Autobiographical note 32 страница

I will begin by giving a few instances of peculiar or unusual modes of representation in dreams.

A lady had the following dream: A servant girl was standing on a ladder as if she were cleaning a window, and had a chimpanzee with her and a gorilla-cat (the dreamer afterwards corrected this to an angora cat). She hurled the animals at the dreamer; the chimpanzee cuddled up to her, which was very disgusting. - This dream achieved its purpose by an extremely simple device: it took a figure of speech literally and gave an exact representation of its wording. ‘Monkey’, and animals’ names in general, are used as invectives; and the situation in the dream meant neither more nor less than ‘hurling invectives’. In the course of the present series of dreams we shall come upon a number of other instances of the use of this simple device during the dream-work.

Another dream adopted a very similar procedure. A woman had a child with a remarkably deformed skull. The dreamer had heard that the child had grown like that owing to its position in the uterus. The doctor said that the skull might be given a better shape by compression, but that that would damage the child’s brain. She reflected that as he was a boy it would do him less harm. -This dream contained a plastic representation of the abstract concept of ‘impressions on children’ which the dreamer had met with in the course of the explanations given her during her treatment.

The dream-work adopted a slightly different method in the following instance. The dream referred to an excursion to the Hilmteich near Graz. The weather outside was fearful. There was a wretched hotel, water was dripping from the walls of the room, the bedclothes were damp. (The latter part of the dream was reported less directly than I have given it.) The meaning of the dream was ‘superfluous’. This abstract idea, which was present in the dream-thoughts, was in the first instance given a somewhat forced twist and put into some such form as ‘overflowing’, ‘flowing over’ or ‘fluid’ - after which it was represented in a number of similar pictures: water outside, water on the walls inside, water in the dampness of the bed-clothes-everything flowing or ‘overflowing.’

We shall not be surprised to find that, for the purpose of representation in dreams, the spelling of words is far less important than their sound, especially when we bear in mind that the same rule holds good in rhyming verse. Rank (1910, 482) has recorded in detail, and analysed very fully, a girl’s dream in which the dreamer described how she was walking through the fields and cutting off rich ears [‘Ähren’] of barley and wheat. A friend of her youth came towards her, but she tried to avoid meeting him. The analysis showed that the dream was concerned with a kiss - an ‘honourable kiss’ [‘Kuss in Ehren’ pronounced the same as ‘Ähren’]. In the dream itself the ‘Ähren’, which had to be cut off, not pulled off, figured as ears of corn, while, condensed with ‘Ehren’, they stood for a whole number of other thoughts.

On the other hand, in other cases, the course of linguistic evolution has made things very easy for dreams. For language has a whole number of words at its command which originally had a pictorial and concrete significance, but are used to-day in a colourless and abstract sense. All that the dream need do is to give these words their former, full meaning or to go back a little way to an earlier phase in their development. A man had a dream, for instance, of his brother being in a Kasten [‘box’]. In the course of interpretation the Kasten was replaced by a Schrank [‘cupboard’ - also used abstractly for ‘barrier’, ‘restriction’]. The dream-thought had been to the effect that his brother ought to restrict himself [‘sich einschränken’] - instead of the dreamer doing so.

Another man dreamt that he climbed to the top of a mountain which commanded a quite unusually extensive view. Here he was identifying himself with a brother of his who was the editor of a survey which dealt with far

Eastern affairs.

In Der Grüne Heinrich a dream is related in which a mettlesome horse was rolling about in a beautiful field of oats, each grain of which was ‘a sweet almond, a raisin and a new penny piece... wrapped up together in red silk and tied up with a bit of pig’s bristle.’ The author (or dreamer) gives us an immediate interpretation of this dream-picture: the horse felt agreeably tickled and called out ‘Der Hafer sticht mich!’

According to Henzen dreams involving puns and turns of speech occur particularly often in the old Norse sagas, in which scarcely a dream is to be found which does not contain an ambiguity or a play upon words.

