Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning 4 страница

Let us now go back to the nurse’s dream, in order to demonstrate the quality of depth in the wish-fulfilment contained in it. We already know that the lady’s interpretation of the dream was by no means complete; there were portions of it to which she was unable to do justice. Moreover she suffered from an obsessional neurosis, a condition which, from what I have observed, makes it considerably harder to understand dream-symbols, just as dementia praecox makes it easier.

Nevertheless, our knowledge of dream-symbolism enables us to understand uninterpreted portions of this dream and to discover a deeper significance behind the interpretations already given. We cannot but notice that some of the material employed by the nurse came from the complex of giving birth, of having children. The expanse of water (the Rhine, the Channel where the whale was seen) was certainly the water out of which children come. And then, too, she came to the water in search of a child. The Jonah legend, which was a factor lying behind the determination of this water, the question how Jonah (the child) could get through such a narrow passage, belongs to the same complex. And the nurse who threw herself into the Rhine out of mortification found a sexual-symbolic consolation for her despair of life in the mode of her death - by going into water. The narrow footbridge on which the apparition met her was in all probability also a genital symbol, although I must admit that here we lack as yet more precise knowledge.

The wish ‘I want to have a child’ seems therefore to have been the dream-constructor from the unconscious; no other would have been better calculated to console the nurse for the distressing state of affairs in real life. ‘I shall be discharged: I shall lose the child in my care. What does it matter? I shall get a real child of my own instead.’ The uninterpreted portion of the dream in which she questioned everyone in the street about the child may perhaps belong here; the interpretation would then run: ‘And even if I have to offer myself on the streets I know how to get a child for myself.’ A strain of defiance in the dreamer, hitherto disguised, suddenly declares itself at this point. Her admission fits in here for the first time: ‘I have shut my eyes and compromised my professional reputation for conscientiousness; now I shall lose my place. Shall I be such a fool as to drown myself like Nurse X? Not I: I’ll give up nursing altogether and get married; I’ll be a woman and have a real child; nothing shall prevent me.’ This interpretation is justified by the consideration that ‘having children’ is really the infantile expression of a wish for sexual intercourse: indeed it can be chosen in consciousness as a euphemistic expression of this objectionable wish.

Thus the dreamer’s disadvantageous admission, to which she showed some inclination even in waking life, was made possible in the dream by being employed by a latent character-trait of hers for the purpose of bringing about the fulfilment of an infantile wish. We may surmise that this trait had a close connection - in regard both to time and to content - with the wish for a child and for sexual enjoyment.

Subsequent enquiry from the lady to whom I owe the first part of this interpretation afforded some unexpected information about the nurse’s previous life. Before she took up nursing she had wanted to marry a man who had been keenly interested in her; but she had abandoned the projected marriage on account of the opposition of an aunt, towards whom her relations were a curious mixture of dependence and defiance. This aunt who prevented the marriage was the Superior of a nursing Order. The dreamer always regarded her as her pattern. She had expectations of an inheritance from her and was tied to her for that reason. Nevertheless, she opposed her aunt by not entering the Order as that lady had planned. The defiance shown in the dream was therefore directed against the aunt. We have ascribed an anal-erotic origin to this character-trait, and may take into consideration that the interests which made her dependent on her aunt were of a financial nature; we are also reminded that children favour the anal theory of birth.

This factor of infantile defiance may perhaps allow us to assume a closer relation between the first and last scenes in the dream. The former saleswoman in a provision shop represents in the dream the attendant who brought the lady’s supper into the room just when she was asking the question ‘Did you see me?’ It appears, however, that she was cast for the role of hostile rival in general. The dreamer disparaged her capacities as a nurse by making her take not the slightest interest in the lost child, but deal only with her own private affairs in her answer. She had thus displaced on to this figure the indifference about the child in her care which she was beginning to feel. The unhappy marriage and divorce which she herself must have dreaded in her most secret wishes were attributed to the other woman. We know, however, that it was the aunt who had separated the dreamer from her fiancé. Hence the ‘provision saleswoman’ (a figure not necessarily without an infantile symbolic significance) may represent the aunt-Superior, who was in fact not much older than the dreamer and who had played the traditional part of mother-rival in her life. A satisfactory confirmation of this interpretation is to be found in the fact that the ‘familiar’ place where she came upon this person standing in front of her door was precisely the place where her aunt resided as a Superior.

