Recommendations to physicians practising psycho-analysis 5 страница

The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage - in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion.

The lay public, about whose attitude to psycho-analysis I spoke at the outset, will doubtless seize upon this discussion of transference-love as another opportunity for directing the attention of the world to the serious danger of this therapeutic method. The psycho-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist. But when have chemists ever been forbidden, because of the danger, from handling explosive substances, which are indispensable, on account of their effects? It is remarkable that psycho-analysis has to win for itself afresh all the liberties which have long since been accorded to other medical activities. I am certainly not in favour of giving up the harmless methods of treatment. For many cases they are sufficient, and, when all is said, human society has no more use for the furor sanandi¹ than for any other fanaticism. But to believe that the psychoneuroses are to be conquered by operating with harmless little remedies is grossly to under-estimate those disorders both as to their origin and their practical importance. No; in medical practice there will always be room for the ‘ferrum’ and the ‘ignis’ side by side with the ‘medicina’; and in the same way we shall never be able to do without a strictly regular, undiluted psycho-analysis which is not afraid to handle the most dangerous mental impulses and to obtain mastery over them for the benefit of the patient.

¹ [’Passion for curing people.’]1

DREAMS IN FOLKLORE (FREUD AND OPPENHEIM) (1957 [1911])

DREAMS IN FOLKLOREBy Sigm. Freud and Prof. Ernst Oppenheim (Vienna)

‘Celsi praetereunt austera poemata Ramnes.’¹

Persius, Satirae.

One of us (O.) in his studies of folklore has made two observations with regard to the dreams narrated there which seem to him worth communicating. Firstly, that the symbolism employed in these dreams coincides completely with that accepted by psycho-analysis, and secondly, that a number of these dreams are understood by the common people in the same way as they would be interpreted by psycho-analysis - that is, not as premonitions about a still unrevealed future, but as the fulfilment of wishes, the satisfaction of needs which arise during the state of sleep. Certain peculiarities of these, usually indecent, dreams, which are told as comic anecdotes, have encouraged the second of us (Fr.) to attempt an interpretation of them which has made them seem more serious and more deserving of attention.IPENIS-SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS OCCURRING IN FOLKLORE

The dream which we introduce first, although it contains no symbolic representations, sounds almost like ridicule of the prophetic and a plea in favour of the psychological interpretation of dreams.

A DREAM-INTERPRETATION²

A girl got up from her bed and told her mother that she had had a most strange dream.

‘Well, what did you dream, then?’ asked her mother.

‘How shall I tell you? I don’t know myself what it was - some sort of long and red and blunted thing.’

‘Long means a road,’ said her mother reflectively, ‘a long road; red means joy, but I don’t know what blunted can mean.’

The girl’s father, who was getting dressed meanwhile, and was listening to everything that the mother and daughter were saying, muttered at this, more or less to himself: ‘It sounds rather like my cock.’³

¹ [‘Haughty persons in authority disdain poems that are lacking in charm.’]

² ‘Sudslavische Volksüberlieferungen, die sich auf den Geschlechtsverkehr beziehen [Southern Slav Folk Traditions concerning Sexual Intercourse]’, collected and elucidated by F. S. Krauss, Anthropophyteia, 7, 450, No. 820.

³ [Addition by F. S. Krauss:] See Anthropophyteia, 1, 4, No. 5. Cf. further the German Jewish proverb: ‘The goose dreams of maize and the betrothed girl of a prick.’

4 It is very much more convenient to study dream-symbolism in folklore than in actual dreams. Dreams are obliged to conceal things and only surrender their secrets to interpretation; these comic anecdotes, however, which are disguised as dreams, are intended as communications, meant to give pleasure to the person who tells them as well as to the listener, and therefore the interpretation is added quite unashamedly to the symbol. These stories delight in stripping off the veiling symbols.

In the following quatrain the penis appears as a sceptre:

Last night I dreamt

I was King of the land,

And how jolly I was

With a prick in my hand.¹

Now compare with this the following examples in which the same symbolism is employed outside a dream.

