Recommendations to physicians practising psycho-analysis 6 страница

Here we encounter spun thread as a new symbol for evacuated faeces, although psycho-analysis furnishes us with no counterpart to this symbolization but on the contrary attributes another symbolic meaning to thread. This contradiction will be settled later on.

¹ Dr. von Waldheim, ‘Skatologische Erzählungen aus Preussisch-Schlesien [Scatologic Tales from Prussian Silesia]’, Anthropophyteia, 6, 431, No. 9.3

The next dream, richly elaborated and pungently told, might be described as a ‘sociable’ one; it ends with the wife’s being dirtied. Its points of agreement with the previous dream are, however, quite striking. The peasant is, it is true, not dead, but he finds himself in Heaven, wants to return to the earth and experiences the same difficulty over ‘spinning’ a sufficiently long thread to let himself down on. However, he does not make this thread for himself as a spider out of his own body, but in a less fantastic way out of everything that he can fasten together, and as the thread is still not long enough to reach, the little angels actually advise him to shit and to lengthen the rope with the turds.

THE PEASANT’S ASSUMPTION TO HEAVEN¹

A peasant had the following dream. He had heard that wheat in Heaven was standing at a high price. So he thought he would like to take his wheat there. He loaded his cart, harnessed the horse and set out. He journeyed a long way till he saw the road to Heaven and followed it. Thus he came to the gates of Heaven, and look! they stood open. He charged straight forward so as to drive right inside, but he had scarcely headed the cart towards them when - crash! the gates banged shut. Then he began to beg: ‘Let me in, please be kind!’ But the angels did not let him in and said he had come late. Then he saw that there was no business to be done here; there was just nothing for him, and so he turned round. But look! the road he had travelled on had vanished. What was he to do? He addressed himself to the angels again. ‘Little dears, please be kind and take me back to the earth, if it’s possible! give me a road so that I can get home with my horse and cart!’ But the angels said: ‘No, child of man, your horse and cart stay here and you can go down how you please.’ ‘But how shall I let myself down then, I haven’t any rope?’ ‘Just look for something to let yourself down with.’ So he took the reins, the bridle and the bit, fastened them all together and began to let himself down. He crawled and he crawled and he looked down - it was still a long way to the earth. He crawled back again and lengthened the rope he had joined together by adding the girth and the traces. Then he began to climb down again and it still did not reach the earth. So he fastened on the shafts and the body of the cart. It was still too short. What was he to do next? He racked his brains and then he thought: ‘Ah, I’ll lengthen it with my coat and my breeches and my shirt and then with my belt.’ And that is what he did, joined everything together and climbed on. When he had reached the end of the belt it was still a long way to the earth. Then he did not know what to do; he had nothing more to fasten on and it was dangerous to jump down: he might break his neck. He begged the angels again: ‘Be kind, take me down to the earth!’ The angels said: ‘Shit, and the muck will make a rope.’ So he shat and he shat almost half an hour until he had nothing left to shit with. It made a long rope and he climbed down it. He climbed and he climbed and reached the end of the rope, but it was still a long way to the earth. Then he began once more to beg the angels to take him down to the earth. But the angels said: ‘Now, child of man, piss and it will make a silken thread.’ The peasant pissed and he pissed, on and on, till he could do no more. He saw that it really had turned into a silken thread and he climbed on. He climbed and he climbed and he reached the end of it, and look, it did not reach to the earth, it still needed one and a half or two fathoms. He begged the angels again to take him down. But the angels said: ‘No, brother, there is no help for you now; just jump down!’ The peasant dangled undecided; he could not find the courage to jump down. But then he saw that there was no other was out left to him, and bump! instead of jumping down from Heaven he came flying down from the stove and only came to his senses in the middle of the room. Then he woke up and shouted: ‘ Wife, wife, where are you?’ His wife woke up, she heard the din and said: ‘The Devil take you, have you gone mad?’ She felt round about her and saw the mess: her husband had shat and pissed all over her. She began to rate and to scold him roundly. The peasant said: ‘What are you screaming about? There’s vexation enough anyway. The horse is lost, stayed behind in Heaven, and I was almost done for. God be thanked that I am alive at least!’ ‘What rubbish you’re talking. You’ve had much too much to drink. The horse is in the stable and you were on the stove, and dirtied me all over and then jumped down.’ Then the man collected himself. Only then did it dawn on him that he had merely dreamt it all; and then he told his wife the dream, how he had journeyed up to Heaven and how from there he came down to the earth again.

