Autobiographical note 27 страница

¹ In the complete analysis there was a reference to an event in my childhood, reached by the following chain of association. ‘Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan, der Mohr kahn gehen.’ [‘The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go.’] Then came a facetious conundrum: ‘How old was the Moor when he had done his duty?’ - ‘One year old, because then he could go [‘gehen’ - both ‘to go’ and ‘ to walk’].’ (It appears that I came into the world with such a tangle of black hair that my young mother declared I was a little Moor.) - My not being able to find my hat was an occurrence from waking life which was used in more than one sense. Our housemaid, who was a genius at putting things away, had hidden it. -The end of this dream also concealed a rejection of some melancholy thoughts about death: ‘I am far from having done my duty, so I must not go yet.’ - Birth and death were dealt with in it, just as they had been in the dream of Goethe and the paralytic patient, which I had dreamt a short time before. (See pp. 797, 886 ff.)

² [Footnote added 1930:] In the light of later knowledge this statement can no longer stand. I shall deal elsewhere (see below) with the meaning and psychical significance of the judgement which often turns up in dreams expressed in the phrase ‘after all this is only a dream’. Here I will merely say in anticipation that it is intended to detract from the importance of what is being dreamt. The interesting and allied problem, as to what is meant when some of the content of a dream is described in the dream itself as ‘dreamt’ - the enigma of the ‘dream within a dream’ - has been solved in a similar sense by Stekel, who has analysed some convincing examples. The intention is, once again, to detract from the importance of what is ‘dreamt’ in the dream, to rob it of its reality. What is dreamt in a dream after waking from the ‘dream within a dream’ is what the dream-wish seeks to put in the place of an obliterated reality. It is safe to suppose, therefore, that what has been ‘dreamt’ in the dream is a representation of the reality, the true recollection, while the continuation of the dream, on the contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes. To include something in a ‘dream within a dream’ is thus equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation of the reality of the event - the strongest affirmation of it. The dream-work makes use of dreaming as a form of repudiation, and so confirms the discovery that dreams are wish-fulfilments.

(D) CONSIDERATIONS OF REPRESENTABILITY

We have been occupied so far with investigating the means by which dreams represent the relations between the dream-thoughts. In the course of this investigation, however, we have more than once touched upon the further topic of the general nature of the modifications which the material of the dream-thoughts undergoes for the purpose of the formation of a dream. We have learnt that that material, stripped to a large extent of its relations, is submitted to a process of compression, while at the same time displacements of intensity between its elements necessarily bring about a psychical transvaluation of the material. The displacements we have hitherto considered turned out to consist in the replacing of some one particular idea by another in some way closely associated with it, and they were used to facilitate condensation in so far as, by their means, instead of two elements, a single common element intermediate between them found its way into the dream. We have not yet referred to any other sort of displacement. Analyses show us, however, that another sort exists and that it reveals itself in a change in the verbal expression of the thoughts concerned. In both cases there is a displacement along a chain of associations; but a process of such a kind can occur in various psychical spheres, and the outcome of the displacement may in one case be that one element is replaced by another, while the outcome in another case may be that a single element has its verbal form replaced by another.

This second species of displacement which occurs in dream-formation is not only of great theoretical interest but is also specially well calculated to explain the appearance of fantastic absurdity in which dreams are disguised. The direction taken by the displacement usually results in a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought being exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one. The advantage, and accordingly the purpose, of such a change jumps to the eyes. A thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of a dream, a thing that is capable of being represented: it can be introduced into a situation in which abstract expressions offer the same kind of difficulties to representation in dreams as a political leading article in a newspaper would offer to an illustrator. But not only representability, but the interests of condensation and the censorship as well can be the gainers from this exchange. A dream-thought is unusable so long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but when once it has been transformed into pictorial language, contrasts and identifications of the kind which the dream-work requires, and which it creates if they are not already present, can be established more easily than before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the material underlying the dream. This is so because in every language concrete terms, in consequence of the history of their development, are richer in associations than conceptual ones. We may suppose that a good part of the intermediate work done during the formation of a dream, which seeks to reduce the dispersed dream-thoughts to the most succinct and unified expression possible, proceeds along the line of finding appropriate verbal transformations for the individual thoughts. Any one thought, whose form of expression may happen to be fixed for other reasons, will operate in a determinant and selective manner on the possible forms of expression allotted to the other thoughts, and it may do so, perhaps, from the very start - as is the case in writing a poem. If a poem is to be written in rhymes, the second line of a couplet is limited by two conditions: it must express an appropriate meaning, and the expression of that meaning must rhyme with the first line. No doubt the best poem will be one in which we fail to notice the intention of finding a rhyme, and in which the two thoughts have, by mutual influence, chosen from the very start a verbal expression which will allow a rhyme to emerge with only slight subsequent adjustment.