I love a little lass

The prettiest I’ve seen,

I’ll put a sceptre in your hand

And you shall be a queen.²

‘Remember, my boy’, said Napoleon,

The Emperor of renown,

‘So long as the prick is the sceptre

The will be the crown.’³

A different variant of this symbolic exaltation of the genitals is favoured in the imagination of artists. A fine etching by Félicien Rops,4 bearing the title ‘Tout est grand chez les rois’ [’Everything about kings is great’], shows the naked figure of a king with the features of the Roi Soleil, whose gigantic penis, which rises to arm level, itself wears a crown. The right hand balances a sceptre, while the left clasps a large orb, which by reason of a central cleft achieves an unmistakable resemblance to another part of the body which is the object of erotic desires.5 The index finger of the left hand is inserted into this groove.

¹ ‘Niederösterreichische Schnadahüpfeln’, collected by Dr. H. Rollett. Anthropophyteia, 5, 151, No. 2.

² From the Austrian Alps, Kryptadia, 4, 111, No. 160.

³ From Gaming in Lower Austria, Anthropophyteia, 3, 190, No. 85, 4.

4 Rops, 1905, Plate 20.

5 [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Like the orb in Rops’s picture, a Roman relief in the Amphitheatre at Nîmes shows an egg transformed into a symbol of the female sexual organs by means of a similar groove. Here, too, the male counterpart is not absent. It appears as a phallus strangely furbished up as a bird which sits on four eggs of the kind described - one might say brooding them.

5 In the Silesian folksong that follows, the dream is only invented in order to hide a different occurrence. The penis appears here as a worm (‘fat earthworm’), which has crawled into the girl, and at the right time crawls out again as a little worm (baby).¹

SONG OF THE EARTHWORMS²

Asleep on the grass one day a young lass

Susanna of passion was dreaming;

A soft smile did play round her nose as she lay

While she thought of her swain and his scheming.

Then - dream full of fear! - it swift did appear

That her lover so handsome and charming

Had become as she slept a fat earthworm which crept

Right inside. What could be more alarming?

Full of dread in her heart she awoke with a start

And swift to the village she hied her

And tearfully told all the folk young and old

That an earthworm had crawled up inside her.

Her wailing and tears came at last to the ears

Of her mother who cursed and swore roundly;

With bodings of gloom she repaired to her room

And examined the maiden most soundly.

For the earthworm she sought, but alas! could find nought -

An unfortunate thing which dismayed her.

So she hurried away without further delay

To ask the wise woman to aid her.

With cunning she laid out the cards for the maid

And said: ‘We must wait a while longer.

‘I have questioned the Knave, but no answer he gave;

‘Perhaps the Red King will prove stronger.

‘'Tis the news that you fear which the Red King³ speaks clear:

‘The worm really crawled in the girlie;

‘But as everything bides its due times and its tides

‘To catch it 'tis yet much too early.’

When Susanna had heard the lugubrious word

She went to her chamber full sadly;

Till at last there appeared the dread hour that she feared

And out crept the little worm gladly.

So be warned, every lass: do not dream on the grass,

But let poor Susanna’s fate guide you,

Or - as you too may know, to your grief and your woe -

A fat earthworm will creep up inside you.4

The same symbolization of the penis by a worm is familiar from numerous obscene jokes.

¹ [‘Würmchen’ (‘little worm’) is a common German expression for ‘baby’.]

² ‘Schlesische Volkslieder [Silesian Folksongs]’, transcribed by Dr. von Waldheim, Anthropophyteia, 7, 369.

³ [’Röter Konig’ (‘Red King’) is an Austrian slang term for ‘menstruation’.]

4 [Footnote by F. S. Krauss:] Cf. p. 359 and the Southern Slav version in Krauss, ‘Die Zeugung in Sitte, Brauch und Glauben der Südslaven [Procreation in the Customs, Usages and Beliefs of the Southern Slavs]’, Kryptadia, 6

, 259-269 and 375 f.6 The dream which now follows symbolizes the penis by a dagger: the woman who dreams it is pulling at a dagger in order to stab herself, when she is awakened by her husband and exhorted not to tear his member off.