Owing to the lack of contact between the analyst and the person under analysis, it is scarcely advisable to penetrate deeper into the structure of the dream. But we may perhaps say that so far as it was accessible to interpretation it has provided us with plenty of confirmations as well as with plenty of new problems.4

THE OCCURRENCE IN DREAMS OF MATERIAL FROM FAIRY TALES (1913)

It is not surprising to find that psycho-analysis confirms our recognition of the important place which folk fairy tales have acquired in the mental life of our children. In a few people a recollection of their favourite fairy tales takes the place of memories of their own childhood; they have made the fairy tales into screen memories.

Elements and situations derived from fairy tales are also frequently to be found in dreams. In interpreting the passages in question the patient will produce the significant fairy tale as an association. In the present paper I shall give two instances of this very common occurrence. But it will not be possible to do more than hint at the relations between the fairy tales and the history of the dreamer’s childhood and his neurosis, though this limitation will involve the risk of breaking links which were of the utmost importance to the analyst.I

Here is a dream of a young married woman who had had a visit from her husband a few days before: She was in a room that was entirely brown. A little door led to the top of a steep staircase, and up this staircase there came into the room a curious manikin - small, with white hair, a bald top to his head and a red nose. He danced round the room in front of her, carried on in the funniest way, and then went down the staircase again. He was dressed in a grey garment, through which every part of his figure was visible. (A correction was made subsequently: He was wearing a long black coat and grey trousers.)

The analysis was as follows. The description of the manikin’s personal appearance fitted the dreamer’s father-in-law without any alteration being necessary.¹ Immediately afterwards, however, she thought of the story of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, who danced around in the same funny way as the man in the dream and in so doing betrayed his name to the queen; but by that he lost his claim to the queen’s first child, and in his fury tore himself in two.

¹ Except for the detail that the manikin had his hair cut short, whereas her father-in-law wore his long.

On the day before she had the dream she herself had been just as furious with her husband and had exclaimed: ‘I could tear him in two.’

The brown room at first gave rise to difficulties. All that occurred to her was her parents’ dining-room, which was panelled in that colour - in brown wood. She then told some stories of beds which were so uncomfortable for two people to sleep in. A few days before, when the subject of conversation had been beds in other countries, she had said something very mal à propos - quite innocently, as she maintained - and everyone in the room had roared with laughter.

The dream was now already intelligible. The brown wood room¹ was in the first place a bed, and through the connection with the dining-room it was a marriage bed.² She was therefore in her marriage bed. Her visitor should have been her young husband, who, after an absence of several months, had visited her to play his part in the double bed. But to begin with it was her husband’s father, her father-in-law.

Behind this first interpretation we have a glimpse of deeper and purely sexual material. Here the room was the vagina. (The room was in her - this was reversed in the dream.) The little man who made grimaces and behaved so funnily was the penis. The narrow door and the steep stairs confirmed the view that the situation was a representation of intercourse. As a rule we are accustomed to find the penis symbolized by a child; but we shall find there was good reason for a father being introduced to represent the penis in this instance.

The solution of the remaining portion of the dream will entirely confirm us in this interpretation. The dreamer herself explained the transparent grey garment as a condom. We may gather that considerations of preventing conception and worries whether this visit of her husband’s might not have sown the seed of a second child were among the instigating causes of the dream.

¹ Wood, as is well known, is frequently a female or maternal symbol: e.g. materia, Madeira, etc.

² For bed and board stand for marriage.8

The black coat. Coats of that kind suited her husband admirably. She wanted to persuade him always to wear them, instead of his usual clothes. Dressed in the black coat, therefore, her husband was as she liked to see him. The black coat and grey trousers. At two different levels, one above the other, this had the same meaning: ‘I should like you to be dressed like that. I like you like that.’

