Autobiographical note 29 страница

The courtyard in which the sheet of tin was spread out is not to be taken symbolically in the first instance. It was derived from the business premises of the dreamer’s father. For reasons of discretion I have substituted ‘tin’ for another material in which his father actually dealt: but I have made no other change in the wording of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had taken violent objection to the somewhat dubious practices on which the firm’s earnings in part depended. Consequently the dream-thought I have just interpreted may have continued in this way: ‘(If I had asked him), he would have deceived me just as he deceives his customers.’ As regards the ‘pulling off’ which served to represent his father’s dishonesty in business, the dreamer himself produced a second explanation - namely that it stood for masturbating. Not only was I already familiar with this interpretation (see p. 817 n. above), but there was something to confirm it in the fact that the secret nature of masturbation was represented by its reverse: it might be done openly. Just as we should expect, the masturbatory activity was once again displaced on to the dreamer’s father, like the questioning in the first scene of the dream. He promptly interpreted the shaft as a vagina, having regard to the soft cushioning of its walls. I added from my own knowledge derived elsewhere that climbing down, like climbing up in other cases, described sexual intercourse in the vagina. (See my remarks, quoted above, p. 821 n.)

The dreamer himself gave a biographical explanation of the fact that the first shaft was followed by a longish platform and then by another shaft. He had practised intercourse for a time but had then given it up on account of inhibitions, and he now hoped to be able to resume it by the help of the treatment. The dream became more indistinct, however, towards the end, and it must seem probable to anyone who is familiar with these things that the influence of another topic was already making itself felt in the second scene of the dream, and was hinted at by the father’s business, by his deceitful conduct and by the interpretation of the first shaft as a vagina: all this pointed to a connection with the dreamer’s mother.

IVTHE MALE ORGAN REPRESENTED BY PERSONS AND THE

FEMALE ORGAN BY A LANDSCAPE(The dream of an uneducated woman whose husband was a policeman, reported by B. Dattner.)

‘... Then someone broke into the house and she was frightened and called out for a policeman. But he had quietly gone into a church ¹, to which a number of steps ² led up, accompanied by two tramps. Behind the church there was a hill ³ and above it a thick wood.4 The policeman was dressed in a helmet, brass collar and cloak.5 He had a brown beard. The two tramps, who went along peaceably with the policeman, had sack-like aprons tied around their middles.6 In front of the church a path led up to the hill; on both sides of it there grew grass and brushwood, which became thicker and thicker and, at the top of the hill, turned into a regular wood.’VDREAMS OF CASTRATION IN CHILDREN

(a) A boy aged three years and five months, who obviously disliked the idea of his father’s returning from the front, woke up one morning in a disturbed and excited state. He kept on repeating: ‘Why was Daddy carrying his head on a plate? Last night Daddy was carrying his head on a plate.’

(b) A student who is now suffering from a severe obsessional neurosis remembers having repeatedly had the following dream during his sixth year: He went to the hairdresser’s to have his hair cut. A big, severe-looking woman came up to him and cut his head off. He recognized the woman as his mother.

¹ ‘Or chapel (= vagina).’

² ‘Symbol of copulation.’

³ ‘Mons veneris.’

4 ‘Pubic hair.’

5 ‘According to an expert, demons in cloaks and hoods are of a phallic character.’

6 ‘The two halves of the scrotum.’

VI URINARY SYMBOLISM

The series of drawings were found by Ferenczi in a Hungarian comic paper called Fidibusz, and he at once saw how well they could be used to illustrate the theory of dreams. Otto Rank has already reproduced them in a paper (1912a).

The drawings bear the title ‘A French Nurse’s Dream’; but it is only the last picture, showing the nurse being woken up by the child’s screams, that tells us that the seven previous pictures represent the phases of a dream. The first picture depicts the stimulus which should have caused the sleeper to wake: the little boy has become aware of a need and is asking for help in dealing with it. But in the dream the dreamer, instead of being in the bedroom, is taking the child for a walk. In the second picture she has already led him to a street corner where he is micturating - and she can go on sleeping. But the arousal stimulus continues; indeed, it increases. The little boy, finding he is not being attended to, screams louder and louder. The more imperiously he insists upon his nurse waking up and helping him, the more insistent becomes the dream’s assurance that everything is all right and that there is no need for her to wake up. At the same time, the dream translates the increasing stimulus into the increasing dimensions of its symbols. The stream of water produced by the micturating boy becomes mightier and mightier. In the fourth picture it is already large enough to float a rowing boat; but there follow a gondola, a sailing-ship and finally a liner. The ingenious artist has in this way cleverly depicted the struggle between an obstinate craving for sleep and an inexhaustible stimulus towards waking.

