Freud - Complete Works (116 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

678

   What, then, could have been the
origin of the ambitiousness which produced the dream in me? At that
point I recalled an anecdote I had often heard repeated in my
childhood. At the time of my birth an old peasant-woman had
prophesied to my proud mother that with her first-born child she
had brought a great man into the world. Prophecies of this kind
must be very common: there are so many mothers filled with happy
expectations and so many old peasant-women and others of the kind
who make up for the loss of their power to control things in the
present world by concentrating it on the future. Nor can the
prophetess have lost anything by her words. Could this have been
the source of my thirst for grandeur? But that reminded me of
another experience, dating from my later childhood, which provided
a still better explanation. My parents had been n the habit, when I
was a boy of eleven or twelve, of taking me with them to the
Prater. One evening, while we were sitting in a restaurant there,
our attention had been attracted by a man who was moving from one
table to another and, for a small consideration, improvising a
verse upon any topic presented to him. I was despatched to bring
the poet to our table and he showed his gratitude to the messenger.
Before enquiring what the chosen topic was to be, he had dedicated
a few lines to myself; and he had been inspired to declare that I
should probably grow up to be a Cabinet Minister. I still
remembered quite well what an impression this second prophecy had
made on me. Those were the days of the
‘
Bürger
’ Ministry. Shortly before, my
father had brought home portraits of these middle-class
professional men - Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger and the rest - and
we had illuminated the house in their honour. There had even been
some Jews among them. So henceforth every industrious Jewish
schoolboy carried a Cabinet Minister’s portfolio in his
satchel. The events of that period no doubt had some bearing on the
fact that up to a time shortly before I entered the University it
had been my intention to study Law; it was only at the last moment
that I changed my mind. A ministerial career is definitely barred
to a medical man. But now to return to my dream. It began to dawn
on me that my dream had carried me back from the dreary present to
the cheerful hopes of the days of the
‘
Bürger
’ Ministry, and that the wish that
it had done its best to fulfil was one dating back to those times.
In mishandling my two learned and eminent colleagues because they
were Jews, and in treating the one as a simpleton and the other as
a criminal, I was behaving as though I were the Minister, I had put
myself in the Minister’s place. Turning the tables on His
Excellency with a vengeance! He had refused to appoint me
professor extraordinarius
and I had retaliated in the dream
by stepping into his shoes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

679

   In another instance it became
apparent that, though the wish which instigated the dream was a
present-day one, it had received a powerful reinforcement from
memories that stretched far back into childhood. What I have in
mind is a series of dreams which are based upon a longing to visit
Rome. For a long time to come, no doubt, I shall have to continue
to satisfy that longing in my dreams: for at the season of the year
when it is possible for me to travel, residence in Rome must be
avoided for reasons of health.¹ For instance, I dreamt once
that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber
and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. The train began to move off, and
it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in the city.
The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known
engraving which I had caught sight of for a moment the day before
in the sitting-room of one of my patients. Another time someone led
me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist;
it was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so
clear. There was more in the content of this dream than I feel
prepared to detail; but the theme of ‘the promised land seen
from afar’ was obvious in it. The town which I saw in this
way for the first time, shrouded in mist, was - Lübeck, and
the prototype of the hill was - at Gleichenberg. In a third dream I
had at last got to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was
disappointed to find that the scenery was far from being of an
urban character.
There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one
side of it were black cliffs and on the other meadows with big
white flowers. I noticed a Herr Zucker
(whom I knew slightly)
and determined to ask him the way to the city
. I was clearly
making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never
seen in my waking life. Breaking up the landscape in the dream into
its elements, I found that the white flowers took me to Ravenna,
which I have visited and which, for a time at least, superseded
Rome as capital of Italy. In the marshes round Ravenna we found the
loveliest water-lilies growing in black water. Because we had had
such difficulty in picking them out of the water, the dream made
them grow in meadows like the narcissi at our own Aussee. The dark
cliff, so close to the water, reminded me vividly of the valley of
the Tepl near Karlsbad. ‘
Karlsbad
’ enabled me to
explain the curious detail of my having asked Herr Zucker the way.
The material out of which the dream was woven included at this
point two of those facetious Jewish anecdotes which contain so much
profound and often bitter worldly wisdom and which we so greatly
enjoy quoting in our talk and letters. Here is the first one: the
‘
constitution
’ story. An impecunious Jew had
stowed himself away without a ticket in the fast train to
Karlsbad
. He was caught, and each time tickets were
inspected he was taken out of the train and treated more and more
severely. At one of the stations on his
via dolorosa
he met
an acquaintance, who asked him where he was travelling to.
‘To Karlsbad’, was his reply, ‘if my constitution
can stand it.’ My memory then passed on to another story: of
a Jew who could not speak French and had been recommended when he
was in Paris to ask the way to the rue Richelieu. Paris itself had
for many long years been another goal of my longings; and the
blissful feelings with which I first set foot on its pavement
seemed to me a guarantee that others of my wishes would be
fulfilled as well. ‘Asking the way’, moreover, was a
direct allusion to Rome, since it is well known that all roads lead
there. Again, the name
Zucker
was once more an allusion to
Karlsbad
; for we are in the habit of prescribing treatment
there for anyone suffering from the
constitutional
complaint
of diabetes. The instigation to this dream had been a proposal made
by my friend in Berlin that we should meet in Prague at Easter.
What we were going to discuss there would have included something
with a further connection with ‘sugar’ and
‘diabetes’.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] I discovered
long since that it only needs a little courage to fulfil wishes
which till then have been regarded as unattainable; [
added
1925:] and thereafter became a constant pilgrim to Rome.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

