Autobiographical note 36 страница

This, then, was the origin of my attempted explanation to the effect that I had changed carriages while I was in an unconscious state; it had been carried over ready-made into the dream from the material of the dream-thoughts, and was evidently intended in the dream to serve the purpose of identifying me with the figure of this patient. My recollection of him had been aroused by an easy association. My last night-journey, a few weeks earlier, had been made in the company of this very man. He was cured, and was travelling with me into the provinces to visit his relatives, who had sent for me. We had a compartment to ourselves; we left all the windows open all through the night and had a most entertaining time for as long as I stayed awake. I knew that the root of his illness had been hostile impulses against his father, dating from his childhood and involving a sexual situation. In so far, therefore, as I was identifying myself with him, I was seeking to confess to something analogous. And in fact the second scene of the dream ended in a somewhat extravagant phantasy that my two elderly travelling companions had treated me in such a stand-offish way because my arrival had prevented the affectionate exchanges which they had planned for the night. This phantasy went back, however, to a scene of early childhood in which the child, probably driven by sexual curiosity, had forced his way into his parents’ bedroom and been turned out of it by his father’s orders.

It is unnecessary, I think, to accumulate further examples. They would merely serve to confirm what we have gathered from those I have already quoted - that an act of judgement in a dream is only a repetition of some prototype in the dream-thoughts. As a rule, the repetition is ill-applied and interpolated into an inappropriate context, but occasionally, as in our last instances, it is so neatly employed that to begin with it may give the impression of independent intellectual activity in the dream. From this point we might turn our attention to the psychical activity which, though it does not appear to accompany the construction of dreams invariably, yet, whenever it does so, is concerned to fuse together elements in a dream which are of disparate origin into a whole which shall make sense and be without contradiction. Before approaching that subject, however, we are under an urgent necessity to consider the expressions of affect which occur in dreams and to compare them with the affects which analysis uncovers in the dream-thoughts.

(H) AFFECTS IN DREAMS

A shrewd observation made by Stricker has drawn our attention to the fact that the expression of affect in dreams cannot be dealt with in the same contemptuous fashion in which, after waking, we are accustomed to dismiss their content. ‘If I am afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary - but the fear is real.’ And this is equally true if I feel glad in a dream. Our feeling tells us that an affect experienced in a dream is in no way inferior to one of equal intensity experienced in waking life; and dreams insist with greater energy upon their right to be included among our real mental experiences in respect to their affective than in respect to their ideational content. In our waking state, however, we cannot in fact include them in this way, because we cannot make any psychical assessment of an affect unless it is linked to a piece of ideational material. If the affect and the idea are incompatible in their character and intensity, our waking judgement is at a loss.

It has always been a matter for surprise that in dreams the ideational content is not accompanied by the affective consequences that we should regard as inevitable in waking thought. Strümpell declared that in dreams ideas are denuded of their psychical values. But there is no lack in dreams of instances of a contrary kind, where an intense expression of affect appears in connection with subject-matter which seems to provide no occasion for any such expression. In a dream I may be in a horrible, dangerous and disgusting situation without feeling any fear or repulsion; while another time, on the contrary, I may be terrified at something harmless and delighted at something childish.

This particular enigma of dream-life vanishes more suddenly, perhaps, and more completely than any other, as soon as we pass over from the manifest to the latent content of the dream. We need not bother about the enigma, since it no longer exists. Analysis shows us that the ideational content has undergone displacements and substitutions, whereas the affects have remained unaltered. It is small wonder that the ideational material, which has been changed by dream-distortion, should no longer be compatible with the affect, which is retained unmodified; nor is there anything left to be surprised at after analysis has put the right material back into its former position.¹

