Autobiographical note 77 страница

I believe, therefore, that I am not mistaken in supposing that Dora’s supervalent train of thought, which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K., was designed not only for the purpose of suppressing her love for Herr K., which had once been conscious, but also to conceal her love for Frau K., which was in a deeper sense unconscious. The supervalent train of thought was directly contrary to the latter current of feeling. She told herself incessantly that her father had sacrificed her to this woman, and made noisy demonstrations to show that she grudged her the possession of her father; and in this was she concealed from herself the contrary fact, which was that she grudged her father Frau K.’s love, and had not forgiven the woman she loved for the disillusionment she had been caused by her betrayal. The jealous emotions of a woman were linked in the unconscious with a jealousy such as might have been felt by a man. These masculine or, more properly speaking, gynaecophilic currents of feeling are to be regarded as typical of the unconscious erotic life of hysterical girls.

II THE FIRST DREAM

Just at a moment when there was a prospect that the material that was coming up for analysis would throw light upon an obscure point in Dora’s childhood, she reported that a few nights earlier she had once again had a dream which she had already dreamt in exactly the same way on many previous occasions. A periodically recurrent dream was by its very nature particularly well calculated to arouse my curiosity; and in any case it was justifiable in the interests of the treatment to consider the way in which the dream worked into the analysis as a whole. I therefore determined to make an especially careful investigation of it.

Here is the dream as related by Dora: ‘A house was on fire.¹ My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: "I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case." We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.’

As the dream was a recurrent one, I naturally asked her when she had first dreamt it. She told me she did not know. But she remembered having had the dream three nights in succession at L-- (the place on the lake where the scene with Herr K. had taken place), and it had now come back again a few nights earlier, here.² My expectations from the clearing-up of the dream were naturally heightened when I heard of its connection with the events at L--. But I wanted to discover first what had been the exciting cause of its recent recurrence, and I therefore asked Dora to take the dream bit by bit and tell me what occurred to her in connection with it. She had already had some training in dream-interpretation from having previously analysed a few minor specimens.

¹ In answer to an inquiry Dora told me that there had never really been a fire at their house.

² The content of the dream makes it possible to establish that it in fact occurred for the first time at L--.2

‘Something occurs to me,’ she said, ‘but it cannot belong to the dream, for it is quite recent, whereas I have certainly had the dream before.’

‘That makes no difference,’ I replied. ‘Start away! It will simply turn out to be the most recent thing that fits in with the dream.’

‘Very well, then. Father has been having a dispute with Mother in the last few days, because she locks the dining-room door at night. My brother’s room, you see, has no separate entrance, but can only be reached through the dining-room. Father does not want my brother to be locked in like that at night. He says it will not do: something might happen in the night so that it might be necessary to leave the room.’

‘And that made you think of the risk of fire?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, I should like you to pay close attention to the exact words you used. We may have to come back to them. You said that "something might happen in the night so that it might be necessary to leave the room".’

But Dora had now discovered the connecting link between the recent exciting cause of the dream and the original one, for she continued:

‘When we arrived at L-- that time, Father and I, he openly said he was afraid of fire. We arrived in a violent thunderstorm, and saw the small wooden house without any lightning-conductor. So his anxiety was quite natural.’

What I now had to do was to establish the relation between the events at L-- and the recurrent dreams which she had had there. I therefore said: ‘Did you have the dream during your first nights at L-- or during your last ones? in other words, before or after the scene in the wood by the lake of which we have heard so much?’ (I must explain that I knew that the scene had not occurred on the very first day, and that she had remained at L-- for a few days after it without giving any hint of the incident.)

¹ I laid stress on these words because they took me aback. They seemed to have an ambiguous ring about them. Are not certain physical needs referred to in the same words? Now, in a line of associations ambiguous words (or, as we may call them, ‘switch-words’) act like points at a junction. If the points are switched across from the position in which they appear to lie in the dream, then we find ourselves on another set of rails; and along this second track run the thoughts which we are in search of but which still lie concealed behind the dream.

Her first reply was that she did not know, but after a while she added: ‘Yes. I think it was after the scene.’

So now I knew that the dream was a reaction to that experience. But why had it recurred there three times? I continued my questions: ‘How long did you stop on at L-- after the scene?’

‘Four more nights. On the following day I went away with Father.’

