Autobiographical note 33 страница

Strictly speaking, this description applies only to such speeches in dreams as possess something of the sensory quality of speech, and which are described by the dreamer himself as being speeches. Other sorts of speeches, which are not, as it were, felt by him as having been heard or spoken (that is, which have no acoustic or motor accompaniments in the dream), are merely thoughts such as occur in our waking thought-activity and are often carried over unmodified into our dreams. Another copious source of undifferentiated speeches of this kind, though one which it is difficult to follow up, seems to be provided by material that has been read. But whatever stands out markedly in dreams as a speech can be traced back to real speeches which have been spoken or heard by the dreamer.

Instances showing that speeches in dreams have this origin have already been given by me in the course of analysing dreams which I have quoted for quite other purposes. Thus, in the ‘innocent’ market dream reported on p. 670, the spoken words ‘that’s not obtainable any longer’ served to identify me with the butcher, while one portion of the other speech, ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it’, was actually responsible for making the dream an ‘innocent’ one. The dreamer, it will be remembered, having had some suggestion made to her on the previous day by her cook, had replied with the words: ‘I don’t recognize that; behave yourself properly!’ The innocent-sounding first part of this speech was taken into the dream by way of allusion to its second part, which fitted excellently into the phantasy underlying the dream, but would at the same time have betrayed it.

Here is another example, which will serve instead of many, all of them leading to the same conclusion.

The dreamer was in a big courtyard in which some dead bodies were being burnt. ‘I’m off’, he said, ‘I can’t bear the sight of it.’ (This was definitely a speech.) He then met two butcher’s boys. ‘Well’, he asked, ‘did it taste nice?’ ‘No’, one of them answered, ‘not a bit nice’ - as though it had been human flesh.

The innocent occasion of the dream was as follows. The dreamer and his wife had paid a visit after supper to their neighbours, who were excellent people but not precisely appetizing. The hospitable old lady was just having her supper and had tried to force him (there is a phrase with a sexual sense used jokingly among men to render this idea¹) to taste some of it. He had declined, saying he had no appetite left: ‘Get along!’ she had replied, ‘you can manage it’, or words to that effect. He had therefore been obliged to taste it and had complimented her on it saying: ‘that was very nice.’ When he was once more alone with his wife he had grumbled at his neighbour’s insistence and also at the quality of the food. The thought, ‘I can’t bear the sight of it’, which in the dream too failed to emerge as a speech in the strict sense, was an allusion to the physical charms of the lady from which the invitation had come, and it must be taken as meaning that he had no desire to look at them.

¹ [‘Notzüchtigen’, ‘to force sexually’, ‘to rape’, is so used in place of ‘nötigen’, ‘to force’ (in the ordinary sense).] More instruction can be derived from another dream, which I shall report in this connection on account of the very distinct speech which formed its centre-point, although I shall have to put off explaining it fully till I come to discuss affect in dreams. I had a very clear dream. I had gone to Brücke’s laboratory at night, and, in response to a gentle knock on the door, I opened it to (the late) Professor Fleischl, who came in with a number of strangers and, after exchanging a few words, sat down at his table. This was followed by a second dream. My friend Fl. had come to Vienna unobtrusively in July. I met him in the street in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and went with them to some place where they sat opposite each other as though they were at a small table. I sat in front at its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and added some such words as ‘that was the threshold.’ As P. failed to understand him, Fl. turned to me and asked me how much I had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon, overcome by strange emotions, I tried to explain to Fl, that P. (could not understand anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I actually said - and I myself noticed the mistake - was, ‘NON VIXIT’. I then gave P. a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned pale; his form grew indistinct and his eyes a sickly blue - and finally he melted away. I was highly delighted at this and I now realized that Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no more than an apparition, a ‘revenant’; and it seemed to me quite possible that people of that kind only existed as long as one liked and could be got rid of if someone else wished it.

This fine specimen includes many of the characteristics of dreams - the fact that I exercised my critical faculties during the dream and myself noticed my mistake when I said ‘Non vixit’ instead of ‘Non vivit’, my unconcerned dealings with people who were dead and were recognized as being dead in the dream itself, the absurdity of my final inference and the great satisfaction it gave me. This dream exhibits so many of these puzzling features, indeed, that I would give a great deal to be able to present the complete solution of its conundrums. But in point of fact I am incapable of doing so - of doing, that is to say, what I did in the dream, of sacrificing to my ambition people whom I greatly value. Any concealment, however, would destroy what I know very well to be the dream’s meaning; and I shall therefore content myself, both here and in a later context, with selecting only a few of its elements for interpretation.

