningless’ word would be. This is what occurred, for instance, in the ten-year-old boy’s dream of a ‘category’ which was recorded by Tausk (1913). ‘Category’ in that case meant ‘female genitals’, and to ‘categorate’ meant the same as ‘to micturate.’

Where spoken sentences occur in dreams and are expressly distinguished as such from thoughts, it is an invariable rule that the words spoken in the dream are derived from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. The text of the speech is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight displacement. A speech in a dream is often put together from various recollected speeches, the text remaining the same but being given, if possible, several meanings, or one different from the original one. A spoken remark in a dream is not infrequently no more than an allusion to an occasion on which the remark in question was made.¹

 

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Not long ago I found a single exception to this rule in the case of a young man who suffered from obsessions while retaining intact his highly developed intellectual powers. The spoken words which occurred in his dreams were not derived from remarks which he had heard or made himself. They contained the undistorted text of his obsessional thoughts, which in his waking life only reached his consciousness in a modified form.

 

(B)THE WORK OF DISPLACEMENT

 

In making our collection of instances of condensation in dreams, the existence of another relation, probably of no less importance, had already become evident. It could be seen that the elements which stand out as the principal components of the manifest content of the dream are far from playing the same part in the dream-thoughts. And, as a corollary, the converse of this assertion can be affirmed: what is clearly the essence of the dream-thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all. The dream is, as it were, differently centred from the dream thoughts - its content has different elements as its central point. Thus in the dream of the botanical monograph, for instance, the central point of the dream-content was obviously the element ‘botanical’; whereas the dream-thoughts were concerned with the complications and conflicts arising between colleagues from their professional obligations, and further with the charge that I was in the habit of sacrificing too much for the sake of my hobbies. The element ‘botanical’ had no place whatever in this core of the dream-thoughts, unless it was loosely connected with it by an antithesis - the fact that botany never had a place among my favourite studies. In my patient’s Sappho dream the central position was occupied by climbing up and down and being up above and down below; the dream-thoughts, however, dealt with the dangers of sexual relations with people of an inferior social class. So that only a single element of the dream-thoughts seems to have found its way into the dream-content, though that element was expanded to a disproportionate extent. Similarly, in the dream of the may-beetles, the topic of which was the relations of sexuality to cruelty, it is true that the factor of cruelty emerged in the dream-content; but it did so in another connection and without any mention of sexuality, that is to say, divorced from its context and consequently transformed into something extraneous. Once again, in my dream about my uncle, the fair beard which formed its centre-point seems to have had no connection in its meaning with my ambitious wishes which, as we saw, were the core of the dream-thoughts. Dreams such as these give a justifiable impression of ‘displacement.’ In complete contrast to these examples, we can see that in the dream of Irma’s injection the different elements were able to retain, during the process of constructing the dream, the approximate place which they occupied in the dream-thoughts. This further relation between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content, wholly variable as it is in its sense or direction, is calculated at first to create astonishment. If we are considering a psychical process in normal life and find that one out of its several component ideas has been picked out and has acquired a special degree of vividness in consciousness, we usually regard this effect as evidence that a specially high amount of psychical value - some particular degree of interest - attaches to this predominant idea. But we now discover that, in the case of the different elements of the dream-thoughts, a value of this kind does not persist or is disregarded in the process of dream-formation. There is never any doubt as to which of the elements of the dream-thoughts have the highest psychical value, we learn that by direct judgement. In the course of the formation of a dream these essential elements, charged, as they are, with intense interest, may be treated as though they were of small value, and their place may be taken in the dream by other elements, of whose small value in the dream-thoughts there can be no question. At first sight it looks as though no attention whatever is paid to the psychical intensity¹ of the various ideas in making the choice among them for the dream, and as though the only thing considered is the greater or less degree of multiplicity of their determination. What appears in dreams, we might suppose, is not what is important in the dream-thoughts but what occurs in them several times over. But this hypothesis does not greatly assist our understanding of dream-formation, since from the nature of things it seems clear that the two factors of multiple determination and inherent psychical value must necessarily operate in the same sense. The ideas which are most important among the dream-thoughts will almost certainly be those which occur most often in them, since the different dream-thoughts will, as it were, radiate out from them. Nevertheless a dream can reject elements which are thus both highly stressed in themselves and reinforced from many directions, and can select for its content other elements which possess only the second of these attributes.