‘Now I am certain that the dream was an immediate effect of your experience with Herr K. It was at L-- that you dreamed it for the first time, and not before. You have only introduced this uncertainty in your memory so as to obliterate the connection in your mind.¹ But the figures do not quite fit in to my satisfaction yet. If you stayed at L-- for four nights longer, the dream might have occurred four times over. Perhaps this was so?’

She no longer disputed my contention; but instead of answering my question she proceeded:² ‘In the afternoon after our trip on the lake, from which we (Herr K. and I) returned at midday, I had gone to lie down as usual on the sofa in the bed room to have a short sleep. I suddenly awoke and saw Herr K. standing beside me...’

‘In fact, just as you saw your father standing beside your bed in the dream?’

‘Yes. I asked him sharply what it was he wanted there. By way of reply he said he was not going to be prevented from coming into his own bedroom when he wanted; besides, there was something he wanted to fetch. This episode put me on my guard, and I asked Frau K. whether there was not a key to the bedroom door. The next morning I locked myself in while I was dressing. That afternoon, when I wanted to lock myself in so as to lie down again on the sofa, the key was gone. I was convinced that Herr K. had removed it.’

‘Then here we have the theme of locking or not locking a room which appeared in the first association to the dream and also happened to occur in the exciting cause of the recent recurrence of the dream.³ I wonder whether the phrase "I dressed quickly" may not also belong to this context?’

¹ Compare what was said on p. 1359 on the subject of doubt accompanying a recollection.

² This was because a fresh piece of material had to emerge from her memory before the question I had put could be answered.

³ I suspected, though I did not as yet say so to Dora, that she had seized upon this element on account of a symbolic meaning which it possessed. ‘Zimmer’ [‘room’] in dreams stands very frequently for ‘Frauenzimmer’ [a slightly derogatory word for ‘woman’; literally, ‘women’s apartments’]. The question whether a woman is ‘open’ or ‘shut’ can naturally not be a matter of indifference. It is well known, too, what sort of ‘key’ effects the opening in such a case.

‘It was then that I made up my mind not to stop on with the K.’s without Father. On the subsequent mornings I could not help feeling afraid that Herr K. would surprise me while I was dressing: so I always dressed very quickly. You see, Father lived at the hotel, and Frau K. used always to go out early so as to go on expeditions with him. But Herr K. did not annoy me again.’

‘I understand. On the afternoon of the day after the scene in the wood you formed your intention of escaping from his persecution, and during the second, third, and fourth nights you had time to repeat that intention in your sleep. (You already knew on the second afternoon - before the dream, therefore - that you would not have the key on the following morning to lock yourself in with while you were dressing; and you could then form the design of dressing as quickly as possible.) But your dream recurred each night, for the very reason that it corresponded to an intention. An intention remains in existence until it has been carried out. You said to yourself, as it were: "I shall have no rest and I can get no quiet sleep until I am out of this house." In your account of the dream you turned it the other way and said: "As soon as I was outside I woke up.".’

At this point I shall interrupt my report of the analysis in order to compare this small piece of dream-interpretation with the general statements I have made upon the mechanism of the formation of dreams. I argued in my book, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), that every dream is a wish which is represented as fulfilled, that the representation acts as a takes disguise if the wish is a repressed one, belonging to the unconscious, and that except in the case of children’s dreams only an unconscious wish or one which reaches down into the unconscious has the force necessary for the formation of a dream. I fancy my theory would have been more certain of general acceptance if I had contented myself with maintaining that every dream had a meaning, which could be discovered by means of a certain process of interpretation; and that when the interpretation had been completed the dream could be replaced by thoughts which would fall into place at an easily recognizable point in the waking mental life of the dreamer. I might then have gone on to say that the meaning of a dream turned out to be of as many different sorts as the processes of waking thought; that in one case it would be a fulfilled wish, in another a realized fear, or again a reflection persisting on into sleep, or an intention (as in the instance of Dora’s dream), or a piece of creative thought during sleep, and so on. Such a theory would no doubt have proved attractive from its very simplicity, and it might have been supported by a great many examples of dreams that had been satisfactorily interpreted, as for instance by the one which has been analysed in these pages.

But instead of this I formulated a generalization according to which the meaning of dreams is limited to a single form, to the representation of wishes, and by so doing I aroused a universal inclination to dissent. I must, however, observe that I did not consider it either my right or my duty to simplify a psychological process so as to make it more acceptable to my readers, when my researches had shown me that it presented a complication which could not be reduced to uniformity until the inquiry had been carried into another field. It is therefore of special importance to me to show that apparent exceptions such as this dream of Dora’s, which has shown itself in the first instance to be the continuation into sleep of an intention formed during the day - nevertheless lend fresh support to the rule which is in dispute.