A BAD DREAM

A woman dreamt that things had got to such a pitch that they had nothing to eat before the holiday and could not buy anything either. Her husband had drunk up all the money. There was only a lottery ticket left and even this they really ought to pawn. But the man was still keeping it back, for the draw was to be on the second of January. He said: ‘Wife, now tomorrow is the draw, let the ticket wait a while longer. If we don’t win, then we must sell the ticket or pawn it.’ - ‘Well, the devil take it, all you’ve bought is worry, and you’ve got about as much out of it as there is milk in a billy-goat.’ So the next day arrived. See, along came the newspaper man. He stopped him, took a copy and began to look down the list. He ran his eyes over the figures, he looked through every column, his number was not among them. He did not trust his eyes, looked through once again and this time sure enough he came upon the number of his ticket. The number was the same, but the number of the series did not fit. Once again he did not trust himself and thought to himself: ‘This must be a mistake. Wait a bit, I will go to the bank and make certain one way or the other.’ So he went there with his head hanging. On the way he met a second newspaper man. He bought another copy of a second paper, scanned the list and found the number of his ticket straight away. The number of the series, too, was the same as the one which included his ticket. The prize of 5,000 roubles fell to his lot. He burst into the bank, rushed up and asked them to pay out on the winning ticket at once. The banker said that they could not pay out yet, only in a week or two. He began to beg and pray: ‘Please be kind, give me one thousand at least, I can get the rest later!’ The banker refused, but advised him to apply to the private individual who had procured the winning lottery ticket for him. What was to be done now? Just then a little Jew appeared as though he had sprung up from the ground. He smelt a bargain and made him an offer to pay over the money at once, though instead of 5,000 only 4,000. The fifth thousand would be his own share. The man was delighted at this good fortune and decided to give the Jew the thousand, just so that he could get the money on the spot. He took the money from the Jew and handed over the ticket to him. Then he went home. On the way he went into an inn, swallowed a quick glass and from there went straight home. He walked along grinning and humming a little song. His wife saw him through the window and thought: ‘Now he’s certainly sold the lottery ticket; you can see he’s cheerful, he’s probably paid a visit to the inn and got himself drunk because he was feeling miserable.’ Then he came indoors, put the money on the kitchen table and went to his wife to bring her the good news that he had won and had got the money. While they were hugging and kissing one another to their heart’s content because they were so happy, their little three-year-old daughter grabbed the money and threw it into the stove. Then they came along to count the money and it was no longer there. The last bundle of notes was already on fire. In a rage the man seized hold of the little girl by the legs and dashed her against the stove. She dropped dead. Disaster stared him in the face, there was no escaping Siberia now. He seized his revolver and bang! he shot himself in the chest and dropped dead. Horrified by such a disaster, the woman snatched up a dagger and was going to stab herself. She tried to pull it out of the sheath but could not manage it however she tried. Then she heard a voice as though from Heaven: ‘Enough, let go! What are you doing?’ She woke up and saw that she was not pulling at a dagger but at her husband’s tool, and he was saying: ‘Enough, let go or you’ll tear it off!’

The representation of the penis as a weapon, cutting knife,¹ dagger, etc., is familiar to us from the anxiety dreams of abstinent women in particular and also lies at the root of numerous phobias in neurotic people. The complicated disguise of this present dream, however, demands that we should make an attempt to clarify our understanding of it by a psycho-analytic interpretation based on interpretations already carried out. In doing so we are not overlooking the fact that we shall be going beyond the material presented in the folk tale itself and that consequently our conclusions will lose in certainty.

