Autobiographical note 26 страница

Dreams are, of course, a mass of these composite structures. I have given some examples of them in dreams that I have already analysed; and I will now add a few more. In the dream reported below on p. 816 ff., which describes the course of the patient’s life ‘in the language of flowers’ the dream-ego held a blossoming branch in her hand which, as we have seen, stood both for innocence and for sexual sinfulness. The branch, owing to the way in which the blossoms were placed on it, also reminded the dreamer of cherry-blossom; the blossoms themselves, regarded individually, were camellias, and moreover the general impression was of an exotic growth. The common factor among the elements of this composite structure was shown by the dream-thoughts. The blossoming branch was composed of allusions to gifts made to her in order to win, or attempt to win, her favour. Thus she had been given cherries in her childhood and, later in life, a camellia-plant; while ‘exotic’ was an allusion to a much-travelled naturalist who had tried to win her favour with a flower-drawing. - Another of my women patients produced in one of her dreams a thing that was intermediate between a bathing-hut at the seaside, an outside closet in the country and an attic in a town house. The first two elements have in common a connection with people naked and undressed; and their combination with the third element leads to the conclusion that (in her childhood) an attic had also been a scene of undressing. - Another dreamer, a man, produced a composite locality out of two places where ‘treatments’ are carried out: one of them being my consulting-room and the other the place of entertainment where he had first made his wife’s acquaintance. -A girl dreamt, after her elder brother had promised to give her a feast of caviare, that this same brother’s legs were covered all over with black grains of caviare. The element of ‘contagion’ (in the moral sense) and a recollection of a rash in her childhood, which had covered her legs all over with red spots, instead of black ones, had been combined with the grains of caviare into a new concept - namely the concept of ‘

what she had got from her brother.’ In this dream, as in others, parts of the human body were treated like objects. - In a dream recorded by Ferenczi, a composite image occurred was made up from the figure of a doctor

and of a horse and was also dressed in a nightshirt. The element common to these three components was arrived at in the analysis after the woman-patient had recognized that the night-shirt was an allusion to her father in a scene from her childhood. In all three cases it was a question of an object of her sexual curiosity. When she was a child she had often been taken by her nurse to a military stud-farm where she had ample opportunities of gratifying what was at that time her still uninhibited curiosity.

I have asserted above that dreams have no means of expressing the relation of a contradiction, a contrary or a ‘no’. I shall now proceed to give a first denial of this assertion One class of cases which can be comprised under the heading of ‘contraries’ are, as we have seen, simply represented by identification - cases, that is, in which the idea of an exchange or substitution can be brought into connection with the contrast. I have given a number of instances of this. Another class of contraries in the dream-thoughts, falling into a category which may be described as ‘contrariwise’ or ‘just the reverse’, find their way into dreams in the following remarkable fashion, which almost deserves to be described as a joke. The ‘just the reverse’ is not itself represented in the dream-content, but reveals its presence in the material through the fact that some piece of the dream-content, which has already been constructed and happens (for some other reason) to be adjacent to it, is - as it were by an afterthought - turned round the other way. The process is more easily illustrated than described. In the interesting ‘Up and Down’ dream (p. 759 ff.) the representation of the climbing in the dream was the reverse of what it was in its prototype in the dream-thoughts - that is, in the introductory scene from Daudet’s Sappho: in the dream the climbing was difficult at first but easier later, while in the Daudet scene it was easy at first but more and more difficult later. Further, the ‘up above’ and ‘down below’ in the dreamer’s relation to his brother were represented the other way round in the dream. This pointed to the presence of a reversed or contrary relation between two pieces of the material in the dream-thoughts; and we found it in the dreamer’s childhood phantasy of being carried by his wet-nurse, which was the reverse of the situation in the novel, where the hero was carrying his mistress. So too in my dream of Goethe’s attack on Herr M. (see below, p. 886 ff.) there is a similar ‘just the reverse’ which has to be put straight before the dream can be successfully interpreted. In the dream Goethe made an attack on a young man, Herr M.; in the real situation contained in the dream-thoughts a man of importance, my friend, had been attacked by an unknown young writer. In the dream I based a calculation on the date of Goethe’s death; in reality the calculation had been made from the year of the paralytic patient’s birth. The thought which turned out to be the decisive one in the dream-thoughts was a contradiction of the idea that Goethe should be treated as though he were a lunatic. ‘Just the reverse’, said the dream, ‘if you don’t understand the book, it’s you that are feeble-minded, and not the author.’ I think, moreover, that all these dreams of turning things round the other way include a reference to the contemptuous implications of the idea of ‘turning one’s back on something.’ (E.g. the dreamer’s turning round in relation to his brother in the Sappho dream.) It is remarkable to observe, moreover, how frequently reversal is employed precisely in dreams arising from repressed homosexual impulses.