It would be a work in itself to collect these modes of representation and to classify them according to their underlying principles. Some of these representations might almost be described as jokes, and they give one a feeling that one would never have understood them without the dreamer’s help.

(1) A man dreamt that he was asked someone’s name but could not think of it. He himself explained that what this meant was that ‘he would never dream of such a thing’.

(2) A woman patient told me a dream in which all the people were especially big. ‘That means’, she went on, ‘that the dream must be to do with events in my early childhood, for at that time, of course, all grown-up people seemed to me enormously big.’ She herself did not appear in the content of this dream. - The fact of a dream referring to childhood may also be expressed in another way, namely by a translation of time into space. The characters and scenes are seen as though they were at a great distance, at the end of a long road, or as though they were being looked at through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses.

(3) A man who in his working life tended to use abstract and indefinite phraseology, though he was quite sharp-witted in general, dreamt on one occasion that he arrived at a railway station just as a train was coming in. What then happened was that the platform moved towards the train, while the train stopped still - an absurd reversal of what actually happens. This detail was no more than an indication that we should expect to find another reversal in the dream’s content. The analysis of the dream led to the patient’s recollecting some picture-books in which there were illustrations of men standing on their heads and walking on their hands.

(4) Another time the same dreamer told me a short dream which was almost reminiscent of the technique of a rebus. He dreamt that his uncle gave him a kiss in an automobile. He went on at once to give me the interpretation, which I myself would never have guessed: namely that it meant auto-erotism. The content of this dream might have been produced as a joke in waking life.

(5) A man dreamt that he was pulling a woman out from behind a bed. The meaning of this was that he was giving her preference.

(6) A man dreamt that he was an officer sitting at a table opposite the Emperor. This meant that he was putting himself in opposition to his father.

(7) A man dreamt that he was treating someone for a broken limb. The analysis showed that the broken bone [‘Knochenbruch’] stood for a broken marriage [‘Ehebruch’, properly ‘adultery’].

(8) The time of day in dreams very often stands for the age of the dreamer at some particular period in his childhood. Thus, in one dream, ‘a quarter past five in the morning’ meant the age of five years and three months, which was significant, since that was the dreamer’s age at the time of the birth of his younger brother.

(9) Here is another method of representing ages in a dream. A woman dreamt that she was walking with two little girls whose ages differed by fifteen months. She was unable to recall any family of her acquaintance to whom this applied. She herself put forward the interpretation that the two children both represented herself and that the dream was reminding her that the two traumatic events of her childhood were separated from each other by precisely that interval. One had occurred when she was three and a half, the other when she was four and three-quarters.

(10) It is not surprising that a person undergoing psycho-analytic treatment should often dream of it and be led to give expression in his dreams to the many thoughts and expectations to which the treatment gives rise. The imagery most frequently chosen to represent it is that of a journey, usually by motor-car, as being a modern and complicated vehicle. The speed of the car will then be used by the patient as an opportunity for giving vent to ironical comments. -If ‘the unconscious’, as an element in the subject’s waking thoughts, has to be represented in a dream, it may be replaced very appropriately by subterranean regions. -These, where they occur without any reference to analytic treatment, stand for the female body or the womb. -’Down below’ in dreams often relates to the genitals, ‘up above’, on the contrary, to the face, mouth or breast. -Wild beasts are as a rule employed by the dream-work to represent passionate impulses of which the dreamer is afraid, whether they are his own or those of other people. (It then needs only a slight displacement for the wild beasts to come to represent the people who are possessed by these passions. We have not far to go from here to cases in which a dreaded father is represented by a beast of prey or a dog or wild horse - a form of representation recalling totemism.) It might be said that the wild beasts are used to represent the libido, a force dreaded by the ego and combated by means of repression. It often happens, too, that the dreamer separates off his neurosis, his ‘sick personality’, from himself and depicts it as an independent person.