VII A STAIRCASE DREAM(Reported and Interpreted by Otto Rank.)

‘I have to thank a colleague to whom I owe the dream with a dental-stimulus for an equally transparent emission dream:

‘"I was running down the staircase in pursuit of a little girl who had done something to me, in order to punish her. At the foot of the stairs someone (a grown-up woman?) stopped the child for me. I caught hold of her; but I don’t know whether I hit her, for I suddenly found myself in the middle of the staircase copulating with the child (as it were in the air). It was not a real copulation; I was only rubbing my genitals against her external genitals, and while I did so I saw them extremely distinctly, as well as her head, which was turned upwards and sideways. During the sexual act I saw hanging above me to my left (also as it were in the air) two small paintings - landscapes representing a house surrounded by trees. At the bottom of the smaller of these, instead of the painter’s signature, I saw my own first name, as though it were intended as a birthday-present for me. Then I saw a label in front of the two pictures, which said that the cheaper pictures were also to be had. (I then saw myself very indistinctly as though I were lying in bed on the landing) and I was woken up by the feeling of wetness caused by the emission I had had."

‘INTERPRETATION. -On the evening of the dream-day the dreamer had been in a book-shop, and as he was waiting to be attended to he had looked at some pictures which were on view there and which represented subjects similar to those in the dream. He went up close to one small picture which had particularly pleased him, to look at the artist’s name - but it had been quite unknown to him.

‘Later the same evening, when he was with some friends, he had heard a story of a Bohemian servant-girl who boasted that her illegitimate child had been "made on the stairs." The dreamer had enquired the details of this rather unusual event and had learnt that the servant-girl had gone home with her admirer to her parents’ house, where there had been no opportunity for sexual intercourse, and in his excitement the man had copulated with her on the stairs. The dreamer had made a joking allusion to a malicious expression used to describe adulterated wines, and had said that in fact the child came of a "cellar-stair vintage".

‘So much for the connections with the previous day, which appeared with some insistence in the dream-content and were reproduced by the dreamer without any difficulty. But he brought up no less easily an old fragment of infantile recollection which had also found its use in the dream. The staircase belonged to the house where he had spent the greater part of his childhood and, in particular, where he had first made conscious acquaintance with the problems of sex. He had frequently played on this staircase and, among other things, used to slide down the banisters, riding astride on them - which had given him sexual feelings. In the dream, too, he rushed down the stairs extraordinarily fast - so fast, indeed, that, according to his own specific account, he did not put his feet down on the separate steps but "flew" down them, as people say. If the infantile experience is taken into account, the beginning part of the dream seems to represent the factor of sexual excitement. - But the dreamer had also often romped in a sexual way with the neighbours’ children on this same staircase and in the adjacent building, and had satisfied his desires in just the same way as he did in the dream.

‘If we bear in mind that Freud’s researches into sexual symbolism (1910d) have shown that stairs and going upstairs in dreams almost invariably stand for copulation, the dream becomes quite transparent. Its motive force, as indeed was shown by its outcome - an emission - was of a purely libidinal nature. The dreamer’s sexual excitement was awakened during his sleep - this being represented in the dream by his rushing down the stairs. The sadistic element in the sexual excitement, based on the romping in childhood, was indicated by the pursuit and overpowering of the child. The libidinal excitement increased and pressed towards sexual action - represented in the dream by his catching hold of the child and conveying it to the middle of the staircase. Up to that point the dream was only symbolically sexual and would have been quite unintelligible to any inexperienced dream-interpreter. But symbolic satisfaction of that kind was not enough to guarantee a restful sleep, in view of the strength of the libidinal excitation. The excitation led to an orgasm and thus revealed the fact that the whole staircase-symbolism represented copulation. -The present dream offers a specially clear confirmation of Freud’s view that one of the reasons for the use of going upstairs as a sexual symbol is the rhythmical character of both activities: for the dreamer expressly stated that the most clearly defined element in the whole dream was the rhythm of the sexual act and its up and down motion.

‘I must add a word with regard to the two pictures which, apart from their real meaning, also figured in a symbolic sense as "Weibsbilder". This was shown at once by there being a large picture and a small picture, just as a large (or grown-up) girl and a small one appeared in the dream. The fact that "cheaper pictures were also to be had" led to the prostitute complex; while on the other hand the appearance of the dreamer’s first name on the small picture and the idea of its being intended as a birthday present for him were hints at the parental complex. ("Born on the stairs" = "begotten by copulation".)