¹ Tarasevsky (1909, 196).4

At this point, however, psycho-analysis forces on our attention an interpretation which changes our whole view of this class of dreams. Extensible objects, so the experience of interpreting dreams tells us, are ordinarily symbols of erection.¹ In both these anecdotes of dreams the emphasis lies on the element of the thread’s refusing to get long enough, and the anxiety in the dream is also attached to this same element. Thread moreover, like all things analogous to it (cord, rope, twine etc.), is a symbol of semen.² The peasant, then, is striving to produce an erection and only when this is unsuccessful does he resort to defaecation. All at once a sexual need comes to view in these dreams behind the excremental one.

This sexual need is, however, much better adapted to explain the remaining constituents of the dream’s content. We are bound to admit, if we are ready to assume that these fictitious dreams are essentially correctly constructed, that the dream-action with which they end must have a meaning and must be one intended by the latent thoughts of the dreamer. If the dreamer defaecates over his wife at the end of it, then the whole dream must have this as its aim and provide the reason for this outcome. It can signify nothing else but an insult to the wife, or, strictly speaking, a rejection of her. It is then easy to establish a connection between this and the deeper significance of the anxiety expressed in the dream.

The situation from which this last dream grows can be construed according to these suggestions as follows. The sleeper is overcome by a strong erotic need which is indicated in fairly clear symbols at the beginning of the dream. (He had heard that wheat - probably equivalent to semen - was standing at a high price. He charged forward in order to drive with his horse and cart - genital symbols - through the open gates of Heaven.) But this libidinal impulse probably applies to an unattainable object. The gates close, he gives up his intention and wants to return to the earth. But his wife, who lies by him, does not attract him; he exerts himself in vain to get an erection for her. The wish to discard her in order to replace her by another and better woman is in the infantile sense a death-wish. When someone cherishes such wishes in his unconscious against a person who is nevertheless really loved, they are transformed for him into fear of death, fear for his own life. Hence the presence in these dreams of the state of being dead, the assumption to Heaven, the hypocritical longing to see wife and children again. But the disappointed sexual libido finds release along the path of regression in the excremental wishful impulse, which abuses and soils the unserviceable sexual object.

¹ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] In a story which comes from Picardy, pushing a ring down on a finger serves as a symbolic way of depicting an erection. The lower the ring goes, the longer the penis becomes - the analogy naturally has a magical force. (Kryptadia, 1, No. 32.)

² Cf. Stekel, 1911a.5

If this particular dream makes an interpretation of this kind plausible, then, in view of the peculiarities of the material which the dream-contains, we can only succeed in proving the interpretation by applying the same one to a whole succession of dreams with an allied content. With this aim in view, let us turn back to the dreams mentioned earlier, where we find the situation of a sleeper who has a man as his bedfellow. The connection in which the woman appears in these dreams now acquires an added significance in retrospect. The sleeper, overcome by a libidinal impulse, rejects the man; he wishes him far away and a woman in his place. A death-wish directed against the dreamer’s unwanted male bedfellow is naturally not so severely punished by the moral censorship as one directed against his wife, but the reaction is sufficiently far-reaching to turn the wish against himself or against the female object he desires. The dreamer himself is carried off by death; not the man, but the woman the dreamer longs for, is dead. In the end, however, the rejection of the male sexual object finds an outlet in defiling him, and this is felt and avenged by the other as an affront.

Our interpretation thus fits this group of dreams. If we now turn back to the dreams accompanied by defilement of the woman, we shall be prepared to find that elements missing or only hinted at in the dream we have taken as the type are expressed unmistakably in other similar dreams.

