Freud - Complete Works (115 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Havelock
Ellis, a friendly critic of this book, writes (1911, 166):
‘This is the point at which many of us are no longer able to
follow Freud.’ Havelock Ellis has not, however, carried out
any analyses of dreams and refuses to believe how impossible it is
to base one’s judgement on their manifest content.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

670

I

   An intelligent and cultivated
young woman, reserved and undemonstrative in her behaviour,
reported as follows:
I dreamt that I arrived too late at the
market and could get nothing either from the butcher or from the
woman who sells vegetables
. An innocent dream, no doubt; but
dreams are not as simple as that, so I asked to be told it in
greater detail. She thereupon gave me the following account.
She
dreamt she was going to the market with her cook, who was carrying
the basket. After she had asked for something, the butcher said to
her: ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’, and
offered her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’
She rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who
tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in
bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don’t
recognize that; I won’t take it
.’

   The dream’s connection with
the previous day was quite straightforward. She had actually gone
to the market too late and had got nothing. The situation seemed to
shape itself into the phrase ‘
Die Flieschbank war schon
gescholossen
’. I pulled myself up: was not that, or
rather its opposite, a vulgar description of a certain sort of
slovenliness in a man’s dress? However, the dreamer herself
did not use the phrase; she may perhaps have avoided using it. Let
us endeavour, then, to arrive at an interpretation of the details
of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

671

   When anything in a dream has the
character of direct speech, that is to say, when it is said or
heard and not merely thought (and it is easy as a rule to make the
distinction with certainty), then it is derived from something
actually spoken in waking life-though, to be sure, this something
is merely treated as raw material and may be cut up and slightly
altered and, more especially, divorced from its context.¹ In
carrying out an interpretation, one method is to start from spoken
phrases of this kind. What, then, was the origin of the
butcher’s remark ‘
That’s not obtainable any
longer
’? The answer was that it came from me myself. A
few days earlier I had explained to the patient that the earliest
experiences of childhood were ‘
not obtainable any
longer
as such’, but were replaced in analysis by
‘transferences’ and dreams. So
I
was the butcher
and she was rejecting these transferences into the present of old
habits of thinking and feeling. -What, again, was the origin of her
own remark in the dream ‘
I don’t recognize that; I
won’t take it
’? For the purposes of the analysis
this had to be divided up. ‘
I don’t recognize
that
’ was something she had said the day before to her
cook, with whom she had had a dispute; but at the time she had gone
on: ‘
Behave yourself properly!
’ At this point
there had clearly been a displacement. Of the two phrases that she
had used in the dispute with her cook, she had chosen the
insignificant one for inclusion in the dream. But it was only the
suppressed one, ‘
Behave yourself properly!
’ that
fitted in with the rest of the content of the dream: those would
have been the appropriate words to use if someone had ventured to
make improper suggestions and had forgotten ‘to close his
meat-shop’. The allusions underlying the incident with the
vegetable-seller were a further confirmation that our
interpretation was on the right track. A vegetable that is sold
tied up in bundles (lengthways, as the patient added afterwards)
and is also black, could only be a dream-combination of asparagus
and black (Spanish) radishes. No knowledgeable person of either sex
will ask for an interpretation of asparagus. But the other
vegetable - ’
Schwarzer Retting
’ - can be taken
as an exclamation - ‘
Schwarzer rett’
dich!
’ -, and accordingly it too seems to hint at the
same sexual topic which we suspected at the very beginning, when we
felt inclined to introduce the phrase about the meat-shop being
closed into the original account of the dream. We need not enquire
now into the full meaning of the dream. So much is quite clear: it
had
a meaning and that meaning was far from
innocent.²

  
¹
See my discussion of speeches in dreams in
my chapter on the dream-work. Only one writer on the subject seems
to have recognized the source of spoken phrases occurring in
dreams, namely Delboeuf (1885, 226), who compares them to
clichés
.