Since this dream ends in an act of sexual aggression carried out by the woman as a dream-action, this suggests that we should take the state of material need in the content of the dream as a substitute for a state of sexual need. Only the most extreme libidinal compulsion can at all justify such aggressiveness on the part of a woman. Other pieces of the dream-content point in a quite definite and different direction. The blame for the state of need is ascribed to the man. (He had drunk up all the money.)² The dream goes on to get rid of the man and the child and skilfully evades the sense of guilt attached to these wishes by causing the child to be killed by the man who then commits suicide out of remorse. Since this is the content of the dream we are led to conclude from many analogous instances that here is a woman who is not satisfied by her husband and who in her phantasies is longing for another marriage. It is all one for the interpretation whether we like to regard this dissatisfaction of the dreamer’s as a permanent state of want or merely as the expression of a temporary one. The lottery, which in the dream brought about a short-lived state of happiness, could perhaps be understood as a symbolic reference to marriage. This symbol has not yet been identified with certainty in psycho-analytic work, but people are in the habit of saying that marriage is a game of chance, that in marriage one either draws the winning lot or a blank.³ The numbers, which have been enormously magnified4 by the dream-work, could well correspond in that case to the number of repetitions of the satisfying act that are wished for. We are thus made aware that the act of pulling the man’s member not only has the meaning of libidinal provocation but also the additional meaning of contemptuous criticism, as though the woman wanted to pull the member off - as the man correctly assumed - because it was no good, did not fulfil its obligations.

We should not have lingered over the interpretation of this dream and exploited it beyond its overt symbolism were it not that other dreams which likewise end in a dream-action demonstrate that the common people have recognized here a typical situation which, wherever it occurs, is susceptible to the same explanation. (Cf. below p. 2538.)

¹ [Footnote by Oppenheim:] A knife is habitually carried by a burglar [‘Einbrecher’, literally, ‘someone who breaks in’]. The kind of breaking-in intended is shown by a proverbial phrase from Solingen, reported in Anthropophyteia, 5, 182: ‘After marriage comes a burglary [breaking-in].’ Cf. the Berlin slang term ‘Brecheisen’ [‘jemmy’, literally, ‘breaking-iron’] for ‘a powerful penis’ (Anthropophyteia, 7, 3).

² [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Cf. further below our remarks on ‘marriage portion’ as a term for ‘penis’ and ‘purse’ for ‘testes’ and also I comparisons between virility and wealth and between the thirst for gold and libido.

³ Another dream about a lottery in this little collection confirms this suggestion.

4 Psycho-analytic experience shows that noughts appended to numbers in dreams can be ignored in interpretation.8

II FAECES-SYMBOLISM AND RELATED DREAM-ACTIONS

Psycho-analysis has taught us that in the very earliest period of childhood faeces is a highly prized substance, in relation to which coprophilic instincts find satisfaction. With the repression of these instincts, which is accelerated as much as possible by up-bringing, this substance falls into contempt and then serves conscious purposes as a means of expressing disdain and scorn. Certain forms of mental activity such as joking are still able to make the obstructed source of pleasure accessible for a brief moment, and thus show how much of the esteem in which human beings once held their faeces still remains preserved in the unconscious. The most important residue of this former esteem is, however, that all the interest which the child has had in faeces is transferred in the adult on to another material which he learns in life to set above almost everything else - gold.¹ How old this connection between excrement and gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremias:² gold, according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of hell.³

In dreams in folklore gold is seen in the most unambiguous way to be a symbol of faeces. If the sleeper feels a need to defaecate, he dreams of gold, of treasure. The disguise in the dream, which is designed to mislead him into satisfying his need in bed, usually makes the pile of faeces serve as a sign to mark the place where the treasure is to be found; that is to say, the dream - as though by means of endopsychic perception - states outright, even if in a reversed form, that gold is a sign or a symbol for faeces.

A simple treasure- or defaecation-dream of this kind is the following one, related in the Facetiae of Poggio.

¹ Cf. ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b),

² Jeremias (1904, 115 n.).

³ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Similarly in Mexico.9DREAM-GOLD¹

A certain man related in company that he had dreamt he had found gold. Thereupon another man capped it with this story. (What follows is quoted verbatim.)

