Autobiographical note 38 страница

‘As he was ambitious, I slew him.’ As he could not wait for the removal of another man, he was himself removed. These had been my thoughts immediately after I attended the unveiling at the University of the memorial - not to him but to the other man. Thus a part of the satisfaction I felt in the dream was to be interpreted: ‘A just punishment! It serves you right!’

¹ [‘... long since appeared before my troubled gaze’]

² It will be noticed that the name Josef plays a great part in my dreams (cf. the dream about my uncle). My own ego finds it very easy to hide itself behind people of that name, since Joseph was the name of a man famous in the Bible as an interpreter of dreams.

At my friend’s funeral, a young man had made what seemed to be an inopportune remark to the effect that the speaker who had delivered the funeral oration had implied that without this one man the world would come to an end. He was expressing the honest feelings of someone whose pain was being interfered with by an exaggeration. But this remark of his was the starting-point of the following dream-thoughts: ‘It’s quite true that no one’s irreplaceable. How many people I’ve followed to the grave already! But I’m still alive. I’ve survived them all; I’m left in possession of the field.’ A thought of this kind, occurring to me at a moment at which I was afraid might not find my friend alive if I made the journey to him, could only be construed as meaning that I was delighted because I had once more survived someone, because it was he and not I who had died, because I was left in possession of the field, as I had been in the phantasied scene from my childhood. This satisfaction, infantile in origin, at being in possession of the field constituted the major part of the affect that appeared in the dream. I was delighted to survive, and I gave expression to my delight with all the naïve egoism shown in the anecdote of the married couple one of whom said to the other: ‘If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.’ So obvious was it to me that I should not be the one to die.

It cannot be denied that to interpret and report one’s dreams demands a high degree of self-discipline. One is bound to emerge as the only villain among the crowd of noble characters who share one’s life. Thus it seemed to me quite natural that the revenants should only exist for just so long as one likes and should be removable at a wish. We have seen what my friend Josef was punished for. But the revenants were a series of reincarnations of the friend of my childhood. It was therefore also a source of satisfaction to me that I had always been able to find successive substitutes for that figure; and I felt I should be able to find a substitute for the friend whom I was now on the point of losing: no one was irreplaceable.

But what had become of the dream-censorship? Why had it not raised the most energetic objections against this blatantly egoistic train of thought? And why had it not transformed the satisfaction attached to that train of thought into severe unpleasure? The explanation was, I think, that other, unobjectionable, trains of thought in connection with the same people found simultaneous satisfaction and screened with their affect the affect which arose from the forbidden infantile source. In another stratum of my thoughts, during the ceremonial unveiling of the memorial, I had reflected thus: ‘What a number of valued friends I have lost, some through death, some through a breach of our friendship! How fortunate that I have found a substitute for them and that I have gained one who means more to me than ever the others could, and that, at a time of life when new friendships cannot easily be formed, I shall never lose his!’ My satisfaction at having found a substitute for these lost friends could be allowed to enter the dream without interference; but there slipped in, along with it, the hostile satisfaction derived from the infantile source. It is no doubt true that infantile affection served to reinforce my contemporary and justified affection. But infantile hatred, too, succeeded in getting itself represented.

In addition to this, however, the dream-contained a clear allusion to another train of thought which could legitimately lead to satisfaction. A short time before, after long expectation, a daughter had been born to my friend. I was aware of how deeply he had mourned the sister he had so early lost and I wrote and told him I was sure he would transfer the love he felt for her on to the child, and that the baby girl would allow him at last to forget his irreparable loss.

Thus this group of thoughts was connected once again with the intermediate thought in the latent content of the dream from which the associative paths diverged in contrary directions: ‘No one is irreplaceable!’ ‘There are nothing but revenants: all those we have lost come back!’ And now the associative links between the contradictory components of the dream-thoughts were drawn closer by the chance fact that my friend’s baby daughter had the same name as the little girl I used to play with as a child, who was of my age and the sister of my earliest friend and opponent. It gave me great satisfaction when I heard that the baby was to be called ‘Pauline.’ And as an allusion to this coincidence, I had replaced one Josef by another in the dream and found it impossible to suppress the similarity between the opening letters of the names ‘Fleischl’ and ‘FI.’ From here my thoughts went on to the subject of the names of my own children. I had insisted on their names being chosen, not according to the fashion of the moment, but in memory of people I have been fond of. Their names made the children into revenants. And after all, I reflected, was not having children our only path to immortality?

