Autobiographical note 31 страница

‘The second point which seems to me to deserve emphasis is the following. It may plausibly be objected that there is no need at all to regard the present case as confirming Freud’s view, since the events of the previous day would be sufficient in themselves to make the content of the dream intelligible. The dreamer’s visit to the dentist, his conversation with the lady and his reading of the Interpretation of Dreams would quite sufficiently explain how he came to produce this dream, especially as his sleep was disturbed by toothache; they would even explain, if need be, how the dream served to dispose of the pain which was disturbing his sleep - by means of the idea of getting rid of the painful tooth and by simultaneously drowning with libido the painful sensation which the dreamer feared. But even if we make the greatest possible allowance for all this, it cannot be seriously maintained that the mere reading of Freud’s explanations could have established in the dreamer the connection between pulling out a tooth and the act of masturbation, or could even have put that connection into operation, unless it had been laid down long since, as the dreamer himself admits it was (in the phrase "sich einen ausreissen"). This connection may have been revived not only by his conversation with the lady but by a circumstance which he reported subsequently. For in reading the Interpretation of Dreams he had been unwilling, for comprehensible reasons, to believe in this typical meaning of dreams with a dental stimulus, and had felt a desire to know whether that meaning applied to all dreams of that sort. The present dream confirmed the fact that this was so, at least as far as he was concerned, and thus showed him why it was that he had been obliged to feel doubts on the subject. In this respect too, therefore, the dream was the fulfilment of a wish namely, the wish to convince himself of the range of application and the validity of this view of Freud’s.’ The second group of typical dreams include those in which the dreamer flies or floats in the air, falls, swims, etc. What is the meaning of such dreams? It is impossible to give a general reply. As we shall hear, they mean something different in every instance; it is only the raw material of sensations contained in them which is always derived from the same source.

The information provided by psycho-analyses forces me to conclude that these dreams, too, reproduce impressions of childhood; they relate, that is, to games involving movement, which are extraordinarily attractive to children. There cannot be a single uncle who has not shown a child how to fly by rushing across the room with him in his outstretched arms, or who has not played at letting him fall by riding him on his knee and then suddenly stretching out his leg, or by holding him up high and then suddenly pretending to drop him. Children are delighted by such experiences and never tire of asking to have them repeated, especially if there is something about them that causes a little fright or giddiness. In after years they repeat these experiences in dreams; but in the dreams they leave out the hands which held them up, so that they float or fall unsupported. The delight taken by young children in games of this kind (as well as in swings and see-saws) is well known; when they come to see acrobatic feats in a circus their memory of such games is revived. Hysterical attacks in boys sometimes consist merely in reproductions of feats of this kind, carried out with great skill. It not uncommonly happens that these games of movement, though innocent in themselves, give rise to sexual feelings. Childish romping [‘Hetzen’], if I may use a word which commonly describes all such activities, is what is being repeated in dreams of flying, falling, giddiness and so on; while the pleasurable feelings attached to these experiences are transformed into anxiety. But, often enough, as every mother knows, romping among children actually ends in squabbling and tears.

Thus I have good grounds for rejecting the theory that what provokes dreams of flying and falling is the state of our tactile feelings during sleep or sensations of the movement of our lungs, and so on. In my view these sensations are themselves reproduced as part of the memory to which the dream goes back: that is to say, they are part of the content of the dream and not its source.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] These remarks on dreams of movement are repeated here, since the present context requires them. See above, p. 747 f.

This material, then, consisting of sensations of movement of similar kinds and derived from the same source, is used to represent dream-thoughts of every possible sort. Dreams of flying or floating in the air (as a rule, pleasurably toned) require the most various interpretations; with some people these interpretations have to be of an individual character, whereas with others they may even be of a typical kind. One of my women patients used very often to dream that she was floating at a certain height over the street without touching the ground. She was very short, and she dreaded the contamination involved in contact with other people. Her floating dream fulfilled her two wishes, by raising her feet from the ground and lifting her head into a higher stratum of air. In other women I have found that flying dreams expressed a desire ‘to be like a bird’; while other dreamers became angels during the night because they had not been called angels during the day. The close connection of flying with the idea of birds explains how it is that in men flying dreams usually have a grossly sensual meaning; and we shall not be surprised when we hear that some dreamer or other is very proud of his powers of flight.