Rumpelstiltskin was connected with the contemporary thoughts underlying the dream - the day’s residues - by a neat antithetic relation. In the fairy tale he comes in order to take away the queen’s first child. In the dream the little man comes in the shape of a father, because he had presumably brought a second child. But Rumpelstiltskin also gave access to the deeper, infantile stratum of the dream-thoughts. The droll little fellow, whose very name is unknown, whose secret is so eagerly canvassed, who can perform such extraordinary tricks - in the fairy tale he turns straw into gold - the fury against him, or rather against his possessor, who is envied for possessing him (the girl’s envy for the penis) - all of these were elements whose relation to the foundations of the patient’s neurosis can, as I have said, barely be touched upon in this paper. The short-cut hair of the manikin in the dream was no doubt also connected with the subject of castration.

If we carefully observe from clear instances the way in which dreamers use fairy tales and the point at which they bring them in, we may perhaps also succeed in picking up some hints which will help in interpreting remaining obscurities in the fairy tales themselves.9

II

A young man told me the following dream. He had a chronological basis for his early memories in the circumstance that his parents moved from one country estate to another just before he was five years old; the dream, which he said was his earliest one, occurred while he was still upon the first estate.

‘I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window: in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great horror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. My nurse hurried to my bed, to see what had happened to me. It took quite a long while before I was convinced that it had only been a dream; I had had such a clear and life-like picture of the window opening and the wolves sitting on the tree. At last I grew quieter, felt as though I had escaped from some danger, and went to sleep again.

‘The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without making any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me. - I think this was my first anxiety-dream. I was three, four, or at most five years old at the time. From then until my eleventh or twelfth year I was always afraid of seeing something terrible in my dreams.’

He added a drawing of the tree with the wolves, which confirmed his description. The analysis of the dream brought the following material to light.

He had always connected this dream with the recollection that during these years of his childhood he was most tremendously afraid of the picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales. His elder sister, who was very much his superior, used to tease him by holding up this particular picture in front of him on some excuse or other, so that he was terrified and began to scream. In this picture the wolf was standing upright, striding out with one foot, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked. He thought this picture must have been an illustration to the story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’.

Why were the wolves white? This made him think of the sheep, large flocks of which were kept in the neighbourhood of the estate. His father occasionally took him with him to visit these flocks, and every time this happened he felt very proud and blissful. Later on - according to enquiries that were made it may easily have been shortly before the time of the dream - an epidemic broke out among the sheep. His father sent for a follower of Pasteur’s, who inoculated the animals, but after the inoculation even more of them died than before.

How did the wolves come to be on the tree? This reminded him of a story that he had heard his grandfather tell. He could not remember whether it was before or after the dream, but its subject is a decisive argument in favour of the former view. The story ran as follows. A tailor was sitting at work in his room, when the window opened and a wolf leapt in. The tailor hit after him with his yard - no (he corrected himself), caught him by his tail and pulled it off, so that the wolf ran away in terror. Some time later the tailor went into the forest, and suddenly saw a pack of wolves coming towards him; so he climbed up a tree to escape from them. At first the wolves were in perplexity; but the maimed one, which was among them and wanted to revenge himself on the tailor, proposed that they should climb one upon another till the last one could reach him. He himself - he was a vigorous old fellow - would be the base of the pyramid. The wolves did as he suggested, but the tailor had recognized the visitor whom he had punished, and suddenly called out as he had before: ‘Catch the grey one by his tail!’ The tailless wolf, terrified by the recollection, ran away, and all the others tumbled down.

In this story the tree appears, upon which the wolves were sitting in the dream. But it also contains an unmistakable allusion to the castration complex. The old wolf was docked of his tail by the tailor. The fox-tails of the wolves in the dream were probably compensations for this taillessness.

Why were there six or seven wolves? There seemed to be no answer to this question, until I raised a doubt whether the picture that had frightened him could be connected with the story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’. This fairy tale only offers an opportunity for two illustrations - Little Red Riding-Hood’s meeting with the wolf in the wood, and the scene in which the wolf lies in bed in the grandmother’s night-cap. There must therefore be some other fairy tale behind his recollection of the picture. He soon discovered that it could only be the story of ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’ Here the number seven occurs, and also the number six, for the wolf only ate up six of the little goats, while the seventh hid itself in the clock-case. The white, too, comes into this story, for the wolf had his paw made white at the baker’s after the little goats had recognized him on his first visit by his grey paw. Moreover, the two fairy tales have much in common. In both there is the eating up, the cutting open of the belly, the taking out of the people who have been eaten and their replacement by heavy stones, and finally in both of them the wicked wolf perishes. Besides all this, in the story of the little goats the tree appears. The wolf lay down under a tree after his meal and snored.