  
²
If anyone is curious to know, I may add
that the dream concealed a phantasy of my behaving in an improper
and sexually provocative manner, and of the patient putting up a
defence against my conduct. If this interpretation seems
incredible, I need only point to the numerous instances in which
doctors have charges of the same kind brought against them by
hysterical women. But in such cases the phantasy emerges into
consciousness undisguised and in the form of a delusion, instead of
being distorted and appearing only as a dream. - [
Added
1909:] This dream occurred at the beginning of the patient’s
psycho-analytic treatment. It was not until later that I learnt
that she had been repeating in it the initial trauma from which her
neurosis had arisen. I have since then come across the same
behaviour in other patients; having been exposed to a sexual
assault in their childhood, they seek, as it were, to bring about a
repetition of it in their dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

672

II

   Here is another innocent dream,
dreamt by the same patient, and in a sense a counterpart to the
last one.
Her husband asked her: ‘Don’t you think we
ought to have the piano tuned?’ And she replied:
‘It’s not worth while; the hammers need reconditioning
in any case
.’

   Once again this was a repetition
of a real event of the previous day. Her husband had asked this
question and she had made some such reply. But what was the
explanation of her dreaming it?  She told me that the piano
was a
disgusting
old
box
, that it made an
ugly
noise
, that it had been in her husband’s possession
before their marriage,¹ and so on. But the key to the solution
was only given by her words: ‘
It’s not worth
while
.’ These were derived from a visit she had paid the
day before to a woman friend. She had been invited to take off her
jacket, but had refused with the words: ‘Thank you, but
its not worth while
; I can only stop a minute.’ As she
was telling me this, I recollected that during the previous
day’s analysis she had suddenly caught hold of her jacket,
one of the buttons having come undone. Thus it was as though she
were saying: ‘Please don’t look;
its not worth
while
.’ In the same way the ‘box’
[‘
Kasten
’] was a substitute for a
‘chest’ [‘
Bruskasten
’]; and the
interpretation of the dream led us back at once to the time of her
physical development at puberty, when she had begun to be
dissatisfied by her figure. We can hardly doubt that it led back to
still earlier times, if we take the word
‘
disgusting
’ into account and the ‘
ugly
noise
’, and if we remember how often - both in
double
entendres
and in dreams - the lesser hemispheres of a
woman’s body are used, whether as contrasts or as
substitutes, for the larger ones.

  
¹
This last was a substitute for the opposite
idea, as the course of the analysis will make clear.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

673

III

   I will interrupt this series for
a moment and insert a short innocent dream produced by a young man.
He dreamt that
he was putting on his winter overcoat once more,
which was a dreadful thing
. The ostensible reason for this
dream was a sudden return of cold weather. If we look more closely,
however, we shall notice that the two short pieces that make up the
dream are not in complete harmony. For what could there be
‘dreadful’ about putting on a heavy or thick overcoat
in cold weather?  Moreover, the innocence of the dream was
decidedly upset by the first association that occurred to the
dreamer in the analysis. He recalled that a lady confided to him
the day before that her youngest child owed its existence to a torn
condom. On that basis he was able to reconstruct his thoughts. A
thin condom was dangerous, but a thick one was bad. The condom was
suitably represented as an overcoat, since one slips into both of
them. But an occurrence such as the lady described to him would
certainly be ‘dreadful’ for an unmarried man.

   And now let us return to our
innocent lady dreamer.

IV

  
She was putting a candle into
a candlestick; but the candle broke so that it wouldn’t stand
up properly. The girls at her school said she was clumsy; but the
mistress said it was not her fault
.