Dr. Paul Federn (of Vienna) has put forward the attractive theory that a good number of these flying dreams are dreams of erection; for the remarkable phenomenon of erection, around which the human imagination has constantly played, cannot fail to be impressive, involving as it does an apparent suspension of the laws of gravity. (Cf. in this connection the winged phalli of the ancients.)

It is a remarkable fact that Mourly Vold, a sober-minded investigator of dreams and one who is disinclined to interpretation of any kind, also supports the erotic interpretation of flying or floating dreams (Vold, 1910-12, 2, 791). He speaks of the erotic factor as ‘the most powerful motive for floating dreams’, draws attention to the intense feeling of vibration in the body that accompanies such dreams and points to the frequency with which they are connected with erections or emissions.

Dreams of falling, on the other hand, are more often characterized by anxiety. Their interpretation offers no difficulty in the case of women, who almost always accept the symbolic use of falling as a way of describing a surrender to an erotic temptation. Nor have we yet exhausted the infantile sources of dreams of falling. Almost every child has fallen down at one time or other and afterwards been picked up and petted; or if he has fallen out of his cot at night, has been taken into bed with his mother or nurse.

People who have frequent dreams of swimming and who feel great joy in cleaving their way through the waves, and so on, have as a rule been bed-wetters and are repeating in their dreams a pleasure which they have long learnt to forgo. We shall learn presently from more than one example what it is that dreams of swimming are most easily used to represent.

The interpretation of dreams of fire justifies the nursery law which forbids a child to ‘play with fire’ - so that he shall not wet his bed at night. For in their case, too, there is an underlying recollection of the enuresis of childhood. In my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, I have given a complete analysis and synthesis of a fire dream of this kind in connection with the dreamer’s case history, and I have shown what impulses of adult years this infantile material can be used to represent.

It would be possible to mention a whole number of other ‘typical’ dreams if we take the term to mean that the same manifest dream-content is frequently to be found in the dreams of different dreamers. For instance we might mention dreams of passing though narrow streets or of walking through whole suites of rooms, and dreams of burglars - against whom, incidentally, nervous people take precautions before they go to sleep; dreams of being pursued by wild animals (or by bulls or horses) or of being threatened with knives, daggers or lances - these last two classes being characteristic of the manifest content of the dreams of people who suffer from anxiety - and many more. An investigation specially devoted to this material would thoroughly repay the labour involved. But instead of this I have two observations to make, though these do not apply exclusively to typical dreams.

The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognize that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. A judgement on this point can be formed only by those who really analyse dreams, that is to say, who make their way through their manifest content to the latent dream-thoughts, and never by those who are satisfied with making a note of the manifest content alone (like Näcke, for instance, in his writings on sexual dreams). Let me say at once that this fact is not in the least surprising but is in complete harmony with the principles of my explanation of dreams. No other instinct has been subjected since childhood to so much suppression as the sexual instinct with its numerous components (cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905d); from no other instinct are so many and such powerful unconscious wishes left over, ready to produce dreams in a state of sleep. In interpreting dreams we should never forget the significance of sexual complexes, though we should also, of course, avoid the exaggeration of attributing exclusive importance to them.

We can assert of many dreams, if they are carefully interpreted, that they are bisexual, since they unquestionably admit of an ‘over-interpretation’ in which the dreamer’s homosexual impulses are realized - impulses, that is, which are contrary to his normal sexual activities. To maintain, however, as do Stekel (1911) and Adler (1910, etc.), that all dreams are to be interpreted bisexually appears to me to be a generalization which is equally undemonstrable and unplausible and which I am not prepared to support. In particular, I cannot dismiss the obvious fact that there are numerous dreams which satisfy needs other than those which are erotic in the widest sense of the word: dreams of hunger and thirst, dreams of convenience, etc. So, too, such statements as that ‘the spectre of death is to be found behind every dream’ (Stekel), or that ‘every dream shows an advance from the feminine to the masculine line’ (Adler), appear to me to go far beyond anything that can be legitimately maintained in dream-interpretation.

The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams. It is not to be found in any of the numerous editions of this book and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it.