‘My neighbour once dreamt that the Devil had led him to a field to dig for gold; but he found none. Then the Devil said: "It is there for sure, only you cannot dig it up now; but take note of the place so that you may recognize it again by yourself."

‘When the man asked that the place should be made recognizable by some sign, the Devil suggested: "Just shit on it, then it will not occur to anybody that there is gold lying hidden here and you will be able to recognize the exact place." The man did so and then immediately awoke and felt that he had done a great heap in his bed.’

(We give the conclusion in summary.) As he was fleeing from the house, he put on a cap in which a cat had done its business during the same night. He had to wash his head and his hair. ‘Thus his dream-gold was turned to filth.’

Tarasevsky (1909, 194, No. 232) reports a similar dream from the Ukraine in which a peasant receives some treasure from the Devil, to whom he has lit a candle, and puts a pile of faeces to mark the place.²

We need not be surprised if the Devil appears in these two dreams as a bestower of treasure and a seducer, for the Devil - himself an angel expelled from Paradise - is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed unconscious instinctual life.³

The motives behind these simple comic anecdotes about dreams appear to be exhausted in a cynical delight in dirt and a malicious satisfaction over the dreamer’s embarrassment. But in other dreams about treasure the form taken by the dream is confused in all sorts of ways and includes various constituents the origin and significance of which we may well investigate. For we shall not regard even these dream-contents, which are intended to provide a rationalistic justification for obtaining the satisfaction, as entirely arbitrary and meaningless.

In the two next examples, the dream is not ascribed to a person sleeping alone but to one of two sleepers - two men - who share a bed. As a result of the dream, the dreamer dirties his bedfellow.

¹ Poggio (1905, No. 130).

² [Addition by Oppenheim:] Attention is there drawn to parallels in Anthropophyteia, 4, 342-345, Nos. 580-581.

³ ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908b).0

A LIVELY DREAM¹

Two travelling journeymen arrived weary at an inn and asked for a night’s lodging. ‘Yes,’ said the host, ‘if you are not afraid, you can have a bedroom, but it’s a haunted one. If you want to stay, that’s all right, and the night will cost you nothing as far as sleeping goes.’ The lads asked one another: ‘Are you frightened?’ ‘No.’ Very well, so they seized another litre of wine and went to the room assigned to them.

They had hardly been lying down any time when the door opened and a white figure glided through the room. One fellow said to the other: ‘Didn’t you see something?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you say anything?’ ‘Just wait, it’s going to come through the room again.’ Sure enough, the figure glided in again. One of the lads jumped up swiftly, but swifter still the ghost glided out through the crack in the door. The lad, by no means slow, pulled open the door and saw the figure, a beautiful woman, already half way down the stairs. ‘What are you doing there?’ the lad shouted out. The figure stood still, turned round and spoke: ‘Now I am released. I have long had to wander. As a reward take the treasure which lies just at the spot where you are standing.’ The lad was as much frightened as delighted, and in order to mark the place he lifted up his shirt and planted a fine pile, for he thought that no one would wipe out that mark. But just as he was at his happiest, he felt someone suddenly seize hold of him. ‘You dirty swine,’ someone bellowed in his ear, ‘you’re shitting on my shirt.’ At these coarse words the happy dreamer awoke from his fairy-tale good fortune to find himself; roughly hurled out of bed.

HE SHAT ON THE GRAVE

Two gentlemen arrived at a hotel, ate their evening meal and drank and at last wanted to go to bed. They asked the host if he would show them to a room. As the rooms were all occupied the host gave up his own bed to them, which they were both to sleep in, and he would soon find a place for himself to sleep somewhere else. The two men lay down in the same bed. A spirit appeared to one of them in a dream, lit a candle and led him to the churchyard. The lychgate opened and the spirit with the candle in its hand and the man behind walked up to the grave of a maiden. When they had reached the grave, the candle suddenly went out. ‘What shall I do now? How shall I tell which is the maiden’s grave to-morrow, when it is day?’ he asked in the dream. Then an idea came to his rescue, he pulled down his drawers and shat on the grave. When he had finished shitting, his comrade, who was sleeping beside him, struck him first on one cheek and then on the other: ‘What! You’d shit right in my face?’