(11) Here is an example recorded by Hanns Sachs (1911): ‘We know from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that the dream-work makes use of different methods for giving a sensory form to words or phrases. If, for instance, the expression that is to be represented is an ambiguous one, the dream-work may exploit the fact by using the ambiguity as a switch-point: where one of the meanings of the word is present in the dream-thoughts the other one can be introduced into the manifest dream. This was the case in the following short dream in which ingenious use was made for representational purposes of appropriate impressions of the previous day. I was suffering from a cold on the "dream-day", and I had therefore decided in the evening that, if I possibly could, I would avoid getting out of bed during the night. I seemed in the dream merely to be continuing what I had been doing during the day. I had been engaged in sticking press-cuttings into an album and had done my best to put each one in the place where it belonged. I dreamt that I was trying to paste a cutting into the album. But it wouldn’t go on to the page ["er geht nicht auf die Seite"], which caused me much pain. I woke up and became aware that the pain in the dream persisted in the form of a pain in my inside, and I was compelled to abandon the decision I had made before going to bed. My dream, in its capacity of guardian of my sleep, had given me the illusion of a fulfilment of my wish to stop in bed, by means of a plastic representation of the ambiguous phrase "er geht nicht auf die Seite" ["he isn’t going to the lavatory"].’

We can go so far as to say that the dream-work makes use, for the purpose of giving a visual representation of the dream-thoughts, of any methods within its reach, whether waking criticism regards them as legitimate or illegitimate. This lays the dream-work open to doubt and derision on the part of everyone who has only heard of dream-interpretation but never practised it. Stekel’s book, Die Sprache des Traumes (1911), is particularly rich in examples of this kind. I have, however, avoided quoting instances from it, on account of the author’s lack of critical judgement and of the arbitrariness of his technique, which give rise to doubts even if unprejudiced minds.

(12) The following examples are taken from a paper by V. Tausk (1914) on the use of clothes and colours in dreaming.

(a) A. dreamt of seeing a former governess of his in a dress of black lustre [‘Lüster’] which fitted very tight across her buttocks. - This was explained as meaning that the governess was lustful [‘lüstern’].

(b) C. dreamt of seeing a girl on the ----Road, who was bathed in white light and was wearing a white blouse. - The dreamer had had intimate relations with a Miss White for the first time on this road.

(c) Frau D. dreamt of seeing the eighty-year-old Viennese actor Blasel lying on a sofa in full armour [‘in voller Rüstung’]. He began jumping over tables and chairs, drew a dagger, looked at himself in the looking-glass and brandished the dagger in the air as though he was fighting an imaginary enemy. - Interpretation: The dreamer suffered from a long-standing affection of the bladder [‘Blase’]. She lay on a sofa for her analysis; when she looked at herself in a looking-glass, she thought privately that in spite of her age and illness she still looked hale and hearty [‘rüsting’].

867 (13) A ‘GREAT ACHIEVEMENT’ IN A DREAM. - A man dreamt that he was a pregnant woman lying in bed. He found the situation very disagreeable. He called out: ‘I’d rather be...’ (during the analysis, after calling to mind a nurse, he completed the sentence with the words ‘breaking stones’). Behind the bed there was hanging a map, the bottom edge of which was kept stretched by a strip of wood. He tore the strip of wood down by catching hold of its two ends. It did not break across but split into two halves lengthways. This action relieved him and at the same time helped on delivery.

Without any assistance he interpreted tearing down the strip [‘Leiste’] as a great achievement [‘Leistung’]. He was escaping from his uncomfortable situation (in the treatment) by tearing himself out of his feminine attitude.... The absurd detail of the strip of wood not simply breaking but splitting lengthways was explained thus: the dreamer recalled that this combination of doubling and destroying was an allusion to castration. Dreams very often represent castration by the presence of two penis symbols as the defiant expression of an antithetical wish. Incidentally, the ‘Leiste’ [‘groin’] is a part of the body in the neighbourhood of the genitals. The dreamer summed up the interpretation of the dream as meaning that he had got the better of the threat of castration which had led to his adopting a feminine attitude.

