Autobiographical note 79 страница

¹ This is a reference to the analysis of a dream quoted in the book as an example.4

I should like, further, to draw special attention to the fact that the analysis of this dream has given us access to certain details of the pathogenically operative events which had otherwise been inaccessible to memory, or at all events to reproduction. The recollection of the bed-wetting in childhood had, as we have seen, already been repressed. And Dora had never mentioned the details of her persecution by Herr K.; they had never occurred to her mind.

I add a few remarks which may help towards the synthesis of this dream. The dream-work began on the afternoon of the day after the scene in the wood, after Dora had noticed that she was no longer able to lock the door of her room. She then said to herself: ‘I am threatened by a serious danger here,’ and formed her intention of not stopping on in the house alone but of going off with her father. This intention became capable of forming a dream, because it succeeded in finding a continuation in the unconscious. What corresponded to it there was her summoning up her infantile love for her father as a protection against the present temptation. The change which thus took place in her became fixed and brought her into the attitude shown by her supervalent train of thought - jealousy of Frau K. on her father’s account, as though she herself were in love with him. There was a conflict within her between a temptation to yield to the man’s proposal and a composite force rebelling against that feeling. This latter force was made up of motives of respectability and good sense, of hostile feelings caused by the governess’s disclosures (jealousy and wounded pride, as we shall see later), and of a neurotic element, namely, the tendency to a repudiation of sexuality which was already present in her and was based on her childhood history. Her love for her father, which she summoned up to protect her against the temptation, had its origin in this same childhood history.

Her intention of flying to her father, which, as we have seen, reached down into the unconscious, was transformed by the dream into a situation which presented as fulfilled the wish that her father should save her from the danger. In this process it was necessary to put on one side a certain thought which stood in the way; for it was her father himself who had brought her into the danger. The hostile feeling against her father (her desire for revenge), which was here suppressed, was, as we shall discover, one of the motive forces of the second dream.

According to the necessary conditions of dream-formation the imagined situation must be chosen so as to reproduce a situation in infancy. A special triumph is achieved if a recent situation, perhaps even the very situation which is the exciting cause of the dream, can be transformed into an infantile one. This has actually been achieved in the present case, by a purely chance disposition of the material. Just as Herr K. had stood beside her sofa and woken her up, so her father had often done in her childhood. The whole trend of her thoughts could be most aptly symbolized by her substitution of her father for Herr K. in that situation.

But the reason for which her father used to wake her up long ago had been to prevent her from making her bed wet.

This ‘wet’ had a decisive influence on the further content of the dream; though it was represented in it only by a distant allusion and by its opposite.

The opposite of ‘wet’ and ‘water’ can easily be ‘fire’ and ‘burning’. The chance that, when they arrived at the place, her father had expressed his anxiety at the risk of fire, helped to decide that the danger from which her father was to rescue her should be a fire. The situation chosen for the dream-picture was based upon this chance, and upon the opposition to ‘wet’: ‘There was a fire. Her father was standing beside her bed to wake her.’ Her father’s chance utterance would, no doubt, not have obtained such an important position in the dream if it had not fitted in so excellently with the dominating current of feeling, which was determined to regard him at any cost as a protector and saviour. ‘He foresaw the danger from the very moment of our arrival! He was in the right!’ (In actual fact, it was he who had brought the girl into danger.)

In consequence of certain connections which can easily be made from it, the word ‘wet’ served in the dream-thoughts as a nodal point between several groups of ideas. ‘Wet’ was connected not only with the bed-wetting, but also with the group of ideas relating to sexual temptation which lay suppressed behind the content of the dream. Dora knew that there was a kind of getting wet involved in sexual intercourse, and that during the act of copulation the man presented the woman with something liquid in the form of drops. She also knew that the danger lay precisely in that, and that it was her business to protect her genitals from being moistened.