In a few instances a change of expression of this kind assists dream-condensation even more directly, by finding a form of words which owing to its ambiguity is able to give expression to more than one of the dream-thoughts. In this way the whole domain of verbal wit is put at the disposal of the dream-work. There is no need to be astonished at the part played by words in dream-formation. Words, since they are the nodal point of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to ambiguity; and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and phobias), no less than dreams, make unashamed use of the advantages thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and disguise.¹ It is easy to show that dream-distortion too profits from displacement of expression. If one ambiguous word is used instead of two unambiguous ones the result is misleading; and if our everyday, sober method of expression is replaced by a pictorial one, our understanding is brought to a halt, particularly since a dream never tells us whether its elements are to be interpreted literally or in a figurative sense or whether they are to be connected with the material of the dream-thoughts directly or through the intermediary of some interpolated phraseology. In interpreting any dream-element it is in general doubtful

(a) whether it is to be taken in a positive or negative sense (as an antithetic relation),

(b) whether it is to be interpreted historically (as a recollection),

(c) whether it is to be interpreted symbolically, or

(d) whether its interpretation is to depend on its wording.

Yet, in spite of all this ambiguity, it is fair to say that the productions of the dream-work, which, it must be remembered, are not made with the intention of being understood, present no greater difficulties to their translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who seek to read them.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] See my volume on jokes (1905c) and the discussion there of the use of ‘verbal bridges’ in the solution of neurotic symptoms.

I have already given several examples of representations in dreams which are only held together by the ambiguity of their wording. (For instance, ‘She opened her mouth properly’ in the dream of Irma’s injection and ‘I could not go after all’ in the dream which I last quoted.) I will now record a dream in which a considerable part was played by the turning of abstract thought into pictures. The distinction between dream-interpretation of this kind and interpretation by means of symbolism can still be drawn quite sharply. In the case of symbolic dream-interpretation the key to the symbolization is arbitrarily chosen by the interpreter; whereas in our cases of verbal disguise the keys are generally known and laid down by firmly established linguistic usage. If one has the right idea at one’s disposal at the right moment, one can solve dreams of this kind wholly or in part even independently of information from the dreamer.

A lady of my acquaintance had the following dream: She was at the Opera. A Wagner opera was being performed, and had lasted till a quarter to eight in the morning. There were tables set out in the stalls, at which people were eating and drinking. Her cousin, who had just got back from his honeymoon, was sitting at one of the tables with his young wife, and an aristocrat was sitting beside them. Her cousin’s wife, so it appeared, had brought him back with her from the honeymoon, quite openly, just as one might bring back a hat. In the middle of the stalls there was a high tower, which had a platform on top of it surrounded by an iron railing. High up at the top was the conductor, who had the features of Hans Richter. He kept running round the railing, and was perspiring violently; and from that position he was conducting the orchestra which was grouped about the base of the tower. She herself was sitting in a box with a woman friend (whom I knew). Her younger sister wanted to hand her up a large lump of coal from the stalls, on the ground that she had not known it would be so long, and must be simply freezing by now. (As though the boxes required to be heated during the long performance.)

Even though the dream was well focused on a single situation, yet in other respects it was sufficiently senseless: the tower in the middle of the stalls, for instance, with the conductor directing the orchestra from the top of it! And above all the coal that her sister handed up to her! I deliberately refrained from asking for an analysis of the dream. But since I had some knowledge of the dreamer’s personal relations, I was able to interpret certain pieces of it independently of her. I knew she had had a great deal of sympathy for a musician whose career had been prematurely cut short by insanity. So I decided to take the tower in the stalls metaphorically. It then emerged that the man whom she had wanted to see in Hans Richter’s place towered high above the other members of the orchestra. The tower might be described as a composite picture formed by apposition. The lower part of its structure represented the man’s greatness; the railing at the top, behind which he was running round like a prisoner or an animal in a cage - this was an allusion to the unhappy man’s name¹ - represented his ultimate fate. The two ideas might have been brought together in the word ‘Narrenturm’.²

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] Hugo Wolf.

² [Literally ‘Fools’ Tower’ - an old term for an insane asylum.]