(14) In an analysis which I was conducting in French a dream came up for interpretation in which I appeared as an elephant. I naturally asked the dreamer why I was represented in that form. ‘Vous me trompez’ [‘you are deceiving me’] was his reply (‘trompe’ = ‘trunk’).

The dream-work can often succeed in representing very refractory material, such as proper names, by a far-fetched use of out-of-the-way associations. In one of my dreams old Brücke had set me the task of making a dissection;... I fished something out that looked like a piece of crumpled silver-paper. (I shall return to this dream later.) The association to this (at which I arrived with some difficulty) was ‘stanniol.’ I then perceived that I was thinking of the name of Stannius, the author of a dissertation on the nervous system of fish, which I had greatly admired in my youth. The first scientific task which my teacher set me was in fact concerned with the nervous system of a fish, Ammocoetes. It was clearly impossible to make use of the name of this fish in a picture puzzle.

At this point I cannot resist recording a very peculiar dream, which also deserves to be noticed as having been dreamt by a child, and which can easily be explained analytically. ‘I remember having often dreamt when I was a child’, said a lady, ‘that God wore a paper cocked-hat on his head. I used very often to have a hat of that sort put on my head at meals, to prevent my being able to look at the other children’s plates, to see how big their helpings were. As I had heard that God was omniscient, the meaning of the dream was that I knew everything - even in spite of the hat that had been put on my head.’

The nature of the dream-work and the way in which it plays about with its material, the dream-thoughts, are instructively shown when we come to consider numbers and calculations that occur in dreams. Moreover, numbers in dreams are regarded superstitiously as being especially significant in regard to the future. I shall therefore select a few instances of this kind from my collection.

I

Extract from a dream dreamt by a lady shortly before her treatment came to an end: She was going to pay for something. Her daughter took 3 florins and 65 kreuzers from her (the mother’s) purse. The dreamer said to her: ‘What are you doing? It only costs 21 kreuzers.’ Owing to my knowledge of the dreamer’s circumstances, this bit of dream was intelligible to me without any further explanation on her part. The lady came from abroad and her daughter was at school in Vienna. She was in a position to carry on her treatment with me as long as her daughter remained in Vienna. The girl’s school year was due to end in three weeks and this also meant the end of the lady’s treatment. The day before the dream, the headmistress had asked her whether she would not consider leaving her daughter at school for another year. From this suggestion she had evidently gone on to reflect that in that case she might also continue her treatment. This was what the dream referred to. One year is equal to 365 days. The three weeks which remained both of the school-year and of the treatment were equivalent to 21 days (though the hours of treatment would be less than this). The numbers, which in the dream-thoughts referred to periods of time, were attached in the dream itself to sums of money - not but what there was a deeper meaning involved, for ‘time is money.’ 365 kreuzers only amount to 3 florins and 65 kreuzers; and the smallness of the sums that occurred in the dream was obviously the result of wish-fulfilment. The dreamer’s wish reduced the cost both of the treatment and of the year’s school-fees.

II

The numbers which occurred in another dream involved more complicated circumstances. A lady who, though she was still young, had been married for a number of years, received news that an acquaintance of hers, Elise L., who was almost exactly her contemporary, had just become engaged. Thereupon she had the following dream. She was at the theatre with her husband. One side of the stalls was completely empty. Her husband told her that Elise L. and her fiancé had wanted to go too; but had only been able to get bad seats - three for 1 florin 50 kreuzers - and of course they could not take those. She thought it would not really have done any harm if they had.