   Yet again the occasion for the
dream was a real event. The day before she had actually put a
candle into a candlestick, though it did not break. Some
transparent symbolism was being used in this dream. A candle is an
object which can excite the female genitals; and, if it is broken,
so that it cannot stand up properly, it means that the man is
impotent. (‘
It was not her fault
.’) But could a
carefully brought-up young woman, who had been screened from the
impact of anything ugly, have known that a candle might be put to
such a use? As it happened, she was able to indicate how it was
that she obtained this piece of knowledge. Once when they were in a
rowing boat on the Rhine, another boat had passed them with some
students in it. They were in high spirits and were singing, or
rather shouting, a song:

                                                               
Wenn die Königin von Schweden,

                                                               
Bei geschlossenen Fensterläden

                                                               
Mit Apollokerzen . . .
¹

She either failed to hear or did not
understand the last word and had to get her husband to give her the
necessary explanation. The verse was replaced in the content of the
dream by an innocent recollection of some job she had done clumsily
when she was at school, and the replacement was made possible owing
to the common element of
closed shutters
. The connection
between the topics of masturbation and impotence is obvious enough.
The ‘Apollo’ in the latent content of this dream linked
it with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured.
Altogether far from innocent.

  
¹
[‘When the Queen of Sweden, behind
closed shutters, . . . with Apollo candles.’
The missing word is ‘
onaniert
’
(‘masturbates’).]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

674

V

   In order that we may not be
tempted to draw conclusions too easily from dreams as to the
dreamer’s actual life, I will add one more dream of the same
patient’s, which once more has an innocent appearance.
‘
I dreamt,
’ she said,
‘of what I really
did yesterday: I filled a small trunk so full of books that I
really had difficulty in shutting it and I dreamt what really
happened
.’ In this instance the narrator herself laid the
chief emphasis on the agreement between the dream and reality. All
such judgements on a dream and comments upon it, though they have
made themselves a place in waking thought, invariably form in fact
part of the latent content of the dream, as we shall find confirmed
by other examples later on. What we were being told, then, was that
what the dream described had really happened the day before. It
would take up too much space to explain how it was that the idea
occurred to me of making use of the English language in the
interpretation. It is enough to say that once again what was in
question was a little ‘box’ (cf. the dream of the dead
child in the ‘case’,
p. 649 f.
) which was so full that
nothing more could get into it. Anyhow, nothing bad this time.

   In all of these
‘innocent’ dreams the motive for the censorship is
obviously the sexual factor. This, however, is a subject of prime
importance which I must leave on one side.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

675

(B)

INFANTILE MATERIAL AS A SOURCE OF
DREAMS

   Like every other writer on the
subject, with the exception of Robert, I have pointed out as a
third peculiarity of the content of dreams that it may include
impressions which date back to earliest childhood, and which seem
not to be accessible to waking memory. It is naturally hard to
determine how rarely or how frequently this occurs, since the
origin of the dream elements in question is not recognized after
waking. Proof that what we are dealing with are impressions from
childhood must therefore be established by external evidence and
there is seldom an opportunity for doing this. A particularly
convincing example is that given by Maury of the man who determined
one day to revisit his old home after an absence of more than
twenty years. During the night before his departure he dreamt that
he was in a totally unknown place and there met an unknown man in
the street and had a conversation with him. When he reached his
home, he found that the unknown place was a real one in the
immediate neighbourhood of his native town, and the unknown man in
the dream turned out to be a friend of his dead father’s who
was still living there. This was conclusive evidence that he had
seen both the man and the place in his childhood. This dream is
also to be interpreted as a dream of impatience like that of the
girl with the concert-ticket in her pocket (
p. 647 f.
), that of the child whose
father had promised to take her on an excursion to the Hameau (cf.
p. 628 f.),
and similar ones. The
motives which led the dreamers to reproduce one particular
impression from their childhood rather than any other cannot, of
course, be discovered without an analysis.

   Someone who attended a course of
lectures of mine and boasted that his dreams very seldom underwent
distortion reported to me that not long before he had dreamt of
seeing
his former tutor in bed with the nurse
who had been
with his family till his eleventh year. In the dream he had
identified the locality where the scene occurred. His interest had
been aroused and he had reported the dream to his elder brother,
who had laughingly confirmed the truth of what he had dreamt. His
brother remembered it very well, as he had been six years old at
the time. The lovers had been in the habit of making the elder boy
drunk with beer, whenever circumstances were favourable for
intercourse during the night. The younger boy - the dreamer - who
was then three years old and slept in the room with the nurse, was
not regarded as an impediment.