I have only a few more remarks to add on the subject of affect in dreams from another point of view. A dominating element in a sleeper’s mind may be constituted by what we call a ‘mood’ - or tendency to some affect - and this may then have a determining influence upon his dreams. A mood of this kind may arise from his experiences or thoughts during the preceding day, or its sources may be somatic. In either case it will be accompanied by the trains of thought appropriate to it. From the point of view of dream-construction it is a matter of indifference whether, as sometimes happens, these ideational contents of the dream-thoughts determine the mood in a primary fashion, or whether they are themselves aroused secondarily by the dreamer’s emotional disposition which is in its turn to be explained on a somatic basis. In any case the construction of dreams is subject to the condition that it can only represent something which is the fulfilment of a wish and that it is only from wishes that it can derive its psychical motive force. A currently active mood is treated in the same way as a sensation arising and becoming currently active during sleep (cf. p. 714), which can be either disregarded or given a fresh interpretation in the sense of a wish-fulfilment. Distressing moods during sleep can become the motive force of a dream by arousing energetic wishes which the dream is supposed to fulfil. The material to which moods are attached is worked over until it can be used to express the fulfilment of a wish. The more intense and dominating a part is played in the dream-thoughts by the distressing mood, the more certain it becomes that the most strongly suppressed wishful impulses will make use of the opportunity in order to achieve representation. For, since the unpleasure which they would otherwise necessarily produce themselves is already present, they find the harder part of their task - the task of forcing their way through to representation - already accomplished for them. Here once more we are brought up against the problem of anxiety-dreams; and these, as we shall find, form a marginal case in the function of dreaming.

(I) SECONDARY REVISION

And now at last we can turn to the fourth of the factors concerned in the construction of dreams. If we pursue our investigation of the content of dreams in the manner in which we have begun it - that is, by comparing conspicuous events in the dream-content with their sources in the dream-thoughts, we shall come upon elements the explanation of which calls for an entirely new assumption. What I have in mind are cases in which the dreamer is surprised, annoyed or repelled in the dream, and, moreover, by a piece of the dream-content itself. As I have shown in a number of instances, the majority of these critical feelings in dreams are not in fact directed against the content of the dream, but turn out to be portions of the dream-thoughts which have been taken over and used to an appropriate end. But some material of this kind does not lend itself to this explanation; its correlate in the material of the dream-thoughts is nowhere to be found. What, for instance, is the meaning of a critical remark found so often in dreams: ‘This is only a dream’? Here we have a genuine piece of criticism of the dream, such as might be made in waking life. Quite frequently, too, it is actually a prelude to waking up; and still more frequently it has been preceded by some distressing feeling which is set at rest by the recognition that the state is one of dreaming. When the thought ‘this is only a dream’ occurs during a dream, it has the same purpose in view as when the words are pronounced on the stage by la belle Hélène in Offenbach’s comic opera of that name: it is aimed at reducing the importance of what has just been experienced and at making it possible to tolerate what is to follow. It serves to lull a particular agency to sleep which would have every reason at that moment to bestir itself and forbid the continuance of the dream - or the scene in the opera. It is more comfortable, however, to go on sleeping and tolerate the dream, because, after all, ‘it is only a dream.’ In my view the contemptuous critical judgement, ‘it’s only a dream’, appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused by it. The phrase is an example of esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychical censorship.

This instance, however, provides us with convincing evidence that not everything contained in a dream is derived from the dream-thoughts, but that contributions to its content may be made by a psychical function which is indistinguishable from on our waking thoughts. The question now arises whether this only occurs in exceptional cases, or whether the psychical agency which otherwise operates only as a censorship plays a habitual part in the construction of dreams.

We can have no hesitation in deciding in favour of the second alternative. There can be no doubt that the censoring agency, whose influence we have so far only recognized in limitations and omissions in the dream-content, is also responsible for interpolations and additions in it. The interpolations are easy to recognize. They are often reported with hesitation, and introduced by an ‘as though’; they are not in themselves particularly vivid and are always introduced at points at which they can serve as links between two portions of the dream-content or to bridge a gap between two parts of the dream. They are less easily retained in the memory than genuine derivatives of the material of the dream-thoughts; if the dream is to be forgotten they are the first part of it to disappear, and I have a strong suspicion that the common complaint of having dreamt a lot, but of having forgotten most of it and of having only retained fragments, is based upon the rapid disappearance precisely of these connecting thoughts. In a complete analysis these interpolations are sometimes betrayed by the fact that no material connected with them is to be found in the dream-thoughts. But careful examination leads me to regard this as the less frequent case; as a rule the connecting thoughts lead back nevertheless to material in the dream-thoughts, but to material which could have no claim to acceptance in the dream either on its own account or owing to its being over-determined. Only in extreme cases, it seems, does the psychical function in dream-formation which we are now considering proceed to make new creations. So long as possible, it employs anything appropriate that it can find in the material of the dream-thoughts.