¹ F. Wernert, ‘Deutsche Bauernerzählungen gesammelt im Ober- und Unterelsass [German Peasant-Tales, Collected in Upper and Lower Alsace]’, Anthropophyteia, 3, 72, No. 15.1

In these two dreams, in place of the Devil other super, natural figures appear, namely ghosts - that is, spirits of dead people. ‘the spirit in the second dream actually leads the dreamer to the churchyard, where he is to mark a particular grave by defaecating on it. A part of this situation is very easy to understand. The sleeper knows that the bed is not the proper place for satisfying his need; hence in the dream he causes himself to be led away from it and procures a person who shows his hidden urge the right way to another place where he is permitted to satisfy his need, indeed is required by the circumstances to do so. The spirit in the second dream actually makes use of a candle when leading him, as a servant would do if he was conducting a stranger to the W.C. at night when it was dark. But why are these representatives of the demand for a change of scene, which the lazy sleeper wants to avoid at all costs, such uncanny individuals as ghosts and spirits of dead people? Why does the spirit in the second dream lead the way to a churchyard as if to desecrate a grave? After all, these: elements seem to have nothing to do with the urge to defaecate and the symbolization of faeces by gold. There is an indication; in them of an anxiety which could perhaps be traced back to an: effort to suppress the achievement of satisfaction in bed; but that anxiety would not explain the specific nature of the dream-content - its reference to death. We will refrain from making an interpretation at this point and will stress further, as being in need of explanation, the fact that in both these situations, where two men are sleeping together, the uncanny element of the ghostly guide is associated with a woman. The spirit in the first dream is early on revealed as a beautiful woman who feels she is now released, and the spirit in the second dream leads the way to the grave of a girl, on which the distinguishing mark is to be placed.

2 Let us turn for further enlightenment to some other defaecation-dreams of this kind, in which the bedfellows are no longer two men but a man and a woman, a married couple. The satisfying action accomplished in sleep as a result of the dream seems here particularly repellent, but perhaps for that very reason conceals a special meaning.

First, however, we will introduce a dream (on account of its connection in content with those that follow) which does not strictly speaking fit in with the plan we have just put forward It is incomplete, inasmuch as the element of the dreamer’s dirtying his bedfellow, his wife, is absent. On the other hand, the connection between the urge to defaecate and the fear of death is extremely plain. The peasant, who is described as married, dreams that he is struck by lightning and that his soul flies up to Heaven. Up there he begs to be allowed to return once more to the earth in order to see his wife and children, obtains permission to transform himself into a spider and to let himself down on the thread spun by himself. The thread is too short and the effort to express still more thread out of his body results in defaecation.

DREAM AND REALITY¹

A peasant lay in bed and had a dream. He saw himself in the field with his oxen, ploughing. Then suddenly down came a flash of lightning and struck him dead. Then he felt quite clearly his soul floating upwards until at last it reached Heaven. Peter stood by the entrance gates and was going to send the peasant in without more ado. But he begged to be allowed down to earth once more, so that he could at least take leave of his wife and his children. But Peter said that would not do, and once a man was in Heaven he was not allowed to return to the world. At this the peasant wept and begged pitifully, until at last Peter gave way. Now there was only one possible way for the peasant to see his family again and that was for Peter to change him into an animal and send him down. So the peasant was turned into a spider and span a long thread on which he let himself down. When he had arrived just over his homestead, at about the level of the chimneys, and could already see his children playing in the meadow, he noticed to his horror that he could not spin any further. Naturally his fear was great, for of course he wanted to get right down to the earth. So he squeezed and he squeezed to make the thread longer. He squeezed with all his might and main - there was a loud noise - and the peasant awoke. Something very human had happened to him while he slept.

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