In the following defaecation-dream the dirtying of the woman is not emphasized, but we are told quite clearly, as far as can be in the realm of symbolism, that the libidinal impulse is directed towards another woman. The dreamer does not want to dirty his own field, but intends to defaecate on his neighbour’s land.

MUTTON-HEAD!¹

A peasant dreamt that he was at work in his clover field. He was overtaken by an urgent need and, since he did not want to foul his own clover, he hurried off to the tree standing in his neighhour’s field, pulled down his breeches and slapped down a pat of number two on to the ground. At last, when he had happily come to an end, he wanted to clean himself and began to tear up grass with a will. But what was that? Our little peasant woke up from his sleep with a jerk, and clutched at his painfully smarting cheek which someone had just slapped. ‘You deaf old mutton-head!’ - the peasant, coming to himself, heard his wife in bed beside him scolding. ‘So you’d go on pulling the hair right off my body would you!’

¹ F. Wernert, ‘Deutsche Bauernerzählungen gesammelt im Ober- und Unterelsass [German Peasant-Tales, Collected in Upper and Lower Alsace]’, Anthropophyteia, 4, 138, No. 173.6

Tearing out hair (grass), which here takes the place of defiling, is found mentioned alongside it in the next dream. Psycho-analytic experience shows that it originates from the group of symbols concerning masturbation (ausreissen, abreissen [to pull out, to pull off]).

The dreamer’s death-wish directed against his wife would seem to be what most requires confirming in our interpretation. But in the dream which follows next, the dreamer actually buries his wife (hypocritically designated as a treasure) by digging the vessel which contains the gold into the earth and, as is familiar to us in dreams about treasure, planting a heap of faeces on the top to mark the place. During the digging he is working his hands in his wife’s vagina.¹

THE DREAM OF THE TREASURE²

Once upon a time a peasant had a terrible dream. It seemed to him just like it was war-time and the whole district was being plundered by the enemy soldiers. But he had a treasure that he was so scared about that he didn’t rightly know what to do with it and where he should really hide it. At last he thought he would bury it in his garden, where he knew of a proper fine place. Now he dreams on further how he goes right out and comes to the place where he wants to dig up the earth so he can put the big pot in the hole. But when he looks for a tool to dig with he finds nix round about, and at last he has to take his hands to it. So he makes the hole with his bare hands, puts the crock with the money into it and covers the whole lot over again with earth. Now he wants to go, but he stops a while standing there and thinks to himself: ‘But when the soldiers have gone away again, how’ll I find my treasure then if I don’t put a sign there?’ And straight away he begins to hunt about; he hunts up and down and to and fro, wherever he can. No, in the end he finds nix nowhere that would show him again straight away where he has buried his money. But just then he feels a need. ‘Ah,’ he says to himself, ‘now that’ll be fine, I can shit on it.’ So of course he pulls his breeches down right away and does a fine heap on the place where he has put the crock in. Then he sees nearby a bit of grass and is going to pull it out, so he cam wipe himself with it. But that moment he gets such a fine clout that for a second he is quite silly and looks round all dazed. And straight after he hears his wife, who is quite beside herself with rage, yelling at him: ‘You cheeky bastard, you good-for-nothing! D’you think I’ve got to put up with everything from you? First you mess about with both hands in my cunt, then you shit on it and now you even want to pull all the hair off it!’

¹ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Significance?

² A Riedl, ‘Schwänke und Schnurren niederösterreichischer Landleute [Comic and Curious Anecdotes from Lower-Austrian Country People]’, Anthropophyteia, 5, 10, No. 19.7

With this example of a dream we have returned to the treasure-dreams from which we started out, and we observe that those defaecation-dreams which are concerned with treasure contain little or no fear of death, whereas the others, in which the relation to death is expressed directly (dreams of an assumption to Heaven), disregard treasure and motivate the defaecation in other ways. It is almost as though the hypocritical transformation of the wife into a treasure had obviated punishment for the death-wish.¹

A death-wish directed against the woman is most clearly admitted to in another dream of an assumption to Heaven, which, however, ends not in defaecating on the woman’s body but in sexual activity involving her genitals, as already happened in the previous dream. The dreamer actually shortens his wife’s life in order to lengthen his own, by putting oil from her lamp of life into his own. As a kind of compensation for this undisguised hostility there appears at the end of the dream something like an attempt at a caress.

