Freud - Complete Works (107 page)

   A number of possible solutions of
the problem may at once occur to us: as, for instance, that some
incapacity exists during sleep for giving direct expression to our
dream-thoughts. But the analysis of certain dreams forces us to
adopt another explanation of distortion in dreams. I will exemplify
this by another dream of my own. Once again this will involve me in
a variety of indiscretions; but a thorough elucidation of the
problem will compensate for my personal sacrifice.

  
PREAMBLE
. - In the spring of 1897 I
learnt that two professors at our university had recommended me for
appointment as
professor
extraordinarius
. The news surprised and greatly delighted
me, since it implied recognition by two eminent men, which could
not be put down to any considerations of a personal kind. But I at
once warned myself not to attach any expectations to the event.
During the last few years the Ministry had disregarded
recommendations of that sort; and several of my colleagues who were
my seniors in age and at least my equals in merit had been waiting
vainly for appointment. I had no reason to believe that I should be
more fortunate. I therefore determined to meet the future with
resignation. So far as I knew, I was not an ambitious man; I was
following my profession with gratifying success even without the
advantages afforded by a title. Moreover there was no question of
my pronouncing the grapes sweet or sour: they hung far too high
over my head.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

634

   One evening I had a visit from a
friend - one of the men whose example I had taken as a warning to
me. For a consider able time he had been a candidate for promotion
to a professorship, a rank which in our society turns its holder
into a demi-god to his patients. Less resigned than I was, however,
he was in the habit of paying his respects from time to time in the
offices of the Ministry with a view to advancing his prospects. He
had been paying one of these visits just before calling on me. He
told me that on this occasion he had driven the exalted official
into a corner and had asked straight out whether the delay over his
appointment was not in fact due to denominational considerations.
The reply had been that, in view of the present state of feeling,
it was no doubt true that, for the moment, His Excellency was not
in a position, etc. etc. ‘At least I know where I am
now’, my friend had concluded. It was not news to me, though
it was bound to strengthen my feeling of resignation; for the same
denominational considerations applied to my own case.

   On the morning after this visit I
had the following dream, which was remarkable among other things
for its form. It consisted of two thoughts and two pictures - each
thought being succeeded by a picture. I shall, however, report only
the first half of the dream here, since the other half has no
connection with the purpose for which I am describing the
dream.

    I. . . .
My friend R. was my uncle. - I had a great feeling of affection
for him
.

    II.
I saw before me his
face, somewhat changed. It was a though it had been drawn out
lengthways. A yellow beard that surrounded it stood out especially
clearly
.

   Then followed the two other
pieces which I shall pass over - once more a thought followed by a
picture.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

635

   The interpretation of the dream
took place as follows.

   When, during the course of the
morning, the dream came into my head, I laughed aloud and said:
‘The dream’s nonsense!’ But it refused to go away
and followed me about all day, till at last in the evening I began
to reproach myself: ‘If one of your patients who was
interpreting a dream could find nothing better to say than that it
was nonsense, you would take him up about it and suspect that the
dream had some disagreeable story at the back of it which he wanted
to avoid becoming aware of. Treat yourself in the same way. Your
opinion that the dream is nonsense only means that you have an
internal resistance against interpreting it. Don’t let
yourself be put off like this.’ So I set about the
interpretation.

   ‘
R. was my
uncle
.’ What could that mean?  I never had more than
one uncle - Uncle Josef.¹ There was an unhappy story attached
to him. Once - more than thirty years ago - in his eagerness to
make money, he allowed himself to be involved in a transaction of a
kind that is severely punished by the law, and he was in fact
punished for it. My father, whose hair turned grey from grief in a
few days, used always to say that Uncle Josef was not a bad man but
only a simpleton; those were his words. So that if my friend R. was
my Uncle Josef, what I was meaning to say was that R. was a
simpleton. Hardly credible and most disagreeable! - But there was
the face which I saw in the dream with its elongated features and
yellow beard. My uncle did in fact have a face like that, elongated
and framed in a handsome fair beard. My friend R. had originally
been extremely dark; but when black-haired people begin to turn
grey they pay for the splendour of their youth. Hair by hair, their
black beards go through an unpleasing change of colour: first they
turn to a reddish brown, then to a yellowish brown, and only then
to a definite grey. My friend R.’s beard was at that time
passing through this stage - and so, incidentally, was my own, as I
had noticed with dissatisfaction. The face that I saw in the dream
was at once my friend R.’s and my uncle’s. It was like
one of Galton’s composite photographs. (In order to bring out
family likenesses, Galton used to photograph several faces on the
same plate.) So there could be no doubt that I really did mean that
my friend R. was a simpleton - like my Uncle Josef.