‘Wet’ and ‘drops’ at the same time opened the way to the other group of associations - the group relating to the disgusting catarrh, which in her later years had no doubt possessed the same mortifying significance for her as the bed-wetting had in her childhood. ‘Wet’ in this connection had the same meaning as ‘dirtied’. Her genitals, which ought to have been kept clean, had been dirtied already by the catarrh - and this applied to her mother no less than to herself (p. 1412). She seemed to understand that her mother’s mania for cleanliness was a reaction against this dirtying.

The two groups of ideas met in this one thought: ‘Mother got both things from father: the sexual wetness and the dirtying discharge.’ Dora’s jealousy of her mother was inseparable from the group of thoughts relating to her infantile love for her father which she summoned up for her protection. But this material was not yet capable of representation. If, however, a recollection could be found which was equally closely connected with both the groups related to the word ‘wet’, but which avoided any offensiveness, then such a recollection would be able to take over the representation in the dream of the material in question.

A recollection of this sort was furnished by the episode of the ‘drops’ - the jewellery [‘Schmuck’] that Dora’s mother wanted to have. In appearance the connection between this reminiscence and the two groups of thoughts relating to sexual wetness and to being dirtied was a purely external and superficial one, of a verbal character. For ‘drops’ was used ambiguously as a ‘switch-word’, while ‘jewellery’ [‘Schmuck’] was taken as an equivalent to ‘clean’, and thus as a rather forced contrary of ‘dirtied’.¹ But in reality the most substantial connections can be shown to have existed between the things denoted themselves. The recollection originated from the material connected with Dora’s jealousy of her mother, which, though its roots were infantile, had persisted far beyond that period. By means of these two verbal bridges it was possible to transfer on to the single reminiscence of the ‘jewel-drops’ the whole of the significance attaching to the ideas of her parents’ sexual intercourse, and of her mother’s gonorrhoea and tormenting passion for cleanliness.

¹ [The German word ‘Schmuck’ has a much wider meaning than the English ‘jewellery’, though that is the sense in which it occurs in the compound ‘Schmuckkästchen’, ‘jewel-case’. As a substantive, ‘Schmuck’ denotes ‘finery’ of all kinds, not only personal adornments, but embellishments of objects and decorations in general. In an adjectival sense, it can mean ‘smart’, ‘ tidy’, or ‘neat’.]7

But a still further displacement had to be effected before this material appeared in the dream. Though ‘drops’ is nearer to the original ‘wet’, it was the more distant ‘jewellery’ that found a place in the dream. When, therefore, this element had been inserted into the dream-situation which had already been established, the account might have run: ‘Mother wanted to stop and save her jewellery.’ But a subsequent influence now made itself felt, and led to the further alteration of ‘jewellery’ into ‘jewel-case’. This influence came from elements in the underlying group relating to the temptation offered by Herr K. He had never given her jewellery, but he had given her a ‘case’ for it, which meant for her all the marks of preference and all the tenderness for which she felt she ought now to have been grateful. And the composite word thus formed, ‘jewel-case’, had beyond this a special claim to be used as a representative element in the dream. Is not ‘jewel-case’ [‘Schmuckkästen’] a term commonly used to describe female genitals that are immaculate and intact? And is it not, on the other hand, an innocent word? Is it not, in short, admirably calculated both to betray and to conceal the sexual thoughts that lie behind the dream?

‘Mother’s jewel-case’ was therefore introduced in two places in the dream; and this element replaced all mention of Dora’s infantile jealousy, of the drops (that is, of the sexual wetness), of being dirtied by the discharge, and, on the other hand, of her present thoughts connected with the temptation - the thoughts which were urging her to reciprocate the man’s love, and which depicted the sexual situation (alike desirable and menacing) that lay before her. The element of ‘jewel-case’ was more than any other a product of condensation and displacement, and a compromise between contrary mental currents. The multiplicity of its origin - both from infantile and contemporary sources - is no doubt pointed to by its double appearance in the content of the dream.

