Freud - Complete Works (113 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

660

   I saw the monograph which I had
written
lying before me
. This again led me back to
something. I had had a letter from my friend in Berlin the day
before in which he had shown his power of visualization: ‘I
am very much occupied with your dream-book.
I see it lying
finished before me and I see myself turning over its pages
. How
much I envied him his gift as a seer! If only
I
could have
seen it lying finished before me!

  
The folded coloured plate
.
While I was a medical student I was the constant victim of an
impulse only to learn things out of
monographs
. In spite of
my limited means, I succeeded in getting hold of a number of
volumes of the proceedings of medical societies and was enthralled
by their
coloured plates
. I was proud of my hankering for
thoroughness. When I myself had begun to publish papers, I had been
obliged to make my own drawings to illustrate them and I remembered
that one of them had been so wretched that a friendly colleague had
jeered at me over it. There followed, I could not quite make out
how, a recollection from very early youth. It had once amused my
father to hand over a book with
coloured plates
(an account
of a journey through Persia) for me and my eldest sister to
destroy. Not easy to justify from the educational point of
view!  I had been five years old at the time and my sister not
yet three; and the picture of the two of us blissfully pulling the
book to pieces (leaf by leaf, like an
artichoke
, I found
myself saying) was almost the only plastic memory that I retained
from that period of my life. Then, when I became a student, I had
developed a passion for collecting and owning books, which was
analogous to my liking for learning out of monographs: a
favourite hobby
. (The idea of ‘
favourite
’
had already appeared in connection with cyclamens and artichokes.)
I had become a
book-worm
. I had always, from the time I
first began to think about myself, referred this first passion of
mine back to the childhood memory I have mentioned. Or rather, I
had recognized that the childhood scene was a ‘screen
memory’ for my later bibliophile propensities.¹ And I
had early discovered, of course, that passions often lead to
sorrow. When I was seventeen I had run up a largish account at the
bookseller’s and had nothing to meet it with; and my father
had scarcely taken it as an excuse that my inclinations might have
chosen a worse outlet. The recollection of this experience from the
later years of my youth at once brought back to my mind the
conversation with my friend Dr. Königstein. For in the course
of it we had discussed the same question of my being blamed for
being too much absorbed in my
favourite hobbies
.

  
¹
Cf. my paper on screen memories.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

661

   For reasons with which we are not
concerned, I shall not pursue the interpretation of this dream any
further, but will merely indicate the direction in which it lay. In
the course of the work of analysis I was reminded of my
conversation with Dr. Königstein, and I was brought to it from
more than one direction. When I take into account the topics
touched upon in that conversation, the meaning of the dream becomes
intelligible to me. All the trains of thought starting from the
dream - the thoughts about my wife’s and my own favourite
flowers, about cocaine, about the awkwardness of medical treatment
among colleagues, about my preference for studying monographs and
about my neglect of certain branches of science such as botany -
all of these trains of thought, when they were further pursued, led
ultimately to one or other of the many ramifications of my
conversation with Dr. Königstein. Once again the dream, like
the one we first analysed - the dream of Irma’s injection -
turns out to have been in the nature of a self-justification, a
plea on behalf of my own rights. Indeed, it carried the subject
that was raised in the earlier dream a stage further and discussed
it with reference to fresh material that had arisen in the interval
between the two dreams. Even the apparently indifferent form in
which the dream was couched turns out to have had significance.
What it meant was: ‘After all, I’m the man who wrote
the valuable and memorable paper (on cocaine)', just as in the
earlier dream I had said on my behalf: ‘I’m a
conscientious and hard-working student.’ In both cases what I
was insisting was: ‘I may allow myself to do this.’
There is, however, no need for me to carry the interpretation of
the dream any further, since my only purpose in reporting it was to
illustrate by an example the relation between the content of a
dream and the experience of the previous day which provoked it. So
long as I was aware only of the dream’s
manifest
content, it appeared to be related only to a
single
event of
the dream-day. But when the analysis was carried out, a
second
source of the dream emerged in another experience of
the same day. The first of these two impressions with which the
dream was connected was an indifferent one, a subsidiary
circumstance: I had seen a book in a shop-window whose title
attracted my attention for a moment but whose subject-matter could
scarcely be of interest to me. The second experience had a high
degree of psychical importance: I had had a good hour’s
lively conversation with my friend the eye-surgeon; in the course
of it I had given him some information which was bound to affect
both of us closely, and I had had memories stirred up in me which
had drawn my attention to a great variety of internal stresses in
my own mind. Moreover, the conversation had been interrupted before
its conclusion because we had been joined by acquaintances.