  
¹
It is astonishing to observe the way in
which my memory - my waking memory - was narrowed at this point,
for the purposes of the analysis. Actually I have known five of my
uncles and loved and honoured one of them. But at the moment at
which I overcame my resistance to interpreting the dream I said to
myself that I never had more than one uncle - the one that was
intended in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

636

   I still had no idea at all what
could be the purpose of this comparison, against which I continued
to struggle. It did not go very deep, after all, since my uncle was
a criminal, whereas my friend R. bore an unblemished
character . . . except for having been fined for
knocking a boy down with his bicycle. Could I have had that crime
in mind? That would have been making fun of the comparison. At this
point I remembered another conversation which I had had a few days
earlier with another colleague, N., and, now I came to think of it,
upon the same subject. I had met N. in the street. He too had been
recommended for a professorship. He had heard of the honour that
had been paid me and had offered me his congratulations on it; but
I had unhesitatingly refused to accept them. ‘You are the
last person’, I had said, ‘to make that kind of joke;
you know what such a recommendation is worth from your own
experience.’ ‘Who can say?’ he had answered -
jokingly, it seemed; ‘there was something definite against
me
. Don’t you know that a woman once started legal
proceedings against me? I needn’t assure you that the case
was dismissed.(It was a disgraceful attempt at blackmail; and I had
the greatest difficulty in saving the prosecutrix from being
punished. But perhaps they may be using this at the Ministry as an
excuse for not appointing me. But
you
have an unblemished
character.’ This told me who the criminal was, and at the
same time showed me how the dream was to be interpreted and what
its purpose was. My Uncle Josef represented my two colleagues who
had not been appointed to professorships - the one as a simpleton
and the other as a criminal. I now saw too why they were
represented in this light. If the appointment of my friends R. and
N. had been postponed for ‘denominational’ reasons, my
own appointment was also open to doubt; if, however, I could
attribute the rejection of my two friends to other reasons, which
did not apply to me, my hopes would remain untouched. This was the
procedure adopted by my dream: it made one of them, R., into a
simpleton and the other, N., into a criminal, whereas
I
was
neither the one nor the other; thus we no longer had anything in
common; I could rejoice at my appointment to a professorship, and I
could avoid drawing the distressing conclusion that R.’s
report of what the high official had said to him must apply equally
to me.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

637

   But I felt obliged to proceed
still further with my interpretation of the dream; I felt I had not
yet finished dealing with it satisfactorily. I was still uneasy
over the light-heartedness with which I had degraded two of my
respected colleagues in order to keep open my own path to a
professorship. My dissatisfaction with my conduct, however, had
diminished since I had come to realize the worth that was to be
attached to expressions in dreams. I was prepared to deny through
thick and thin that I really considered that R. was a simpleton and
that I really disbelieved N.’s account of the blackmailing
affair. Nor did I believe that Irma was really made dangerously ill
through being injected with Otto’s preparation of propyl. In
both these cases what my dreams had expressed was only
my wish
that it might be so
. The assertion in which my wish was
realized sounded less absurd in the later dream than in the earlier
one; it made cleverer use of the actual facts in its construction,
like a well designed slander of the kind that makes people feel
that ‘there’s something in it’. For one of the
professors in his own faculty had voted against my friend R., and
my friend N. had himself innocently provided me with the material
for my aspersions. Nevertheless, I must repeat, the dream seemed to
me to stand in need of further elucidation.

   I then recalled that there was
still a piece of the dream which the interpretation had not
touched. After the idea had occurred to me that R. was my uncle, I
had had a warm feeling of affection for him in the dream. Where did
that feeling belong?  I had naturally never had any feeling of
affection for my Uncle Josef. I had been fond of my friend R. and
had esteemed him for many years; but if I had gone up to him and
expressed my sentiments in terms approaching the degree of
affection I had felt in the dream, there could be no doubt that he
would have been astonished. My affection for him struck me as
ungenuine and exaggerated - like the judgement of his intellectual
qualities which I had expressed by fusing his personality with my
uncle’s, though
there
the exaggeration had been in the
opposite direction. But a new light began to dawn on me. The
affection in the dream did not belong to the latent content, to the
thoughts that lay behind the dream; it stood in contradiction to
them and was calculated to conceal the true interpretation of the
dream. And probably that was precisely its
raison
d’être
. I recalled my resistance against embarking
on the interpretation, how long I had put it off and how I had
declared that the dream was sheer nonsense. My psycho-analytic
treatments taught me how a repudiation of that kind was to be
interpreted: it had no value as a judgement but was simply an
expression of emotion. If my little daughter did not want an apple
that was offered to her, she asserted that the apple tasted sour
without having tasted it. And if my patients behaved like the
child, I knew that they were concerned with an idea which they
wanted to repress. The same was true of my dream. I did not want to
interpret it, because the interpretation contained something that I
was struggling against. When I had completed the interpretation I
learnt what it was that I had been struggling against - namely, the
assertion that R. was a simpleton. The affection that I felt for R.
could not be derived from the latent dream-thoughts; but no doubt
it originated from this struggle of mine. If my dream was distorted
in this respect from its latent content - and distorted into its
opposite - then the affection that was manifest in the dream served
the purpose of this distortion. In other words, distortion was
shown in this case to be deliberate and to be a means of
dissimulation
. My dream thoughts had contained a slander
against R.; and, in order that I might not notice this, what
appeared in the dream was the opposite, a feeling of affection for
him.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

638

   It seemed as though this might be
a discovery of general validity. It is true that, as was shown by
the instances quoted in Chapter III, there are some dreams which
are undisguised fulfilments of wishes. But in cases where the
wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised,
there must have existed some inclination to put up a defence
against the wish; and owing to this defence the wish was unable to
express itself except in a distorted shape. I will try to seek a
social parallel to this internal event in the mind. Where can we
find a similar distortion of a psychical act in social life? Only
where two persons are concerned, one of whom possesses a certain
degree of power which the second is obliged to take into account.
In such a case the second person will distort his psychical acts
or, as we might put it, will dissimulate. The politeness which I
practise every day is to a large extent dissimulation of this kind;
and when I interpret my dreams for my readers I am obliged to adopt
similar distortions. The poet complains of the need for these
distortions in the words: