Autobiographical note 35 страница

Here is a similar case. One of my patients had a dream which struck him as interesting, for immediately after waking he said to himself: ‘I must tell the doctor that.’ The dream was analysed and produced the clearest allusions to a liaison which he had started during the treatment and which he had decided to himself not to tell me about.²

¹ [’Nicht auf meinem eigenen Mist gewachsen’ - meaning ‘I am not responsible for that’, or ‘It’s not my baby.’ The German word ‘Mist’, properly meaning manure, is used in slang for ‘rubbish’ and occurs in this sense in the Viennese term for a dust-bin: ‘Misttrügerl.’]

² [Footnote added 1909:] If in the actual course of a dream dreamt during psycho-analytic treatment the dreamer says to himself: ‘I must tell the doctor that’, it invariably implies the presence of a strong resistance against confessing the dream - which is not infrequently thereupon forgotten.

III

Here is a third example, one from my own experience. I was going to the hospital with P. through a district in which there were houses and gardens. At the same time I had a notion that I had often seen this district before in dreams. I did not know my way about very well. He showed me a road that led round the corner to a restaurant (indoors, not a garden). There I asked for Frau Doni and was told that she lived at the back in a small room with three children. I went towards it, but before I got there met an indistinct figure with my two little girls; I took them with me after I had stood with them for a little while. Some sort of reproach against my wife, for having left them there.

When I woke up I had a feeling of great satisfaction, the reason for which I explained to myself as being that I was going to discover from this analysis the meaning of ‘I’ve dreamt of that before.’¹ In fact, however, the analysis taught me nothing of the kind; what it did show me was that the satisfaction belonged to the latent content of the dream and not to any judgement upon it. My satisfaction was with the fact that my marriage had brought me children. P. was a person whose course in life lay for some time alongside mine, who then out distanced me both socially and materially, but whose marriage was childless. The two events which occasioned the dream will serve, instead of a complete analysis, to indicate its meaning. The day before, I had read in a newspaper the announcement of the death of Frau Dona A----y (which I turned into ‘Doni’ in the dream), who had died in childbirth. My wife told me that the dead woman had been looked after by the same midwife who had attended her at the birth of our two youngest children. The name ‘Dona’ had struck me because I had met it for the first time a short while before in an English novel. The second occasion for the dream was provided by the date on which it occurred. It was on the night before the birthday of my eldest boy - who seems to have some poetic gifts.

¹ A protracted discussion on this subject has run through recent volumes of the Revue Philosophique under the title of ‘Paramnesia in Dreams.’

IV

I was left with the same feeling of satisfaction when I woke from the absurd dream of my father having played a political part among the Magyars after his death; and the reason I gave myself for this feeling was that it was a continuation of the feeling that accompanied the last piece of the dream. I remembered how like Garibaldi he had looked on his death-bed and felt glad that it had come true.... (There was a continuation which I had forgotten). The analysis enabled me to fill in this gap in the dream. It was a mention of my second son, to who I had given the first name of a great historical figure who had powerfully attracted me in my boyhood, especially since my visit to England. During the year before the child’s birth I had made up my mind to use this name if it were a son and I greeted the new-born baby with it with a feeling of high satisfaction. (It is easy to see how the suppressed megalomania of fathers is transferred in their thoughts on to their children, and it seems quite probable that this is one of the ways in which the suppression of that feeling, which becomes necessary in actual life, is carried out.) The little boy’s right to appear in the context of this dream was derived from the fact that he had just had the same misadventure - easily forgivable both in a child and in a dying man - of soiling his bed-clothes. Compare in this connection Stuhlrichter [‘presiding judge’, literally ‘chair-' or ‘stool-judge’] and the wish expressed in the dream to stand before one’s children’s eyes great and unsullied. ]

V

I now turn to consider expressions of judgement passed in the dream itself but not continued into waking life or transposed into it. In looking for examples of these, my task will be greatly assisted if I may make use of dreams which I have already recorded with other aims in view. The dream of Goethe’s attack on Herr M. appears to contain a whole number of acts of judgement. ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me improbable.’ This has every appearance of being a criticism of the absurd idea that Goethe should have made a literary attack on a young man of my acquaintance. ‘It seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen.’ This, again, sounds exactly like the outcome of a calculation, though, it is true, of a feeble-minded one. Lastly, ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in’ seems like an instance of uncertainty or doubt in a dream.