The dream was a reaction to a fresh experience of an exciting nature; and this experience must inevitably have revived the memory of the only previous experience which was at all analogous to it. The latter was the scene of the kiss in Herr K.’s place of business, when she had been seized with disgust. But this same scene was associatively accessible from other directions too, namely, from the group of thoughts relating to the catarrh (p. 83), and from her present temptation. The scene therefore brought to the dream a contribution of its own, which had to be made to fit in with the dream situation that had already been laid down: ‘There was a fire’... no doubt the kiss smelt of smoke; so she smelt smoke in the dream, and the smell persisted till after she was awake.

By inadvertence, I unfortunately left a gap in the analysis of the dream. Dora’s father was made to say, ‘I refuse to let my two children go to their destruction...’ (‘as a result of masturbation’ should no doubt be added from the dream-thoughts). Such speeches in dreams are regularly constructed out of pieces of actual speeches which have either been made or heard. I ought to have made enquiries as to the actual source of this speech. The results of my enquiry would no doubt have shown that the structure of the dream was still more complicated, but would at the same time have made it easier to penetrate.

Are we to suppose that when this dream occurred at L-- it had precisely the same content as when it recurred during the treatment? It does not seem necessary to do so. Experience shows that people often assert that they have had the same dream, when as a matter of fact the separate appearances of the recurrent dream have differed from one another in numerous details and in other respects that were of no small importance. Thus one of my patients told me that she had had her favourite dream again the night before, and that it always recurred in the same form: she had dreamed of swimming in the blue sea, of joyfully cleaving her way through the waves, and so on. On closer investigation it turned out that upon a common background now one detail and now another was brought out; on one occasion, even, she was swimming in a frozen sea and was surrounded by icebergs. This patient had other dreams, which turned out to be closely connected with the recurrent one, though even she made no attempt to claim that they were identical with it. Once, for instance, she was looking at a view of Heligoland (based on a photograph, but life-size) which showed the upper and lower parts of the island simultaneously; on the sea was a ship, in which were two people whom she had known in her youth, and so on.

What is certain is that in Dora’s case the dream which occurred during the treatment had gained a new significance connected with the present time, though perhaps its manifest content had not changed. The dream-thoughts behind it included a reference to my treatment, and it corresponded to a renewal of the old intention of withdrawing from a danger. If her memory was not deceiving her when she declared that even at L-- she had noticed the smoke after she woke up, it must be acknowledged that she had brought my proverb, ‘There can be no smoke without fire’, very ingeniously into the completed form of the dream, in which it seemed to serve as an overdetermination of the last element. It was undeniably a mere matter of chance that the most recent exciting cause - her mother’s locking the dining-room door so that her brother was shut into his bedroom - had provided a connection with her persecution by Herr K. at L--, where her decision had been made when she found she could not lock her bedroom door. It is possible that her brother did not appear in the dream on the earlier occasions, so that the words ‘my two children’ did not form part of its content until after the occurrence of its latest exciting cause.

III THE SECOND DREAM

A few weeks after the first dream the second occurred, and when it had been dealt with the analysis was broken off. It cannot be made as completely intelligible as the first, but it afforded a desirable confirmation of an assumption which had become necessary about the patient’s mental state, it filled up a gap in her memory, and it made it possible to obtain a deep insight into the origin of another of her symptoms.

Dora described the dream as follows: ‘I was walking about in a town which I did not know. I saw streets and squares which were strange to me.¹ l then came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and found a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I had left home without my parents’ knowledge she had not wished to write to me to say that Father was ill. "Now he is dead, and if you like² you can come." I then went to the station ["Bahnhof"] and asked about a hundred times: " Where is the station?" I always got the answer: "Five minutes." I then saw a thick wood before me which I went into, and there I asked a man whom I met. He said to me: "Two and a half hours more." ³ He offered to accompany me. But I refused and went alone. I saw the station in front of me and could not reach it. At the same time I had the usual feeling of anxiety that one has in dreams when one cannot move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in the meantime, but I know nothing about that. I walked into the porter’s lodge, and enquired for our flat. The maidservant opened the door to me and replied that Mother and the others were already at the cemetery [“Friedhof"].’4

¹ To this she subsequently made an important addendum: ‘I saw a monument in one of the squares.’

