Freud - Complete Works (104 page)

   I have now completed the
interpretation of the dream.¹ While I was carrying it out I
had some difficulty in keeping at bay all the ideas which were
bound to be provoked by a comparison between the content of the
dream and the concealed thoughts lying behind it. And in the
meantime the ‘meaning’ of the dream was borne in upon
me. I became aware of an intention which was carried into effect by
the dream and which must have been my motive for dreaming it. The
dream fulfilled certain wishes which were started in me by the
events of the previous evening (the news given me by Otto and my
writing out of the case history). The conclusion of the dream, that
is to say, was that I was not responsible for the persistence of
Irma’s pains, but that Otto was. Otto had in fact annoyed me
by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure, and the dream
gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him. The
dream acquitted me of the responsibility for Irma’s condition
by showing that it was due to other factors - it produced a whole
series of reasons. The dream represented a particular state of
affairs as I should have wished it to be.
Thus its content was
the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish
.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909] Though it will
be understood that I have not reported everything that occurred to
me during the process of interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

619

   Thus much leapt to the eyes. But
many of the details of the dream also became intelligible to me
from the point of view of wish-fulfilment. Not only did I revenge
myself on Otto for being too hasty in taking sides against me by
representing him as being too hasty in his medical treatment (in
giving the injection); but I also revenged myself on him for giving
me the bad liqueur which had an aroma of fusel oil. And in the
dream I found an expression which united the two reproaches: the
injection was of a preparation of propyl. This did not satisfy me
and I pursued my revenge further by contrasting him with his more
trustworthy competitor. I seemed to be saying: ‘I like
him
better than
you
.’ But Otto was not the only
person to suffer from the vials of my wrath. I took revenge as well
on my disobedient patient by exchanging her for one who was wiser
and less recalcitrant. Nor did I allow Dr. M. to escape the
consequences of his contradiction but showed him by means of a
clear allusion that he was an ignoramus on the subject.
(‘
Dysentery will supervene
’, etc.) Indeed I
seemed to be appealing from him to someone else with greater
knowledge (to my friend who had told me of trimethylamin) just as I
had turned from Irma to her friend and from Otto to Leopold.
‘Take these people away! Give me three others of my choice
instead! Then I shall be free of these undeserved
reproaches!’ The groundlessness of the reproaches was proved
for me in the dream in the most elaborate fashion.
I
was not
to blame for Irma’s pains, since she herself was to blame for
them by refusing to accept my solution.
I
was not concerned
with Irma’s pains, since they were of an organic nature and
quite incurable by psychological treatment. Irma’s pains
could be satisfactorily explained by her widowhood (cf. the
trimethylamin) which
I
had no means of altering.
Irma’s pains had been caused by Otto giving her an incautious
injection of an unsuitable drug - a thing
I
should never
have done. Irma’s pains were the result of an injection with
a dirty needle, like my old lady’s phlebitis - whereas I
never did any harm with my injections. I noticed, it is true, that
these explanations of Irma’s pains (which agreed in
exculpating me) were not entirely consistent with one another, and
indeed that they were mutually exclusive. The whole plea - for the
dream was nothing else - reminded one vividly of the defence put
forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with
having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The
defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged;
secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and
thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at
all. So much the better: if only a single one of these three lines
of defence were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be
acquitted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

620

   Certain other themes played a
part in the dream, which were not so obviously connected with my
exculpation from Irma’s illness: my daughter’s illness
and that of my patient who bore the same name, the injurious effect
of cocaine, the disorder of my patient who was travelling in Egypt,
my concern about my wife’s health and about that of my
brother and of Dr. M., my own physical ailments, my anxiety about
my absent friend who suffered from suppurative rhinitis. But when I
came to consider all of these, they could all be collected into a
single group of ideas and labelled, as it were, ‘concern
about my own and other people’s health - professional
conscientiousness’. I called to mind the obscure disagreeable
impression I had had when Otto brought me the news of Irma’s
condition. This group of thoughts that played a part in the dream
enabled me retrospectively to put this transient impression into
words. It was as though he had said to me: ‘You don’t
take your medical duties seriously enough. You’re not
conscientious; you don’t carry out what you’ve
undertaken.’ Thereupon, this group of thoughts seemed to have
put itself at my disposal, so that I could produce evidence of how
highly conscientious I was, of how deeply I was concerned about the
health of my relations, my friends and my patients. It was a
noteworthy fact that this material also included some disagreeable
memories, which supported my friend Otto’s accusation rather
than my own vindication. The material was, as one might say,
impartial; but nevertheless there was an unmistakable connection
between this more extensive group of thoughts which underlay the
dream and the narrower subject of the dream which gave rise to the
wish to be innocent of Irma’s illness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

621

   I will not pretend that I have
completely uncovered the meaning of this dream or that its
interpretation is without a gap. I could spend much more time over
it, derive further information from it and discuss fresh problems
raised by it. I myself know the points from which further trains of
thought could be followed. But considerations which arise in the
case of every dream of my own restrain me from pursuing my
interpretative work. If anyone should feel tempted to express a
hasty condemnation of my reticence, I would advise him to make the
experiment of being franker than I am. For the moment I am
satisfied with the achievement of this one piece of fresh
knowledge. If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams which I
have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a
meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary
activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed.
When the
work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream
is the fulfilment of a wish
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

622

CHAPTER III

A
DREAM IS THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH

When, after passing through a narrow defile,
we suddenly emerge upon a piece of high ground, where the path
divides and the finest prospects open up on every side, we may
pause for a moment and consider in which direction we shall first
turn our steps. Such is the case with us, now that we have
surmounted the first interpretation of a dream. We find ourselves
in the full daylight of a sudden discovery. Dreams are not to be
likened to the unregulated sounds that rise from a musical
instrument struck by the blow of some external force instead of by
a player’s hand; they are not meaningless, they are not
absurd; they do not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is
asleep while another portion is beginning to wake. On the contrary,
they are psychical phenomena of complete validity - fulfilments of
wishes; they can be inserted into the chain of intelligible waking
mental acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated activity
of the mind.