   There is another way in which it
can be established with certainty without the assistance of
interpretation that a dream contains elements from childhood. This
is where the dream is of what has been called the
‘recurrent’ type: that is to say, where a dream was
first dreamt in childhood and then constantly reappears from time
to time during adult sleep. I am able to add to the familiar
examples of such dreams a few from my own records, though I have
never myself experienced one. A physician in his thirties told me
that from the earliest days of his childhood to the present time a
yellow lion frequently appeared in his dreams; he was able to give
a minute description of it. This lion out of his dreams made its
appearance one day in bodily form, as a china ornament that had
long disappeared. The young man then learnt from his mother that
this object had been his favourite toy during his early childhood,
though he himself had forgotten the fact.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

676

   If we turn now from the manifest
content of dreams to the dream-thoughts which only analysis
uncovers, we find to our astonishment that experiences from
childhood also play a part in dreams whose content would never have
led one to suppose it. I owe a particularly agreeable and
instructive example of a dream of this kind to my respected
colleague of the yellow lion. After reading Nansen’s
narrative of his polar expedition, he had a dream of being in a
field of ice and of giving the gallant explorer galvanic treatment
for an attack of sciatica from which he was suffering. In the
course of analysing the dream, he thought of a story dating from
his childhood, which alone, incidentally, made the dream
intelligible. One day, when he was a child of three or four, he had
heard the grown-ups talking of voyages of discovery and had asked
his father whether that was a serious illness. He had evidently
confused ‘
Reisen
’ [‘voyages’] with
‘
Reissen
’ [‘gripes’], and his
brothers and sisters saw to it that he never forgot this
embarrassing mistake.

   There was a similar instance of
this when, in the course of my analysis of the dream of the
monograph on the genus Cyclamen, I stumbled upon the childhood
memory of my father, when I was a boy of five, giving me a book
illustrated with coloured plates to destroy. It may perhaps be
doubted whether this memory really had any share in determining the
form taken by the content of the dream or whether it was not rather
that the process of analysis built up the connection subsequently.
But the copious and intertwined associative links warrant our
accepting the former alternative: cyclamen - favourite flower -
favourite food - artichokes; pulling to pieces like an artichoke,
leaf by leaf (a phrase constantly ringing in our ears in relation
to the piecemeal dismemberment of the Chinese Empire) - herbarium -
book-worms, whose favourite food is books. Moreover I can assure my
readers that the ultimate meaning of the dream, which I have not
disclosed, is intimately related to the subject of the childhood
scene.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

677

   In the case of another group of
dreams, analysis shows us that the actual wish which instigated the
dream, and the fulfilment of which is represented by the dream, is
derived from childhood; so that, to our surprise,
we find the
child and the child’s impulses still living on in the
dream
.

   At this point I shall once more
take up the interpretation of a dream which we have already found
instructive - the dream of my friend R. being my uncle. We have
followed its interpretation to the point of recognizing clearly as
one of its motives my wish to be appointed to a professorship; and
we explained the affection I felt in the dream for my friend R. as
a product of opposition and revolt against the slanders upon my two
colleagues which were contained in the dream-thoughts. The dream
was one of my own; I may therefore continue its analysis by saying
that my feelings were not yet satisfied by the solution that had so
far been reached. I knew that my waking judgement upon the
colleagues who were so ill-used in the dream-thoughts would have
been a very different one; and the force of my wish not to share
their fate in the matter of the appointment struck me as
insufficient to explain the contradiction between my waking and
dreaming estimates of them. If it was indeed true that my craving
to be addressed with a different title was as strong as all that,
it showed a pathological ambition which I did not recognize in
myself and which I believed was alien to me. I could not tell how
other people who believed they knew me would judge me in this
respect. It might be that I was really ambitious; but, if so, my
ambition had long ago been transferred to objects quite other than
the title and rank of
professor extraordinarius
.