Much of the dream, however, still remained to be interpreted, and I proceeded with my questions: ‘What is this about the jewel-case that your mother wanted to save?’

‘Mother is very fond of jewellery and had had a lot given her by Father.’

‘And you?’

‘I used to be very fond of jewellery too, once; but I have not worn any since my illness. - Once, four years ago’ (a year before the dream), ‘Father and Mother had a great dispute about a piece of jewellery. Mother wanted to be given a particular thing - pearl drops to wear in her ears. But Father does not like that kind of thing, and he brought her a bracelet instead of the drops. She was furious, and told him that as he had spent so much money on a present she did not like he had better just give it to some one else.’

‘I dare say you thought to yourself you would accept it with pleasure.’

‘I don’t know.¹ I don’t in the least know how Mother comes into the dream; she was not with us at L-- at the time.’²

‘I will explain that to you presently. Does nothing else occur to you in connection with the jewel-case? So far you have only talked about jewellery and have said nothing about a case.’

‘Yes, Herr K. had made me a present of an expensive jewel-case a little time before.’

‘Then a return-present would have been very appropriate. Perhaps you do not know that "jewel-case" ["Schmuckkästchen"] is a favourite expression for the same thing that you alluded to not long ago by means of the reticule you were wearing³ - for the female genitals, I mean.’

‘I knew you would say that.’4

¹ The regular formula with which she confessed to anything that had been repressed.

² This remark gave evidence of a complete misunderstanding of the rules of dream-interpretation, though on other occasions Dora was perfectly familiar with them. This fact, coupled with the hesitancy and meagreness of her associations with the jewel-case, showed me that we were here dealing with material which had been very intensely repressed.

³ This reference to the reticule will be explained further on.

4 A very common way of putting aside a piece of knowledge that emerges from the repressed.7

‘That is to say, you knew that it was so. - The meaning of the dream is now becoming even clearer. You said to yourself: "This man is persecuting me; he wants to force his way into my room. My ‘jewel-case’ is in danger, and if anything happens it will be Father’s fault." For that reason in the dream you chose a situation which expresses the opposite - a danger from which your father is saving you. In this part of the dream everything is turned into its opposite; you will soon discover why. As you say, the mystery turns upon your mother. You ask how she comes into the dream? She is, as you know, your former rival in your father’s affections. In the incident of the bracelet, you would have been glad to accept what your mother had rejected. Now let us just put "give" instead of "accept" and "withhold" instead of "reject". Then it means that you were ready to give your father what your mother withheld from him; and the thing in question was connected with jewellery.¹ Now bring your mind back to the jewel-case which Herr K. gave you. You have there the starting-point for a parallel line of thoughts, in which Herr K. is to be put in the place of your father just as he was in the matter of standing beside your bed. He gave you a jewel-case; so you are to give him your jewel-case. That was why I spoke just now of a "return-present". In this line of thoughts your mother must be replaced by Frau K. (You will not deny that she, at any rate, was present at the time.) So you are ready to give Herr K, what his wife withholds from him. That is the thought which has had to be repressed with so much energy, and which has made it necessary for every one of its elements to be turned into its opposite. The dream confirms once more what I had already told you before you dreamt it - that you are summoning up your old love for your father in order to protect yourself against your love for Herr K. But what do all these efforts show? Not only that you are afraid of Herr K., but that you are still more afraid of yourself, and of the temptation you feel to yield to him. In short, these efforts prove once more how deeply you loved him.’²

Naturally Dora would not follow me in this part of the interpretation. I myself, however, had been able to arrive at a further step in the interpretation, which seemed to me indispensable both for the anamnesis of the case and for the theory of dreams. I promised to communicate this to Dora at the next session.

¹ We shall be able later on to interpret even the drops in a way which will fit in with the context.

² I added: ‘Moreover, the re-appearance of the dream in the last few days forces me to the conclusion that you consider that the same situation has arisen once again, and that you have decided to give up the treatment - to which, after all, it is only your father who makes you come.’ The sequel showed how correct my guess had been. At this point my interpretation touches for a moment upon the subject of ‘transference’ - a theme which is of the highest practical and theoretical importance, but into which I shall not have much further opportunity of entering in the present paper.

