Freud - Complete Works (109 page)

   I asked her what that meant; and
she explained that she had wished for a long time that she could
have a caviare sandwich every morning but had grudged the expense.
Of course her husband would have let her have it at once if she had
asked him. But, on the contrary, she had asked him
not
to
give her any caviare, so that she could go on teasing him about
it.

  
¹
Cf. the phrase ‘sitting for
one’s portrait’ and Goethe’s lines:

                                               
Und wenn er keinen Hintern hat,

                                               
Wie mag der Edle sitzen?

                                               
[And if he hasn’t a behind,

                                               
How can his Lordship sit?]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

643

   This explanation struck me as
unconvincing. Inadequate reasons like this usually conceal
unconfessed motives. They remind one of Bernheim’s hypnotized
patients. When one of these carries out a post-hypnotic suggestion
and is asked why he is acting in this way, instead of saying that
he has no idea he feels compelled to invent some obviously
unsatisfactory reason. The same was no doubt true of my patient and
the caviare. I saw that she was obliged to create an unfulfilled
wish for herself in her actual life; and the dream represented this
renunciation as having been put into effect. But why was it that
she stood in need of an unfulfilled wish?

   The associations which she had so
far produced had not been sufficient to interpret the dream. I
pressed her for some more. After a short pause, such as would
correspond to the over coming of a resistance, she went on to tell
me that the day before she had visited a woman friend of whom she
confessed she felt jealous because her (my patient’s) husband
was constantly singing her praises. Fortunately this friend of hers
is very skinny and thin and her husband admires a plumper figure. I
asked her what she had talked about to her thing friend. Naturally,
she replied, of that lady’s wish to grow a little stouter.
Her friend had enquired, too: ‘When are you going to ask us
to another meal? You always feed one so well.’

   The meaning of the dream was now
clear, and I was able to say to my patient: ‘It is just as
though when she made this suggestion you said to yourself: "A
likely thing! I’m to ask you to come and eat in my house so
that you may get stout and attract my husband still more! I’d
rather never give another supper-party." What the dream was
saying to you was that you were unable to give any supper-parties,
and it was thus fulfilling your wish not to help your friend to
grow plumper. The fact that what people eat at parties makes them
stout had been brought home to you by your husband’s decision
not to accept any more invitations to supper in the interests of
his plan to reduce his weight.’ All that was now lacking was
some coincidence to confirm the solution. The smoked salmon in the
dream had not yet been accounted for. ‘How’, I asked,
‘did you arrive at the salmon that came into your
dream?’ ‘Oh’, she replied, ‘smoked salmon
is my friend’s favourite dish.’ I happen to be
acquainted with the lady in question myself, and I can confirm the
fact that she grudges herself salmon no less than my patient
grudges herself caviare.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

644

   The same dream admits of another
and subtler interpretation, which in fact becomes unavoidable if we
take a subsidiary detail into account. (The two interpretations are
not mutually contradictory, but both cover the same ground; they
are a good instance of the fact that dreams, like all other
psychopathological structures, regularly have more than one
meaning.) My patient, it will be remembered, at the same time as
she was occupied with her dream of the renunciation of a wish, was
also trying to bring about a renounced wish (for the caviare
sandwich) in real life. Her friend had also given expression to a
wish - to become stouter - and it would not have been surprising if
my patient had dreamt that her friend’s wish was unfulfilled;
for my patient’s own wish was that her friend’s wish
(to put on weight) should not be fulfilled. But instead of this she
dreamt that one of her
own
wishes was not fulfilled. Thus
the dream will acquire a new interpretation if we suppose that the
person indicated in the dream was not herself but her friend, that
she had put herself in her friend’s place, or, as we might
say, that she had ‘identified’ herself with her friend.
I believe she had in fact done this; and the circumstance of her
having brought about a renounced wish in real life was evidence of
this identification.