The thing that distinguishes and at the same time reveals this part of the dream-work is its purpose. This function behaves in the manner which the poet maliciously ascribes to philosophers: it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches. As a result of its efforts, the dream loses its appearance of absurdity and disconnectedness and approximates to the model of an intelligible experience. But its efforts are not always crowned with success. Dreams occur which, at a superficial view, may seem faultlessly logical and reasonable; they start from a possible situation, carry it on through a chain of consistent modifications and - though far less frequently - bring it to a conclusion which causes no surprise. Dreams which are of such a kind have been subjected to a far-reaching revision by this psychical function that is akin to waking thought; they appear to have a meaning, but that meaning is as far removed as possible from their true significance. If we analyse them, we can convince ourselves that it is in these dreams that the secondary revision has played about with the material the most freely, and has retained the relations present in that material to the least extent. They are dreams which might be said to have been already interpreted once, before being submitted to waking interpretation. In other dreams this tendentious revision has only partly succeeded; coherence seems to rule for a certain distance, but the dream then becomes senseless or confused, while perhaps later on in its course it may for a second time present an appearance of rationality. In yet other dreams the revision has failed altogether; we find ourselves hopelessly face to face with a heap of fragmentary material.

I do not wish to deny categorically that this fourth power in dream-construction - which we shall soon recognize as all old acquaintance, since in fact it is the only one of the four with which we are familiar in other connections - I do not wish to deny that this fourth factor has the capacity to create new contributions to dreams. It is certain, however, that, like the others, it exerts its influence principally by its preferences and selections from psychical material in the dream-thoughts that has already been formed. Now there is one case in which it is to a great extent spared the labour of, as it were, building up a façade for the dream - the case, namely, in which a formation of that kind already exists, available for use in the material of the dream-thoughts. I am in the habit of describing the element in the dream-thoughts which I have in mind as a ‘phantasy.’ I shall perhaps avoid misunderstanding if I mention the ‘day-dream’ as something analogous to it in waking life.¹ The part played in our mental life by these structures has not yet been fully recognized and elucidated by psychiatrists, though M. Benedikt has made what seems to me a very promising start in that direction. The importance of day-dreams has not escaped the unerring vision of imaginative writers; there is, for instance, a well-known account by Alphonse Daudet in Le Nabab of the day-dreams of one of the minor characters in that story. The study of the psychoneuroses leads to the surprising discovery that these phantasies or day-dreams are the immediate forerunners of hysterical symptoms, or at least of a whole number of them. Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories, but to phantasies erected on the basis of the basis of memories. The frequent occurrence of conscious daytime phantasies brings these structures to our knowledge; but just as there are phantasies of this kind which are conscious, so, too, there are unconscious ones in great numbers, which have to remain unconscious on account of their content and of their origin from repressed material. Closer investigation of the characteristics of these day-time phantasies shows us how right it is that these formations should bear the same name as we give to the products of our thought during the night - the name, that is, of ‘dreams.’ They share a large number of their properties with night-dreams, and their investigation might, in fact, have served as the shortest and best approach to an understanding of night-dreams.

¹ ‘Rêve’, ‘petit roman’, - ‘day-dream’, ‘[continuous] story’.

Like dreams, they are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are based to a great extent on impressions of infantile experiences; like dreams, they benefit by a certain degree of relaxation of censorship. If we examine their structure, we shall perceive the way in which the wishful purpose that is at work in their production has mixed up the material of which they are built, has rearranged it and has formed it into a new whole. They stand in much the same relation to the childhood memories from which they are derived as do some of the Baroque palaces of Rome to the ancient ruins whose pavements and columns have provided the material for the more recent structures.