Thus all of these seemed to be acts of judgement made for the first time in the dream. But analysis showed that their wording can be taken in another way, in the light of which they become indispensable for the dream’s interpretation, while at the same time every trace of absurdity is removed. The sentence ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data’ put me in the place of my friend who was in fact seeking to throw light on the chronological data of life. This deprives the sentence of its significance as a judgement protesting against the absurdity of the preceding sentences. The interpolated phrase, ‘which seemed to me improbable’, belonged with the subsequent one, ‘It seemed to be a plausible notion’. I had used almost these precise words to the lady who had told her brother’s case-history. ‘It seems to me an improbable notion that his cries of "Nature! Nature!" had anything to do with Goethe; it seems to me far more plausible that the words had the sexual meaning you are familiar with.’ It is true that here a judgement was passed - not in the dream, however, but in reality, and on an occasion which was recollected and exploited by the dream-thoughts. The content of the dream took over this judgement just like any other fragment of the dream-thoughts. The number ‘18' to which the judgement in the dream was senselessly attached, retains a trace of the real context from which the judgement was torn. Lastly, ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in’ was intended merely to carry further my identification with the paralytic patient in my examination of whom this point had really arisen.

The resolution of what are ostensibly acts of judgement in dreams may serve to remind us of the rules laid down at the beginning of this book for carrying out the work of interpretation: namely, that we should disregard the apparent coherence between a dream’s constituents as an unessential illusion, and that we should trace back the origin of each of its elements on its own account. A dream is a conglomerate which, for purposes of investigation, must be broken up once more into fragments. On the other hand, however, it will be observed that a psychical force is at work in dreams which creates this apparent connectedness, which, that is to say, submits the material produced by the dream-work to a ‘secondary revision’. This brings us face to face with the manifestations of a force whose importance we shall later assess as the fourth of the factors concerned in the construction of dreams.

VI

Here is a further instance of a process of judgement at work in a dream that I have already recorded. In the absurd dream of the communication from the town council I asked: ‘Did you get married soon after that?’ I calculated that, of course, I was born in 1856, which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question. All of this was clothed in the form of a set of logical conclusions. My father had married in 1851, immediately after his attack; I, of course, was the eldest of the family and had been born in 1856; Q.E.D. As we know, this false conclusion was drawn in the interests of wish-fulfilment; and the predominant dream-thought ran: ‘Four or five years; that’s no time at all; it doesn’t count.’ Every step in this set of logical conclusions, however alike in their content and their form, could be explained in another way as having been determined by the dream-thoughts. It was the patient, of whose long analysis my colleague had fallen foul, who had decided to get married immediately the treatment was finished. The manner of my interview with my father in the dream was like an interrogation or examination, and reminded me too of a teacher at the University who used to take down exhaustive particulars from the students who were enrolling themselves for his lectures: ‘Date of birth?’ - ‘1856.’ - ‘Patre?’ In reply to this, one gave one’s father’s first name with a Latin termination; and we students assumed that the Hofrat drew conclusions from the first name of the father which could not always be drawn from that of the student himself. Thus the drawing of the conclusion in the dream was no more than a repetition of the drawing of a conclusion which appeared as a piece of the material of the dream-thoughts. Something new emerges from this. If a conclusion appears in the content of the dream there is no question that it is derived from the dream-thoughts; but it may either be present in these as a piece of recollected material or it may link a series of dream-thoughts together in a logical chain. In any case, however, a conclusion in a dream represents a conclusion in the dream-thoughts.¹

At this point we may resume our analysis of the dream. The interrogation by the professor led to a recollection of the register of University Students (which in my time was drawn up in Latin). It led further to thoughts upon the course of my academic studies. The five years which are prescribed for medical studies were once again too few for me. I quietly went on with my work for several more years; and in my circle of acquaintances I was regarded as an idler and it was doubted whether I should ever get through. Thereupon I quickly decided to take my examinations and I got through them in spite of the delay. Here was a fresh reinforcement of the dream-thoughts with which I was defiantly confronting my critics: ‘Even though you won’t believe it because I’ve taken my time, I shall get through: I shall bring my medical training to a conclusion. Things have often turned out like that before.’

¹ These findings are in some respects a correction of what I have said above (p. 783) on the representation of logical relations in dreams. This earlier passage describes the general behaviour of the dream-work but takes no account of the finer and more precise details of its functioning.

