Autobiographical note 30 страница

¹ From a paper by Hanns Sachs.

‘In the second part of the dream, the dreamer’s wishes were represented as fulfilled in two ways: undisguisedly and obviously, and, in addition, symbolically. Their fulfilment was represented symbolically by the disappearance of the obstructive rock and the appearance in its place of a broad path - the "way out", which he was in search of, in its most convenient form; and, it was represented undisguisedly in the picture of the advancing Prussian troops. In order to explain this prophetic vision there is no need whatever for constructing mystical hypotheses; Freud’s theory of wish-fulfilment fully suffices. Already at the time of this dream Bismarck desired a victorious war against Austria as the best escape from Prussia’s internal conflicts. Thus the dream was representing this wish as fulfilled, just as is postulated by Freud, when the dreamer saw the Prussian troops with their banners in Bohemia, that is, in enemy country. The only peculiarity of the case was that the dreamer with whom we are here concerned was not content with the fulfilment of his wish in a dream but knew how to achieve it in reality. One feature which cannot fail to strike anyone familiar with the psycho-analytic technique of interpretation is the riding whip - which grew to an "endless length." Whips, sticks, lances and similar objects are familiar to us as phallic symbols; but when a whip further possesses the most striking characteristic of a phallus, its extensibility, scarcely a doubt can remain. The exaggeration of the phenomenon, its growing to an "endless length," seems to hint at a hypercathexis from infantile sources. The fact that the dreamer took the whip in his hand was a clear allusion to masturbation, though the reference was not, of course, to the dreamer’s contemporary circumstances but to childish desires in the remote past. The interpretation discovered by Dr. Stekel that in dreams "left" stands for what is wrong, forbidden and sinful is much to the point here, for it might very well be applied to masturbation carried out in childhood in the face of prohibition. Between this deepest infantile stratum and the most superficial one, which was concerned with the statesman’s immediate plans, it is possible to detect an intermediate layer which was related to both the others. The whole episode of a miraculous liberation from need by striking a rock and at the same time calling on God as a helper bears a remarkable resemblance to the Biblical scene in which Moses struck water from a rock for the thirsting Children of Israel. We may unhesitatingly assume that this passage was familiar in all its details to Bismarck, who came of a Bible-loving Protestant family. It would not be unlikely that in this time of conflict Bismarck should compare himself with Moses, the leader, whom the people he sought to free rewarded with rebellion, hatred and ingratitude. Here, then, we should have the connection with the dreamer’s contemporary wishes. But on the other hand the Bible passage contains some details which apply well to a masturbation phantasy. Moses seized the rod in the face of God’s command and the Lord punished him for this transgression by telling him that he must die without entering the Promised Land. The prohibited seizing of the rod (in the dream an unmistakably phallic one), the production of fluid from its blow, the threat of death - in these we find all the principal factors of infantile masturbation united. We may observe with interest the process of revision which has welded together these two heterogeneous pictures (originating, the one from the mind of a statesman of genius, and the other from the impulse: of the primitive mind of a child) and which has by that means succeeded in eliminating all the distressing factors. The fact that seizing the rod was a forbidden and rebellious act was no longer indicated except symbolically by the "left" hand which performed it. On the other hand, God was called on in the manifest content of the dream as though to deny as ostentatiously as possible any thought of a prohibition or secret. Of the two prophecies made by God to Moses - that he should see the Promised Land but that he should not enter it - the first is clearly represented as fulfilled ("the view over hills and forests"), while the second, highly distressing one was not mentioned at all. The water was probably sacrificed to the requirements of secondary revision, which successfully endeavoured to make this scene and the former one into a single unity; instead of water, the rock itself fell.

‘We should expect that at the end of an infantile masturbation phantasy, which included the theme of prohibition, the child would wish that the people in authority in his environment should learn nothing of what had happened. In the dream this wish was represented by its opposite, a wish to report to the King immediately what had happened. But this reversal fitted in excellently and quite unobtrusively into the phantasy of victory contained in the superficial layer of dream-thoughts and in a portion of the manifest content of the dream. A dream such as this of victory and conquest is often a cover for a wish to succeed in an erotic conquest; certain features of the dream, such as, for instance, that an obstacle was set in the way of the dreamer’s advance but that after he had made use of the extensible whip a broad path opened out, might point in that direction, but they afford an insufficient basis for inferring that a definite trend of thoughts and wishes of that kind ran though the dream. We have here a perfect example of completely successful dream-distortion. Whatever was obnoxious in it was worked over so that it never emerged through the surface layer that was spread over it as a protective covering. In consequence of this it was possible to avoid any release of anxiety. The dream was an ideal case of a wish successfully fulfilled without infringing the censorship; so that we may well believe that the dreamer awoke from it "rejoiced and strengthened".’

As a last example here is

XII A CHEMIST’S DREAM

This was dreamt by a young man who was endeavouring to give up his habit of masturbating in favour of sexual relations with women.

PREAMBLE. - On the day before he had the dream he had been instructing a student on the subject of Grignard’s reaction, in which magnesium is dissolved in absolutely pure ether through the catalytic action of iodine. Two days earlier, when the same reaction was being carried out, an explosion had occurred which had burnt the hand of one of the workers.

DREAM. - (I) He was supposed to be making phenyl-magnesium-bromide. He saw the apparatus with particular distinctness, but had substituted himself for the magnesium. He now found himself in a singularly unstable state. He kept on saying to himself: ‘This is all right, things are working, my feet are beginning to dissolve already, my knees are getting soft.’ Then he put out his hands and felt his feet. Meanwhile (how, he could not tell) he pulled his legs out of the vessel and said to himself once more: ‘This can’t be right. Yes it is, though.’ At this point he partly woke up and went through the dream to himself, so as to be able to report it to me. He was positively frightened of the solution) of the dream. He felt very much excited during this period of semi-sleep and kept repeating: ‘Phenyl, phenyl.’

(II) He was at -----ing with his whole family and was due to be at the Schottentor at half-past eleven to meet a particular lady. But he only woke at half-past eleven, and said to himself: ‘It’s too late. You can’t get there before half-past twelve.’ The next moment he saw the whole family sitting round the table; he saw his mother particularly clearly and the maidservant carrying the sour-tureen. So he thought: ‘Well, as we’ve started dinner, its too late for me to go out.’

ANALYSIS. - He had no doubt that even the first part of the dream had some connection with the lady whom he was to meet. (He had had the dream during the night before the expected rendez-vous.) He thought the student to whom he had given the instructions a particularly unpleasant person. He had said to him: ‘That’s not right’, because the magnesium showed no signs of being affected. And the student had replied, as though he were quite unconcerned: ‘No, nor it is.’ The student must have stood for himself (the patient), who was just as indifferent about the analysis as the student was about the synthesis. The ‘he’ in the dream who carried out the operation stood for me. How unpleasant I must think him for being so indifferent about the result!

On the other hand, he (the patient) was the material which was being used for the analysis (or synthesis). What was in question was the success of the treatment. The reference to his legs in the dream reminded him of an experience of the previous evening. He had been having a dancing-lesson and had met a lady of whom he had been eager to make a conquest. He clasped her to himself so tightly that on one occasion she gave a scream. As he relaxed his pressure against her legs, he felt her strong responsive pressure against the lower part of his thighs as far down as his knees - the point mentioned in his dream. So that in this connection it was the woman who was the magnesium in the retort - things were working at last. He was feminine in relation to me, just as he was masculine in relation to the woman. If it was working with the lady it was working with him in the treatment. His feeling himself and the sensations in his knees pointed to masturbation and fitted in with his fatigue on the previous day. -His appointment with the lady had in fact been for half-past eleven. His wish to miss it by oversleeping and to stay with his sexual objects at home (that is, to keep to masturbation) corresponded to his resistance.

In connection with his repeating the word ‘phenyl’, he told me that he had always been very fond of all these radicals ending in ‘-yl’, because they were so easy to use: benzyl, acetyl, etc. This explained nothing. But when I suggested ‘Schlemihl’ to him as another radical in the series, he laughed heartily and told me that in the course of the summer he had read a book by Marcel Prevost in which there was a chapter on ‘Les exclus de l’amour’ which in fact included some remarks upon ‘les Schlémiliés’. When he read them he had said to himself: ‘This is just what I’m like.’ - If he had missed the appointment it would have been another example of his ‘Schlemihlness’.

It would seem that the occurrence of sexual symbolism in dreams has already been experimentally confirmed by some work carried out by K. Schrötter, on lines proposed by H. Swoboda. Subjects under deep hypnosis were given suggestions by Schrötter, and these led to the production of dreams a large part of whose content was determined by the suggestions. If he gave a suggestion that the subject should dream of normal or abnormal sexual intercourse, the dream, in obeying the suggestion, would make use of symbols familiar to us from psycho-analysis in place of the sexual material. For instance, when a suggestion was made to a female subject that she should dream of having homosexual intercourse with a friend, the friend appeared in the dream carrying a shabby hand-bag with a label stuck on to it bearing the words ‘Ladies only.’ The woman who dreamt this was said never to have had any knowledge of symbolism in dreams or of their interpretation. Difficulties are, however, thrown in the way of our forming an opinion of the value of these interesting experiments by the unfortunate circumstance that Dr. Schrötter committed suicide soon after making them. The only record of them is to be found in a preliminary communication published in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (Schrötter, 1912).

Similar findings were published by Roffenstein in 1923. Some experiments made by Betlheim and Hartmann (1924) were of particular interest, since they made no use of hypnosis. These experimenters related anecdotes of a coarsely sexual character to patients suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome and observed the distortions which occurred when the anecdotes were reproduced by the patients in these confusional states. They found that the symbols familiar to us from the interpretation of dreams made their appearance (e.g. going upstairs, stabbing and shooting as symbols of copulation, and knives and cigarettes as symbols of the penis). The authors attached special importance to the appearance of the symbol of a staircase, for, as they justly observed, ‘no conscious desire to distort could have arrived at a symbol of such a kind.’ It is only now, after we have properly assessed the importance of symbolism in dreams, that it becomes possible for us to take up the theme of typical dreams, which was broken off on p. 541 above. I think we are justified in dividing such dreams roughly into two classes: those which really always have the same meaning, and those which, in spite of having the same or a similar content, must nevertheless be interpreted in the greatest variety of ways. Among typical dreams of the first class I have already dealt in some detail with examination dreams.

Dreams of missing a train deserve to be put alongside examination dreams on account of the similarity of their affect, and their explanation shows that we shall be right in doing so. They are dreams of consolation for another kind of anxiety felt in sleep - the fear of dying. ‘Departing’ on a journey is one of the commonest and best authenticated symbols of death. These dreams say in a consoling way: ‘Don’t worry, you won’t die (depart)’, just as examination dreams say soothingly: ‘Don’t be afraid, no harm will come to you this time either.’ The difficulty of understanding both these kinds of dreams is due to the fact that the feeling of anxiety is attached precisely to the expression of consolation.

The meaning of dreams ‘with a dental stimulus’, which I often had to analyse in patients, escaped me for a long time because, to my surprise, there were invariably too strong resistances against their interpretation. Overwhelming evidence left me at last in no doubt that in males the motive force of these dreams was derived from nothing other than the masturbatory desires of the pubertal period. I will analyse two dreams of this kind, one of which is also a ‘flying dream.’ They were both dreamt by the same person, a young man with strong homosexual leanings, which were, however, inhibited in real life.

He was attending a performance of ‘Fidelio’ and was sitting in the stalls at the Opera besides L., a man who was congenial to him and with whom he would have liked to make friends. Suddenly he flew through the air right across the stalls, put his hand in his mouth and pulled out two of his teeth.

He himself said of the flight that it was as though he was being ‘thrown’ into the air. Since it was a performance of Fidelio, the words:

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen...

might have seemed appropriate. But the gaining of even the loveliest woman was not among the dreamer’s wishes. Two other lines were more to the point:

Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,

Eines Freundes Freund zu sein...¹

The dream in fact contained this ‘great throw’, which, however, was not only a wish-fulfilment. It also concealed the painful reflection that the dreamer had often been unlucky in his attempts at friendship, and had been ‘thrown out’. It concealed, too, his fear that this misfortune might be repeated in relation to the young man by whose side he was enjoying the performance of Fidelio. And now followed what the fastidious dreamer regarded as a shameful confession: that once, after being rejected by one of his friends, he had masturbated twice in succession in the state of sensual excitement provoked by his desire.

Here is the second dream: He was being treated by two University professors of his acquaintance instead of by me. One of them was doing something to his penis. He was afraid of an operation. The other was pushing against his mouth with an iron rod, so that he lost one or two of his teeth. He was tied up with four silk cloths.

It can scarcely be doubted that this dream had a sexual meaning. The silk cloths identified him with a homosexual whom he knew. The dreamer had never carried out coitus and had never aimed at having sexual intercourse with men in real life; and he pictured sexual intercourse on the model of the pubertal masturbation with which he had once been familiar.

¹ [ Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,

Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,

Wer ein holdes Weib errungen...

‘He who has won the great throw of becoming the friend of a friend, he who has gained a lovely woman...!’]