² To this came the addendum: ‘There was a question-mark after this word, thus: “like?”.’

³ In repeating the dream she said: ‘Two hours.’

4 In the next session Dora brought me two addenda to this: ‘I saw myself particularly distinctly going up the stairs,’ and ‘After she had answered I went to my room, but not the least sadly, and began reading a big book that lay on my writing-table.’

It was not without some difficulty that the interpretation of this dream proceeded. In consequence of the peculiar circumstances in which the analysis was broken off - circumstances connected with the content of the dream - the whole of it was not cleared up. And for this reason, too, I am not equally certain at every point of the order in which my conclusions were reached. I will begin by mentioning the subject-matter with which the current analysis was dealing at the time when the dream intervened. For some time Dora herself had been raising a number of questions about the connection between some of her actions and the motives which presumably underlay them. One of these questions was: ‘Why did I say nothing about the scene by the lake for some days after it had happened?’ Her second question was: ‘Why did I then suddenly tell my parents about it?’ Moreover, her having felt so deeply injured by Herr K.’s proposal seemed to me in general to need explanation, especially as I was beginning to realize that Herr K. himself had not regarded his proposal to Dora as a mere frivolous attempt at seduction. I looked upon her having told her parents of the episode as an action which she had taken when she was already under the influence of a morbid craving for revenge. A normal girl, I am inclined to think, will deal with a situation of this kind by herself.

I shall present the material produced during the analysis of this dream in the somewhat haphazard order in which it recurs to my mind.

She was wandering about alone in a strange town and saw streets and squares. Dora assured me that it was certainly not B--, which I had first hit upon, but a town in which she had never been. It was natural to suggest that she might have seen some pictures or photographs and have taken the dream-pictures from them. After this remark of mine came the addendum about the monument in one of the squares and immediately afterwards her recognition of its source. At Christmas she had been sent an album from a German health-resort, containing views of the town; and the very day before the dream she had looked this out to show it to some relatives who were stopping with them. It had been put in a box for keeping pictures in, and she could not lay her hands on it at once. She had therefore said to her mother: ‘Where is the box?.’¹ One of the pictures was of a square with a monument in it. The present had been sent to her by a young engineer, with whom she had once had a passing acquaintance in the manufacturing town. The young man had accepted a post in Germany, so as to become sooner self-supporting; and he took every opportunity of reminding Dora of his existence. It was easy to guess that he intended to come forward as a suitor one day, when his position had improved. But that would take time, and it meant waiting.

¹ In the dream she said: ‘Where is the station?’ The resemblance between the two questions led me to make an inference which I shall go into presently.2

The wandering about in a strange town was overdetermined. It led back to one of the exciting causes from the day before. A young cousin of Dora’s had come to stay with them for the holidays, and Dora had had to show him round Vienna. This cause was, it is true, a matter of complete indifference to her. But her cousin’s visit reminded her of her own first brief visit to Dresden. On that occasion she had been a stranger and had wandered about, not failing, of course, to visit the famous picture gallery. Another cousin of hers, who was with them and knew Dresden, had wanted to act as a guide and take her round the gallery. But she declined and went alone, and stopped in front of the pictures that appealed to her. She remained two hours in front of the Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration. When I asked her what had pleased her so much about the picture she could find no clear answer to make. At last she said: ‘The Madonna.’