8 The fact was that I could not forget the hint which seemed to be conveyed by the ambiguous words already noticed - that it might be necessary to leave the room; that an accident might happen in the night. Added to this was the fact that the elucidation of the dream seemed to me incomplete so long as a particular requirement remained unsatisfied; for, though I do not wish to insist that this requirement is a universal one, I have a predilection for discovering a means of satisfying it. A regularly formed dream stands, as it were, upon two legs, one of which is in contact with the main and current exciting cause, and the other with some momentous event in the years of childhood. The dream sets up a connection between those two factors - the event during childhood and the event of the present day - and it endeavours to re-shape the present on the model of the remote past. For the wish which creates the dream always springs from the period of childhood; and it is continually trying to summon childhood back into reality and to correct the present day by the measure of childhood. I believed that I could already clearly detect those elements of Dora’s dream which could be pieced together into an allusion to an event in childhood.

I opened the discussion of the subject with a little experiment, which was, as usual, successful. There happened to be a large match-stand on the table. I asked Dora to look round and see whether she noticed anything special on the table, something that was not there as a rule. She noticed nothing. I then asked her if she knew why children were forbidden to play with matches.

‘Yes; on account of the risk of fire. My uncle’s children are very fond of playing with matches.’

‘Not only on that account. They are warned not to "play with fire", and a particular belief is associated with the warning.’9

She knew nothing about it. - ‘Very well, then; the fear is that if they do they will wet their bed. The antithesis of "water" and "fire" must be at the bottom of this. Perhaps it is believed that they will dream of fire and then try and put it out with water. I cannot say exactly. But I notice that the antithesis of water and fire has been extremely useful to you in the dream. Your mother wanted to save the jewel-case so that it should not be burnt; while in the dream-thoughts it is a question of the "jewel-case" not being wetted. But fire is not only used as the contrary of water, it also serves directly to represent love (as in the phrase "to be consumed with love"). So that from "fire" one set of rails runs by way of this symbolic meaning to thoughts of love; while the other set runs by way of the contrary "water", and, after sending off a branch line which provides another connection with "love" (for love also makes things wet), leads in a different direction. And what direction can that be? Think of the expressions you used: that an accident might happen in the night, and that it might be necessary to leave the room. Surely the allusion must be to a physical need? And if you transpose the accident into childhood what can it be but bed-wetting? But what is usually done to prevent children from wetting their bed? Are they not woken up in the night out of their sleep, exactly as your father woke you up in the dream? This, then, must be the actual occurrence which enabled you to substitute your father for Herr K., who really, woke you up out of your sleep. I am accordingly driven to conclude that you were addicted to bed-wetting up to a later age than is usual with children. The same must also have been true of your brother; for your father said: "I refuse to let my two children go to their destruction...." Your brother has no other sort of connection with the real situation at the K.’s; he had not gone with you to L--. And now, what have your recollections to say to this?’

‘I know nothing about myself,’ was her reply, ‘but my brother used to wet his bed up till his sixth or seventh year; and it used sometimes to happen to him in the daytime too.’

I was on the point of remarking to her how much easier it is to remember things of that kind about one’s brother than about oneself, when she continued the train of recollections which had been revived: ‘Yes. I used to do it too, for some time, but not until my seventh or eighth year. It must have been serious, because I remember now that the doctor was called in. It lasted till a short time before my nervous asthma.’

‘And what did the doctor say to it?’

‘He explained it as nervous weakness; it would soon pass off, he thought; and he prescribed a tonic.’¹

¹ This physician was the only one in whom she showed any confidence, because this episode showed her that he had not penetrated her secret. She felt afraid of any other doctor about whom she had not yet been able to form a judgement, and we can now see that the motive of her fear was the possibility that he might guess her secret.