What was the origin of the 1 florin 50 kreuzers? It came from what was in fact an indifferent event of the previous day. Her sister-in-law had been given a present of 150 florins by her husband and had been in a hurry to get rid of them by buying a piece of jewellery. It is to be noticed that 150 florins is a hundred times as much as 1 florin 50 kreuzers. Where did the three come from which was the number of the theatre tickets? The only connection here was that her newly-engaged friend was the same number of months - three - her junior. The solution of the dream was arrived at with the discovery of the meaning of the empty stalls. They were an unmodified allusion to a small incident which had given her husband a good excuse for teasing her. She had planned to go to one of the plays that had been announced for the coming week and had taken the trouble to buy tickets several days ahead, and had therefore had to pay a booking fee. When they got to the theatre they found that one side of the house was almost empty. There had been no need for her to be in such a hurry.

Let me now put the dream-thoughts in place of the dream. ‘It was absurd to marry so early. There was no need for me to be in such a hurry. I see from Elise L.’s example that I should have got a husband in the end. Indeed, I should have got one a hundred times better’ (a treasure) ‘if I had only waited’ (in antithesis to her sister-in-law’s hurry). ‘My money’ (or dowry) ‘could have bought three men just as good.’

It will be observed that the meaning and context of the numbers have been altered to a far greater extent in this dream than in the former one. The processes of modification and distortion have gone further here; and this is to be explained by the dream-thoughts in this case having to overcome a specially high degree of endopsychic resistance before they could obtain representation. Nor should we overlook the fact that there was an element of absurdity in the dream, namely the three seats being taken by two people. I will anticipate my discussion of absurdity in dreams by pointing out that this absurd detail in the content of the dream was intended to represent the most strongly emphasized of the dream-thoughts, viz., ‘it was absurd to marry so early.’ The absurdity which had to find a place in the dream was ingeniously supplied by the number 3, which was itself derived from a quite immaterial point of distinction between the two people under comparison - the 3 months’ difference between their ages. The reduction of the actual 150 florins to 1 florin 50 corresponded to the low value assigned by the dreamer to her husband (or treasure), in her suppressed thoughts.

III

The next example exhibits the methods of calculation employed by dreams, which have brought them into so much disrepute. A man had a dream that he was settled in a chair at the B.’s - a family with which he had been formerly acquainted - and said to them: ‘It was a great mistake your not letting me have Mali.’ - ‘How old are you?’ he then went on to ask the girl. - ‘I was born in 1882’, she replied. - ‘Oh, so you’re 28, then.’

Since the dream dates from 1898 this was evidently a miscalculation, and the dreamer’s inability to do sums would deserve to be compared with that of a general paralytic unless it could be explained in some other way. My patient was one of those people who, whenever they happen to catch sight of a woman, cannot let her alone in their thoughts. The patient who for some months used regularly to come next after him in my consulting room, and whom he thus ran into, was a young lady; he used constantly to make enquiries about her and was most anxious to create a good impression with her. It was she whose age he estimated at 28 years. So much by way of explanation of the result of the ostensible calculation. 1882, incidentally, was the year in which the dreamer had married. - I may add that he was unable to resist entering into conversation with the two other members of the female sex whom he came across in my house - the two maids (neither of them by any means youthful), one or other of whom used to open the door to him; he explained their lack of response as being due to their regarding him as an elderly gentleman of settled habits.IV

Here is another dream dealing with figures, which is characterized by the clarity of the manner in which it was determined, or rather, overdetermined. I owe both the dream and its interpretation to Dr. B. Dattner. ‘The landlord of my block of flats, who is a police-constable, dreamt that he was on street-duty. (This was a wish-fulfilment.) An inspector came up to him, who had the number 22 followed by 62 or 26, on his collar. At any rate there were several twos on it.