I have already shown elsewhere that strikingly innocent dreams may embody crudely erotic wishes, and I could confirm this by many new instances. But it is also true that many dreams which appear to be indifferent and which one would not regard as in any respect peculiar lead back on analysis to wishful impulses which are unmistakably sexual and often of an unexpected sort. Who, for instance, would have suspected the presence of a sexual wish in the following dream before it had been interpreted? The dreamer gave this account of it: Standing back a little behind two stately palaces was a little house with closed doors. My wife led me along the piece of street up to the little house and pushed the door open; I then slipped quickly and easily into the inside of a court which rose in an incline. Anyone, however, who has had a little experience in translating dreams will at once reflect that penetrating into narrow spaces and opening closed doors are among the commonest sexual symbols, and will easily perceive in this dream a representation of an attempt at coitus a tergo (between the two stately buttocks of the female body). The narrow passage rising in an incline stood, of course, for the vagina. The assistance attributed by the dreamer to his wife forces us to conclude that in reality it was only consideration for her that restrained the dreamer from making attempts of this kind. It turned out that on the dream-day a girl had come to live in the dreamer’s household who had attracted him and had given him the impression that she would raise no great objections to an approach of that kind. The little house between the two palaces was a reminiscence of the Hradshin in Prague and was a further reference to the same girl, who came from that place.

When I insist to one of my patients on the frequency of Oedipus dreams, in which the dreamer has sexual intercourse with his own mother, he often replies: ‘I have no recollection of having had any such dream.’ Immediately afterwards, however, a memory will emerge of some other inconspicuous and indifferent dream, which the patient has dreamt repeatedly. Analysis then shows that this is in fact a dream with the same content - once more an Oedipus dream. I can say with certainty that disguised dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer’s mother are many times more frequent than straightforward ones.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] I have published elsewhere a typical example of a disguised Oedipus dream of this kind. [Reprinted below.] Another example, with a detailed analysis, has been published by Otto Rank (1911a). - [Added

1914:] For some other disguised Oedipus dreams, in which eye-symbolism is prominent, see Rank (1913). Other papers on eye-dreams and eye-symbolism, by Eder, Ferenczi and Reitler will be found in the same place. The blinding in the legend of Oedipus, as well as elsewhere, stands for castration. - [Added 1911:] Incidentally, the symbolic interpretation of undisguised Oedipus dreams was not unknown to the ancients. Rank (1910, 534) writes: ‘Thus Julius Caesar is reported to have had a dream of sexual intercourse with his mother which was explained by the dream-interpreters as a favourable augury for his taking possession of the earth (Mother Earth). The oracle given to the Tarquins is equally well known, which prophesied that the conquest of Rome would fall to that one of them who should first kiss his mother ("osculum matri tulerit"). This was interpreted by Brutus as referring to Mother Earth. ("Terram osculo contigit, scilicet quod ea communis mater omnium mortalium eeset" Livy, I, 56.)' - [Added 1914:] Compare in this connection the dream of Hippias reported by Herodotus (VI, 107)): ‘As for the Persians, they were guided to Marathon by Hippias son of Pisistratus. Hippias in the past night had seen a vision in his sleep wherein he thought that he lay with his own mother; he interpreted this dream to signify that he should return to Athens and recover his power, and so die an old man in his own mother-country.’ - [Added 1911:] These myths and interpretations reveal a true psychological insight. I have found that people who know that they are preferred or favoured by the mother give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakeable optimism which often seem like heroic attributes and bring actual success to their possesors.

[Added 1925:] ‘TYPICAL EXAMPLE OF A DISGUISED OEDIPUS DREAM: A man dreamt that he had a secret liaison with a lady whom someone else wanted to marry. He was worried in case this other man might discover the liaison and the proposed marriage came to nothing. He therefore behaved in a very affectionate way to the man. He embraced him and kissed him. - There was only one point of contact between the content of this dream and the facts of the dreamer’s life. He had a secret liaison with a married woman; and an ambiguous remark made by her husband, who was a friend of his, led him to suspect that the husband might have noticed something. But in reality there was something else involved, all mention of which was avoided in the dream but which alone provided a key to its understanding. The husband’s life was threatened by an organic illness. His wife was prepared for the possibility of his dying suddenly, and the dreamer was consciously occupied with an intention to marry the young widow after her husband’s death. This external situation placed the dreamer in the constellation of the Oedipus dream. His wish was capable of killing the man in order to get the woman as his wife. The dream expressed this wish in a hypocritically distorted form. Instead of her being married already, he made out that someone else wanted to marry her, which corresponded to his own secret intentions; and his hostile wishes towards her husband were concealed behind demonstrations of affection which were derived from his memory of his relations with his own father in childhood.’

In some dreams of landscapes or other localities emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a convinced feeling of having been there once before. (Occurrences of ‘déjà vu’ in dreams have a special meaning.) These places are invariably the genitals of the dreamer’s mother; there is indeed no other place about which one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once before.

On one occasion only I was perplexed by an obsessional neurotic who told me a dream in which he was visiting a house that he had been in twice before. But this particular patient had told me a considerable time before of an episode during his sixth year. On one occasion he had been sharing his mother’s bed and misused the opportunity by inserting his finger into her genitals while she was asleep.

A large number of dreams, often accompanied by anxiety and having as their content such subjects as passing though narrow spaces or being in water, are based upon phantasies of intra-uterine life, of existence in the womb and of the act of birth. What follows was the dream of a young man who, in his imagination, had taken advantage of an intra-uterine opportunity of watching his parents copulating.

He was in a deep pit with a window in it like the one in the Semmering Tunnel. At first he saw an empty landscape through the window, but then invented a picture to fit the space, which immediately appeared and filled in the gap. The picture represented a field which was being ploughed up deeply by some implement; and the fresh air together with the idea of hard work which accompanied the scene, and the blue-black clods of earth, produced a lovely impression. He then went on further and saw a book upon education open in front of him... and was surprised that so much attention was devoted in it to the sexual feelings (of children); and this led him to think of me.

And here is a pretty water dream, dreamt by a woman patient, which served a special purpose in the treatment. At her summer holiday resort, by the Lake of ----, she dived into the dark water just where the pale moon was mirrored in it.

Dreams like this one are birth dreams. Their interpretation is reached by reversing the event reported in the manifest dream; thus, instead of ‘diving into the water’ we have ‘coming out of the water’, i.e. being born.¹ We can discover the locality from which a child is born by calling to mind the slang use of the word ‘lune’ in French. The pale moon was thus the white bottom which children are quick to guess that they came out of. What was the meaning of the patient’s wishing to be born at her summer holiday resort? I asked her and she replied without hesitation: ‘Isn’t it just as though I had been reborn through the treatment?’ Thus the dream was an invitation to me to continue treating her at the holiday resort - that is, to visit her there. Perhaps there was a very timid hint in it, too, of the patient’s wish to become a mother herself.²

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] For the mythological significance of birth from the water see Rank (1909).

² [Footnote added 1909:] It was not for a long time that I learned to appreciate the importance of phantasies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain an explanation of the remarkable dread that many people have of being buried alive; and they also afford the deepest unconscious basis for the belief in survival after death, which merely represents a projection into the future of this uncanny life before birth. Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.

I will quote another birth-dream, together with its interpretation, from a paper by Ernest Jones.) ‘She stood on the sea-shore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near the surface. The scene then changed into a crowded hall of an hotel. Her husband left her, and she "entered into a conversation" with a stranger. The second half of the dream revealed itself in the analysis as representing a flight from her husband and the entering into intimate relations with a third person.... The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth-phantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of the child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head into the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a reverie in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him to a nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her household.

‘The second half of the dream therefore represented thoughts concerning the elopement, that belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth-phantasy. Besides this inversion in order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the first half the child entered the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dream-thoughts first the quickening occurred and then the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream-thoughts she left her husband.’

Abraham (1909, 22 ff.) has reported another birth-dream, dreamt by a young woman who was facing her first confinement. A subterranean channel led direct into the water from a place in the floor of her room (genital canal-amniotic fluid). She raised a trap-door in the floor and a creature dressed in brown fur, very much resembling a seal, promptly appeared. This creature turned out to be the dreamer’s younger brother, to whom she had always been like a mother.

Rank has shown from a series of dreams that birth-dreams make use of the same symbolism as dreams with a urinary stimulus. The erotic stimulus is represented in the latter as a urinary stimulus; and the stratification of meaning in these dreams corresponds to a change that has come over the meaning of the symbol since infancy.

This is an appropriate point at which to return to a topic that was broken off in an earlier chapter (p. 716): the problem of the part played in the formation of dreams by organic stimuli which disturb sleep. Dreams which come about under their influence openly exhibit not only the usual tendency to wish-fulfilment and to serving the end of convenience, but very often a perfectly transparent symbolism as well; for it not infrequently happens that a stimulus awakens a dreamer after a vain attempt has been made to deal with it in a dream under a symbolic disguise. This applies to dreams of emission or orgasm as well as to those provoked by a need to micturate or defaecate. ‘The peculiar nature of emission dreams not only puts us in a position to reveal directly certain sexual symbols which are already known as being typical, but which have nevertheless been violently disputed; it also enables us to convince ourselves that some apparently innocent situations in dreams are no more than a symbolic prelude to crudely sexual scenes. The latter are as a rule represented undisguisedly in the relatively rare emission dreams, whereas they culminate often enough in anxiety dreams, which have the same result of awakening the sleeper.’