The central feature of the dream was a scene in which I annihilated P. with a look. His eyes changed to a strange and uncanny blue and he melted away. This scene was unmistakably copied from one which I had actually experienced. At the time I have in mind I had been a demonstrator at the Physiological Institute and was due to start work early in the morning. It came to Brücke’s ears that I sometimes reached the students’ laboratory late. One morning he turned up punctually at the hour of opening and awaited my arrival. His words were brief and to the point. But it was not they that mattered. What overwhelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with which he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing - just as P. was in the dream, where, to my relief, the roles were reversed. No one who can remember the great man’s eyes, which retained their striking beauty even in his old age, and who has ever seen him in anger, will find it difficult to picture the young sinner’s emotions.

It was a long time, however, before I succeeded in tracing the origin of the ‘Non vixit’ with which I passed judgement in the dream. But at last it occurred to me that these two words possessed their high degree of clarity in the dream, not as words heard or spoken, but as words seen. I then knew at once where they came from. On the pedestal of the Kaiser Josef Memorial in the Hofburg in Vienna the following impressive words are inscribed:

Saluti patriae vixit

non diu sed totus.¹

I extracted from this inscription just enough to fit in with hostile train of ideas among the dream-thoughts, just enough to imply that ‘this fellow has no say in the matter - he isn’t even alive.’ And this reminded me that I had the dream only a few days after the unveiling of the memorial to Fleischl in the cloisters of the University. At that time I had seen the Brücke memorial once again and must have reflected (unconsciously) with regret on the fact that the premature death of my brilliant friend P., whose whole life had been devoted to science, had robbed him of a well-merited claim to a memorial in these same precincts. Accordingly, I gave him this memorial in my dream; and, incidentally, as I remembered, his first name was Josef.²

¹ [‘For the well-being of his country he lived not long but wholly.’ - Footnote added 1925:] The actual wording of the inscription is:

Saluti publicae vixit

non diu sed totus.

The reason for my mistake in putting ‘patriae’ for ‘publicae’ has probably been rightly guessed by Wittels.

² I may add as an example of over-determination that my excuse for arriving too late at the laboratory lay in the fact that after working far into the night I had in the morning to cover the long distance between the Kaiser Josef Strasse and the Währinger Strasse.

By the rules of dream-interpretation I was even now not entitled to pass from the Non vixit derived from my recollection of the Kaiser Josef Memorial to the Non vixit required by the sense of the dream-thoughts. There must have been some other element in the dream-thoughts which would help to make the transition possible. It then struck me as noticeable that in the scene in the dream there was a convergence of a hostile and an affectionate current of feeling towards my friend P., the former being on the surface and the latter concealed, but both of them being represented in the single phrase Non vixit. As he had deserved well of science I built him a memorial; but as he was guilty of an evil wish (which was expressed at the end of the dream) I annihilated him. I noticed that this last sentence had a quite special cadence, and I must have had some model in my mind. Where was an antithesis of this sort to be found, a juxtaposition like this of two opposite reactions towards a single person, both of them claiming to be completely justified and yet not incompatible? Only in one passage in literature - but a passage which makes a profound impression on the reader: in Brutus’s speech of self-justification in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’ Were not the formal structure of these sentences and their antithetical meaning precisely the same as in the dream-thought I had uncovered? Thus I had been playing the part of Brutus in the dream. If only I could find one other piece of evidence in the content of the dream to confirm this surprising collateral connecting link! A possible one occurred to me. ‘My friend Fl. came to Vienna in July.’ There was no basis in reality for this detail of the dream. So far as I knew, my friend Fl. had never been in Vienna in July. But the month of July was named after Julius Caesar and might therefore very well represent the allusion I wanted to the intermediate thought of my playing the part of Brutus.¹

¹ There was the further connection between ‘Caesar’ and ‘Kaiser’.