There could be no doubt that these associations really belonged to the material concerned in forming the dream. They included portions which reappeared in the dream unchanged (‘she declined and went alone’ and ‘two hours’). I may remark at once that ‘pictures’ was a nodal point in the network of her dream-thoughts (the pictures in the album, the pictures at Dresden). I should also like to single out, with a view to subsequent investigation, the theme of the ‘Madonna’, of the virgin mother. But what was most evident was that in this first part of the dream she was identifying herself with a young man. This young man was wandering about in a strange place, he was striving to reach a goal, but he was being kept back, he needed patience and must wait. If in all this she had been thinking of the engineer, it would have been appropriate for the goal to have been the possession of a woman, of herself. But instead of this it was - a station. Nevertheless, the relation of the question in the dream to the question which had been put in real life allows us to substitute ‘box’ for ‘station’. A box and a woman: the notions begin to agree better.

She asked quite a hundred times.... This led to another exciting cause of the dream, and this time to one that was less indifferent. On the previous evening they had had company, and afterwards her father had asked her to fetch him the brandy: he could not get to sleep unless he had taken some brandy. She had asked her mother for the key of the sideboard; but the latter had been deep in conversation, and had not answered her, until Dora had exclaimed with the exaggeration of impatience: ‘I’ve asked you a hundred times already where the key is.’ As a matter of fact, she had of course only repeated the question about five times.¹

‘Where is the key?’ seems to me to be the masculine counterpart to the question ‘Where is the box?'² They are therefore questions referring to - the genitals.

Dora went on to say that during this same family gathering some one had toasted her father and had expressed the hope that he might continue to enjoy the best of health for many years to come, etc. At this a strange quiver passed over her father’s tired face, and she had understood what thoughts he was having to keep down. Poor sick man! who could tell what span of life was still to be his?

This brings us to the contents of the letter in the dream. Her father was dead, and she had left home by her own choice. In connection with this letter I at once reminded Dora of the farewell letter which she had written to her parents or had at least composed for their benefit. This letter had been intended to give her father a fright, so that he should give up Frau K.; or at any rate to take revenge on him if he could not be induced to do that. We are here concerned with the subject of her death and of her father’s death. (Cf. ‘cemetery’ later on in the dream.) Shall we be going astray if we suppose that the situation which formed the façade of the dream was a phantasy of revenge directed against her father? The feelings of pity for him which she remembered from the day before would be quite in keeping with this. According to the phantasy she had left home and gone among strangers, and her father’s heart had broken with grief and with longing for her. Thus she would be revenged. She understood very clearly what it was that her father needed when he could not get to sleep without a drink of brandy.³ We will make a note of Dora’s craving for revenge as a new element to be taken into account in any subsequent synthesis of her dream-thoughts.

¹ In the dream the number five occurs in the mention of the period of ‘five minutes’. In my book on the interpretation of dreams I have given several examples of the way in which numbers occurring in the dream-thoughts are treated by dreams. We frequently find them torn out of their true context and inserted into a new one.

² See the first dream, p. 1403.

³ There can be no doubt that sexual satisfaction is the best soporific, just as sleeplessness is almost always the consequence of lack of satisfaction. Her father could not sleep because he was debarred from sexual intercourse with the woman he loved. (Compare in this connection the phrase discussed just below: ‘I get nothing out of my wife.’)

But the contents of the letter must be capable of further determination. What was the source of the words ‘if you like’? It was at this point that the addendum of there having been a question-mark after the word ‘like’ occurred to Dora, and she then recognized these words as a quotation out of the letter from Frau K. which had contained the invitation to L--, the place by the lake. In that letter there had been a question-mark placed, in a most unusual fashion, in the very middle of a sentence, after the intercalated words ‘if you would like to come’.