THE LIGHT OF LIFE²

Saint Peter appeared to a man when he was fast asleep and led him away to Paradise. The man agreed to go with all his heart and went with Saint Peter. They wandered about in Paradise for a long time and came to a copse, which was large and spacious but kept in beautiful order, and where hanging lamps were burning on every tree. The man asked Saint Peter what this could mean. Saint Peter answered that they were hanging lamps which only burned as long as a man lived. But as soon as the oil vanished and the lamp went out, the man had to die at once too. This interested the man very much and he asked Saint Peter if he would lead him to his own hanging lamp. Saint Peter granted his request and led him to his wife’s lamp, and just by it was the man’s own lamp. The man saw that his wife’s lamp still had a lot of oil in it, but there was very little in his own and this made him very sorry because he would have to die soon, and he asked Saint Peter if he would pour a little more oil into his lamp. Saint Peter said that God put the oil in at the moment when a man was born and determined for each the length of his life. This made the man very downcast and he wept and wailed beside his lamp. Saint Peter said to him: ‘You stay there, but I must go on - I have more to do.’ The man rejoiced at this and hardly was Saint Peter out of sight when he began to dip his finger in his wife’s hanging lamp and to drip the oil into his own. He did this several times and when Saint Peter approached he started up terrified, and awoke from his dream, and saw that he had been dipping his finger in his wife’s cunt and then dribbling it into his mouth and licking his finger.

Note. According to a version told by a journeyman in Sarajevo, the man awoke after getting a box on the ears from his wife, whom he had awakened by fumbling around in her pudenda. Here Saint Peter is missing and instead of hanging lamps there are glasses with oil burning in them. According to a third version, which I heard from a student in Mostar, a venerable greybeard shows the man various burning candles. His own is very thin, his wife’s enormously thick. In order to lengthen his life, the man then begins with burning zeal to lick the thick candle. But then he gets a tremendous clout. ‘I knew that you were an ox, but I honestly didn’t know that you were a swine as well,’ his wife said to him, for he was licking her cunt in his sleep.

The story is extraordinarily widespread in Europe.³

¹ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] What about the treasure in the dreams of one of two male bedfellows?

² Narrated by a Secondary School teacher in Belgrade, based on a version told by a peasant woman from the region of Kragujevac. Anthropophyteia, 4, 255, No. 10.

³ [Marginal Note by Oppenheim:] Cf. a very similar story from the Ukraine, Kryptadia, 5, 15.

This is the moment to recall the ‘bad dream’ of the woman who ended by pulling at her husband’s organ as if she wanted to tear it out. The interpretation which we found; reason to make in that instance agrees completely with the interpretation of the defaecation-dreams dreamt by men which is expounded here. In the dream of the unsatisfied wife, she, as well, shamelessly gets rid of her husband (and the child) as obstacles in the way of satisfaction.

Another defaecation-dream, about whose interpretation we cannot perhaps be completely certain, suggests, however, that we should concede that there are certain differences in the purpose of these dreams, and throws new light on dreams like the ones we have just mentioned and on some that are still to follow, in which the dream-action consists in a manipulation of the woman’s genitals.

‘FROM FRIGHT’¹

The Pasha passed the night with the Bey. When the next day came, the Bey lay on in bed and did not want to get up. The Bey asked the Pasha: ‘What did you dream?’ ‘I dreamt that on the minaret there was another minaret.’ ‘Could that really be?’ wondered the Bey. ‘And what else did you dream?’ ‘I dreamt,’ he said, ‘that on the minaret there stood a copper jug, and there was water in the jug. The wind blew and the copper jug rocked. Now what would you have done if you had dreamt that?’ ‘I should have pissed myself and shat myself as well, from fright.’ ‘And, you see, I only pissed myself.’