Having thus discovered the mode of representation adopted by the dream, we might attempt to use the same key for solving its second apparent absurdity - the coal handed up to the dreamer by her sister. ‘Coal’ must mean ‘secret love’:

Kein Feuer, keine Kohle

kann brennen so heiss

als wie heimliche Liebe,

von der niemand nichts weiss.¹

She herself and her woman friend had been left unmarried. Her younger sister, who still had prospects of marriage, handed her up the coal ‘because she had not known it would be so long’. The dream did not specify what would be so long. If it were a story, we should say ‘the performance’; but since it is a dream, we may take the phrase as an independent entity, decide that it was used ambiguously and add the words ‘before she got married.’ Our interpretation of ‘secret love’ is further supported by the mention of the dreamer’s cousin sitting with his wife in the stalls, and by the open love-affair attributed to the latter. The dream was dominated by the antithesis between secret and open love and between the dreamer’s own fire and the coldness of the young wife. In both cases, moreover, there was someone ‘highly-placed’ - a term applying equally to the aristocrat and to the musician on whom such high hopes had been pinned.

¹ [ No fire, no coal

So hotly glows

As secret love

Of which no one knows.] The foregoing discussion has led us at last to the discovery of a third factor whose share in the transformation of the dream thoughts into the dream-content is not to be underrated: namely, considerations of representability in the peculiar psychical material of which dreams make use - for the most part, that is, representability in visual images. Of the various subsidiary thoughts attached to the essential dream-thoughts, those will be preferred which admit of visual representation; and the dream-work does not shrink from the effort of recasting unadaptable thoughts into a new verbal form - even into a less usual one - provided that that process facilitates representation and so relieves the psychological pressure caused by constricted thinking. This pouring of the content of a thought into another mould may at the same time serve the purposes of the activity of condensation and may create connections, which might not otherwise have been present, with some other thought; while this second thought itself may already have had its original form of expression changed, with a view to meeting the first one half-way.

Herbert Silberer (1909) has pointed out a good way of directly observing the transformation of thoughts into pictures in the process of forming dreams and so of studying this one factor of the dream-work in isolation. If, when he was in a fatigued and sleepy condition, he set himself some intellectual task, he found that it often happened that the thought escaped him and that in its place a picture appeared, which he was then able to recognize as a substitute for the thought. Silberer describes these substitutes by the not very appropriate term of ‘auto-symbolic.’ I will here quote a few examples from Silberer’s paper, and I shall have occasion, on account of certain characteristics of the phenomena concerned, to return to them later.

‘Example 1. - I thought of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay.

‘Symbol. - I saw myself planing a piece of wood.’

‘Example 5. - I endeavoured to bring home to myself the aim of certain metaphysical studies which I was proposing to make. Their aim, I reflected, was to work one’s way through to ever higher forms of consciousness and layers of existence, in one’s search for the bases of existence.

‘Symbol. - I was pushing a long knife under a cake, as though to lift out a slice.

‘Interpretation. - My motion with the knife meant the "working my way through" which was in question.... Here is the explanation of the symbolism. It is from time to time my business at meals to cut up a cake and distribute the helpings. I perform the task with a long, flexible knife - which demands some care. In particular, to lift out the slices cleanly after they have been cut offers certain difficulties; the knife must be pushed carefully under the slice (corresponding to the slow "working my way through" to reach the "bases"). But there is yet more symbolism in the picture. For the cake in the symbol was a "Dobos" cake - a cake with a number of "layers" through which, in cutting it, the knife has to penetrate (the "layers" of consciousness and thought).’

‘Example 9. - I had lost the thread in a train of thought. I tried to find it again, but had to admit that the starting-point had completely escaped me.

‘Symbol. - Part of a compositor’s forme, with the last lines of type fallen away.’

In view of the part played by jokes, quotations, songs and proverbs in the mental life of educated people, it would fully agree with our expectations if disguises of such kinds were used with extreme frequency for representing dream-thoughts. What, for instance, is the meaning in a dream of a number of carts, each filled with a different sort of vegetable? They stand for a wishful contrast to ‘Kraut und Rüben’, that is to say to ‘higgledy-piggledy’, and accordingly signify ‘disorder.’ I am surprised that this dream has only been reported to me once.¹ A dream-symbolism of universal validity has only emerged in the case of a few subjects, on the basis of generally familiar allusions and verbal substitutes. Moreover a good part of this symbolism is shared by dreams with psychoneuroses, legends and popular customs.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] I have in fact never met with this image again; so I have lost confidence in the correctness of the interpretation.