Strange to say, I really did once play the part of Brutus. I once acted in the scene between Brutus and Caesar from Schiller before an audience of children. I was fourteen years old at the time and was acting with a nephew who was a year my senior. He had come to us on a visit from England; and he, too, was a revenant, for it was the playmate of my earliest years who had returned in him. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable. We had loved each other and fought with each other; and this childhood relationship, as I have already hinted above, had a determining influence on all my subsequent relations with contemporaries. Since that time my nephew John has had many reincarnations which revived now one side and now another of his personality, unalterably fixed as it was in my unconscious memory. There must have been times when he treated me very badly and I must have shown courage in the face of my tyrant; for in my later years I have often been told of a short speech made by me in my own defence when my father, who was at the same time John’s grandfather, had said to me accusingly: ‘Why are you hitting John? My reply - I was not yet two years old at the time - was ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me.’ It must have been this scene from my childhood which diverted ‘Non vivit’ into ‘Non vixit’, for in the language of later childhood the word for to hit is ‘wichsen’. The dream-work is not ashamed to make use of links such as this one. There was little basis in reality for my hostility to my friend P., who was very greatly my superior and for that reason was well fitted to appear as a new edition of my early playmate. This hostility must therefore certainly have gone back to my complicated childhood relations to John.

As I have said, I shall return to this dream later.

(G) ABSURD DREAMS - INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY IN DREAMS

In the course of our dream-interpretations we have so often come across the element of absurdity that we cannot postpone any longer the moment of investigating its source and significance, if it has any. For it will be remembered that the absurdity of dreams has provided those who deny the value of dreams with one of their principal arguments in favour of regarding them as the meaningless product of a reduced and fragmentary mental activity.

I shall begin by giving a few examples in which the absurdity is only an apparent one and disappears as soon as the meaning of the dream is more closely examined. Here are two or three dreams which deal (by chance, as it may seem at first sight) with the dreamer’s dead father.I

This is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years earlier. His father had met with a grave calamity. He had been travelling by the night train, which had been derailed. The carriage seats were forced together and his head was compressed from side to side. The dreamer then saw him lying in bed with a wound over his left eyebrow which ran in a vertical direction. He was surprised at his father’s having met with a calamity (since he was already dead, as he added in telling me the dream). How clear his eyes were!

According to the ruling theory of dreams we should have to explain the content of this dream as follows. To begin with, we should suppose, while the dreamer was imagining the accident, he must have forgotten that his father had been in his grave for several years; but, as the dream proceeded, the recollection must have emerged, and led to his astonishment at his own dream while he was still asleep. Analysis teaches us, however, that it is eminently useless to look for explanations of this kind. The dreamer had commissioned a bust of his father from a sculptor and had seen it for the first time two days before the dream. It was this that he had thought of as a calamity. The sculptor had never seen his father and had worked from photographs. On the day immediately before the dream the dreamer, in his filial piety, had sent an old family servant to the studio to see whether he would form the same opinion of the marble head, namely, that it was too narrow from side to side at the temples. He now proceeded to recall from his memory the material which had gone to the construction of the dream. Whenever his father was tormented by business worries or family difficulties, he had been in the habit of pressing his hands to the sides of his forehead, as though he felt that his head was too wide and wanted to compress it. -When the patient was four years old he had been present when a pistol, which had been accidentally loaded, had been discharged and had blackened his father’s eyes. (‘How clear his eyes were!’) - At the spot on his forehead at which the dream located his father’s injury, a deep furrow showed during his lifetime whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that this furrow was replaced in the dream by a wound led back to the second exciting cause of the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter. The plate had slipped through his fingers, and when he picked it up showed a crack which ran perpendicularly down the little girl’s forehead as far as her eyebrow. He could not help feeling superstitious about this, since a few days before his mother’s death he had broken a photographic plate with her portrait on it.

The absurdity of this dream was thus no more than the result of a piece of carelessness in verbal expression which failed to distinguish the bust and the photograph from the actual person. We might any of us say: ‘There’s something wrong with Father, don’t you think?’ The appearance of absurdity in the dream could easily have been avoided; and if we were to judge from this single example, we should be inclined to think that the apparent absurdity had been permitted or even designed.

II

Here is another, almost exactly similar, example from a dream of my own. (I lost my father in 1896.) After his death my father played a political part among the Magyars and brought them together politically. Here I saw a small and indistinct picture: a crowd of men as though they were in the Reichstag; someone standing on one or two chairs, with other people round him. I remembered how like Garibaldi he had looked on his death-bed, and fell glad that that promise had come true.