So here we were back again at the scene by the lake and at the problems connected with it. I asked Dora to describe the scene to me in detail. At first she produced little that was new. Herr K.’s exordium had been somewhat serious; but she had not let him finish what he had to say. No sooner had she grasped the purport of his words than she had slapped him in the face and hurried away. I enquired what his actual words had been. Dora could only remember one of his pleas: ‘You know I get nothing out of my wife.’¹ In order to avoid meeting him again she had wanted to get back to L-- on foot, by walking round the lake, and she had asked a man whom she met how far it was. On his replying that it was ‘Two and a half hours’, she had given up her intention and had after all gone back to the boat, which left soon afterwards. Herr K. had been there too and had come up to her and begged her to forgive him and not to mention the incident. But she had made no reply. - Yes. The wood in the dream had been just like the wood by the shore of the lake, the wood in which the scene she had just described once more had taken place. But she had seen precisely the same thick wood the day before, in a picture at the Secessionist exhibition. In the background of the picture there were nymphs

.²

¹ These words will enable us to solve one of our problems.

² Here for the third time we come upon ‘picture’ (views of towns, the Dresden gallery), but in a much more significant connection. Because of what appears in the picture (the wood, the nymphs), the ‘Bild’ [‘picture’] is turned into a ‘

Weibsbild’ [literally, ‘picture of a woman’- a somewhat derogatory expression for ‘woman’].5

At this point a certain suspicion of mine became a certainty. The use of ‘Bahnhof’ [‘station’; literally, ‘railway-court’]¹ and ‘Friedhof’ [‘cemetery’; literally, ‘peace-court’] to represent the female genitals was striking enough in itself, but it also served to direct my awakened curiosity to the similarly formed ‘Vorhof’ [‘vestibulum’; literally, ‘fore-court’] - an anatomical term for a particular region of the female genitals. This might have been no more than mistaken ingenuity. But now, with the addition of ‘nymphs’ visible in the background of a ‘thick wood’, no further doubts could be entertained. Here was a symbolic geography of sex! ‘Nymphae’, as is known to physicians though not to laymen (and even by the former the term is not very commonly used), is the name given to the labia minora, which lie in the background of the ‘thick wood’ of the pubic hair. But any one who employed such technical names as ‘vestibulum’ and ‘nymphae’ must have derived his knowledge from books, and not from popular ones either, but from anatomical text-books or from an encyclopaedia - the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. If this interpretation were correct, therefore, there lay concealed behind the first situation in the dream a phantasy of defloration, the phantasy of a man seeking to force an entrance into the female genitals.²

¹ Moreover, a ‘station’ is used for purposes of ‘Verkehr’ [‘traffic’, intercourse’, ‘sexual intercourse’]: this fact determines the psychical coating in a number of cases of railway phobia.

² The phantasy of defloration formed the second component of the situation. The emphasis upon the difficulty of getting forward and the anxiety felt in the dream indicated the stress which the dreamer was so ready to lay upon her virginity - a point alluded to in another place by means of the Sistine Madonna. These sexual thoughts gave an unconscious ground-colouring to the wishes (which were perhaps merely kept secret) concerned with the suitor who was waiting for her in Germany. We have already recognized the phantasy of revenge as the first component of the same situation in the dream. The two components do not coincide completely, but only in part. We shall subsequently come upon the traces of a third and still more important train of thought.

I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached. The impression made upon her must have been forcible, for there immediately appeared a piece of the dream which had been forgotten: she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing table.¹ The emphasis here was upon the two details ‘calmly’ and ‘big’ in connection with ‘book’. I asked whether the book was in encyclopaedia format, and she said it was. Now children never read about forbidden subjects in an encyclopaedia calmly. They do it in fear and trembling, with an uneasy look over their shoulder to see if some one may not be coming. Parents are very much in the way while reading of this kind is going on. But this uncomfortable situation had been radically improved, thanks to the dream’s power of fulfilling wishes. Dora’s father was dead, and the others had already gone to the cemetery. She might calmly read whatever she chose. Did not this mean that one of her motives for revenge was a revolt against her parents’ constraint? If her father was dead she could read or love as she pleased.

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