Freud - Complete Works (110 page)

   In order to conceal her wish, she
had evidently chosen a situation in which such wishes are usually
suppressed, a situation in which one is so much filled with grief
that one has no thought of love. Yet it is quite possible that even
in the real situation of which the dream was an exact replica,
beside the coffin of the elder boy whom she had loved still more,
she may have been unable to suppress her tender feelings for the
visitor who had been absent so long.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

649

   A similar dream of another woman
patient had a different explanation. When she was young the had
been remarkable for her ready wit and cheerful disposition; and
these characteristics were still to be seen, at all events in the
ideas that occurred to her during the treatment. In the course of a
longish dream, this lady imagined that she saw her only,
fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead ‘in a case.’ She
had half a mind to use the scene as an objection to the
wish-fulfilment theory, though she herself suspected that the
detail of the ‘case’ must point the way to another view
of the dream.¹ In the course of the analysis she recalled that
at a party the evening before there had been some talk about the
English word ‘box’ and the various ways in which it
could be translated into German - such as
‘
Schachtel
’, ‘
Loge
’,
‘
Kasten
’, ‘
Ohrfeige
’, and so
on. Other portions of the same dream enabled us to discover further
that she had guessed that the English ‘box’ was related
to the German ‘
Büchse
’, and that she had
then been plagued by a recollection that
‘
Büchse
’ is used as a vulgar term for the
female genitals. If some allowance was made for the limits of her
knowledge of topographical anatomy, it might be presumed,
therefore, that the child lying in the case meant an embryo in the
womb. After being enlightened up to this point, she no longer
denied that the dream-picture corresponded to a wish of hers. Like
so many young married women, she had been far from pleased when she
became pregnant; and more than once she had allowed herself to wish
that the child in her womb might die. Indeed, in a fit of rage
after a violent scene with her husband, she had beaten with her
fists on her body so as to hit the child inside it. Thus the dead
child was in fact the fulfilment of a wish, but of a wish that had
been put aside fifteen years earlier. It is scarcely to be wondered
at if a wish that was fulfilled after such a long delay was not
recognized. Too much had changed in the interval.

  
¹
Like the smoked salmon in the dream of the
abandoned supper party.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

650

   I shall have to return to the
group of dreams to which the last two examples belong (dreams
dealing with the death of relatives of whom the dreamer is fond)
when I come to consider ‘typical’ dreams. I shall then
be able to show from further instances that, in spite of their
unwished for contents, all such dreams must be interpreted as
wish-fulfilments.

   I owe the following dream, not to
a patient, but to an intelligent jurist of my acquaintance. He told
it to me, once again, in order to restrain me from rash
generalizing on the theory of wishful dreams. ‘I
dreamt’, said my informant, ‘that
I came up to my
house with a lady on my arm. A closed carriage was standing in
front of it and a man came up to me, showed me his credentials as a
police officer and requested me to follow him. I asked him to allow
me a little time to put my affairs in order
. Can you suppose
that I have a wish to be arrested?’ - Of course not, I could
only agree. Do you happen to know the charge on which you were
arrested?  - ‘Yes, for infanticide, I believe.’ -
Infanticide? But surely you’re aware that that’s a
crime that can only be committed by a mother on a new-born child? -
‘Quite true.’¹ - And what were the circumstances
in which you had the dream? What happened on the previous evening?
- ‘I would prefer not to tell you. It’s a delicate
matter.’ - Nevertheless I shall have to hear it; otherwise we
shall have to give up the idea of interpreting the dream. -
‘Very well then, listen. I didn’t spend last night at
home but with a lady who means a great deal to me. When we woke up
in the morning there was a further passage between us, after which
I went to sleep again and had the dream I described to you.’
- Is she a married woman? - ‘Yes.’ - And you
don’t want to have a child by her? - ‘Oh, no; that
might give us away.’ - So you don’t practice normal
intercourse? - ‘I take the precaution of withdrawing before
ejaculation.’ - I think I may assume that you had used this
device several times during the night, and that after repeating it
in the morning you felt a little uncertain whether you had carried
it out success fully. - ‘That’s possible, no
doubt.’ - In that case your dream was the fulfilment of a
wish. It gave you a reassurance that you had not procreated a
child, or, what amounts to the same thing, that you had killed a
child. The intermediate links are easily indicated. You remember
that a few days ago we were talking about marriage difficulties and
how inconsistent it is that there should be no objection to
carrying out intercourse in such a way that no fertilization takes
place, whereas any interference when once the ovum and semen have
come together and a foetus has been formed is punished as a crime.
We went on to recall the mediaeval controversy over the exact point
of time at which the soul enters the foetus, since it is not until
after that that the concept of murder becomes applicable. No doubt,
too, you know Lenau’s gruesome poem in which child murder and
child prevention are equated. - ‘Oddly enough I happened to
think of Lenau this morning, quite by chance, as it seemed.’
- An after-echo of your dream. And now I can show you another
incidental wish-fulfilment contained in your dream. You came up to
your house with the lady on your arm. Thus you were bringing her
home, instead of spending the night in her house as you did in
reality. There may be more than one reason why the wish-fulfilment
which constitutes the core of the dream was disguised in such a
disagreeable form. Perhaps you have learned from my paper on the
aetiology of anxiety neurosis that I regard
coitus
interruptus
as one of the aetiological factors in the
development of neurotic anxiety? It would tally with this if, after
carrying out sexual intercourse in this way several times, you were
left in an uneasy mood which afterwards became an element in the
construction of your dream. Moreover, you made use of this
moodiness to help disguise the wish-fulfilment. Incidentally, your
reference to infanticide has not been explained. How did you come
to light on this specifically feminine crime? - ‘I must admit
that some years ago I became involved in an occurrence of that
kind. I was responsible for a girl’s trying to avoid the
consequence of a love-affair with me by means of an abortion. I had
nothing to do with her carrying out her intention, but for a long
time I naturally felt very nervous in case the business came
out.’ - I quite understand that. This recollection provides a
second reason why you must have been worried by your suspicion that
your device might have gone wrong.