‘The indistinct final scene, in which the dreamer saw himself lying in bed on the landing and had a feeling of wetness, seems to have pointed the way beyond infantile masturbation still further back into childhood and to have had its prototype in similarly pleasurable scenes of bed-wetting.’

VIII A MODIFIED STAIRCASE DREAM

One of my patients, a man whose sexual abstinence was imposed on him by a severe neurosis, and whose phantasies were fixed upon his mother, had repeated dreams of going upstairs in her company. I once remarked to him that a moderate amount of masturbation would probably do him less harm than his compulsive self-restraint, and this provoked the following dream:

His piano-teacher reproached him for neglecting his piano-playing, and for not practising Mocheles’ ‘Etudes’ and Clementi’s ‘Gradus ad Parnassum.’

By way of comment, he pointed out that ‘Gradus’ are also ‘steps’; and that the key-board itself is a staircase, since it contains scales.

It is fair to say that there is no group of ideas that is incapable of representing sexual facts and wishes.

IX THE FEELING OF REALITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REPETITION

A man who is now thirty-five years old reported a dream which he remembered clearly and claimed to have had at the age of four. The lawyer who had charge of his father’s will - he had lost his father when he was three - brought two large pears. He was given one of them to eat; the other lay on the window-sill in the sitting-room. He awoke with a conviction of the reality of what he had dreamt and kept obstinately asking his mother for the second pear, and insisted that it was on the window-sill. His mother had laughed at this.

ANALYSIS. -The lawyer was a jovial old gentleman who, the dreamer seemed to remember, had really once brought some pears along. The window-sill was as he had seen it in the dream. Nothing else occurred to him in connection with it - only that his mother had told him a dream shortly before. She had had two birds sitting on her head and had asked herself when they would fly away; they did not fly away, but one of them flew to her mouth and sucked at it.

The failure of the dreamer’s associations gave us a right to attempt an interpretation by symbolic substitution. The two pears - ‘pommes ou poires’ - were his mother’s breasts which had given him nourishment; the window-sill was the projection formed by her bosom - like balconies in dreams of houses (see p. 821). His feeling of reality after waking was justified, for his mother had really suckled him, and had done so, in fact, for far longer than the usual time and his mother’s breast was still available to him. The dream must be translated: ‘Give (or show) me your breast again, Mother, that I used to drink from in the past.’ ‘In the past’ was represented by his eating one of the pears; ‘again’ was represented by his longing for the other. The temporal repetition of an act is regularly shown in dreams by the numerical multiplication of an object.

It is most remarkable, of course, that symbolism should already be playing a part in the dream of a four-year-old child. But this is the rule and not the exception. It may safely be asserted that dreamers have symbolism at their disposal from the very first.

The following uninfluenced recollection by a lady who is now twenty-seven shows at what an early age symbolism is employed outside dream-life as well as inside it. She was between three and four years old. Her nurse-maid took her to the lavatory along with a brother eleven months her junior and a girl cousin of an age between the other two, to do their small business before going out for a walk. Being the eldest, she sat on the seat, while the other two sat on chambers. She asked her cousin: ‘Have you got a purse too? Walter’s got a little sausage; I’ve got a purse.’ Her cousin replied: ‘Yes, I’ve got a purse too.’ The nurse-maid heard what they said with much amusement and reported the conversation to the children’s mother, who reacted with a sharp reprimand.

I will here interpolate a dream (recorded in a paper by Alfred Robitsek, 1912) in which the beautifully chosen symbolism made an interpretation possible with only slight assistance from the dreamer.

X ‘THE QUESTION OF SYMBOLISM IN THE DREAMS OF NORMAL PERSONS’

‘One objection which is frequently brought forward by opponents of psycho-analysis, and which has lately been voiced by Havelock Ellis (1911, 168), argues that though dream-symbolism may perhaps occur as a product of the neurotic mind, it is not to be found in normal persons. Now psycho-analytic research finds no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions between normal and neurotic life; and indeed the analysis of dreams, in which repressed complexes are operative alike in the healthy and the sick, shows a complete identity both in their mechanisms and in their symbolism. The naive dreams of healthy people actually often contain a much simpler, more perspicuous and more characteristic symbolism than those of neurotics; for in the latter, as a result of the more powerful workings of the censorship and of the consequently more far-reaching dream-distortion, the symbolism may be obscure and hard to interpret. The dream recorded below will serve to illustrate this fact. It was dreamt by a girl who is not neurotic but is of a somewhat prudish and reserved character. In the course of conversation with her I learnt that she was engaged, but that there were some difficulties in the way of her marriage which were likely to lead to its postponement. Of her own accord she told me the following dream.