Incidentally, reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of representation most favoured by the dream-work and one which is capable of employment in the most diverse directions. It serves in the first place to give expression to the fulfilment of a wish in reference to some particular element of the dream-thoughts. ‘If only it had been the other way round!’ This is often the best way of expressing the ego’s reaction to a disagreeable fragment of memory. Again, reversal is of quite special use as a help to the censorship, for it produces a mass of distortion in the material which is to be represented, and this has a positively paralysing effect, to begin with, on any attempt at understanding the dream. For that reason, if a dream obstinately declines to reveal its meaning, it is always worth while to see the effect of reversing some particular elements in its manifest content, after which the whole situation often becomes immediately clear.

And, apart from the reversal of subject-matter, chronological reversal must not be overlooked. Quite a common technique of dream-distortion consists in representing the outcome of an event or the conclusion of a train of thought at the beginning of a dream and of placing at its end the premises on which the conclusion was based or the causes which led to the event. Anyone who fails to bear in mind this technical method adopted by dream-distortion will be quite at a loss when confronted with the task of interpreting a dream.¹

In some instances, indeed, it is only possible to arrive at the meaning of a dream after one has carried out quite a number of reversals of its content in various respects. For instance, in the case of a young obsessional neurotic, there lay concealed behind one of his dreams the memory of a death-wish dating from his childhood and directed against his father, of whom he had been afraid. Here is the text of the dream: His father was scolding him for coming home so late. The context in which the dream occurred in the psycho-analytic treatment and the dreamer’s associations showed, however, that the original wording must have been that he was angry with his father, and that in his view his father always came home too early (i.e. too soon). He would have preferred it if his father had not come home at all, and this was the same thing as a death-wish against his father. (See p. 733 f.) For as a small boy, during his father’s temporary absence, he had been guilty of an act of sexual aggression against someone, and as a punishment had been threatened in these words: ‘Just you wait till your father comes back!’

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Hysterical attacks sometimes make use of the same kind of chronological reversal in order to disguise their meaning from observers. For instance, a hysterical girl needed to represent something in the nature of a brief romance in one of her attacks - a romance of which she had had a phantasy in her unconscious after an encounter with someone on the suburban railway. She imagined how the man had been attracted by the beauty of her foot and had spoken to her while she was reading; whereupon she had gone off with him and had had a passionate love-scene. Her attack began with a representation of this love-scene by convulsive twitching of her body, accompanied by movements of her lips to represent kissing and tightening of her arms to represent embracing. She then hurried into the next room, sat down on a chair, raised her skirt so as to show her foot, pretended to be reading a book and spoke to me (that is, answered me). - [Added 1914:] Cf. in this connection what Artemidorus says: ‘In interpreting the images seen in dreams one must sometimes follow them from the beginning to the end and sometimes from the end to the beginning...’

If we wish to pursue our study of the relations between dream-content and dream-thoughts further, the best plan will be to take dreams themselves as our point of departure and consider what certain formal characteristics of the method of representation in dreams signify in relation to the thoughts underlying them. Most prominent among these formal characteristics, which cannot fail to impress us in dreams, are the differences in sensory intensity between particular dream-images and in the distinctness of particular parts of dreams or of whole dreams as compared with one another.

The differences in intensity between particular dream-images cover the whole range extending between a sharpness of definition which we feel inclined, no doubt unjustifiably, to regard as greater than that of reality and an irritating vagueness which we declare characteristic of dreams because it is not completely comparable to any degree of indistinctness which we ever perceive in real objects. Furthermore we usually describe an impression which we have of an indistinct object in a dream as ‘fleeting’, while we feel that those dream-images which are more distinct have been perceived for a considerable length of time. The question now arises what it is in the material of the dream-thoughts that determines these differences in the vividness of particular pieces of the content of a dream.

We must begin by countering certain expectations which almost inevitably present themselves. Since the material of a dream may include real sensations experienced during sleep, it will probably be presumed that these, or the elements in the dream derived from them, are given prominence in the dream content by appearing with special intensity; or, conversely, that whatever is very specially vivid in a dream can be traced back to real sensations during sleep. In my experience, however, this has never been confirmed. It is not the case that the elements of a dream which are derivatives of real impressions during sleep (i.e. of nervous stimuli) are distinguished by their vividness from other elements which arise from memories. The factor of reality counts for nothing in determining the intensity of dream images.