This dream calls for a symbolic interpretation, because its manifest content is quite incomprehensible whereas the symbols are unmistakably clear. Why should the dreamer really feel frightened at the sight of a water-jug rocking on the tip of a minaret? But a minaret is excellently suited to be a symbol for the penis, and the rhythmically moving water-vessel seems a good symbol of the female genitals in the act of copulation The Pasha, then, has had a copulation-dream, and if his host suggests defaecation in connection with it this makes it likely that the interpretation is to be sought in the circumstance that both of them are old and impotent men, in whom old age has occasioned the same proverbial replacement of sexual by excremental pleasure which, as we have seen, came about in the other dreams owing to the lack of an appropriate sexual object. For a man who can no longer copulate, so say the common people with their crude love of truth, there still remains the pleasure of shitting; we can say of such a man there is a recurrence of anal erotism, which was there before genital erotism and

was repressed and replaced by this later impulse. Defaecation-dreams can thus also be impotence-dreams.

¹ F. S. Krauss, ‘Südslavische Volksüberlieferungen, die sich auf den Geschlechtsverkehr beziehen [Southern Slav Folk Traditions concerning Sexual Intercourse]’, Anthropophyteia, 5, 293, No. 697.9

The difference between the interpretations is not so pronounced as might appear at first sight. The defaecation-dreams too, in which the victim is a woman, deal with impotence - relative impotence, at least, towards the particular person who no longer has any attraction for the dreamer. A defaecation-dream thus becomes the dream of a man who can no longed satisfy a woman, as well as of a man whom a woman no longer satisfies.

The same interpretation (as an impotence-dream) can also be applied to a dream in the Facetiae of Poggio, which manifestly, it is true, poses as the dream of a jealous man - that is, in fact, of a man who does not think he can satisfy his wife.THE RING OF FIDELITY¹

Franciscus Philelphus was jealous of his wife and became tormented by the greatest fear that she had to do with another man, and day and night he lay on the watch. Since what occupies us in waking is wont to return to us in dreams, there appeared to him during his sleep a demon, who said to him that if he would act according to his bidding his wife would always remain faithful to him. Franciscus said to him in the dream that he would be very indebted to him and promised him a reward.

‘Take this ring,’ replied the demon, ‘and wear it on your finger with care. As long as you wear it, your wife cannot lie with any other man without your knowledge.’

As he awoke, excited with joy, he felt that he was pushing his finger into the vulva of his wife.

The jealous have no better expedient; in this way their wives can never let themselves be taken by another man without the knowledge of their husbands.

¹ Poggio (1905, No. 133).0

This anecdote of Poggio is considered to be the source of a tale by Rabelais, which, in other respects very similar, is clearer inasmuch as it actually describes the husband bringing home a young wife in his old age, who then gives him grounds for jealous fears.¹

Hans Carvel was a learned, experienced, industrious man, a man of honour, of good understanding and judgement, benevolent, charitable to the poor and a cheerful philosopher. Withal a good companion, who was fond of a jest, somewhat corpulent and unsteady, but otherwise well set up in every way. In his old age he married the daughter of Concordat the bailiff, a young, comely, good, gay, lively and pleasing woman, merely perchance a little too friendly towards the gentlemen neighbours and menservants. So it befell that in the course of some weeks he became as jealous as a tiger and was suspicious that she might be getting her buttocks drummed upon elsewhere. To guard against this, he related to her a whole stock of pleasing histories of the punishments for adultery, often read aloud to her lovely legends of virtuous women, preached her the gospel of chastity, wrote her a small volume of songs of praise to matrimonial fidelity, inveighed in sharp and caustic words against the wantonness of undisciplined wives and in addition to all bestowed on her a magnificent necklace set round with oriental sapphires.

But regardless of this, he saw her going about with the neighbours in such a friendly and sociable fashion that his jealousy mounted yet higher. One night at that time, as he was lying with her in bed, in the midst of these painful thoughts, he dreamt he spoke with the Fiend Incarnate and bewailed his grief to him. But the Devil comforted him, put a ring on his finger and said: ‘Take this ring; as long as you carry it on your finger no other man can have carnal knowledge of your wife without your knowledge and against your will.’ ‘A thousand thanks, Sir Devil!’ said Hans Carvel, ‘I will deny Mahomet before ever I take this ring from my finger.’ The Devil disappeared. But Hans Carvel awoke with a joyful heart and found that he had his finger in his wife’s what-d’you-call-it.