  
¹
It often happens that the account first
given of a dream is incomplete and that the memory of the omitted
portions only emerges in the course of analysis. These subsequently
added portions regularly turn out to provide the key to the
dream’s interpretation. Cf. the discussion below on the
forgetting of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

651

   A young physician who heard me
describe this dream during a course of lectures must have been
greatly struck by it, for he promptly re-dreamt it, applying the
same pattern of thought to another theme. The day before, he had
sent in his income tax return, which he had filled in perfectly
honestly, since he had very little to declare. He then had a dream
that
an acquaintance of his had come to him from a meeting of
the tax commissioners and informed him that, while no objection had
been raised to any of the other tax returns, general suspicion had
been aroused by his and a heavy fine had been imposed on him
.
The dream was a poorly disguised fulfilment of his wish to be known
as a doctor with a large income. It recalls the well-known story of
the girl who was advised not to accept a suitor because he had a
violent temper and would be sure to beat her if they were married.
‘If only he’d begun beating me already!’ the girl
replied. Her wish to be married was so intense that she was ready
to take the threatened unpleasantness into the bargain, and even
went so far as to turn it into a wish.

   The very frequent dreams, which
appear to stand in contradiction to my theory because their
subject-matter is the frustration of a wish or the occurrence of
something clearly unwished-for, may be brought together under the
heading of ‘counter-wish dreams’. If these dreams are
considered as a whole, it seems to me possible to trace them back
to two principles; I have not yet mentioned one of these, although
it plays a large part not only in people’s dreams but in
their lives as well. One of the two motive forces leading to such
dreams is the wish that I may be wrong. These dreams appear
regularly in the course of my treatments when a patient is in a
state of resistance to me; and I can count almost certainly on
provoking one of them after I have explained to a patient for the
first time my theory that dreams are fulfilments of wishes.¹
Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to
some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready
to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their
wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] During the
last few years similar ‘counter-wish dreams’ have
repeatedly been reported to me by people who have heard me
lecturing, as a reaction to first making the acquaintance of my
‘wishful’ theory of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

652

   The same point is illustrated by
one last dream of the kind which I will quote from a patient under
treatment. This was the dream of a girl who had succeeded in her
struggle to continue her treatment with me against the will of her
relatives and of the authorities whose opinions had been consulted.
She dreamt that her people forbade her to go on coming to me.
She then reminded me of a promise I had given her that if necessary
I would continue the treatment without a fee. To this I replied:
‘I cannot make any allowances in money matters
.’ It
must be admitted that it was not easy to point to the
wish-fulfilment in this instance. But in all such cases one
discovers a second riddle, the solution of which helps one to solve
the original one. What was the origin of the words she put into my
mouth? Of course I had said nothing of the kind to her; but one of
her brothers, and the one by whom she was most influenced, had been
good enough to attribute this sentiment to me. The dream was thus
intended to prove her brother right. And it was not only in her
dreams that she insisted on his being right; the same idea
dominated her whole life and it was the motive of her illness.

   A dream which seems at first
sight to put special difficulties in the way of the wish-fulfilment
theory was dreamt and interpreted by a physician, and reported by
August Stärcke (1911): ‘
I saw upon my left
index-finger the first indication of syphilis on the terminal
phalange
.’ The reflection that, apart from the
dream’s unwished-for content, it appears to be clear and
coherent, might dissuade us from analysing it. If, however, we are
prepared to face the trouble involved, we shall find that
‘
Primäraffekt
’ was equivalent to a
‘
prima affectio
’ (a first love), and that the
repellent ulcer turned out, to quote Stärcke’s words, to
‘stand for wish-fulfilments that were highly charged with
emotion’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

653

   The second motive for
counter-wish dreams is so obvious that it is easy to overlook it,
as I did myself for some considerable time. There is a masochistic
component in the sexual constitution of many people, which arises
from the reversal of an aggressive, sadistic component into its
opposite. Those who find their pleasure, not in having
physical
pain inflicted on them, but in humiliation and
mental torture, may be described as ‘mental
masochists’. It will at once be seen that people of this kind
can have counter-wish dreams and unpleasurable dreams, which are
none the less wish-fulfilments since they satisfy their masochistic
inclinations. I will quote one such dream, produced by a young man
who in his earlier years had greatly tormented his elder brother,
to whom he had a homosexual attachment. His character having
undergone a fundamental change, he had the following dream, which
was in three pieces:
I. His elder brother was chaffing him. II.
Two grown men were caressing each other with a homosexual purpose.
III. His brother had sold the business of which he himself had
looked forward to becoming the director
. He awoke from the last
dream with the most distressing feelings. Nevertheless it was a
masochistic wishful dream, and might be translated thus: ‘It
would serve me right if my brother were to confront me with this
sale as a punishment for all the torments he had to put up with
from me.