The symbolism of dreams with a urinary stimulus is especially transparent and has been recognized from the earliest times. The view was already expressed by Hippocrates that dreams of fountains and springs indicate a disorder of the bladder (Havelock Ellis). Scherner studied the multiplicity of the symbolism of urinary stimuli and asserted that ‘any urinary stimulus of considerable strength invariably passes over into stimulation of the sexual regions and symbolic representations of them.... Dreams with a urinary stimulus are often at the same time representatives of sexual dreams.’

Otto Rank, whose discussion in his paper on the stratification of symbols in arousal dreams I am here following, has made it seem highly probable that a great number of dreams with a urinary stimulus have in fact been caused by a sexual stimulus which has made a first attempt to find satisfaction regressively in the infantile form of urethral erotism. Those cases are particularly instructive in which the urinary stimulus thus set up leads to awakening and emptying the bladder, but in which the dream is nevertheless continued and the need then expressed in undisguisedly erotic imagery.¹

Dreams with an intestinal stimulus throw light in an analogous fashion on the symbolism involved in them, and at the same time confirm the connection between gold and faeces which is also supported by copious evidence from social anthropology. (See Freud, 1908b; Rank, 1912a; Dattner, 1913; and Reik, 1915.) ‘Thus, for instance, a woman who was receiving medical treatment for an intestinal disorder dreamt of someone who was burying a treasure in the neighbourhood of a little wooden hut which looked like a rustic out-door closet. There was a second part to the dream in which she was wiping the behind of her little girl who had dirtied herself.’

Rescue dreams are connected with birth dreams. In women’s dreams, to rescue, and especially to rescue from the water, has the same significance as giving birth; but the meaning is modified if the dreamer is a man.²

Robbers, burglars and ghosts, of whom some people feel frightened before going to bed, and who sometimes pursue their victims after they are asleep, all originate from one and the same class of infantile reminiscence. They are the nocturnal visitors who rouse children and take them up to prevent their wetting their beds, or who lift the bed-clothes to make sure where they have put their hands in their sleep. Analyses of some of these anxiety-dreams have made it possible for me to identify these nocturnal visitors more precisely. In every case the robbers stood for the sleeper’s father, whereas the ghosts corresponded to female figures in white night-gowns.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] ‘The same symbols which occur in their infantile aspect in bladder dreams, appear with an eminently sexual meaning in their "recent" aspects: Water = urine = semen = amniotic fluid; ship = "pump ship" (micturate) = uterus (box); to get wet = enuresis = copulation = pregnancy; to swim = full bladder = abode of the unborn; rain = micturate = symbol of fertility; travel (starting, getting out) = getting out of bed = sexual intercourse (honeymoon); micturate = emission.’ (Rank, 1912a, 95.)

² [Footnote added 1911:] A dream of this kind has been reported by Pfister (1909). For the symbolic meaning of rescuing see Freud, 1910d, and Freud, 1910h. [Added 1914:] See also Rank (1911b) and Reik (1911). [Added 1919:] See further, Rank (1914).

(F) SOME EXAMPLES - CALCULATIONS AND SPEECHES IN DREAMS

Before assigning the fourth of the factors which govern the formation of dreams to its proper place, I propose to quote a number of examples from my collection. These will serve partly to illustrate the interplay between the three factors already known to us and partly to provide confirmatory evidence for what have hitherto been unsupported assertions or to indicate some conclusions which inevitably follow from them. In giving an account of the dream-work, I have found very great difficulty in backing my findings by examples. Instances in support of particular propositions carry conviction only if they are treated in the context of the interpretation of a dream as a whole. If they are torn from their context they lose their virtue; while, on the other hand, a dream-interpretation which is carried even a little way below the surface quickly becomes so voluminous as to make us lose the thread of the train of thought which it was designed to illustrate. This technical difficulty must serve as my excuse if in what follows I string together all sorts of things, whose only common bond is their connection with the contents of the preceding sections of this chapter.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23