   What is the meaning of hysterical
identification? It requires a somewhat lengthy explanation.
Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of
hysterical symptoms. It enables patients to express in their
symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number
of other people; it enables them, as it were, to suffer on behalf
of a whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play
single-handed. I shall be told that this is not more than the
familiar hysterical imitation, the capacity of hysterics to imitate
any symptoms in other people that may have struck their attention -
sympathy, as it were, intensified to the point of reproduction.
This, however, does no more than show us the path along which the
psychical process in hysterical imitation proceeds. The path is
something different from the mental act which proceeds along it.
The latter is a little more complicated than the common picture of
hysterical imitation; it consists in the unconscious drawing of an
inference, as an example will make clear. Supposing a physician is
treating a woman patient, who is subject to a particular kind of
spasm, in a hospital ward among a number of other patients. He will
show no surprise if he finds one morning that this particular kind
of hysterical attack has found imitators. He will merely say:
‘The other patients have seen it and copied it; it’s a
case of psychical infection.’ That is true; but the psychical
infection has occurred along some such lines as these. As a rule,
patients know more about one another than the doctor does about any
of them; and after the doctor’s visit is over they turn their
attention to one another. Let us imagine that this patient had her
attack on a particular day; then the others will quickly discover
that it was caused by a letter from home, the revival of some
unhappy love-affair, or some such thing. Their sympathy is aroused
and they draw the following inference, though it fails to penetrate
into consciousness: ‘If a cause like this can produce an
attack like this, I may have the same kind of attack since I have
the same grounds for having it.’ If this inference were
capable of entering consciousness, it might possibly give rise to a
fear
of having the same kind of attack. But in fact the
inference is made in a different psychical region, and consequently
results in the actual realization of the dreaded symptom. Thus
identification is not simple imitation but
assimilation
on
the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a
resemblance and is derived from a common element which remains in
the unconscious.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

645

   Identification is most frequently
used in hysteria to express a common
sexual
element. A
hysterical woman identifies herself in her symptoms most readily -
though not exclusively - with people with whom she has had sexual
relations or with people who have had sexual relations with the
same people as herself. Linguistic usage takes this into account,
for two lovers are spoken of as being ‘one’. In
hysterical phantasies, just as in dreams, it is enough for purposes
of identification that the subject should have
thoughts
of
sexual relations without their having necessarily taken place in
reality. Thus the patient whose dream I have been discussing was
merely following the rules of hysterical processes of thought in
expressing her jealousy of her friend (which incidentally she
herself knew was unjustified) by taking her place in the dream and
identifying herself with her by creating a symptom - the renounced
wish. The process might be expressed verbally thus: my patient put
herself in her friend’s place in the dream because her friend
was taking my patient’s place with her husband and because
she (my patient) wanted to take her friend’s place in her
husband’s high opinion.¹

  
¹
I myself regret the insertion into my
argument of excerpts from the psychopathology of hysteria. Their
fragmentary presentation and detachment from their context cannot
fail to detract from their enlightening effect. If, however, they
serve to indicate the intimate connection between the topic of
dreams and that of the psychoneuroses, they will have fulfilled the
purpose for which they are inserted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

646

   A contradiction to my theory of
dreams produced by another of my women patients (the cleverest of
all my dreamers) was resolved more simply, but upon the same
pattern: namely that the non-fulfilment of one wish meant the
fulfilment of another. One day I had been explaining to her that
dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Next day she brought me a dream
in which she was travelling down with her mother-in-law to the
place in the country where they were to spend their holidays
together. Now I knew that she had violently rebelled against the
idea of spending the summer near her mother-in-law and that a few
days earlier she had successfully avoided the propinquity she
dreaded by engaging rooms in a far distant resort. And now her
dream had undone the solution she had wished for: was not this the
sharpest possible contradiction of my theory that in dreams wishes
are fulfilled? No doubt; and it was only necessary to follow the
dream’s logical consequence in order to arrive at its
interpretation. The dream showed that I was wrong.
Thus it was
her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish
fulfilled
. But her wish that I might be wrong, which was
fulfilled in connection with her summer holidays, related in fact
to another and more serious matter. For at about the same time I
had inferred from the material produced in her analysis that at a
particular period of her life something must have occurred that was
of importance in determining her illness. She had disputed this,
since she had no recollection of it; but soon afterwards it had
turned out that I was right. Thus her wish that I might be wrong,
which was transformed into her dream of spending her holidays with
her mother-in-law, corresponded to a well-justified wish that the
events of which she was then becoming aware for the first time
might never have occurred.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