‘"I arrange the centre of a table with flowers for a birthday." In reply to a question she told me that in the dream she seemed to be in her own home (where she was not at present living) and had "a feeling of happiness."

‘"Popular" symbolism made it possible for me to translate the dream unaided. It was an expression of her bridal wishes: the table with its floral centre-piece symbolized herself and her genitals; she represented her wishes for the future as fulfilled, for her thoughts were already occupied with the birth of a baby; so her marriage lay a long way behind her.

‘I pointed out to her that "the ‘centre’ of a table" was an unusual expression (which she admitted), but I could not of course question her further directly on that point. I carefully avoided suggesting the meaning of the symbols to her, and merely asked her what came into her head in connection with the separate parts of the dream. In the course of the analysis her reserve gave place to an evident interest in the interpretation and to an openness made possible by the seriousness of the conversation.

‘When I asked what flowers they had been, her first reply was: "expensive flowers; one has to pay for them," and then that they had been "lilies of the valley, violets and pinks or carnations." I assumed that the word "lily" appeared in the dream in its popular sense as a symbol of chastity; she confirmed this assumption, for her association to "lily" was "purity". "Valley" is a frequent female symbol in dreams; so that the chance combination of the two symbols in the English name of the flower was used in the dream-symbolism to stress the preciousness of her virginity - "expensive flowers, one has to pay for them" - and to express her expectation that her husband would know how to appreciate its value. The phrase "expensive flowers, etc.”, as will be seen, had a different meaning in the case of each of the three flower-symbols.

‘"Violets" was ostensibly quite asexual; but, very boldly, as it seemed to me, I thought I could trace a secret meaning for the word in an unconscious link with the French word "viol" ["rape"]. To my surprise the dreamer gave as an association the English word "violate". The dream had made use of the great chance similarity between the words "violet" and "violate" - the difference in their pronunciation lies merely in the different stress upon their final syllables - in order to express "in the language of flowers" the dreamer’s thoughts on the violence of defloration (another term that employs flower symbolism) and possibly also a masochistic trait in her character. A pretty instance of the "verbal bridges" crossed by the paths leading to the unconscious. The words "one has to pay for them" signified having to pay with her life for being a wife and a mother.

‘In connection with "pinks", which she went on to call "carnations", I thought of the connection between that word and "carnal." But the dreamer’s association to it was "colour". She added that "carnations" were the flowers which her fiancé gave her frequently and in great numbers. At the end of her remarks she suddenly confessed of her own accord that she had not told the truth: what had occurred to her had not been "

colour" but "incarnation" - the word I had expected. Incidentally "colour" itself was not a very remote association, but was determined by the meaning of "carnation" (flesh-colour) - was determined, that is, by the same complex. This lack of straightforwardness showed that it was at this point that resistance was greatest, and corresponded to the fact that this was where the symbolism was most clear and that the struggle between libido and its repression was at its most intense in relation to this phallic theme. The dreamer’s comment to the effect that her fiancé frequently gave her flowers of that kind was an indication not only of the double sense of the word: carnation" but also of their phallic meaning in the dream. The gift of flowers, an exciting factor of the dream derived from her current life, was used to express an exchange of sexual gifts: she was making a gift of her virginity and expected a full emotional and sexual life in return for it. At this point, too, the words "expensive flowers, one has to pay for them" must have had what was no doubt literally a financial meaning. -Thus the flower symbolism in this dream included virginal femininity, masculinity and an allusion to defloration by violence. It is worth pointing out in this connection that sexual flower symbolism, which, indeed, occurs very commonly in other connections, symbolizes the human organs of sex by blossoms, which are the sexual organs of plants. It may perhaps be true in general that gifts of flowers between lovers have this unconscious meaning.

‘The birthday for which she was preparing in the dream meant, no doubt, the birth of a baby. She was identifying herself with her fiancé, and was representing him as "arranging" her for a birth - that is, as copulating with her. The latent thought may have run: "If I were he, I wouldn’t wait - I would deflower my fianceé without asking her leave - I would use violence." This was indicated by the word "violate", and in this way the sadistic component of the libido found expression.

‘In a deeper layer of the dream, the phrase "I arrange..." must no doubt have an auto-erotic, that is to say, an infantile, significance.

‘The dreamer also revealed an awareness, which was only possible to her in a dream, of her physical deficiency: she saw herself like a table, without projections, and on that account laid all the more emphasis on the preciousness of the "centre" - on another occasion she used the words, "a centre-piece of flowers" - that is to say, on her virginity. The horizontal attribute of a table must also have contributed something to the symbol.

‘The concentration of the dream should be observed: there was nothing superfluous in it, every word was a symbol.