 

¹ Psychical intensity or value or the degree of interest of an idea is of course to be distinguished from sensory intensity or the intensity of the image presented.

 

In order to solve this difficulty we shall make use of another impression derived from our enquiry into the overdetermination of the dream-content. Perhaps some of those who have read that enquiry may already have formed an independent conclusion that the overdetermination of the elements of dreams is no very important discovery, since it is a self-evident one. For in analysis we start out from the dream-elements and note down all the associations which lead off from them; so that there is nothing surprising in the fact that in the thought-material arrived at in this way we come across these same elements with peculiar frequency. I cannot accept this objection; but I will myself put into words something that sounds not unlike it. Among the thoughts that analysis brings to light are many which are relatively remote from the kernel of the dream and which look like artificial interpolations made for some particular purpose. That purpose is easy to divine. It is precisely they that constitute a connection, often a forced and far-fetched one, between the dream-content and the dream thoughts; and if these elements were weeded out of the analysis the result would often be that the component parts of the dream-content would be left not only without overdetermination but without any satisfactory determination at all. We shall be led to conclude that the multiple determination which decides what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dream-construction but is often the secondary product of a psychical force which is still unknown to us. Nevertheless multiple determination must be of importance in choosing what particular elements shall enter a dream, since we can see that a considerable expenditure of effort is used to bring it about in cases where it does not arise from the dream-material unassisted.

 

It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the dream-work a psychical force is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical value of their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their way into the dream-content. If that is so, a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation, and it is as a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the dream thoughts comes about. The process which we are here presuming is nothing less than the essential portion of the dream work; and it deserves to be described as ‘dream-displacement.’ Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams.

 

Nor do I think we shall have any difficulty in recognizing the psychical force which manifests itself in the facts of dream-displacement. The consequence of the displacement is that the dream-content no longer resembles the core of the dream-thoughts and that the dream gives no more than a distortion of the dream-wish which exists in the unconscious. But we are already familiar with dream-distortion. We traced it back to the censorship which is exercised by one psychical agency in the mind over another. Dream-displacement is one of the chief methods by which that distortion is achieved. Is fecit cui profuit. We may assume, then, that dream-displacement comes about through the influence of the same censorship - that is, the censorship of endopsychic defence.¹

 

The question of the interplay of these factors - of displacement, condensation and overdetermination - in the construction of dreams, and the question which is a dominant factor and which a subordinate one - all of this we shall leave aside for later investigation. But we can state provisionally a second condition which must be satisfied by those elements of the dream-thoughts which make their way into the dream: they must escape the censorship imposed by resistance. And henceforward in interpreting dreams we shall take dream-displacement into account as an undeniable fact.

 

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Since I may say that the kernel of my theory of dreams lies in my derivation of dream-distortion from the censorship, I will here insert the last part of a story from Phantasien ein Realisten by ‘Lynkeus’ (Vienna, 2nd edition, 1900), in which I have found this principal feature of my theory once more expounded.

‘About a man who has the remarkable attribute of never dreaming nonsense...

‘"This splendid gift of yours, for dreaming as though you were waking, is a consequence of your virtue, of your kindness, your sense of justice, and your love of truth; it is the moral serenity of your nature which makes me understand all about you."