This same dream in its opening passage contained some sentences which could hardly be refused the name of an argument. This argument was not even absurd; it might just as well have occurred in waking thought: I was amused in the dream at the communication from the town council since, in the first place, I was not yet in the world in 1851 and, in the second place, my father, to whom it might have related, was already dead. Both of these statements were not only correct in themselves but agreed precisely with the real arguments that I should bring up if I were actually to receive a communication of that kind. My earlier analysis of the dream showed that it grew out of deeply embittered and derisive dream-thoughts. If we may also assume that there were strong reasons present for the activity of the censorship, we shall understand that the dream-work had every motive for producing a perfectly valid refutation of an absurd suggestion on the model contained in the dream-thoughts. The analysis showed, however, that the dream-work did not have a free hand in framing this parallel but was obliged, for that purpose, to use material from the dream-thoughts. It was just as though there were an algebraic equation containing (in addition to numerals) plus and minus signs, indices and radical signs, and as though someone were to copy out the equation without understanding it, taking over both the operational symbols and the numerals into his copy but mixing them all up together. The two arguments could be traced back to the following material. It was distressing to me to think that some of the premises which underlay my psychological explanations of the psychoneuroses were bound to excite scepticism and laughter when they were first met with. For instance, I had been driven to assume that impressions from the second year of life, and sometimes even from the first, left a lasting trace on the emotional life of those who were later to fall ill, and that these impressions - though distorted and exaggerated in many ways by the memory - might constitute the first and deepest foundation for hysterical symptoms. Patients, to whom I explained this at some appropriate moment, used to parody this newly gained knowledge by declaring that they were ready to look for recollections dating from a time at which they were not yet alive. My discovery of the unexpected part played by their father in the earliest sexual impulses of female patients might well be expected to meet with a similar reception (see the discussion on p. 736 f.). Nevertheless, it was my well-grounded conviction that both of these hypotheses were true. By way of confirmation I called to mind some instances in which the death of the father occurred while the child was at a very early age and in which later events, otherwise inexplicable, proved that the child had nevertheless retained unconsciously recollections of the figure which had disappeared so early in his life. I was aware that these two assertions of mine rested on the drawing of conclusions whose validity would be disputed. It was therefore an achievement of wish-fulfilment when the material of precisely those conclusions which I was afraid would be contested was employed by the dream-work for drawing conclusions which it was impossible to contest.

VII

At the beginning of a dream, which I have so far hardly touched upon, there was a clear expression of astonishment at the subject which had cropped up. Old Brücke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH, it related to a dissection of the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs which I saw before me as though in the dissecting-room, but without noticing their absence in myself and also without a trace of any gruesome feeling. Louise N. was standing beside me and doing the work with me. The pelvis had been eviscerated, and it was visible now in its superior, now in its inferior, aspect, the two being mixed together. Thick flesh-coloured protuberances (which, in the dream itself, made me think of haemorrhoids) could be seen. Something which lay over it and was like crumpled silver-paper¹ had also to be carefully fished out. I was then once more in possession of my legs and was making my way through the town. But (being tired) I took a cab. To my astonishment the cab drove in through the door of a house, which opened and allowed it to pass along a passage which turned a corner at its end and finally led into the open air again.² Finally I was making a journey through a changing landscape with an Alpine guide who was carrying my belongings. Part of the way he carried me too, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was boggy; we went round the edge; people were sitting on the ground like Red Indians or gypsies - among them a girl. Before this I had been making my own way forward over the slippery ground with a constant feeling of surprise that I was able to do it so well after the dissection. As we reached a small wooden house at the end of which was an open window. There the guide set me down and laid two wooden boards, which were standing ready, upon the window-sill, so as to bridge the chasm which had to be crossed over from the window. At that point I really became frightened about my legs, but instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying on wooden benches that were along the walls of the hut, and what seemed to be two children sleeping beside them. It was as though what was going to make the crossing possible was not the boards but the children. I awoke in a mental fright.

¹ Stanniol, which was an allusion to the book by Stannius on the nervous system of fishes. (Cf. loc. cit.)

² It was the place on the ground-floor of my block of flats where the tenants keep their perambulators; but it was over-determined in several other ways.

Anyone who has formed even the slightest idea of the extent of condensation in dreams will easily imagine what a number of pages would be filled by a full analysis of this dream. Fortunately, however, in the present context I need only take up one point in it, which provides an example of astonishment in dreams, as exhibited in the interpolation ‘strangely enough’. The following was the occasion of the dream. Louise N., the lady who was assisting me in my job in the dream, had been calling on me. ‘Lend me something to read’, she had said. I offered her Rider Haggard’s She. ‘A strange book, but full of hidden meaning’, I began to explain to her; ‘the eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions...’ Here she interrupted me: ‘I know it already. Have you nothing of your own?’ - ‘No, my own immortal works have not yet been written.’ - ‘Well, when are we to expect these so-called ultimate explanations of yours which you’ve promised even we shall find readable?’ she asked, with a touch of sarcasm. At that point I saw that someone else was admonishing me through her mouth and I was silent. I reflected on the amount of self-discipline it was costing me to offer the public even my book upon dreams - I should have to give away so much of my own private character in it.