‘Later on the dreamer produced an addendum to the dream: "I decorate the flowers with green crinkled paper". She added that it was "fancy paper" of the sort used for covering common flower pots. She went on: "to hide untidy things, whatever was to be seen, which was not pretty to the eye; there is a gap, a little space in the flowers. The paper looks like velvet or moss." - To "decorate" she gave the association "decorum", as I had expected. She said the green colour predominated, and her association to it was "hope" - another link with pregnancy. -In this part of the dream the chief factor was not identification with a man; ideas of shame and self-revelation came to the fore. She was making herself beautiful for him and was admitting physical defects which she felt ashamed of and was trying to correct. Her associations "velvet" and "moss" were a clear indication of a reference to pubic hair.

‘This dream, then, gave expression to thoughts of which the girl was scarcely aware in her waking life - thoughts concerned with sensual love and its organs. She was being "arranged for a birthday" - that is, she was being copulated with. The fear of being deflowered was finding expression, and perhaps, too, ideas of pleasurable suffering. She admitted her physical deficiencies to herself and overcompensated for them by an over-valuation of her virginity. Her shame put forward as an excuse for the signs of sensuality the fact that its purpose was the production of a baby. Material considerations, too, alien to a lover’s mind, found their way to expression. The affect attaching to this simple dream - a feeling of happiness - indicated that powerful emotional complexes had found satisfaction in it.’

Ferenczi (1917) has justly pointed out that the meaning of symbols and the significance of dreams can be arrived at with particular ease from the dreams of precisely those people who are uninitiated into psycho-analysis. At this point I shall interpose a dream dreamt by a contemporary historical figure. I am doing so because in it an object that would in any case appropriately represent a male organ has a further attribute which established it in the clearest fashion as a phallic symbol. The fact of a riding whip growing to an endless length could scarcely be taken to mean anything but an erection. Apart from this, too, the dream is an excellent instance of the way in which thoughts of a serious kind, far removed from anything sexual, can come to be represented by infantile sexual material.XIA DREAM OF BISMARCK’S¹

‘In his Gedanken und Errinnerungen Bismarck quotes a letter written by him to the Emperor William I on December 18th 1881, in the course of which the following passage occurs: "Your Majesty’s communication encourages me to relate a dream which I had in the Spring of 1863, in the hardest days of the Conflict, from which no human eye could see any possible way out. I dreamt (as I related the first thing next morning to my wife and other witnesses) that I was riding on a narrow Alpine path, precipice on the right, rocks on the left. The path grew narrower, so that the horse refused to proceed, and it was impossible to turn round or dismount, owing to lack of space. Then, with my whip in my left hand, I struck the smooth rock and called on God. The whip grew to an endless length, the rocky wall dropped like a piece of stage scenery and opened out a broad path, with a view over hills and forests, like a landscape in Bohemia; there were Prussian troops with banners, and even in my dream the thought came to me at once that I must report it to your Majesty. This dream was fulfilled, and I woke up rejoiced and strengthened...."'

‘The action of this dream falls into two sections. In the first part the dreamer found himself in an impasse from which he was miraculously rescued in the second part. The difficult situation in which the horse and its rider were placed is an easily recognizable dream-picture of the statesman’s critical position, which he may have felt with particular bitterness as he thought over the problems of his policy on the evening before the dream. In the passage quoted above Bismarck himself uses the same simile in describing the hopelessness of his position at the time. The meaning of the dream picture must therefore have been quite obvious to him. We are at the same time presented with a fine example of Silberer’s "functional phenomenon". The process taking place in the dreamer’s mind - each of the solutions attempted by his thoughts being met in turn by insuperable obstacles, while nevertheless he could not and might not tear himself free from the consideration of those problems - were most appropriately depicted by the rider who could neither advance not retreat. His pride, which forbade his thinking of surrendering or resigning, was expressed in the dream by the words "it was impossible to turn round or dismount." In his quality of a man of action who exerted himself unceasingly and toiled for the good of others, Bismarck must have found it easy to liken himself to a horse; and in fact he did so on many occasions, for instance, in his well-known saying: "A good horse dies in harness." In this sense the words "the horse refused to proceed" meant nothing more nor less than that the over-tired statesman felt a need to turn away from the cares of the immediate present, or, to put it another way, that he was in the act of freeing himself from the bonds of the reality principle by sleeping and dreaming. The wish-fulfilment, which became so prominent in the second part of the dream, was already hinted at in the words "Alpine path." No doubt Bismarck already knew at that time that he was going to spend his next vacation in the Alps - at Gastein; thus the dream, by conveying him thither, set him free at one blow from all the burdens of State business.

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