In the case of a psychical complex which has come under the influence of the censorship imposed by resistance, the affects are the constituent which is least influenced and which alone can give us a pointer as to how we should fill in the missing thoughts. This is seen even more clearly in the psychoneuroses than in dreams. Their affects are always appropriate, at least in their quality though we must allow for their intensity being increased owing to displacements of neurotic attention. If a hysteric is surprised at having to be so frightened of something trivial or if a man suffering from obsessions is surprised at such distressing self-reproaches arising out of a mere nothing, they have both gone astray, because they regard the ideational content - the triviality or the mere nothing - as what is essential; and they put up an unsuccessful fight because they take this ideational content as the starting-point of their thought-activity. Psycho-analysis can put them upon the right path by recognizing the affect as being, on the contrary, justified and by seeking out the idea which belongs to it but has been repressed and replaced by a substitute. A necessary premise to all this is that the release of affect and the ideational content do not constitute the indissoluble organic unity as which we are in the habit of treating them, but that these two separate entities may be merely soldered together and can thus be detached from each other by analysis. Dream-interpretation shows that this is in fact the case.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] If I am not greatly mistaken, the first dream that I was able to pick up from my grandson, at the age of one year and eight months, revealed a state of affairs in which the dream-work had succeeded in transforming the material of the dream-thoughts into a wish-fulfilment, whereas the affect belonging to them persisted unchanged during the state of sleep. On the night before the day on which his father was due to leave for the front, the child cried out, sobbing violently: ‘Daddy! Daddy! - baby!’ This can only have meant that Daddy and baby were remaining together; whereas the tears recognized the approaching farewell. At that time the child was already quite well able to express the concept of separation. ‘Fort’ [‘gone’] (replaced by a long-drawn-out and peculiarly stressed ‘o-o-o’) had been one of his first words, and several months before this first dream he had played at ‘gone’ with all his toys. This game went back to a successful piece of self-discipline which he had achieved at an early age in allowing his mother to leave him and be ‘gone.’

I shall begin by giving an example in which analysis explained the apparent absence of affect in a case where the ideational content should have necessitated its release.

I

She saw three lions in a desert, one of which was laughing; but she was not afraid of them. Afterwards, however, she must have run away from them, for she was trying to climb up a tree; but she found that her cousin, who was a French mistress, was up there already, etc.

The analysis brought up the following material. The indifferent precipitating cause of the dream was a sentence in her English composition: ‘The mane is the ornament of the lion.’ Her father wore a beard which framed his face like a mane. Her English mistress was called Miss Lyons. An acquaintance had sent her the ballads of Loewe. These, then, were the three lions; why should she be afraid of them? - She had read a story in which a negro, who had stirred up his companions to revolt, was hunted with blood hounds and climbed up a tree to save himself. She went on, in the highest spirits, to produce a number of fragmentary recollections, such as the advice on how to catch lions from Fliegende Blätter: ‘Take a desert and put it through a sieve and the lions will be left over.’ And again, the highly amusing but not very proper anecdote of an official who was asked why he did not take more trouble to ingratiate himself with the head of his department and replied that he had tried to make his way in, but his superior was up there already. The whole material became intelligible when it turned out that the lady had had a visit on the dream-day from her husband’s superior. He had been very polite to her and had kissed her hand and she had not been in the least bit afraid of him, although he was a very ‘big bug’, and played the part of a ‘social lion’ in the capital of the country she came from. So this lion was like the lion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that concealed the figure of Snug the joiner; and the same is true of all dream-lions of which the dreamer is not afraid.

II

As my second example I may quote the dream of the young girl who saw her sister’s little son lying dead in his coffin, but who, as I may now add, felt neither pain nor grief. We know from the analysis why this was. The dream merely disguised her wish to see the man she was in love with once more; and her affect had to be in tune with her wish and not with its disguise. There was thus no occasion for grief.

In some dreams the affect does at least remain in contact with the ideational material which has replaced that to which the affect was originally attached. In others, the dissolution of the complex has gone further. The affect makes its appearance completely detached from the idea which belongs to it and is introduced at some other point in the dream, where it fits in with the new arrangement of the dream-elements. The situation is then similar to the one we have found in the case of acts of judgement in dreams. If an important conclusion is drawn in the dream-thoughts, the dream also contains one; but the conclusion in the dream may be displaced on to quite different material. Such a displacement not infrequently follows the principle of antithesis.

This last possibility is exemplified in the following dream, which I have submitted to a most exhaustive analysis.

III

A castle by the sea; later it was no longer immediately on the sea, but on a narrow canal leading to the sea. The Governor was a Herr P. I was standing with him in a big reception room - with three windows in front of which there rose buttresses with what looked like crenellations. I had been attached to the garrison as something in the nature of a volunteer naval officer. We feared the arrival of enemy warships, since we were in a state of war. Herr P. intended to leave, and gave me instructions as to what was to be done if the event that we feared took place. His invalid wife was with their children in the threatened castle. If the bombardment began, the great hall was to be evacuated. He breathed heavily and turned to go; I held him back and asked him how I was to communicate with him in case of necessity. He added something in reply, but immediately fell down dead. No doubt I had put an unnecessary strain upon him with my questions. After his death, which made no further impression on me, I wondered whether his widow would remain in the castle, whether I should report his death to the Higher Command and whether I should take over command of the castle as being next in order of rank. I was standing at the window, and observing the ships as they went past. They were merchant vessels rushing past rapidly through the dark water, some of them with several funnels and others with bulging decks (just like the station buildings in the introductory dream - not reported here). Then my brother was standing beside me and we were both looking out of the window at the canal. At the sight of one ship we were frightened and cried out: ‘Here comes the warship!’ But it turned out that it was only the same ships that I already knew returning. There now came a small ship, cut off short, in a comic fashion, in the middle. On its deck some curious cup-shaped or box-shaped objects were visible. We called out with one voice: ‘That’s the breakfast-ship!’