Das Beste was du wissen kannst,

Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen.

The task which was imposed on me in the dream of carrying out a dissection of my own body was thus my self-analysis which was linked up with my giving an account of my dreams. Old Brücke came in here appropriately; even in the first years of my scientific work it happened that I allowed a discovery of mine to lie fallow until an energetic remonstrance on his part drove me into publishing it. The further thoughts which were started up by my conversation with Louise N. went too deep to become conscious. They were diverted in the direction of the material that had been stirred up in me by the mention of Rider Haggard’s She. The judgement ‘strangely enough’ went back to that book and to another one, Heart of the World, by the same author; and numerous elements of the dream were derived from these two imaginative novels. The boggy ground over which people had to be carried, and the chasm which they had to cross by means of boards brought along with them, were taken from She; the Red Indians, the girl and the wooden house were taken from Heart of the World. In both novels the guide is a woman; both are concerned with perilous journeys; while She describes an adventurous road that had scarcely ever been trodden before, leading into an undiscovered region. The tired feeling in my legs, according to a note which I find I made upon the dream, had been a real sensation during the day-time. It probably went along with a tired mood and a doubting thought: ‘How much longer will my legs carry me?’ The end of the adventure in She is that the guide, instead of finding immortality for herself and the others, perishes in the mysterious subterranean fire. A fear of that kind was unmistakably active in the dream-thoughts. The ‘wooden house’ was also, no doubt, a coffin, that is to say, the grave. But the dream-work achieved a masterpiece in its representation of this most unwished-for of all thoughts by a wish-fulfilment. For I had already been in a grave once, but it was an excavated Etruscan grave near Orvieto, a narrow chamber with two stone benches along its walls, on which the skeletons of two grown-up men were lying. The inside of the wooden house in the dream looked exactly like it, except that the stone was replaced by wood. The dream seems to have been saying: ‘If you must rest in a grave, let it be the Etruscan one.’ And, by making this replacement, it transformed the gloomiest of expectations into one that was highly desirable. Unluckily, as we are soon to hear, a dream can turn into its opposite the idea accompanying an affect but not always the affect itself. Accordingly, I woke up in a ‘mental fright’, even after the successful emergence of the idea that children may perhaps achieve what their father has failed to - a fresh allusion to the strange novel in which a person’s identity is retained through a series of generations for over two thousand years.

VIII

Included in yet another of my dreams there was an expression of surprise at something I had experienced in it; but the surprise was accompanied by such a striking, far-fetched and almost brilliant attempt at an explanation that, if only on its account, I cannot resist submitting the whole dream to analysis, quite apart from the dream’s possessing two other points to attract our interest. I was travelling along the Südbahn railway line during the night of July 18-19th, and in my sleep I heard: ‘Hollthurn, ten minutes’ being called out. I at once thought of holothurians - of a natural history museum - that this was the spot at which valiant men had fought in vain against the superior power of the ruler of their country - yes, the Counter-Reformation in Austria - it was as though it were a place in Styria or the Tyrol. I then saw indistinctly a small museum, in which the relics or belongings of these men were preserved. I should have liked to get out, but hesitated to do so. There were women with fruit on the platform. They were crouching on the ground and holding up their baskets invitingly. - I hesitated because I was not sure whether there was time, but we were still not moving. - I was suddenly in another compartment, in which the upholstery and seats were so narrow that one’s back pressed directly against the back of the carriage.1I was surprised by this, but I reflected that I MIGHT HAVE CHANGED CARRIAGES WHILE I WAS IN A SLEEPING STATE. There were several people, including an English brother and sister; a row of books were distinctly visible on a shelf on the wall. I saw ‘The Wealth of Nations’ and ‘Matter and Motion’ (by Clerk-Maxwell), a thick volume and bound in brown cloth. The man asked his sister about a book by Schiller, whether she had forgotten it. It seemed as though the books were sometimes mine and sometimes theirs. I felt inclined at that point to intervene in the conversation in a confirmatory or substantiating sense.... I woke up perspiring all over because all the windows were shut. The train was drawn up at Marburg.