What could be more absurd than this? It was dreamt at a time at which the Hungarians had been driven by parliamentary obstruction into a state of lawlessness and were plunged into the crisis from which they were rescued by Koloman Széll. The trivial detail of the scene in the dream appearing in pictures of such a small size was not without relevance to its interpretation. Our dream-thoughts are usually represented in visual pictures which appear to be more or less life-size. The picture which I saw in my dream, however, was a reproduction of a woodcut inserted in an illustrated history of Austria, which showed Maria Theresa at the Reichstag of Pressburg in the famous episode of ‘Moriamur pro rege nostro’. [‘We will die for our king!’]¹ Like Maria Theresa in the picture, so my father stood in the dream surrounded by the crowd. But he was standing on one or two chairs [‘chair’ = ‘Stuhl’]. He had brought them together, and was thus a presiding judge [‘Stuhlrichter’, literally ‘chair-judge’]. (A connecting link was provided by the common phrase ‘we shall need no judge.’) -Those of us who were standing round had in fact remarked how like Garibaldi my father looked on his death bed. He had had a post mortem rise of temperature, his cheeks had been flushed more and more deeply red.... As I recalled this, my thoughts involuntarily ran on:

Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine

Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.²

¹ I cannot remember where I read an account of a dream which was filled with unusually small figures, and the source of which turned out to be one of Jacques Callot’s etchings seen by the dreamer during the day. These etchings do in fact contain a large number of very small figures. One series of them depicts the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.

² [‘Behind him, a shadowy illusion, lay what holds us all in bondage - the things that are common.’]

These elevated thoughts prepared the way for the appearance of something that was common [‘gemein’] in another sense. My father’s post mortem rise of temperature corresponded to the words ‘after his death’ in the dream. His most severe suffering had been caused by a complete paralysis (obstruction) of the intestines during his last weeks. Disrespectful thoughts of all kinds followed from this. One of my contemporaries who lost his father while he was still at his secondary school - on that occasion I myself had been deeply moved and had offered to be his friend - once told me scornfully of how one of his female relatives had had a painful experience. Her father had fallen dead in the street and had been brought home; when his body was undressed it was found that at the moment of death, or post mortem, he had passed a stool [‘Stuhl’]. His daughter had been so unhappy about this that she could not prevent this ugly detail from disturbing her memory of her father. Here we have reached the wish that was embodied in this dream. ‘To stand before one’s children’s eyes, after one’s death, great and unsullied’ - who would not desire this? What has become of the absurdity of the dream? Its apparent absurdity is due only to the fact that it gave a literal picture of a figure of speech which is itself perfectly legitimate and in which we habitually overlook any absurdity involved in the contradiction between its parts. In this instance, once again, it is impossible to escape an impression that the apparent absurdity is intentional and has been deliberately produced.

The frequency with which dead people appear in dreams and act and associate with us as though they were alive has caused unnecessary surprise and has produced some remarkable explanations which throw our lack of understanding of dreams into strong relief. Yet the explanation of these dreams is a very obvious one. It often happens that we find ourselves thinking: ‘If my father were alive, what would he say to this?’ Dreams are unable to express an ‘if’ of this kind except by representing the person concerned as present in some particular situation. Thus, for instance, a young man who had been left a large legacy by his grandfather, dreamt, at a time when he was feeling self-reproaches for having spent a considerable sum of money, that his grandfather was alive again and calling him to account. And when, from our better knowledge, we protest that after all the person in question is dead, what we look upon as a criticism of the dream is in reality either a consoling thought that the dead person has not lived to witness the event, or a feeling of satisfaction that he can no longer interfere in it.

There is another kind of absurdity, which occurs in dreams of dead relatives but which does not express ridicule and derision. It indicates an extreme degree of repudiation, and so makes it possible to represent a repressed thought which the dreamer would prefer to regard as utterly unthinkable. It seems impossible to elucidate dreams of this kind unless one bears in mind the fact that dreams do not differentiate between what is wished and what is real. For instance, a man who had nursed his father during his last illness and had been deeply grieved by his death, had the following senseless dream some time afterwards. His father was alive once more and talking to him in his usual way, but (the remarkable thing was that) he had really died, only he did not know it. This dream only becomes intelligible if, after the words ‘but he had really died’ we insert ‘in consequence of the dreamer’s wish’, and if we explain that what ‘he did not know’ was that the dreamer had had this wish. While he was nursing his father he had repeatedly wished his father were dead; that is to say, he had had what was actually a merciful thought that death might put an end to his sufferings. During his mourning, after his father’s death, even this sympathetic wish became a subject of unconscious self-reproach, as though by means of it he had really helped to shorten the sick man’s life. A stirring up of the dreamer’s earliest infantile impulses against his father made it possible for this self-reproach to find expression as a dream; but the fact that the instigator of the dream and the daytime thoughts were such worlds apart was precisely what necessitated the dream’s absurdity.¹