The rapid movements of the ships, the deep dark blue of the water and the brown smoke from the funnels - all of this combined to create a tense and sinister impression.

The localities in the dream were brought together from several trips of mine to the Adriatic (to Miramare, Duino, Venice and Aquileia). A short but enjoyable Easter trip which I had made to Aquileia with my brother a few weeks before the dream was still fresh in my memory. The dream also contained allusions to the maritime war between America and Spain and to anxieties to which it had given rise about the fate of my relatives in America. At two points in the dream affects were in question. At one point an affect that was to be anticipated was absent: attention was expressly drawn to the fact that the Governor’s death made no impression on me. At another point, when I thought I saw the warship, I was frightened and felt all the sensations of fright in my sleep. In this well-constructed dream the affects were distributed in such a way that any striking contradiction was avoided. There was no reason why I should be frightened at the death of the Governor and it was quite reasonable that as Commandant of the Castle I should be frightened at the sight of the warship. The analysis showed, however, that Herr P. was only a substitute for my own self. (In the dream I was the substitute for him.) I was the Governor who suddenly died. The dream-thoughts dealt with the future of my family after my premature death. This was the only distressing one among the dream-thoughts; and it must have been from it that the fright was detached and brought into connection in the dream with the sight of the warship. On the other hand, the analysis showed that the region of the dream-thoughts from which the warship was taken was filled with the most cheerful recollections. It was a year earlier, in Venice, and we were standing one magically beautiful day at the windows of our room on the Riva degli Schiavoni and were looking across the blue lagoon on which that day there was more movement than usual. English ships were expected and were to be given a ceremonial reception. Suddenly my wife cried out gaily as a child: ‘Here comes the English warship!’ In the dream I was frightened at these same words. (We see once again that speeches in a dream are derived from speeches in real life; I shall show shortly that the element ‘English’ in my wife’s exclamation did not elude the dream-work either.) Here, then, in the process of changing the dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content, I have transformed cheerfulness into fear, and I need only hint that this transformation was itself giving expression to a portion of the latent dream-content. This example proves, however, that the dream-work is at liberty to detach an affect from its connections in the dream-thoughts and introduce it at any other point it chooses in the manifest dream.

I take this opportunity of making a somewhat detailed analysis of the ‘breakfast-ship’, the appearance of which in the dream brought such a nonsensical conclusion to a situation which had up to then been kept at a rational level. When subsequently I called the dream-object more precisely to mind, it struck me that it was black and that, owing to the fact that it was cut off short where it was broadest in the middle, it bore a great resemblance at that end to a class of objects which had attracted our interest in the museums in the Etruscan towns. These were rectangular trays of black pottery, with two handles, on which there stood things like coffee- or tea-cups, not altogether unlike one of our modern breakfast-sets. In response to our enquiries we learned that this was the ‘toilette’ [toilet-set] of an Etruscan lady, with receptacles for cosmetics and powder on it, and we had jokingly remarked that it would be a good idea to take one home with us for the lady of the house. The object in the dream meant, accordingly, a black ‘toilette’, i.e. mourning dress, and made a direct reference to a death. The other end of the dream-object reminded me of the funeral boats¹ in which in early times dead bodies were placed and committed to the sea for burial. This led on to the point which explained why the ships returned in the dream:Still, auf gerettetem Boot, treibt in den Hafen der Greis.²

It was the return after a shipwreck [‘Schiffbruch’, literally ‘ship-break’] - the breakfast-ship was broken off short in the middle. But what was the origin of the name ‘breakfast’-ship? It was here that the word ‘English’ came in, which was left over from the warships. The English word ‘breakfast’ means ‘breaking fast’. The ‘breaking’ related once more to the shipwreck [‘ship-break’] and the fasting was connected with the black dress or toilette.

But it was only the name of the breakfast-ship that was newly constructed by the dream. The thing had existed and reminded me of one of the most enjoyable parts of my last trip. Mistrusting the food that would be provided at Aquileia, we had brought provisions with us from Gorizia and had bought a bottle of excellent Istrian wine at Aquileia. And while the little mail steamer made its way slowly through the ‘Canale delle Mee’ across the empty lagoon to Grado we, who were the only passengers, ate our breakfast on deck in the highest spirits, and we had rarely tasted a better one. This, then, was the ‘breakfast-ship’, and it was precisely behind this memory of the most cheerful joie de vivre that the dream-concealed the gloomiest thoughts of an unknown and uncanny future.