 

‘"But when I think the matter over properly," replied the other, "I almost believe that everyone is made like me, and that no one at all ever dreams nonsense. Any dream which one can remember clearly enough to describe it afterwards - any dream, that is to say, which is not a fever-dream - must always make sense, and it cannot possibly be otherwise. For things that were mutually contradictory could not group themselves into a single whole. The fact that time and space are often thrown into confusion does not affect the true content of the dream, since no doubt neither of them are of significance for its real essence. We often do the same thing in waking life. Only think of fairy tales and of the many daring products of the imagination, which are full of meaning and of which only a man without intelligence could say: ‘This is nonsense, for it’s impossible.’"

 

‘"If only one always knew how to interpret dreams in the right way, as you have just done with mine!" said his friend.

‘"That is certainly no easy task; but with a little attention on the part of the dreamer himself it should no doubt always succeed. -You ask why it is that for the most part it does not succeed? In you other people there seems always to be something that lies concealed in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and higher sense, a certain secret quality in your being which it is hard to follow. And that is why your dreams so often seem to be without meaning or even to be nonsense. But in the deepest sense this is not in the least so; indeed, it cannot be so at all - for it is always the same man, whether he is awake or dreaming."'

 

(B)THE MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN DREAMS

 

In the process of transforming the latent thoughts into the manifest content of a dream we have found two factors at work: dream-condensation and dream-displacement. As we continue our investigation we shall, in addition to these, come across two further determinants which exercise an undoubted influence on the choice of the material which is to find access to the dream.

But first, even at the risk of appearing to bring our progress to a halt, I should like to take a preliminary glance at the processes involved in carrying out the interpretation of a dream. I cannot disguise from myself that the easiest way of making those processes clear and of defending their trustworthiness against criticism would be to take some particular dream as a sample, go through its interpretation (just as I have done with the dream of Irma’s injection in my second chapter), and then collect the dream-thoughts which I have discovered and so on to reconstruct from them the process by which the dream was formed - in other words, to complete a dream-analysis by a dream-synthesis. I have in fact carried out that task for my own instruction on several specimens; but I cannot reproduce them here, since I am forbidden to do so for reasons connected with the nature of the psychical material involved - reasons which are of many kinds and which will be accepted as valid by any reasonable person. Such considerations interfered less in the analysis of dreams, since an analysis could be incomplete and nevertheless retain its value, even though it penetrated only a small way into the texture of the dream. But in the case of the synthesis of a dream I do not see how it can be convincing unless it is complete. I could only give a complete synthesis of dreams dreamt by people unknown to the reading public. Since, however, this condition is fulfilled only by my patients, who are neurotics, I must postpone this part of my exposition of the subject till I am able - in another volume - to carry the psychological elucidation of neuroses to a point at which it can make contact with our present topic.¹

 

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Since writing the above words, I have published a complete analysis and synthesis of two dreams in my ‘Fragment of the Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’. [Added 1914:] Otto Rank’s analysis, ‘Ein Traum, der sich selbst deutet’, deserves mention as the most complete interpretation that has been published of a dream of considerable length.

 

My attempts at building up dreams by synthesis from the dream-thoughts have taught me that the material which emerges in the course of interpretation is not all of the same value. One part of it is made up of the essential dream-thoughts - those, that is, which completely replace the dream, and which, if there were no censorship of dreams, would be sufficient in themselves to replace it. The other part of the material is usually to be regarded as of less importance. Nor is it possible to support the view that all the thoughts of this second kind had a share in the formation of the dream. On the contrary, there may be associations among them which relate to events that occurred after the dream, between the times of dreaming and interpreting. This part of the material includes all the connecting paths that led from the manifest dream-content to the latent dream-thoughts, as well as the intermediate and linking associations by means of which, in the course of the process of interpretation, we came to discover these connecting paths.

 

We are here interested only in the essential dream-thoughts. These usually emerge as a complex of thoughts and memories of the of the most intricate possible structure, with all the attributes of the trains of thought familiar to us in waking life. They are not infrequently trains of thought starting out from more than one centre, though having points of contact. Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart, linked with it by antithetical association.




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