   But no sooner have we begun to
rejoice at this discovery than we are assailed by a flood of
questions. If, as we are told by dream-interpretation, a dream
represents a fulfilled wish, what is the origin of the remarkable
and puzzling form in which the wish-fulfilment is expressed? What
alteration have the dream thoughts undergone before being changed
into the manifest dream which we remember when we wake up? How does
that alteration take place? What is the source of the material that
has been modified into the dream? What is the source of the many
peculiarities that are to be observed in the dream-thoughts - such,
for instance, as the fact that they may be mutually contradictory?
(Cf. the analogy of the borrowed kettle on
p. 619.
) Can a dream tell us anything new
about our internal psychical processes? Can its content correct
opinions we have held during the day?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

623

   I propose that for the moment we
should leave all these questions on one side and pursue our way
further along one particular path. We have learnt that a dream can
represent a wish as fulfilled. Our first concern must be to enquire
whether this is a universal characteristic of dreams or whether it
merely happened to be the content of the particular dream (the
dream of Irma’s injection) which was the first that we
analysed. For even if we are prepared to find that every dream has
a meaning and a psychical value, the possibility must remain open
of this meaning not being the same in every dream. Our first dream
was the fulfilment of a wish; a second one might turn out to be a
fulfilled fear; the content of a third might be a reflection; while
a fourth might merely reproduce a memory. Shall we find other
wishful dreams besides this one? or are there perhaps no dreams but
wishful ones?

   It is easy to prove that dreams
often reveal themselves without any disguise as fulfilments of
wishes; so that it may seem surprising that the language of dreams
was not understood long ago. For instance, there is a dream that I
can produce in myself as often as I like - experimentally, as it
were. If I eat anchovies or olives or any other highly salted food
in the evening, I develop thirst during the night which wakes me
up. But my waking is preceded by a dream; and this always has the
same content, namely, that I am drinking. I dream I am swallowing
down water in great gulps, and it has the delicious taste that
nothing can equal but a cool drink when one is parched with thirst.
Then I wake up and have to have a real drink. This simple dream is
occasioned by the thirst which I become aware of when I wake. The
thirst gives rise to a wish to drink, and the dream shows me that
wish fulfilled. In doing so it is performing a function - which it
was easy to divine. I am a good sleeper and not accustomed to be
woken by any physical need. If I can succeed in appeasing my thirst
by
dreaming
that I am drinking, then I need not wake up in
order to quench it. This, then, is a dream of convenience. Dreaming
has taken the place of action, as it often does elsewhere in life.
Unluckily my need for water to quench my thirst cannot be satisfied
by a dream in the same way as my thirst for revenge against my
friend Otto and Dr. M.; but the good intention is there in both
cases. Not long ago this same dream of mine showed some
modification. I had felt thirsty even before I fell asleep, and I
had emptied a glass of water that stood on the table beside my bed.
A few hours later during the night I had a fresh attack of thirst,
and this had inconvenient results. In order to provide myself with
some water I should have had to get up and fetch the glass standing
on the table by my wife’s bed. I therefore had an appropriate
dream that my wife was giving me a drink out of a vase; this vase
was an Etruscan cinerary urn which I had brought back from a
journey to Italy and had since given away. But the water in it
tasted so salty (evidently because of the ashes in the urn) that I
woke up. It will be noticed how conveniently everything was
arranged in this dream. Since its only purpose was to fulfil a
wish, it could be completely egoistical. A love of comfort and
convenience is not really compatible with consideration for other
people. The introduction of the cinerary urn was probably yet
another wish-fulfilment. I was sorry that the vase was no longer in
my possession - just as the glass of water on my wife’s table
was out of my reach. The urn with its ashes fitted in, too, with
the salty taste in my mouth which had now grown stronger and which
I knew was bound to wake me.¹

  
¹
Weygandt (1893, 41) was aware of the
occurrence of thirst dreams, for he writes: ‘The sensation of
thirst is perceived with greater precision than any other; it
always gives rise to an idea of its being quenched. The manner in
which the thirst is represented as being quenched in the dream
varies, and derives its special form from some near-by memory.
Another general feature in these cases is that immediately after
the idea of the thirst being quenched there follows a
disappointment over the small effect produced by the imaginary
refreshment.’ Weygandt, however, overlooks the fact that this
reaction of a dream to a stimulus is one which holds good
universally. Other people who are attacked by thirst in the night
may wake up without having had a dream; but that is no objection to
my experiment. It merely shows that they are worse sleepers than I
am. - Compare in this connection Isaiah xxix, 8: ‘It shall
even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but
he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man
dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he
is faint, and his soul hath appetite.’