¹ ‘Nachen’ [in German], a word which is derived, as a philological friend tells me, from the root ‘ ‘ [corpse].

² [Safe on his ship, the old man quietly sails into port.] The detachment of affects from the ideational material which generated them is the most striking thing which occurs to them during the formation of dreams; but it is neither the only nor the most essential alteration undergone by them on their path from the dream-thoughts to the manifest dream. If we compare the affects of the dream-thoughts with those in the dream, one thing at once becomes clear. Whenever there is an affect in the dream, it is also to be found in the dream-thoughts. But the reverse is not true. A dream is in general poorer in affect than the psychical material from the manipulation of which it has proceeded. When I have reconstructed the dream-thoughts, I habitually find the most intense psychical impulses in them striving to make themselves felt and struggling as a rule against others that are sharply opposed to them. If I then turn back to the dream, it not infrequently appears colourless, and without emotional tone of any great intensity. The dream-work has reduced to a level of indifference not only the content but often the emotional tone of my thoughts as well. It might be said that the dream-work brings about a suppression of affects. Let us, for instance, take the dream of the botanical monograph. The thoughts corresponding to it consisted of a passionately agitated plea on behalf of my liberty to act as I chose to act and to govern my life as seemed right to me and me alone. The dream that arose from them has an indifferent ring about it: ‘I had written a monograph; it lay before me; it contained coloured plates; dried plants accompanied each copy.’ This reminds one of the peace that has descended upon a battle field strewn with corpses; no trace is left of the struggle which raged over it.

Things can be otherwise: lively manifestations of affect can make their way into the dream itself. For the moment, however, I will dwell upon the incontestable fact that large numbers of dreams appear to be indifferent, whereas it is never possible to enter into the dream-thoughts without being deeply moved.

No complete theoretical explanation can here be given of this suppression of affect in the course of the dream-work. It would require to be preceded by a most painstaking investigation of the theory of affects and of the mechanism of repression. I will only permit myself a reference to two points. I am compelled - for other reasons - to picture the release of affects as a centrifugal process directed towards the interior of the body and analogous to the processes of motor and secretory innervation. Now just as in the state of sleep the sending out of motor impulses towards the external world appears to be suspended, so it may be that the centrifugal calling-up of affects by unconscious thinking may become more difficult during sleep. In that case the affective impulses occurring during the course of the dream-thoughts would from their very nature be weak impulses, and consequently those which found their was into the dream would be no less weak. On this view, then, the ‘suppression of affect’ would not in any way be the consequence of the dream-work but would result from the state of sleep. This may be true, but it cannot be the whole truth. We must also bear in mind that any relatively complex dream turns out to be a compromise produced by a conflict between psychical forces. For one thing, the thoughts constructing the wish are obliged to struggle against the opposition of a censoring agency; and for another thing, we have often seen that in unconscious thinking itself every train of thought is yoked with its contradictory opposite. Since all of these trains of thought are capable of carrying an affect, we shall by and large scarcely be wrong if we regard the suppression of affect as a consequence of the inhibition which these contraries exercise upon each other and which the censorship exercises upon the impulsions suppressed by it. The inhibition of affect, accordingly, must be considered as the second consequence of the censorship of dreams, just as dream-distortion is its first consequence.

I will here give as an instance a dream in which the indifferent feeling-tone of the content of the dream can be explained by the antithesis between the dream-thoughts. It is a short dream, which will fill every reader with disgust.

IV

A hill, on which there was something like an open-air closet: a very long seat with a large hole at the end of it. Its back edge was thickly covered with small heaps of faeces of all sizes and degrees of freshness. There were bushes behind the seat. I micturated on the seat; a long stream of urine washed everything clean; the lumps of faeces came away easily and fell into the opening. It was as though at the end there was still some left.

Why did I feel no disgust during this dream?