I shall have, for a special reason, to deal with this dream again elsewhere, and interpret it and consider its significance in greater detail. For it is the earliest anxiety-dream that the dreamer remembered from his childhood, and its content, taken in connection with other dreams that followed it soon afterwards and with certain events in his earliest years, is of quite peculiar interest. We must confine ourselves here to the relation of the dream to the two fairy tales which have so much in common with each other, ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’. The effect produced by these stories was shown in the little dreamer by a regular animal phobia. This phobia was only distinguished from other similar cases by the fact that the anxiety-animal was not an object easily accessible to observation (such as a horse or a dog), but was known to him only from stories and picture-books.

I shall discuss on another occasion the explanation of these animal phobias and the significance attaching to them. I will only remark in anticipation that this explanation is in complete harmony with the principal characteristic shown by the neurosis from which the present dreamer suffered later in his life. His fear of his father was the strongest motive for his falling ill, and his ambivalent attitude towards every father-surrogate was the dominating feature of his life as well as of his behaviour during the treatment.

If in my patient’s case the wolf was merely a first father-surrogate, the question arises whether the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf that ate up the little goats and of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ may not simply be infantile fear of the father.¹ Moreover, my patient’s father had the characteristic, shown by so many people in relation to their children, of indulging in ‘affectionate abuse’; and it is possible that during the patient’s earlier years his father (though he grew severe later on) may more than once, as he caressed the little boy or played with him, have threatened in fun to ‘gobble him up’. One of my patients told me that her two children could never get to be fond of their grandfather, because in the course of his affectionate romping with them he used to frighten them by saying he would cut open their tummies.

¹ Compare the similarity between these two fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out by Rank (1912).2

THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS (1913)

Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for posing and solving a small problem.

The first of these scenes is the suitors’ choice between the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. The fair and wise Portia is bound at her father’s bidding to take as her husband only that one of her suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before him. The three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver. Bassanio, the third, decides in favour of lead; thereby he wins the bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune. Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a speech in which he praises the metal he prefers and depreciates the other two. The most difficult task thus falls to the share of the fortunate third suitor; what he finds to say in glorification of lead as against gold and silver is little and has a forced ring. If in psycho-analytic practice we were confronted with such a speech, we should suspect that there were concealed motives behind the unsatisfying reasons produced.

Shakespeare did not himself invent this oracle of the choice of a casket; he took it from a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, in which a girl has to make the same choice to win the Emperor’s son.¹ Here too the third metal, lead, is the bringer of fortune. It is not hard to guess that we have here an ancient theme, which requires to be interpreted, accounted for and traced back to its origin. A first conjecture as to the meaning of this choice between gold, silver and lead is quickly confirmed by a statement of Stucken’s,² who has made a study of the same material over a wide field. He writes: ‘The identity of Portia’s three suitors is clear from their choice: the Prince of Morocco chooses the gold casket - he is the sun; the Prince of Arragon chooses the silver casket - he is the moon; Bassanio chooses the leaden casket - he is the star youth.’ In support of this explanation he cites an episode from the Estonian folk-epic ‘Kalewipoeg’, in which the three suitors appear undisguisedly as the sun, moon and star youths (the last being ‘the Pole-star’s eldest boy’) and once again the bride falls to the lot of the third.

¹ Brandes (1896).

² Stucken (1907, 655).5

Thus our little problem has led us to an astral myth! The only pity is that with this explanation we are not at the end of the matter. The question is not exhausted, for we do not share the belief of some investigators that myths were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge with Otto Rank¹ that they were projected on to the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions. It is in this human content that our interest lies.

Let us look once more at our material. In the Estonian epic, just as in the tale from the Gesta Romanorum, the subject is a girl choosing between three suitors; in the scene from The Merchant of Venice the subject is apparently the same, but at the same time something appears in it that is in the nature of an inversion of the theme: a man chooses between three - caskets. If what we were concerned with were a dream, it would occur to us at once that caskets are also women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and therefore of a woman herself - like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets, and so on. If we boldly assume that there are symbolic substitutions of the same kind in myths as well, then the casket scene in The Merchant of Venice really becomes the inversion we suspected. With a wave of the wand, as though we were in a fairy tale, we have stripped the astral garment from our theme; and now we see that the theme is a human one, a man’s choice between three women.