Again, it might be expected that the sensory intensity (that is, the vividness) of particular dream-images would be related to the psychical intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts corresponding to them. In the latter, psychical intensity coincides with psychical value: the most intense elements are also the most important ones - those which form the centre-point of the dream-thoughts. We know, it is true, that these are precisely elements which, on account of the censorship, cannot as a rule make their way into the content of the dream; nevertheless, it might well be that their immediate derivatives which represent them in the dream might bear a higher degree of intensity, without necessarily on that account forming the centre of the dream. But this expectation too is disappointed by a comparative study of dreams and the material from which they are derived. The intensity of the elements in the one has no relation to the intensity of the elements in the other: the fact is that a complete ‘transvaluation of all psychical values’ takes place between the material of the dream-thoughts and the dream. A direct derivative of what occupies a dominating position in the dream-thoughts can often only be discovered precisely in some transitory element of the dream which is quite overshadowed by more powerful images.

The intensity of the elements of a dream turns out to be determined otherwise - and by two independent factors. In the first place, it is easy to see that the elements by which the wish-fulfilment is expressed are represented with special intensity. And in the second place, analysis shows that the most vivid elements of a dream are the starting-point of the most numerous trains of thought - that the most vivid elements are also those with the most numerous determinants. We shall not be altering the sense of this empirically based assertion if we put it in these terms: the greatest intensity is shown by those elements of a dream on whose formation the greatest amount of condensation has been expended. We may expect that it will eventually turn out to be possible to express this determinant and the other (namely relation to the wish-fulfilment) in a single formula.

The problem with which I have just dealt - the causes of the greater or less intensity or clarity of particular elements of a dream - is not to be confounded with another problem, which relates to the varying clarity of whole dreams or sections of dreams. In the former case clarity is contrasted with vagueness, but in the latter case it is contrasted with confusion. Nevertheless it cannot be doubted that the increase and decrease of the qualities in the two scales run parallel. A section of a dream which strikes us as perspicuous usually contains intense elements; a dream which is obscure, on the other hand, is composed of elements of small intensity. Yet the problem presented by the scale which runs from what is apparently clear to what is obscure and confused is far more complicated than that of the varying degrees of vividness of dream-elements. Indeed, for reasons which will appear later, the former problem cannot yet be discussed.

In a few cases we find to our surprise that the impression of clarity or indistinctness given by a dream has no connection at all with the make-up of the dream itself but arises from the material of the dream-thoughts and is a constituent of it. Thus I remember a dream of mine which struck me when I woke up as being so particularly well-constructed, flawless and clear that, while I was still half-dazed with sleep, I thought of introducing a new category of dreams which were not subject to the mechanisms of condensation and displacement but were to be described as ‘phantasies during sleep.’ Closer examination proved that this rarity among dreams showed the same gaps and flaws in its structure as any other; and for that reason I dropped the category of ‘dream-phantasies.’ ¹ The content of the dream, when it was arrived at, represented me as laying before my friend a difficult and long-sought theory of bisexuality; and the wish-fulfilling power of the dream was responsible for our regarding this theory (which, incidentally, was not given in the dream) as clear and flawless. Thus what I had taken to be a judgement on the completed dream was actually a part, and indeed the essential part, of the dream-content. The dream-work had in this case encroached, as it were, upon my first waking thoughts and had conveyed to me as a judgement upon the dream the part of the material of the dream-thoughts which it had not succeeded in representing accurately in the dream. I once came across a precise counterpart to this in a woman patient’s dream during analysis. To begin with she refused altogether to tell it me, ‘because it was so indistinct and muddled’. At length, protesting repeatedly that she felt no certainty that her account was correct, she informed me that several people had come into the dream - she herself, her husband and her father - and that it was as though she had not known whether her husband was her father, or who her father was, or something of that sort. This dream, taken in conjunction with her associations during the analytic session, showed beyond a doubt that it was a question of the somewhat commonplace story of a servant-girl who was obliged to confess that she was expecting a baby but was in doubts as to ‘who the (baby’s) father really was’. ² Thus here again the lack of clarity shown by the dream was a part of the material which instigated the dream: part of this material, that is, was represented in the form of the dream. The form of a dream, or the form in which it is dreamt is used with quite surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject-matter.

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Whether rightly I am now uncertain.

² Her accompanying hysterical symptoms were amenorrhoea and great depression (which was this patient’s chief symptom).