680

   A fourth dream, which occurred
soon after the last one, took me to Rome once more. I saw a
street-corner before me and was surprised to find so many posters
in German stuck up there. I had written to my friend with prophetic
foresight the day before to say that I thought Prague might not be
an agreeable place for a German to walk about in. Thus the dream
expressed at the same time a wish to meet him in Rome instead of in
a Bohemian town, and a desire, probably dating back to my student
days, that the German language might be better tolerated in Prague.
Incidentally, I must have understood Czech in my earliest
childhood, for I was born in a small town in Moravia which has a
Slav population. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my
seventeenth year, printed itself on my memory so easily that I can
repeat it to this day, though I have no notion what it means. Thus
there was no lack of connections with my early childhood in these
dreams either.

   It was on my last journey to
Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimene, that
finally - after having seen the Tiber and sadly turned back when I
was only fifty miles from Rome - I discovered the way in which my
longing for the eternal city had been reinforced by impressions
from my youth. I was in the act of making a plan to by-pass Rome
next year and travel to Naples, when a sentence occurred to me
which I must have read in one of our classical authors:¹
‘Which of the two, it may be debated, walked up and down his
study with the greater impatience after he had formed his plan of
going to Rome - Winckelmann, the Vice-Principal, or Hannibal, the
Commander-in-Chief’ I had actually been following in
Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see
Rome; and he too had moved into the Campagna when everyone had
expected him in Rome. But Hannibal, whom I had come to resemble in
these respects, had been the favourite hero of my later school
days. Like so many boys of that age, I had sympathized in the Punic
Wars not with the Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in
the higher classes I began to understand for the first time what it
meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-semitic feelings among
the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position,
the figure of the semitic general rose still higher in my esteem.
To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict
between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic
church. And the increasing importance of the effects of the
anti-semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the
thoughts and feelings of those early days. Thus the wish to go to
Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of
other passionate wishes. Their realization was to be pursued with
all the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Carthaginian,
though their fulfilment seemed at the moment just as little
favoured by destiny as was Hannibal’s lifelong wish to enter
Rome.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] The author in
question must no doubt have been Jean Paul.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

681

   At that point I was brought up
against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in
all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years
old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and
reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live
in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to
show me how much better things were now than they had been in his
days. ‘When I was a young man’, he said, ‘I went
for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was
well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up
to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and
shouted: "Jew! get off the pavement!"' ‘And
what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and
picked up my cap’, was his quiet reply. This struck me as
unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding
the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with
another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which
Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca,¹ made his boy swear
before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever
since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.

   I believe I can trace my
enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general a step further back into my
childhood; so that once more it would only have been a question of
a transference of an already formed emotional relation on to a new
object. One of the first books that I got hold of when I had learnt
to read was Thiers’ history of the Consulate and Empire. I
can still remember sticking labels on the flat backs of my wooden
soldiers with the names of Napoleon’s marshals written on
them. And at that time my declared favourite was already Massena
(or to give the name its Jewish form, Manasseh).² (No doubt
this preference was also partly to be explained by the fact that my
birthday fell on the same day as his, exactly a hundred years
later.) Napoleon himself lines up with Hannibal owing to their both
having crossed the Alps. It may even be that the development of
this martial ideal is traceable still further back into my
childhood: to the times when, at the age of three, I was in a close
relation, sometimes friendly but some times warlike, with a boy a
year older than myself, and to the wishes which that relation must
have stirred up in the weaker of us.

   The deeper one carries the
analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of
experiences in childhood which have played a part among the sources
of that dream’s latent content.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] In the first
edition the name of Hasdrubal appeared instead: a puzzling mistake,
which I have explained in my
Psychopathology of Everyday
Life
(1901
b
), Chapter X (2).

  
²
[
Footnote added
1930:] Incidentally,
doubts have been thrown on the Marshal’s Jewish
origin.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

682