The function of ‘secondary revision’, which we have attributed to the fourth of the factors concerned in shaping the content of dreams, shows us in operation once more the activity which is able to find free vent in the creation of day-dreams without being inhibited by any other influences. We might put it simply by saying that this fourth factor of ours seeks to mould the material offered to it into something like a day-dream. If, however, a day-dream of this kind has already been formed within the nexus of the dream-thoughts, this fourth factor in the dream-work will prefer to take possession of the ready-made day-dream and seek to introduce it into the content of the dream. There are some dreams which consist merely in the repetition of a day-time phantasy which may perhaps have remained unconscious: such, for instance, as the boy’s dream of driving in a war-chariot with the heroes of the Trojan War. In my ‘Autodidasker’ dream the second part at all events was a faithful reproduction of a daytime phantasy, innocent in itself, of a conversation with Professor N. In view of the complicated conditions which a dream has to satisfy when it comes into existence, it happens more frequently that the ready-made phantasy forms only a portion of the dream, or that only a portion of the phantasy forces its way into the dream. Thereafter, the phantasy is treated in general like any other portion of the latent material, though it often remains recognizable as an entity in the dream. There are often parts of my dreams which stand out as producing a different impression from the rest. They strike me as being, as it were, more fluent, more connected and at the same time more fleeting than other parts of the same dream. These, I know, are unconscious phantasies which have found their way into the fabric of the dream, but I have never succeeded in pinning down a phantasy of this kind. Apart from this, these phantasies, like any other component of the dream-thoughts, are compressed, condensed, superimposed on one another, and so on. There are, however, transitional cases, between the case in which they constitute the content (or at least the façade) of the dream unaltered and the extreme opposite in which they are represented in the content of the dream only by one of their elements or by a distant allusion. What happens to phantasies present in the dream-thoughts is evidently also determined by any advantages they may have to offer the requirements of the censorship and of the urge towards condensation.

In selecting examples of dream-interpretation I have so far as possible avoided dreams in which unconscious phantasies play any considerable part, because the introduction of this particular psychical element would have necessitated lengthy discussions on the psychology of unconscious thinking. Nevertheless, I cannot completely escape a consideration of phantasies in this connection, since they often make their way complete into dreams and since still more often clear glimpses of them can be seen behind the dream. I will therefore quote one more dream, which seems to be composed of two different and opposing phantasies which coincide with each other at a few points and of which one is superficial while the second is, as it were, an interpretation of the first.¹

The dream - it is the only one of which I possess no careful notes - ran roughly as follows. The dreamer, a young unmarried man, was sitting in the restaurant at which he usually ate and which was presented realistically in the dream. Several people then appeared, in order to fetch him away, and one of them wanted to arrest him. He said to his companions at table: ‘I’ll pay later; I’ll come back.’ But they exclaimed with derisive smiles: ‘We know all about that; that’s what they all say!’ One of the guests called out after him: ‘There goes another one!’ He was then led into a narrow room in which he found a female figure carrying a child. One of the people accompanying him said: ‘This is Herr Müller.’ A police inspector, or some such official, was turning over a bundle of cards or papers and as he did so repeated ‘Müller, Müller, Müller.’ Finally he asked the dreamer a question, which he answered with an ‘I will.’ He then turned round to look at the female figure and observed that she was now wearing a big beard.

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] In my ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905e), I have analysed a good specimen of a dream of this sort, made up of a number of superimposed phantasies. Incidentally, I underestimated the importance of the part played by these phantasies in the formation of dreams so long as I was principally working on my own dreams, which are usually based on discussions and conflict of thought and comparatively rarely on day-dreams. In the case of other people it is often much easier to demonstrate the complete analogy between night-dreams and day-dreams. With hysterical patients, a hysterical attack can often be replaced by a dream; and it is then easy to convince oneself that the immediate forerunner of both these psychical structures was a day-dream phantasy.