Glosses on a dream, or apparently innocent comments on it, often serve to disguise a portion of what has been dreamt in the subtlest fashion, though in fact betraying it. For instance, a dreamer remarked that at one point ‘the dream had been wiped away’; and the analysis led to an infantile recollection of his listening to someone wiping himself after defaecating. Or here is another example which deserves to be recorded in detail. A young man had a very clear dream which reminded him of some phantasies of his boyhood that had remained conscious. He dreamt that it was evening and that he was in a hotel at a summer resort. He mistook the number of his room and went into one in which an elderly lady and her two daughters were undressing and going to bed. He proceeded: ‘Here there are some gaps in the dream; there’s something missing. Finally there was a man in the room who tried to throw me out, and I had to have a struggle with him.’ He made vain endeavours to recall the gist and drift of the boyish phantasy to which the dream was evidently alluding; until at last the truth emerged that what he was in search of was already in his possession in his remark about the obscure part of the dream. The ‘gaps’ were the genital apertures of the women who were going to bed; and ‘there’s something missing’ described the principal feature of the female genitalia. When he was young he had had a consuming curiosity to see a woman’s genitals and had been inclined to hold to the infantile sexual theory according to which women have male organs.

An analogous recollection of another dreamer assumed a very similar shape. He dreamt as follows: ‘I was going into the Volkgarten Restaurant with Fräulein K..... then came an obscure patch, an interruption..., then I found myself in the salon of a brothel, where I saw two or three women, one of them in her chemise and drawers.’

ANALYSIS. - Fräulein K. was the daughter of his former chief, and, as he himself admitted, a substitute sister of his own. He had seldom had an opportunity of talking to her, but they once had a conversation in which ‘it was just as though we had become aware of our sex, it was as though I were to say: "I’m a man and you’re a woman."' He had only once been inside the restaurant in question, with his brother-in-law’s sister, a girl who meant nothing at all to him. Another time he had gone with a group of three ladies as far as the entrance of the same restaurant. These ladies were his sister, his sister-in-law and the brother-in-law’s sister who has just been mentioned. All of them were highly indifferent to him, but all three fell into the class of ‘sister.’ He had only seldom visited a brothel - only two or three times in his life.

The interpretation was based on the ‘obscure patch’ and the ‘interruption’ in the dream, and put forward the view that in his boyish curiosity he had occasionally, though only seldom, inspected the genitals of a sister who was a few years his junior. Some days later he had a conscious recollection of the misdeed alluded to by the dream.

803 The content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole; the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number of those sections - all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of information arising from the latent dream-thoughts. In interpreting dreams consisting of several main sections or, in general, dreams occurring during the same night, the possibility should not be overlooked that separate and successive dreams of this kind may have the same meaning, and may be giving expression to the same impulses in different material. If so, the first of these homologous dreams to occur is often the more distorted and timid, while the succeeding one will be more confident and distinct.

Pharaoh’s dreams in the Bible of the kine and the ears of corn, which were interpreted by Joseph, were of this kind. They are reported more fully by Josephus (Ancient History of the Jews, Book 2, Chapter 5) than in the Bible. After the King had related his first dream, he said: ‘After I had seen this vision, I awaked out of my sleep; and, being in disorder, and considering with myself what this appearance should be, I fell asleep again, and saw another dream, more wonderful than the foregoing, which did more affright and disturb me...’ After hearing the King’s account of the dream, Joseph replied: ‘This dream, O King, although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same event...’

In his ‘Contribution to the Psychology of Rumour’, Jung (1910b) describes how the disguised erotic dream of a school-girl was understood by her school-friends without any interpreting and how it was further elaborated and modified. He remarks in connection with one of these dream stories: ‘The final thought in a long series of dream-images contains precisely what the first image in the series had attempted to portray. The censorship keeps the complex at a distance as long as possible by a succession of fresh symbolic screens, displacements, innocent disguises, etc.’ (Ibid., 87.) Scherner (1861, 166) was well acquainted with this peculiarity of the method of representation in dreams and describes it, in connection with his theory of organic stimuli, as a special law: ‘Lastly, however, in all symbolic dream-structures which arise from particular nervous stimuli, the imagination observes a general law: at the beginning of a dream it depicts the object from which the stimulus arises only by the remotest and most inexact allusions, but at the end, when the pictorial effusion has exhausted itself, it nakedly presents the stimulus itself, or, as the case may be, the organ concerned or the function of that organ, and therewith the dream, having designated its actual organic cause, achieves its end...’