647

   I have ventured to interpret -
without any analysis, but only by a guess - a small episode which
occurred to a friend of mine who was in the same class as I was all
through our career at a secondary school. One day he listened to a
lecture which I gave before a small audience on the novel idea that
dreams were wish-fulfilments. He went home and dreamt that
he
had lost all his cases
(he was a barrister) and afterwards
arraigned me on the subject. I evaded the issue by telling him that
after all one can’t win
all
one’s cases. But to
myself I thought: ‘Considering that for eight whole years I
sat on the front bench as top of the class while he drifted about
somewhere in the middle, he can hardly fail to nourish a wish, left
over from his school-days, that some day or other I may come a
complete cropper.’

   A dream of a gloomier kind was
also brought up against me by a patient as an objection to the
theory of wishful dreams.

   The patient, who was a young
girl, began thus: ‘As you will remember, my sister has only
one boy left now - Karl; she lost his elder brother, Otto, while I
was still living with her. Otto was my favourite; I more or less
brought him up. I’m fond of the little one too, but of course
not nearly so fond as I was of the one who died. Last night, then,
I dreamt that
I saw Karl lying before me dead. He was lying in
his little coffin with his hands folded and with candles all around
- in fact just like little Otto, whose death was such a blow to
me
. Now tell me, what can that mean? You know me. Am I such a
wicked person that I can wish my sister to lose the one child she
still has? Or does the dream mean that I would rather Karl were
dead than Otto whom I was so much fonder of?

   I assured her that this last
interpretation was out of question. And after reflecting a little I
was able to give her the correct interpretation of the dream, which
she afterwards confirmed. I was able to do so because I was
familiar with the whole of the dreamer’s previous
history.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

648

   The girl had early been left an
orphan and had been brought up in the house of a much older sister.
Among the friends who visited at the house was a man who made a
lasting impression on her heart. For a time it had seemed as though
her scarcely acknowledged relations with him would lead to
marriage; but this happy outcome was brought to nothing by her
sister, whose motives were never fully explained. After the breach
the man ceased to visit the house; and shortly after the death of
little Otto, on to whom she had meanwhile turned her affection, my
patient herself set up on her own. She did not succeed, however, in
freeing herself from her attachment to her sister’s friend.
Her pride bade her avoid him; but she was unable to transfer her
love to any of the other admirers who presented themselves later.
Whenever it was announced that the object of her affections, who
was by profession a literary man, was to give a lecture anywhere,
she was invariably in the audience; and she took every possible
opportunity of seeing him from a distance on neutral ground. I
remembered that she had told me the day before that the Professor
was going to a particular concert and that she intended to go to it
as well so as to enjoy a glimpse of him once more. That had been on
the day before the dream, and the concert was to take place on the
day on which she told me the dream. It was therefore easy for me to
construct the correct interpretation, and I asked her whether she
could think of anything that happened after little Otto’s
death. She answered at once: ‘Of course! the Professor came
to see us again after a long absence, and I saw him once more
beside little Otto’s coffin.’ This was exactly what I
had expected, and I interpreted the dream in this way: ‘If
now the other boy were to die, the same thing would happen. You
would spend the day with your sister and the Professor would be
certain to come to offer his condolences, so that you would see him
again under the same conditions as the other time. The dream means
no more than your wish to see him once more, a wish which you are
inwardly struggling against. I know you have a ticket for
to-day’s concert in your pocket. Your dream was a dream of
impatience: it anticipated the glimpse you are to have of him
to-day by a few hours.’