‘The mere fact that in reporting the dream the dreamer broke up the number 2262 showed that its components had separate meanings. He recalled that the day before there had been some talk at the police station about the men’s length of service. The occasion for it was an inspector who had retired on his pension at the age of 62. The dreamer had only served for 22 years, and it would be 2 years and 2 months before he would be eligible for a 90 percent pension. The dream represented in the first place the fulfilment of a long-cherished wish of the dreamer’s to reach the rank of inspector. The superior officer with "2262" on his collar was the dreamer himself. He was on street duty - another favourite wish of his - he had served his remaining 2 years and 2 months and now, like the 62-year-old inspector, he could retire on a full pension.’¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] For analyses of other dreams containing numbers, see Jung, Marcinowski and others. These often imply very complicated operations with numbers, which have been carried out by the dreamer with astonishing accuracy. See also Jones (1912a) When we take together these and some other examples which I shall give later, we may safely say that the dream-work does not in fact carry out any calculations at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it merely throws into the form of a calculation numbers which are present in the dream-thoughts and can serve as allusions to matter that cannot be represented in any other way. In this respect the dream-work is treating numbers as a medium for the expression of its purpose in precisely the same way as it treats any other idea, including proper names and speeches that occur recognizably as verbal presentations.

For the dream-work cannot actually create speeches. However much speeches and conversations, whether reasonable or unreasonable in themselves, may figure in dreams, analysis invariably proves that all that the dream has done is to extract from the dream-thoughts fragments of speeches which have really been made or heard. It deals with these fragments in the most arbitrary fashion. Not only does it drag them out of their context and cut them in pieces, incorporating some portions and rejecting others, but it often puts them together in a new order, so that a speech which appears in the dream to be a connected whole turns out in analysis to be composed of three or four detached fragments. In producing this new version, a dream will often abandon the meaning that the words originally had in the dream-thoughts and give them a fresh one.¹ If we look closely into a speech that occurs in a dream, we shall find that it consists on the one hand of relatively clear and compact portions and on the other hand of portions which serve as connecting matter and have probably been filled in at a later stage, just as, in reading, we fill in any letters or syllables that may have been accidentally omitted. Thus speeches in dreams have a structure similar to that of breccia, in which largish blocks of various kinds of stone are cemented together by a binding medium.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] In this respect neuroses behave exactly like dreams. I know a patient one of whose symptoms is that, involuntarily and against her will she hears - i.e. hallucinates - songs or fragments of songs, without being able to understand what part they play in her mental life. (Incidentally, she is certainly not paranoic.) Analysis has shown that, by allowing herself a certain amount of licence, she puts the text of these songs to false uses. For instance in the lines ‘Leise, leise, Fromme Weise!’ [literally, ‘Softly, softly, devout melody’] the last word was taken by her unconscious as though it was spelt ‘Waise’ [= ‘orphan’, thus making the lines read ‘Softly, softly, pious orphan’], the orphan being herself. Again ‘O du selige, o du fröhliche’ [‘Oh thou blessed and happy...’] is the opening of a Christmas carol; by not continuing the quotation to the word ‘Christmastide’ she turned it into a bridal song. -The same mechanism of distortion can also operate in the occurrence of an idea unaccompanied by hallucination. Why was it that one of my patients was pestered by the recollection of a poem that he had had to learn in his youth: ‘Nächtlich am Busento lispeln...’ [‘By night on the Busento whispering...’]? Because his imagination went no further than the first part of this quotation: ‘Nächtlich am Busen’ [‘By night on the bosom’].

We are familiar with the fact that this same technical trick is used by parodists. Included in a series of ‘Illustrations to the German Classics’ published in Fliegende Blätter was one which illustrated Schiller’s ‘Siegesfest’, with the following quotation attached to it:

Und des frisch erkämpften Weibes

Freut sich der Atrid und strickt...

[The conqu’ring son of Atreus sits

At his fair captive’s side and knits...]

Here the quotation broke off. In the original the lines continue:

... Um den Reiz des schönen Leibes

Seine Arme hochbeglückt.

[... His joyful and triumphant arms

About her body’s lovely charms. ]

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