I forgot to relate how the young woman, when she felt this, jerked her buttocks backwards as if to say: ‘Stop! No, no! That’s not what ought to be put in there!’ - which made Hans Carvel imagine that someone wanted to pull off his ring.

Is that not an infallible measure? Believe me! act after this example and take care at all times to have your wife’s ring on your finger!²

The Devil, who appears here as counsellor, as he does in the treasure-dreams, gives us a clue to something of the dreamer’s latent thoughts. Originally at least, he was supposed to ‘take’ the unfaithful wife who is hard to keep a watch on. He then shows in the manifest dream an infallible means of keeping her permanently. In this too we recognize an analogy with the wish to get rid of someone (death-wish) in the defaecation-dreams. ¹ Rabelais, Pantagruel, Chapter 28 of Le Tiers Livre.

² [Footnote by Freud:] Goethe is concerned with this symbolism of the ring and the finger in a Venetian Epigram (Paralipomena, No. 65, Sophienausgabe, Abt. II, Bd. 5, 381).

Costly rings I possess! Excellent stones, engraved

In lofty style and conception, held by the purest of gold;

Dearly men pay for these rings, adorned with fiery stones,

Oft have you seen them sparkle over the gaming-table.

But one little ring I know, whose virtue is not the same,

Which Hans Carvel once possessed, sadly, when he was old.

Foolish he pushed in the ring the smallest of all his ten fingers,

The eleventh, the biggest, alone is worthy and fit to be there.1 We will conclude this small collection of dreams by adding a lottery-dream, whose connection with the others is rather slight, but which serves to confirm the suggestion which we put forward earlier that a lottery symbolizes a marriage contract.IT’S NO USE CRYING OVER SPILT MILK!¹

A merchant had a strange dream. He dreamt that he saw a woman’s arse with everything that belonged to it. On one half was a figure 1 and on the other a 3. Before this, the merchant had had the idea of buying a lottery ticket. It seemed to him that this picture in his dream was a lucky omen. Without waiting till the ninth hour, he ran to the bank first thing in the morning, in order to buy his ticket. He arrived there and without pausing to think he demanded ticket Number Thirteen, the same figures that he had seen in his dream. After he had bought his ticket, not a day passed on which he did not look in all the newspapers to see if his number had won. After a week, or at the most after ten days, the list of the draw came out. When he looked through, he saw that his number had not been drawn but the number 103, Series 8, and that number had won 200,000 roubles. The merchant nearly tore his hair out. ‘I must have made a mistake! there is something wrong!’ He was beside himself, he was almost inconsolable and could not conceive what his having had such a dream could mean. Then he resolved to discuss the matter with his friend to see if he could not account for his misfortune. He met his friend and told him everything in minute detail. Then his friend said: ‘Oh you simpleton! Didn’t you see the nought between the number 1 and the 3 on the arse?’ ‘A-a-ah, the Devil take it, it never occurred to me that the arse had a nought.’ ‘But it was there plain and clear, only you didn’t work out the lottery number right. And the number 8 belonging to the series - the cunt shows you that - it’s like a number 8.’ - It’s no use crying over spilt milk!

¹ Tarasevsky (1909, 40).2 Our intention in putting together this short paper was twofold. On the one hand we wanted to suggest that one should not be deterred by the often repulsively dirty and indecent nature of this popular material from seeking in it valuable confirmation of psycho-analytic views. Thus on this occasion we have been able to establish the fact that folklore interprets dream-symbols in the same way as psycho-analysis, and that, contrary to loudly proclaimed popular opinion, it derives a group of dreams from needs and wishes which have become immediate. On the other hand, we should like to express the view that it is doing the common people an injustice to assume that they employ this form of entertainment merely to satisfy the coarsest desires. It seems rather that behind these ugly façades are concealed mental reactions to impressions of life which are to be taken seriously, which even strike a sad note - reactions to which common people are ready to surrender, but only if they are accompanied by a yield of coarse pleasure.

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