Indeed, when we look into the matter more closely, we must recognize the fact that the dream-work is doing nothing original in making substitutions of this kind. In order to gain its ends - in this case the possibility of a representation hampered by censorship - it merely follows the paths which it finds already laid down in the unconscious; and it gives preference to those transformations of the repressed material which can also become conscious in the form of jokes or allusions and of which the phantasies of neurotic patients are so full. At this point we suddenly reach an understanding of Scherner’s dream interpretations, whose essential correctness I have defended elsewhere. The imagination’s pre-occupation with the subject’s own body is by no means peculiar to dreams or characteristic only of them. My analyses have shown me that it is habitually present in the unconscious thoughts of neurotics, and that it is derived from sexual curiosity, which, in growing youths or girls, is directed to the genitals of the other sex, and to those of their own as well. Nor, as Scherner and Volkelt have rightly insisted, is a house the only circle of ideas employed for symbolizing the body; and this is equally true of dreams and of the unconscious phantasies of neurosis. It is true that I know patients who have retained an architectural symbolism for the body and the genitals. (Sexual interest ranges far beyond the sphere of the external genitalia.) For these patients pillars and columns represent the legs (as they do in the Song of Solomon), every gateway stands for one of the bodily orifices (a ‘hole’), every water-pipe is a reminder of the urinary apparatus, and so on. But the circle of ideas centring round plant-life or the kitchen may just as readily be chosen to conceal sexual images.¹ In the former case the way has been well prepared by linguistic usage, itself the precipitate of imaginative similes reaching back to remote antiquity: e.g. the Lord’s vineyard, the seed, and the maiden’s garden in the Song of Solomon. The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of sexual life may be thought and dreamt of in seemingly innocent allusions to activities in the kitchen; and the symptoms of hysteria could never be interpreted if we forgot that sexual symbolism can find its best hiding-place behind what is commonplace and inconspicuous. There is a valid sexual meaning behind the neurotic child’s intolerance of blood or raw meat, or his nausea at the sight of eggs or macaroni, and behind the enormous exaggeration in neurotics of the natural human dread of snakes. Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest periods of civilization - paths of whose continued existence today, under the thinnest of veils, evidence is to be found in linguistic usages, superstitions and customs.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Abundant evidence of this is to be found in the three supplementary volumes to Fuchs (1909-12).

I will now append the ‘flowery’ dream dreamt by one of my women patients which I have already promised to record. I have indicated in small capitals those elements in it that are to be given a sexual interpretation. The dreamer quite lost her liking for this pretty dream after it had been interpreted.

(a) INTRODUCTORY DREAM: She went into the kitchen where her two maidservants were, and found fault with them for not having got her ‘bite of food’ ready. At the same time she saw quite a quantity of crockery standing upside down to drain, common crockery piled up in heaps. Later addition: The two maidservants went to fetch some water and had to step into a kind of river which came right up to the house into the yard.¹

(b) MAIN DREAM ²: She was descending from a height³ over some strangely constructed pallisades or fences, which were put together into large panels, and consisted of small squares of wattling4. It was not intended for climbing over; she had trouble in finding a place to put her feet in and felt glad that her dress had not been caught anywhere, so that she had stayed respectable as she went along.5 She was holding a

BIG BRANCH in her hand 6; actually, it was like a tree, covered over with RED BLOSSOMS, branching and spreading out.7 There was an idea of their being cherry-BLOSSOMS; but they also looked like double CAMELLIAS, though of course those do not grow on trees. As she went down, first she had ONE, then suddenly TWO, and later again ONE.8 When she got down, the lower BLOSSOMS were already a good deal FADED. Then she saw, after she had got down, a manservant who - she felt inclined to say - was combing a similar tree, that is to say, he was using a similar PIECE OF WOOD to drag out some THICK TUFTS OF HAIR that were hanging down from it like moss. Some other workmen had cut down some similar BRANCHES from a GARDEN and thrown them into the ROAD, where they LAY ABOUT, so that A LOT OF PEOPLE TOOK SOME. But she asked whether that was alright - whether she might TAKE ONE TOO.9 A young MAN (someone she knew, a stranger) was standing in the garden; she went up to him to ask him how BRANCHES

of that kind could be TRANSPLANTED INTO HER OWN GARDEN.10 He embraced her; whereupon she struggled and asked him what he was thinking of and whether he thought people could embrace her like that. He said there was no harm in that: it was allowed.11 He then said that he was willing to go up into the OTHER GARDEN with her, to show her how the planting was done, and added something she could not quite understand: ‘Anyhow, I need three YARDS (later she gave it as: three square yards) or three fathoms of ground.’ It was as though he were asking her for something in return for his willingness, as though he intended to COMPENSATE HIMSELF IN HER GARDEN, or as though he wanted to CHEAT some law or other, to get some advantage from it without causing her harm. Whether he really showed her something, she had no idea.