Because, as the analysis showed, the most agreeable and satisfying thoughts contributed to bringing the dream about. What at once occurred to me in the analysis were the Augean stables which were cleansed by Hercules. This Hercules was I. The hill and bushes came from Aussee, where my children were stopping at the time. I had discovered the infantile aetiology of the neuroses and had thus saved my own children from falling ill. The seat (except, of course, for the hole) was an exact copy of a piece of furniture which had been given to me as a present by a grateful woman patient. It thus reminded me of how much my patients honoured me. Indeed, even the museum of human excrement could be given an interpretation to rejoice my heart. However much I might be disgusted by it in reality, in the dream it was a reminiscence of the fair land of Italy where, as we all know, the W.C.s in the small towns are furnished in precisely this way. The stream of urine which washed everything clean was an unmistakable sign of greatness. It was in that way that Gulliver extinguished the great fire in Lilliput though incidentally this brought him into disfavour with its tiny queen. But Gargantua, too, Rabelais’ superman, revenged himself in the same way on the Parisians by sitting astride on Notre Dame and turning his stream of urine upon the city. It was only on the previous evening before going to sleep that I had been turning over Garnier’s illustrations to Rabelais. And, strangely enough, here was another piece of evidence that I was the superman. The platform of Notre Dame was my favourite resort in Paris; every free afternoon I used to clamber about there on the towers of the church between the monsters and the devils. The fact that all the faeces disappeared so quickly under the stream recalled the motto: ‘Afflavit et dissipati sunt’, which I intended one day to put at the head of a chapter upon the therapy of hysteria.

And now for the true exciting cause of the dream. It had been a hot summer afternoon; and during the evening I had delivered my lecture on the connection between hysteria and the perversions, and everything I had had to say displeased me intensely and seemed to me completely devoid of any value. I was tired and felt no trace of enjoyment in my difficult work; I longed to be away from all this grubbing about in human dirt and to be able to join my children and afterwards visit the beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the lecture room to a café, where I had a modest snack in the open air, since I had no appetite for food. One of my audience, however, went with me and he begged leave to sit by me while I drank my coffee and choked over my crescent roll. He began to flatter me: telling me how much he had learnt from me, how he looked at everything now with fresh eyes, how I had cleansed the Augean stables of errors and prejudices in my theory of the neuroses. He told me, in short, that I was a very great man. My mood fitted ill with this paean of praise; I fought against my feeling of disgust, went home early to escape from him, and before going to sleep turned over the pages of Rabelais and read one of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s short stories, ‘Die Leiden eines Knaben’ [‘A Boy’s Sorrows’].

Such was the material out of which the dream emerged. Meyer’s short story brought up in addition a recollection of scenes from my childhood. (Cf. the last episode in the dream about Count Thun.) The day-time mood of revulsion and disgust persisted into the dream in so far as it was able to provide almost the entire material of its manifest content. But during the night a contrary mood of powerful and even exaggerated self-assertiveness arose and displaced the former one. The content of the dream had to find a form which would enable it to express both the delusions of inferiority and the megalomania in the same material. The compromise between them produced an ambiguous dream-content; but it also resulted in an indifferent feeling-tone owing to the mutual inhibition of these contrary impulses.

According to the theory of wish-fulfilment, this dream would not have become possible if the antithetical megalomanic train of thought (which, it is true, was suppressed, but had a pleasurable tone) had not emerged in addition to the feeling of disgust. For what is distressing may not be represented in a dream; nothing in our dream-thoughts which is distressing can force an entry into a dream unless it at the same time lends a disguise to the fulfilment of a wish. There is yet another alternative way in which the dream-work can deal with affects in the dream-thoughts, in addition to allowing them through or reducing them to nothing. It can turn them into their opposite. We have already become acquainted with the interpretative rule according to which every element in a dream can, for purposes of interpretation, stand for its opposite just as easily as for itself. We can never tell beforehand whether it stands for the one or for the other; only the context can decide. A suspicion of this truth has evidently found its way into popular consciousness: ‘dream books’ very often adopt the principle of contraries in their interpretation of dreams. This turning of a thing into its opposite is made possible by the intimate associative chain which links the idea of a thing with its opposite in our thoughts. Like my other kind of displacement it can serve the ends of the censorship; but it is also frequently a product of wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists in nothing else than a replacement of a disagreeable thing by its opposite. Just as ideas of things can make their appearance in dreams turned into their opposite, so too can the affects attaching to dream-thoughts; and it seems likely that this reversal of affect is brought about as a rule by the dream-censorship. In social life, which has provided us with our familiar analogy with the dream-censorship, we also make use of the suppression and reversal of affect, principally for purposes of dissimulation. If I am talking to someone whom I am obliged to treat with consideration while wishing to say something hostile to him, it is almost more important that I should conceal any expression of my affect from him than that I should mitigate the verbal form of my thoughts. If I were to address him in words that were not impolite, but accompanied them with a look or gesture of hatred and contempt, the effect which I should produce on him would not be very different from what it would have been if I had thrown my contempt openly in his face. Accordingly, the censorship bids me above all suppress my affects; and, if I am a master of dissimulation, I shall assume the opposite affect - smile when I am angry and seem affectionate when I wish to destroy.

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