0 The interpretation of the dream now seemed to me to be complete.¹ But Dora brought me an addendum to the dream on the very next day. She had forgotten to relate, she said, that each time after waking up she had smelt smoke. Smoke, of course, fitted in well with fire, but it also showed that the dream had a special relation to myself; for when she used to assert that there was nothing concealed behind this or that, I would often say by way of rejoinder: ‘There can be no smoke without fire!’ Dora objected, however, to such a purely personal interpretation, saying that Herr K. and her father were passionate smokers - as I am too, for the matter of that. She herself had smoked during her stay by the lake, and Herr K. had rolled a cigarette for her before he began his unlucky proposal. She thought, too, that she clearly remembered having noticed the smell of smoke on the three occasions of the dream’s occurrence at L--, and not for the first time at its recent reappearance. As she would give me no further information, it was left to me to determine how this addendum was to be introduced into the texture of the dream-thoughts. One thing which I had to go upon was the fact that the smell of smoke had only come up as an addendum to the dream, and must therefore have had to overcome a particularly strong effort on the part of repression. Accordingly it was probably related to the thoughts which were the most obscurely presented and the most successfully repressed in the dream, to the thoughts, that is, concerned with the temptation to show herself willing to yield to the man. If that were so, the addendum to the dream could scarcely mean anything else than the longing for a kiss, which, with a smoker, would necessarily smell of smoke. But a kiss had passed between Herr K. and Dora some two years further back, and it would certainly have been repeated more than once if she had given way to him. So the thoughts of temptation seemed in this way to have harked back to the earlier scene, and to have revived the memory of the kiss against whose seductive influence the little ‘thumb-sucker’ had defended herself at the time, by the feeling of disgust. Taking into consideration, finally, the indications which seemed to point to there having been a transference on to me - since I am a smoker too - I came to the conclusion that the idea had probably occurred to her one day during a session that she would like to have a kiss from me. This would have been the exciting cause which led her to repeat the warning dream and to form her intention of stopping the treatment. Everything fits together very satisfactorily upon this view; but owing to the characteristics of ‘transference’ its validity is not susceptible of definite proof.

¹ The essence of the dream might perhaps be translated into words such as these: ‘The temptation is so strong. Dear Father, protect me again as you used to in my childhood, and prevent my bed from being wetted!’1 I might at this point hesitate whether I should first consider the light thrown by this dream on the history of the case, or whether I should rather begin by dealing with the objection to my theory of dreams which may be based on it interpretation. I shall take the former course.

The significance of enuresis in the early history of neurotics is worth going into thoroughly. For the sake of clearness I will confine myself to remarking that Dora’s case of bed-wetting was not the usual one. The disorder was not simply that the habit had persisted beyond what is considered the normal period, but, according to her explicit account, it had begun by disappearing and had then returned at a relatively late age - after her sixth year. Bed-wetting of this kind has, to the best of my knowledge, no more likely cause than masturbation, a habit whose importance in the aetiology of bed-wetting in general is still insufficiently appreciated. In my experience, the children concerned have themselves at one time been very well aware of this connection, and all its psychological consequences follow from it as though they had never forgotten it. Now, at the time when Dora reported the dream, we were engaged upon a line of enquiry which led straight towards an admission that she had masturbated in childhood. A short while before, she had raised the question of why it was that precisely she had fallen ill, and, before I could answer, had put the blame on her father. The justification for this was forthcoming not out of her unconscious thoughts but from her conscious knowledge. It turned out, to my astonishment, that the girl knew what the nature of her father’s illness had been. After his return from consulting me she had overheard a conversation in which the name of the disease had been mentioned. At a still earlier period - at the time of the detached retina - an oculist who was called in must have hinted at a luetic aetiology; for the inquisitive and anxious girl overheard an old aunt of hers saying to her mother: ‘He was ill before his marriage, you know’, and adding something which she could not understand, but which she subsequently connected in her mind with improper subjects.

Her father, then, had fallen ill through leading a loose life, and she assumed that he had handed on his bad health to her by heredity. I was careful not to tell her that, as I have already mentioned, I too was of opinion that the offspring of luetics were very specially predisposed to severe neuropsychoses. The line of thought in which she brought this accusation against her father was continued in her unconscious material. For several days on end she identified herself with her mother by means of slight symptoms and peculiarities of manner, which gave her an opportunity for some really remarkable achievements in the direction of intolerable behaviour. She then allowed it to transpire that she was thinking of a stay she had made at Franzensbad, which she had visited with her mother - I forget in what year. Her mother was suffering from abdominal pains and from a discharge (a catarrh) which necessitated a cure at Franzensbad. It was Dora’s view - and here again she was probably right - that this illness was due to her father, who had thus handed on his venereal disease to her mother. It was quite natural that in drawing this conclusion she should, like the majority of laymen, have confused gonorrhoea and syphilis, as well as what is contagious and what is hereditary. The persistence with which she held to this identification with her mother almost forced me to ask her whether she too was suffering from a venereal disease; and I then learnt that she was afflicted with a catarrh (leucorrhoea) whose beginning, she said, she could not remember.

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