This same content, however, is to be found in another scene of Shakespeare’s, in one of his most powerfully moving dramas; not the choice of a bride this time, yet linked by many hidden similarities to the choice of the casket in The Merchant of Venice. The old King Lear resolves to divide his kingdom while he is still alive among his three daughters, in proportion to the amount of love that each of them expresses for him. The two elder ones, Goneril and Regan, exhaust themselves in asseverations and laudations of their love for him; the third, Cordelia, refuses to do so. He should have recognized the unassuming, speechless love of his third daughter and rewarded it, but he does not recognize it. He disowns Cordelia, and divides the kingdom between the other two, to his own and the general ruin. Is not this once more the scene of a choice between three women, of whom the youngest is the best, the most excellent one?

¹ Rank (1909, 8 ff.).6

There will at once occur to us other scenes from myths, fairy tales and literature, with the same situation as their content. The shepherd Paris has to choose between three goddesses, of whom he declares the third to be the most beautiful. Cinderella, again, is a youngest daughter, who is preferred by the prince to her two elder sisters. Psyche, in Apuleius’s story, is the youngest and fairest of three sisters. Psyche is, on the one hand, revered as Aphrodite in human form; on the other, she is treated by that goddess as Cinderella was treated by her stepmother and is set the task of sorting a heap of mixed seeds, which she accomplishes with the help of small creatures (doves in the case of Cinderella, ants in the case of Psyche).¹ Anyone who cared to make a wider survey of the material would undoubtedly discover other versions of the same theme preserving the same essential features.

Let us be content with Cordelia, Aphrodite, Cinderella and Psyche. In all the stories the three women, of whom the third is the most excellent one, must surely be regarded as in some way alike if they are represented as sisters. (We must not be led astray by the fact that Lear’s choice is between three daughters; this may mean nothing more than that he has to be represented as an old man. An old man cannot very well choose between three women in any other way. Thus they become his daughters.)

But who are these three sisters and why must the choice fall on the third? If we could answer this question, we should be in possession of the interpretation we are seeking. We have once already made use of an application of psycho-analytic technique, when we explained the three caskets symbolically as three women. If we have the courage to proceed in the same way, we shall be setting foot on a path which will lead us first to something unexpected and incomprehensible, but which will perhaps, by a devious route, bring us to a goal.

¹ I have to thank Dr. Otto Rank for calling my attention to these similarities.7

It must strike us that this excellent third woman has in several instances certain peculiar qualities besides her beauty. They are qualities that seem to be tending towards some kind of unity; we must certainly not expect to find them equally well marked in every example. Cordelia makes herself unrecognizable, in conspicuous like lead, she remains dumb, she ‘loves and is silent’. Cinderella hides so that she cannot be found. We may perhaps be allowed to equate concealment and dumbness. These would of course be only two instances out of the five we have picked out. But there is an intimation of the same thing to be found, curiously enough, in two other cases. We have decided to compare Cordelia, with her obstinate refusal, to lead. In Bassanio’s short speech while he is choosing the casket, he says of lead (without in any way leading up to the remark):‘Thy paleness¹ moves me more than eloquence.’

That is to say: ‘Thy plainness moves me more than the blatant nature of the other two.’ Gold and silver are ‘loud’; lead is dumb - in fact like Cordelia, who ‘loves and is silent’.²

In the ancient Greek accounts of the Judgement of Paris, nothing is said of any such reticence on the part of Aphrodite. Each of the three goddesses speaks to the youth and tries to win him by promises. But, oddly enough, in a quite modern handling of the same scene this characteristic of the third one which has struck us makes its appearance again. In the libretto of Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, Paris, after telling of the solicitations of the other two goddesses, describes Aphrodite’s behaviour in this competition for the beauty-prize:

La troisième, ah! la troisième...

La troisième ne dit rien.

Elle eut le prix tout de même...³

¹ ‘Plainness’ according to another reading.

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