It is true that dreams of dead people whom the dreamer has loved raise difficult problems in dream-interpretation and that these cannot always be satisfactorily solved. The reason for this is to be found in the particularly strongly marked emotional ambivalence which dominates the dreamer’s relation to the dead person. It very commonly happens that in dreams of this kind the dead person is treated to begin with as though he were alive, that he then suddenly turns out to be dead and that in a subsequent part of the dream he is alive once more. This has a confusing effect, It eventually occurred to me that this alternation between death and life is intended to represent indifference on the part of the dreamer. (‘It’s all the same to me whether he’s alive or dead.’) This indifference is, of course, not real but merely desired; it is intended to help the dreamer to repudiate his very intense and often contradictory emotional attitudes and it thus becomes a dream-representation of his ambivalence. -In other dreams in which the dreamer associates with dead people, the following rule often helps to give us our bearings. If there is no mention in the dream of the fact that the dead man is dead, the dreamer is equating himself with him: he is dreaming of his own death. If, in the course of the dream, the dreamer suddenly says to himself in astonishment, ‘why, he died ever so long ago’, he is repudiating this equation and is denying that the dream signifies his own death. - But I willingly confess to a feeling that dream-interpretation is far from having revealed all the secrets of dreams of this character.

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Cf. my paper on the two principles of mental functioning (1911b).

III

In the example which I shall next bring forward I have been able to catch the dream-work in the very act of intentionally fabricating an absurdity for which there was absolutely no occasion in the material. It is taken from the dream which arose from my meeting with Count Thun as I was starting for my holidays. I was driving in a cab and ordered the driver to drive me to a station. ‘Of course I can’t drive with you along the railway line itself’, I said, after he had raised some objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if I had already driven with him for some of the distance one normally travels by train. The analysis produced the following explanations of this confused and senseless story. The day before, I had hired a cab to take me to an out-of-the-way street in Dornbach. The driver, however, had not known where the street was and, as these excellent people are apt to do, had driven on and on until at last I had noticed what was happening and had told him the right way, adding a few sarcastic comments. A train of thought, to which I was later in the analysis to return, led from this cab-driver to aristocrats. For the moment it was merely the passing notion that what strikes us bourgeois plebs about the aristocracy is the preference they have for taking the driver’s seat. Count Thun, indeed, was the driver of the State Coach of Austria. The next sentence in the dream, however, referred to my brother, whom I was thus identifying with the cab-driver. That year I had called off a trip I was going to make with him to Italy. (‘I can’t drive with you along the railway line itself.’) And this cancellation had been a kind of punishment for the complaints he used to make that I was in the habit of overtiring him on such trips (this appeared in the dream unaltered) by insisting upon moving too rapidly from place to place and seeing too many beautiful things in a single day. On the evening of the dream my brother had accompanied me to the station; but he had jumped out shortly before we got there, at the suburban railway station adjoining the main line terminus, in order to travel to Purkersdorf by the suburban line. I had remarked to him that he might have stayed with me a little longer by travelling to Purkersdorf by the main line instead of the suburban one. This led to the passage in the dream in which I drove in the cab for some of the distance one normally travels by train. This was an inversion of what had happened in reality - a kind of ‘tu quoque’ argument. What I had said to my brother was: ‘you can travel on the main line in my company for the distance you would travel by the suburban line.’ I brought about the whole confusion in the dream by putting ‘cab’ instead of ‘suburban line’ (which, incidentally, was of great help in bringing together the figures of the cab-driver and my brother). In this way I succeeded in producing something senseless in the dream, which it seems scarcely possible to disentangle and which was almost a direct contradiction of an earlier remark of mine in the dream (‘I can’t drive with you along the railway line itself.’) Since, however, there was no necessity whatever for me to confuse the suburban railway and a cab, I must have arranged the whole of this enigmatic business in the dream on purpose.

But for what purpose? We are now to discover the significance of absurdity in dreams and the motives which lead to its being admitted or even created. The solution of the mystery in the present dream was as follows. It was necessary for me that there should be something absurd and unintelligible in this dream in connection with the word ‘fahren’¹ because the dream-thoughts included a particular judgement which called for representation. One evening, while I was at the house of the hospitable and witty lady who appeared as the ‘housekeeper’ in one of the other scenes in the same dream, I had heard two riddles which I had been unable to solve. Since they were familiar to the rest of the company, I cut a rather ludicrous figure in my vain attempts to find the answers. They depended upon puns on the words ‘Nachkommen’ and ‘

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