Otto Rank (1910) has produced a neat confirmation of this law of Scherner’s. A girl’s dream reported by him was composed of two separate dreams dreamt, with an interval between them, during the same night, the second of which ended with an orgasm. It was possible to carry out a detailed interpretation of this second dream even without many contributions from the dreamer; and the number of connections between the contents of the two dreams made it possible to see that the first dream represented in a more timid fashion the same thing as the second. So that the second, the dream with the orgasm, helped towards the complete explanation of the first. Rank rightly bases upon this example a discussion of the general significance of dreams of orgasm or emission for the theory of dreaming.

Nevertheless in my experience it is only rarely that one is in a position to interpret the clarity or confusion of a dream by the presence of certainty or doubt in its material. Later on I shall have to disclose a factor in dream-formation which I have not yet mentioned and which exercises the determining influence upon the scale of these qualities in any particular dream.

Sometimes, in a dream in which the same situation and setting have persisted for some time, an interruption will occur which is described in these words: ‘But then it was as though at the same time it was another place, and there such and such a thing happened.’ After a while the main thread of the dream may be resumed, and what interrupted it turns out to be a subordinate clause in the dream-material - an interpolated thought. A conditional in the dream-thoughts has been represented in the dream by simultaneity: ‘if’ has become ‘when’.

What is the meaning of the sensation of inhibited movement which appears so commonly in dreams and verges so closely upon anxiety? One tries to move forward but finds oneself glued to the spot, or one tries to reach something but is held up by a series of obstacles. A train is on the point of departure but one is unable to catch it. One raises one’s hand to avenge an insult but finds it powerless and so forth. We have already met with this sensation in dreams of exhibiting, but have not as yet made any serious attempt to interpret it. An easy but insufficient answer would be to say that motor paralysis prevails in sleep and that we become aware of it in the sensation we are discussing. But it may be asked why in that case we are not perpetually dreaming of these inhibited movements; and it is reasonable to suppose that this sensation, though one which can be summoned up at any moment during sleep, serves to facilitate some particular kind of representation, and is only aroused when the material of the dream-thoughts needs to be represented in that way.

This ‘not being able to do anything’ does not always appear in dreams as a sensation but is sometimes simply a part of the content of the dream. A case of this sort seems to me particularly well qualified to throw light on the meaning of this feature of dreaming. Here is an abridged version of a dream in which I was apparently charged with dishonesty. The place was a mixture of a private sanatorium and several other institutions. A man-servant appeared to summon me to an examination. I knew in the dream that something had been missed and that the examination was due to a suspicion that I had appropriated the missing article. (The analysis showed that the examination was to be taken in two senses and included a medical examination.) Conscious of my innocence and of the fact that I held the position of a consultant in the establishment, I accompanied the servant quietly. At the door we were met by another servant who said, pointing to me: ‘Why have you brought him? He’s a respectable person.’ I then went, unattended, into a large hall, with machines standing in it, which reminded me of an Inferno with its hellish instruments of punishment. Stretched out on one apparatus I saw one of my colleagues, who had every reason to take some notice of me; but he paid no attention. I was then told I could go. But I could not find my hat and could not go after all.

The wish-fulfilment of the dream evidently lay in my being recognized as an honest man and told I could go. There must therefore have been all kinds of material in the dream-thoughts containing a contradiction of this. That I could go was a sign of my absolution. If therefore something happened at the end of the dream which prevented my going, it seems plausible to suppose that the suppressed material containing the contradiction was making itself felt at that point. My not being able to find my hat meant accordingly: ‘After all you’re not an honest man.’ Thus the ‘not being able to do something’ in this dream was a way of expressing a contradiction - a ‘no’- so that my earlier statement that dreams cannot express a ‘no’ requires correction.¹

In other dreams, in which the ‘not carrying out’ of a movement occurs as a sensation and not simply as a situation, the sensation of the inhibition of a movement gives a more forcible expression to the same contradiction - it expresses a volition which is opposed by a counter-volition. Thus the sensation of the inhibition of a movement represents a conflict of will. We shall learn later that the motor paralysis accompanying sleep is precisely one of the fundamental determinants of the psychical process during dreaming. Now an impulse transmitted along the motor paths is nothing other than a volition, and the fact of our being so certain that we shall feel that impulse inhibited during sleep is what makes the whole process so admirably suited for representing an act of volition and a ‘no’ which opposes it. It is also easy to see, on my explanation of anxiety, why the sensation of an inhibition of will approximates so closely to anxiety and is so often linked with it in dreams. Anxiety is a libidinal impulse which has its origin in the unconscious and is inhibited by the preconscious.² When, therefore, the sensation of inhibition is linked with anxiety in a dream, it must be a question of an act of volition which was at one time capable of generating libido - that is, it must be a question of a sexual impulse.

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