The many modifications of the typical dream with a dental stimulus (dreams, for instance, of a tooth being pulled out by someone else, etc.) are, I think, to be explained in the same way.¹ It may, however, puzzle us to discover how ‘dental stimuli’ have come to have this meaning. But I should like to draw attention to the frequency with which sexual repression makes use of transpositions from a lower to an upper part of the body. Thanks to them it becomes possible in hysteria for all kinds of sensations and intentions to be put into effect, if not where they properly belong - in relation to the genitals, at least in relation to other, unobjectionable parts of the body. One instance of a transposition of this kind is the replacement of the genitals by the face in the symbolism of unconscious thinking. Linguistic usage follows the same line in recognizing the buttocks as homologous to the cheeks, and by drawing a parallel between the ‘labia’ and the lips which frame the aperture of the mouth. Comparisons between nose and penis are common, and the similarity is made more complete by the presence of hair in both places. The one structure which affords no possibility of an analogy is the teeth; and it is precisely this combination of similarity and dissimilarity which makes the teeth so appropriate for representational purposes when pressure is being exercised by sexual repression.

I cannot pretend that the interpretation of dreams with a dental stimulus as dreams of masturbation - an interpretation whose correctness seems to me beyond doubt - has been entirely cleared up.² I have given what explanation I can and must leave what remains unsolved. But I may draw attention to another parallel to be found in linguistic usage. In our part of the world the act of masturbation is vulgarly described as ‘

sich einen ausreissen’ or ‘sich einen herunterreissen’.³ I know nothing of the source of this terminology or of the imagery on which it is based; but ‘a tooth’ would fit very well into the first of the two phrases.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A tooth being pulled out by someone else in a dream is as a rule to be interpreted as castration (like having one’s hair cut by a barber, according to Stekel). A distinction must in general be made between dreams with a dental stimulus and dentist dreams, such as those recorded by Coriat (1913).

² [Footnote added 1909:] A communication by C. G. Jung informs us that dreams with a dental stimulus occurring in women have the meaning of birth dreams. - [Added 1919:] Ernest Jones has brought forward clear confirmation of this. The element in common between this interpretation and the one put forward above lies in the fact that in both cases (castration and birth) what is in question is the separation of a part of the body from the whole.

³ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. the ‘biographical’ dream on p. 817, n. 2.

According to popular belief dreams of teeth being pulled out are to be interpreted as meaning the death of a relative, but psycho-analysis can at most confirm this interpretation only in the joking sense I have alluded to above. In this connection, however, I will quote a dream with a dental stimulus that has been put at my disposal by Otto Rank.

‘A colleague of mine, who has for some time been taking a lively interest in the problems of dream-interpretation, has sent me the following contribution to the subject of dreams with a dental stimulus.

‘"A short time ago I had a dream that I was at the dentist’s and he was drilling a back tooth in my lower jaw. He worked on it so long that the tooth became useless. He then seized it with a forceps and pulled it out with an effortless ease that excited my astonishment. He told me not to bother about it, for it was not the tooth that he was really treating, and put it on the table, where the tooth (as it now seemed to me, an upper incisor) fell apart into several layers. I got up from the dentist’s chair, went closer to it with a feeling of curiosity, and raised a medical question which interested me. The dentist explained to me, while he separated out the various portions of the strikingly white tooth and crushed them up (pulverized them) with an instrument, that it was connected with puberty and that it was only before puberty that teeth came out so easily, and that in the case of women the decisive factor was the birth of a child.

‘"I then became aware (while I was half asleep, I believe) that the dream had been accompanied by an emission, which I could not attach with certainty, however, to any particular part of the dream; I was most inclined to think that it had already occurred while the tooth was being pulled out.

‘"I then went on to dream of an occurrence which I can no longer recall, but which ended with my leaving my hat and coat somewhere (possibly in the dentist’s cloakroom) in the hope that someone would bring them after me, and with my hurrying off, dressed only in my overcoat, to catch a train which was starting. I succeeded at the last moment in jumping on to the hindmost carriage where someone was already standing. I was not able, though, to make my way into the inside of the carriage, but was obliged to travel in an uncomfortable situation, from which I tried, successfully in the end, to escape. We entered a big tunnel and two trains, going in the opposite direction to us, passed through our train as if it were the tunnel. I was looking into a carriage window as though I were outside.

‘"The following experiences and thoughts from the previous day provide material for an interpretation of the dream:

‘"(I.) I had in fact been having dental treatment recently, and at the time of the dream I was having continual pain in the tooth in the lower jaw which was being drilled in the dream and at which the dentist had, again in reality, worked longer than I liked. On the morning of the dream-day I had once more been to the dentist on account of the pain; and he had suggested to me that I should have another tooth pulled out in the same jaw as the one he had been treating, saying that the pain probably came from this other one. This was a ‘wisdom tooth’ which I was cutting just then. I had raised a question touching his medical conscience in that connection.