While I was writing the dream down a new piece of it occurred to me, which my memory had tried to pass over. I said to the brother and sister, referring to a ‘articular work: ‘It is from...’, but corrected myself: ‘It is by...’ ‘Yes’, the man commented to his sister’,he said that right.’

¹ This description was unintelligible even to myself; but I have followed the fundamental rule of reporting a dream in the words which occurred to me as I was writing it down. The wording chosen is itself part of what is represented by the dream.

The dream opened with the name of the station, which must no doubt have partly woken me up. I replaced its name, Marburg, by Hollthurn. The fact that I heard ‘Marburg’ when it was first called out, or perhaps later, was proved by the mentioning in the dream of Schiller, who was born at Marburg, though not at the one in Styria.¹ I was making my journey on that occasion, although I was travelling first class, under very uncomfortable conditions. The train was packed full, and in my compartment I had found a lady and gentleman who appeared to be very aristocratic and had not the civility, or did not think it worth the trouble, to make any disguise of their annoyance at my intrusion. My polite greeting met with no response. Although the man and his wife were sitting side by side (with their backs to the engine) the woman nevertheless made haste, under my very eyes, to engage the window-seat facing her by putting an umbrella on it. The door was shut immediately, and pointed remarks were exchanged between them on the subject of opening windows. They had probably seen at once that I was longing for some fresh air. It was a hot night and the atmosphere in the completely closed compartment soon became suffocating. My experiences of travelling have taught me that conduct of this ruthless and overbearing kind is a characteristic of people who are travelling on a free or half-price ticket. When the ticket-collector came and I showed him the ticket I had bought at such expense, there fell from the lady’s mouth, in haughty and almost menacing tones, the words: ‘My husband has a free pass.’ She was an imposing figure with discontented features, of an age not far from the time of the decay of feminine beauty; the man uttered not a word but sat there motionless. I attempted to sleep. In my dream I took fearful vengeance on my disagreeable companions; no one could suspect what insults and humiliations lay concealed behind the broken fragments of the first half of the dream. When this need had been satisfied a second wish made itself felt - to change compartments. The scene is changed so often in dreams, and without the slightest objection being raised, that it would not have been in the least surprising if I had promptly replaced my travelling companions by more agreeable ones derived from my memory. But here was a case in which something resented the change of scene and thought it necessary to explain it. How did I suddenly come to be in another compartment? I had no recollection of having changed. There could be only one explanation: I must have left the carriage while I was in a sleeping state - a rare event, of which, however, examples are to be found in the experience of a neuropathologist. We know of people who have gone upon railway journeys in a twilight state, without betraying their abnormal condition by any signs, till at some point in the journey they have suddenly come to themselves completely and been amazed at the gap in their memory. In the dream itself, accordingly, I was declaring myself to be one of these cases of ‘automotisme ambulatoire’.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] Schiller was not born at any Marburg, but at Marbach, as every German school-boy knows, and as I knew myself. This was one more of those mistakes (see above, p. 681 n.) which slip in as a substitute for an intentional falsification at some other point, and which I have tried to explain in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Analysis made it possible to find another solution. The attempt at an explanation, which seemed so striking when I was obliged to ascribe it to the dream-work, was not an original one of my own, but was copied from the neurosis of one of my patients. I have already spoken elsewhere of a highly educated and, in real life, soft-hearted man who, shortly after the death of his parents, began to reproach himself with having murderous inclinations, and then fell a victim to the precautionary measures which he was obliged to adopt as a safeguard. It was a case of severe obsessions accompanied by complete insight. To begin with, walking through the streets was made a burden to him by a compulsion to make certain where every single person he met disappeared to; if anyone suddenly escaped his watchful eye, he was left with a distressing feeling and the idea that he might possibly have got rid of him. What lay behind this was, among other things, a ‘Cain’ phantasy - for ‘all men are brothers.’ Owing to the impossibility of carrying out this task, he gave up going for walks and spent his life incarcerated between his own four walls. But reports of murders which had been committed outside were constantly being brought into his room by the newspapers, and his conscience suggested to him, in the form of a doubt, that he might be the wanted murderer. The certainty that he had in fact not left his house for weeks protected him from these charges for a while, till one day the possibility came into his head that he might have left his house while he was in an unconscious state and have thus been able to commit the murder without knowing anything about it. From that time onwards he locked the front door of the house and gave the key to his old housekeeper with strict instructions never to let it fall into his hands even if he asked for it.

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