Here there is no difficulty in separating the two components. The superficial one was a phantasy of arrest which appears as though it had been freshly constructed by the dream-work. But behind it some material is visible which had been only slightly re-shaped by the dream-work: a phantasy of marriage. Those features which were common to both phantasies emerge with special clarity, in the same way as in one of Galton’s composite photographs. The promise made by the young man (who up till then had been a bachelor) that he would come back and join his fellow-diners at their table, the scepticism of his boon-companions (whom experience had taught better), the exclamation ‘there goes another one '- all of these features fitted in easily with the alternative interpretation. So, too, did the ‘I will’ with which he replied to the official’s question. The turning over the bundle of papers, with the constant repetition of the same name corresponded to a less important but recognizable feature of wedding festivities, namely the reading out of a bundle of telegrams of congratulation, all of them with addresses bearing the same names. The phantasy of marriage actually scored a victory over the covering phantasy of arrest in the fact of the bride’s making a personal appearance in the dream. I was able to discover from an enquiry - the dream was not analysed - why it was that at the end of it the bride wore a beard. On the previous day the dreamer had been walking in the street with a friend who was as shy of marrying as he was himself, and he had drawn his friend’s attention to a darkhaired beauty who had passed them. ‘Yes’, his friend had remarked, ‘if only women like that didn’t grow beards like their fathers’ in a few years’ time.’ This dream did not, of course, lack elements in which dream-distortion had been carried deeper. It may well be, for instance, that the words ‘I’ll pay later’ referred to what he feared might be his father-in-law’s attitude on the subject of a dowry. In fact, all kinds of qualms were evidently preventing the dreamer from throwing himself into the phantasy of marriage with any enjoyment. One of these qualms, a fear that marriage might cost him his freedom, was embodied in the transformation into a scene of arrest.

If we return for a moment to the point that the dream-work is glad to make use of a ready-made phantasy instead of putting one together out of the material of the dream-thoughts, we may perhaps find ourselves in a position to solve one of the most interesting puzzles connected with dreams. On pp. 568 f. I told the well-known anecdote of how Maury, having been struck in his sleep on the back of his neck by a piece of wood, woke up from a long dream which was like a full-length story set in the days of the French Revolution. Since the dream, as reported, was a coherent one and was planned entirely with an eye to providing an explanation of the stimulus which woke him and whose occurrence he could not have anticipated, the only possible hypothesis seems to be that the whole elaborate dream must have been composed and must have taken place in the short period of time between the contact of the board with Maury’s cervical vertebrae and his consequent awakening. We should never dare to attribute such rapidity to thought-activity in waking life, and we should therefore be driven to conclude that the dream-work possesses the advantage of accelerating our thought-processes to a remarkable degree.

Strong objections have been raised to what quickly became a popular conclusion by some more recent writers (Le Lorrain, 1894 and 1895, Egger, 1895, and others). On the one hand they throw doubts upon the accuracy of Maury’s account of his dream; and on the other hand they attempt to show that the rapidity of the operations of our waking thoughts is no less than in this dream when exaggerations have been discounted. The discussion raised questions of principle which do not seem to me immediately soluble. But I must confess that the arguments brought forward (by Egger, for instance), particularly against Maury’s guillotine dream, leave me unconvinced. I myself would propose the following explanation of this dream. Is it so highly improbable that Maury’s dream represents a phantasy which had been stored up ready-made in his memory for many years and which was aroused - or I would rather say ‘alluded to’ - at the moment at which he became aware of the stimulus which woke him? If this were so, we should have escaped the whole difficulty of understanding how such a long story with all its details could have been composed in the extremely short period of time which was at the dreamer’s disposal - for the story would have been composed already. If the piece of wood had struck the back of Maury’s neck while he was awake, there would have been an opportunity for some such thought as: ‘That’s just like being guillotined.’ But since it was in his sleep that he was struck by the board, the dream-work made use of the impinging stimulus in order rapidly to produce a wish-fulfilment; it was as though it thought (this is to he taken purely figuratively): ‘Here’s a good opportunity of realizing a wishful phantasy which was formed at such and such a time in the course of reading.’ It can hardly be disputed, I think, that the dream-story was precisely of a sort likely to be constructed by a young man under the influence of powerfully exciting impressions. Who - least of all what Frenchman or student of the history of civilization - could fail to be gripped by narratives of the Reign of Terror, when the men and women of the aristocracy, the flower of the nation, showed that they could die with a cheerful mind and could retain the liveliness of their wit and the elegance of their manners till the very moment of the fatal summons? How tempting for a young man to plunge into all this in his imagination - to picture himself bidding a lady farewell - kissing her hand and mounting the scaffold unafraid! Or, if ambition were the prime motive of the phantasy, how tempting for him to take the place of one of those formidable figures who, by the power alone of their thoughts and flaming eloquence, ruled the city in which the heart of humanity beat convulsively in those days - who were led by their convictions to send thousands of men to their death and who prepared the way for the transformation of Europe, while all the time their own heads were insecure and destined to fall one day beneath the knife of the guillotine - how tempting to picture himself as one of the Girondists, perhaps, or as the heroic Danton! There is one feature in Maury’s recollection of the dream, his being ‘led to the place of execution, surrounded by an immense mob’, which seems to suggest that his phantasy was in fact of this ambitious type.

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