‘"(II.) On the afternoon of the same day, I had been obliged to apologize to a lady for the bad temper I was in owing to my toothache; whereupon she had told me she was afraid of having a root pulled out, the crown of which had crumbled away almost entirely. She thought that pulling out ‘eye-teeth’ was especially painful and dangerous, although on the other hand one of her acquaintances had told her that it was easier to pull out teeth in the upper jaw, which was where hers was. This acquaintance had also told her that he had once had the wrong tooth pulled out under an anaesthetic, and this had increased her dread of the necessary operation. She had then asked me whether ‘eye-teeth’ were molars or canines, and what was known about them. I pointed out to her on the one hand the superstitious element in all these opinions, though at the same time I emphasized the nucleus of truth in certain popular views. She was then able to repeat to me what she believed was a very old and wide-spread popular belief - that if a pregnant woman had toothache she would have a boy.

‘"(III.) This saying interested me in connection with what Freud says in his Interpretation of Dreams on the typical meaning of dreams with a dental stimulus as substitutes for masturbation, since in the popular saying a tooth and male genitals (or a boy) were also brought into relation with each other. On the evening of the same day, therefore, I read through the relevant passage in the Interpretation of Dreams and found there amongst other things the following statements whose influence upon my dream may be observed just as clearly as that of the other two experiences I have mentioned. Freud writes of dreams with a dental stimulus that ‘in males the motive force of these dreams was derived from nothing other than the masturbatory desires of the pubertal period’. And further: ‘The many modifications of the typical dream with a dental stimulus (dreams, for instance, of a tooth being pulled out by someone else, etc.) are, I think, to be explained in the same way. It may, however, puzzle us to discover how "dental stimuli" should have come to have this meaning. But I should like to draw attention to the frequency with which sexual repression makes use of transpositions from a lower to an upper part of the body.’ (In the present dream from the lower jaw to the upper jaw.) ‘Thanks to them it becomes possible in hysteria for all kinds of sensations and intentions to be put into effect, if not where they properly belong - in relation to the genitals, at least in relation to other, unobjectionable parts of the body’. And again: ‘But I may draw attention to another parallel to be found in linguistic usage. In our part of the world the act of masturbation is vulgarly described as "sich einen ausreissen" or "sich einen herunterreissen

"'. I was already familiar with this expression in my early youth as a description of masturbation, and no experienced dream-interpreter will have any difficulty in finding his way from here to the infantile material underlying the dream. I will only add that the ease with which the tooth in the dream, which after its extraction turned into an upper incisor, came out, reminded me of an occasion in my childhood on which I myself pulled out a loose upper front tooth easily and without pain. This event, which I can still remember clearly to-day in all its details, occurred at the same early period to which my first conscious attempts at masturbation go back. (This was a screen memory.)

‘"Freud’s reference to a statement by C. G. Jung to the effect that ‘dreams with a dental stimulus occurring in women have the meaning of birth dreams’, as well as the popular belief in the significance of toothache in pregnant women, accounted for the contrast drawn in the dream between the decisive factor in the case of females and of males (puberty). In this connection I recall an earlier dream of mine which I had soon after a visit to the dentist and in which I dreamt that the gold crowns which had just been fixed fell out; this annoyed me very much in the dream on account of the considerable expense in which I had been involved and which I had not yet quite got over at the time. This other dream now became intelligible to me (in view of a certain experience of mine) as a recognition of the material advantages of masturbation over object-love: the latter, from an economic point of view, was in every respect less desirable (cf. the gold crowns); and I believe that the lady’s remark about the significance of toothache in pregnant women had re-awakened these trains of thought in me."

‘So much for the interpretation put forward by my colleague, which is most enlightening and to which, I think, no objections can be raised. I have nothing to add to it, except, perhaps, a hint at the probable meaning of the second part of the dream. This seems to have represented the dreamer’s transition from masturbation to sexual intercourse, which was apparently accomplished with great difficulty - (cf. the tunnel through which the trains went in and out in various directions) as well as the danger of the latter (cf. pregnancy and the overcoat). The dreamer made use for this purpose of the verbal bridges "Zahn-ziehen (Zug)" and "Zahn-reissen (Reisen)".

‘On the other hand, theoretically, the case seems to me interesting in two respects. In the first place, it brings evidence in favour of Freud’s discovery that ejaculation in a dream accompanies the act of pulling out a tooth. In whatever form the emission may appear, we are obliged to regard it as a masturbatory satisfaction brought about without the assistance of any mechanical stimulation. Moreover, in this case, the satisfaction accompanying the emission was not, as it usually is, directed to an object, even if only to an imaginary one, but had no object, if one may say so; it was completely auto-erotic, or at the most showed a slight trace of homosexuality (in reference to the dentist).

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