   We must now ask what was the
relation of the two impressions of the dream-day to each other and
to the dream of the subsequent night. In the manifest content of
the dream only the
indifferent
impression was alluded to,
which seems to confirm the notion that dreams have a preference for
taking up unimportant details of waking life. All the strands of
the interpretation, on the other hand, led to the
important
impression, to the one which had justifiably stirred my feelings.
If the sense of the dream is judged, as it can only rightly be, by
its latent content as revealed by the analysis, a new and
significant fact is unexpectedly brought to light. The conundrum of
why dreams are concerned only with worthless fragments of waking
life seems to have lost all its meaning; nor can it any longer be
maintained that waking life is not pursued further in dreams and
that dreams are thus psychical activity wasted upon foolish
material. The contrary is true: our dream-thoughts are dominated by
the same material that has occupied us during the day and we only
bother to dream of things which have given us cause for reflection
in the daytime.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

662

   Why is it, then, that, though the
occasion of my dreaming was a daytime impression by which I had
been justifiably stirred, I nevertheless actually dreamt of
something indifferent? The most obvious explanation, no doubt, is
that we are once more faced by one of the phenomena of
dream-distortion, which in my last chapter I traced to a psychical
force acting as a censorship. My recollection of the monograph on
the genus Cyclamen would thus serve the purpose of being an
allusion
to the conversation with my friend, just as the
‘smoked salmon’ in the dream of the abandoned
supper-party served as an
allusion
to the dreamer’s
thought of her woman friend. The only question is as to the
intermediate links which enabled the impression of the monograph to
serve as an allusion to the conversation with the eye-surgeon,
since at first sight there is no obvious connection between them.
In the example of the abandoned supper-party the connection was
given at once: ‘smoked salmon’, being the
friend’s favourite dish, was an immediate constituent of the
group of ideas which were likely to be aroused in the
dreamer’s mind by the personality of her friend. In this
later example there were two detached impressions which at a first
glance only had in common the fact of their having occurred on the
same day: I had caught sight of the monograph in the morning and
had had the conversation the same evening. The analysis enabled us
to solve the problem as follows: connections of this kind, when
they are not present in the first instance, are woven
retrospectively between the ideational content of one impression
and that of the other. I have already drawn attention to the
intermediate links in the present case by the words I have
italicized in my record of the analysis. If there had been no
influences from another quarter, the idea of the monograph on the
Cyclamen would only, I imagine, have led to the idea of its being
my wife’ s favourite flower, and possibly also to Frau
L.’s absent bouquet. I scarcely think that these background
thoughts would have sufficed to evoke a dream. As we are told in
Hamlet
:

                                               
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave

                                               
To tell us this.

But, lo and behold, I was reminded in the
analysis that the man who interrupted our conversation was called
Gärtner
and that I had thought his wife looked
blooming
. And even as I write these words I recall that one
of my patients, who bore the charming name of
Flora
, was for
a time the pivot of our discussion. These must have been the
intermediate links, arising from the botanical group of ideas,
which formed the bridge between the two experiences of that day,
the indifferent and the stirring one. A further set of connections
was then established - those surrounding the idea of cocaine, which
had every right to serve as a link between the figure of Dr.
Königstein and a botanical monograph which I had written; and
these connections strengthened the fusion between the two groups of
ideas so that it became possible for a portion of the one
experience to serve as an allusion to the other one.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

663

   I am prepared to find this
explanation attacked on the ground of its being arbitrary or
artificial. What, it may be asked, would have happened if Professor
Gärtner and his wife with her blooming looks had not come up
to us or if the patient we were talking about had been called Anna
instead of Flora? The answer is simple. If these chains of thought
had been absent others would no doubt have been selected. It is
easy enough to construct such chains, as is shown by the puns and
riddles that people make every day for their entertainment. The
realm of jokes knows no boundaries. Or, to go a stage further, if
there had been no possibility of forging enough intermediate links
between the two impressions, the dream would simply have been
different. Another indifferent impression of the same day - for
crowds of such impressions enter our minds and are then forgotten -
would have taken the place of the ‘monograph’ in the
dream, would have linked up with the subject of the conversation
and would have represented it in the content of the dream. Since it
was in fact the monograph and not any other idea that was chosen to
serve this function, we must suppose that it was the best adapted
for the connection. There is no need for us to emulate
Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau and feel astonished that
‘only the rich people own the most money’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

664

   A psychological process by which,
according to our account, indifferent experiences take the place of
psychically significant ones, cannot fail to arouse suspicion and
bewilderment. It will be our task in a later chapter to make the
peculiarities of this apparently irrational operation more
intelligible. At this point we are only concerned with the
effects
of a process whose reality I have been driven to
assume by innumerable and regularly recurrent observations made in
analysing dreams. What takes place would seem to be something in
the nature of a ‘displacement’ - of psychical emphasis,
shall we say? - by means of intermediate links; in this way, ideas
which originally had only a
weak
charge of intensity take
over the charge from ideas which were originally
intensely
cathected and at last attain enough strength to enable them to
force an entry into consciousness. Displacements of this kind are
no surprise to us where it is a question of dealing with quantities
of
affect
or with motor activities in general. When a lonely
old maid transfers her affection to animals, or a bachelor becomes
an enthusiastic collector, when a soldier defends a scrap of
coloured cloth - a flag - with his life’s blood, when a few
seconds’ extra pressure in a hand-shake means bliss to a
lover, or when, in
Othello
, a lost handkerchief precipitates
an outburst of rage - all of these are instances of psychical
displacements to which we raise no objection. But when we hear that
a decision as to what shall reach our consciousness and what shall
be kept out of it - what we shall
think
, in short - has been
arrived at in the same manner and on the same principles, we have
an impression of a pathological event and, if such things happen in
waking life, we describe them as errors in thought. I will
anticipate the conclusions to which we shall later be led, and
suggest that the psychical process which we have found at work in
dream-displacement, though it cannot be described as a pathological
disturbance, nevertheless differs from the normal and is to be
regarded as a process of a more
primary
nature.