¹ For the interpretation of this introductory dream, which is to be interpreted as a causal dependent clause, see p. 786.

² Describing the course of her life.

³ Her high descent: a wishful antithesis to the introductory dream.

4 A composite picture, uniting two localities: what were known as the ‘attics’ of her family home, where she used to play with her brother, the object of her later phantasies, and a farm belonging to a bad uncle who used to tease her.

5 A wishful antithesis to a real recollection of her uncle’s farm, where she used to throw off her clothes in her sleep.

6 Just as the angel carries a sprig of lilies in pictures of the Annunciation.

7 For the explanation of this composite image see p. 789: innocence, menstruation, La dame aux camélias.

8 Referring to the multiplicity of the people involved in her phantasy

9 That is whether she might pull one down, i. e. masturbate.

10 The branch had long since come to stand for the male genital organ; incidentally it also made a plain allusion to her family name.

11 This, as well as what next follows, related to marriage precautions.

This dream, which I have brought forward on account of its symbolic elements, may be described as a ‘biographical’ one. Dreams of this kind occur frequently during psycho-analysis, but perhaps only rarely outside it.¹

I naturally have at my disposal a superfluity of material of this kind, but to report it would involve us too deeply in a consideration of neurotic conditions. It all leads to the same conclusion, namely that there is no necessity to assume that any peculiar symbolizing activity of the mind is operating in the dream-work, but that dreams make use of any symbolizations which are already present in unconscious thinking, because they fit in better with the requirements of dream-construction on account of their representability and also because as a rule they escape censorship.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] A similar ‘biographical’ dream will be found below as the third of my examples of dream-symbolism. Another one has been recorded at length by Rank, and another, which must be read ‘in reverse’, by Stekel (1909, 486).

(E) REPRESENTATION BY SYMBOLS IN DREAMS

- SOME FURTHER TYPICAL DREAMS

The analysis of this last, biographical, dream is clear evidence that I recognized the presence of symbolism in dreams from the very beginning. But it was only by degrees and as my experience increased that I arrived at a full appreciation of its extent and significance, and I did so under the influence of the contributions of Wilhelm Stekel (1911), about whom a few words will not be out of place here.

That writer, who has perhaps damaged psycho-analysis as much as he has benefited it, brought forward a large number of unsuspected translations of symbols; to begin with they were met with scepticism, but later they were for the most part confirmed and had to be accepted. I shall not be belittling the value of Stekel’s services if I add that the sceptical reserve with which his proposals were received was not without justification. For the examples by which he supported his interpretations were often unconvincing, and he made use of a method which must be rejected as scientifically untrustworthy. Stekel arrived at his interpretations of symbols by way of intuition, thanks to a peculiar gift for the direct understanding of them. But the existence of such a gift cannot be counted upon generally, its effectiveness is exempt from all criticism and consequently its findings have no claim to credibility. It is as though one sought to base the diagnosis of infectious diseases upon olfactory impressions received at the patient’s bedside - though there have undoubtedly been clinicians who could accomplish more than other people by means of the sense of smell (which is usually atrophied) and were really able to diagnose a case of enteric fever by smell.

Advances in psycho-analytic experience have brought to our notice patients who have shown a direct understanding of dream-symbolism of this kind to a surprising extent. They were often sufferers from dementia praecox, so that for a time there was an inclination to suspect every dreamer who had this grasp of symbols of being a victim of that disease. But such is not the case. It is a question of a personal gift or peculiarity which has no visible pathological significance.

When we have become familiar with the abundant use made of symbolism for representing sexual material in dreams, the question is bound to arise of whether many of these symbols do not occur with a permanently fixed meaning, like the ‘grammalogues’ in shorthand; and we shall feel tempted to draw up a new ‘dream-book’ on the decoding principle. On that point there is this to be said: this symbolism is not peculiar to dreams, but is characteristic of unconscious ideation, in particular among the people, and it is to be found in folklore, and in popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes, to a more complete extent than in dreams.

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