Freud - Complete Works (117 page)

   We have already seen (on
p. 534
) that a dream very seldom
reproduces recollections in such a way that they constitute,
without abbreviation or modification, the
whole
of its
manifest content. Nevertheless there are some undoubted instances
of this happening: and I can add a few more, relating, once more,
to childhood scenes. One of my patients was presented in a dream
with an almost undistorted reproduction of a sexual episode, which
was at once recognizable as a true recollection. His memory of the
event had, in fact, never been completely lost in waking life,
though it had become greatly obscured, and its revival was a
consequence of work previously done in analysis. At the age of
twelve, the dreamer had gone to visit a school friend who was laid
up in bed, when the latter, by what was probably an accidental
movement, uncovered his body. At the sight of his friend’s
genitals, my patient had been overcome by some sort of compulsion
and had uncovered himself too and caught hold of the other’s
penis. His friend looked at him with indignation and astonishment;
where upon, overcome by embarrassment, he let go. This scene was
repeated in a dream twenty-three years later, including all the
details of his feelings at the time. It was modified, however, to
this extent, that the dreamer assumed the passive instead of the
active role, while the figure of his school-friend was replaced by
someone belonging to his contemporary life.

   It is true that as a rule the
childhood scene is only represented in the dream’s manifest
content by an allusion, and has to be arrived at by an
interpretation of the dream. Such instances when they are recorded,
cannot carry much conviction, since as a rule there is no other
evidence of these childhood experiences having occurred: if they
date back to a very early age they are no longer recognized as
memories. The general justification for inferring the occurrence of
these childhood experiences from dreams is provided by a whole
number of factors in psycho-analytic work, which are mutually
consistent and thus seem sufficiently trustworthy. If I record some
of these inferred childhood experiences torn from their context for
the purposes of dream-interpretation, they may perhaps create
little impression, especially as I shall not even be able to quote
all the material on which the interpretations were based.
Nevertheless I shall not allow this to deter me from relating
them.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

683

I

   All the dreams of one of my women
patients were characterized by her being ‘rushed’: she
would be in a violent rush to get somewhere in time not to miss a
train, and so on. In one dream
she was going to call on a woman
friend; her mother told her to take a cab and not to walk; but she
ran instead and kept on falling down
. -The material which came
up in analysis led to memories of
rushing
about and romping
as a child. One particular dream recalled the favourite
children’s game of saying a sentence ‘
Die Kuh
rannte, bies sie fiel
’ [‘The cow ran till it
fell’] so quickly that it sounds as though it were a single
word - another
rush
in fact. All these innocent
rushings-about with little girl friends were remembered because
they took the place of other, less innocent ones.

II

   Here is another woman
patient’s dream:
She was in a big room in which all sorts
of machines were standing, like what she imagined an orthopaedic
institute to be. She was told I had no time and that she must have
her treatment at the same time as five others. She refused,
however, and would not lie down in the bed - or whatever it was -
that was meant for her. She stood in the corner and waited for me
to say it wasn’t true. Meanwhile the others were laughing at
her and saying it was just her way of ‘carrying on.’ -
Simultaneously, it was as though she was making a lot of small
squares
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

684

   The first part of the content of
this dream related to the treatment and was a transference on to
me. The second part contained an allusion to a scene in childhood.
The two parts were linked together by the mention of the bed.

   The
orthopaedic institute
referred back to a remark I had made in which I had compared the
treatment, alike in its length and in its nature, to an
orthopaedic
one. When I started her treatment I had been
obliged to tell her that for the time being
I had not much time
for her
, though later I should be able to give her a whole hour
daily. This had stirred up her old sensitiveness, which is a
principal trait in the character of children inclined to hysteria:
they are insatiable for love. My patient had been the youngest of a
family of six children (hence:
at the same time as five
others
) and had therefore been her father’s favourite;
but even so she seems to have felt that her adored father devoted
too little of his time and attention to her. -Her
waiting for me
to say it wasn’t true
had the following origin. A young
tailor’s apprentice had brought her a dress and she had given
him the money for it. Afterwards she had asked her husband whether
if the boy lost the money she would have to pay it over again. Her
husband, to
tease
her, had said that was so. (The
teasing
in the dream.) She kept on asking over and over
again and
waited for him to say after all it wasn’t
true
. It was then possible to infer that in the latent content
of the dream she had had a thought of whether she would have to pay
me twice as much if I gave her twice as much time - a thought which
she felt was avaricious or
filthy
. (Uncleanliness in
childhood is often replaced in dreams by avariciousness for money;
the link between the two is the word ‘filthy’.) If the
whole passage about
waiting for me to say
, etc., was
intended in the dream as a circumlocution for the word
‘filthy’, then her ‘
standing in the
corner
’ and ‘
not lying down in the
bed
’ would fit in with it as constituents of a scene from
her childhood: a scene in which she had dirtied her bed and been
punished by being made to stand in the corner, with a threat that
her father would not love her any more and her brothers and sisters
would laugh at her, and so on. -The
small squares
related to
her little niece, who had shown her the arithmetical trick of
arranging the digits in nine squares (I believe this is correct) so
that they add up in all directions to fifteen.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

685

III

   A man dreamt as follows:
He
saw two boys struggling - barrel-maker’s boys, to judge by
the implements lying around. One of the boys threw the other down;
the boy on the ground had earrings with blue stones. He hurried
towards the offender with his stick raised, to chastise him. The
latter fled for protection to a woman, who was standing by a wooden
fence, as though she was his mother. She was a woman of the working
classes and her back was turned to the dreamer. At last she turned
around and gave him a terrible look so that he ran off in terror.
The red flesh of the lower lids of her eyes could be seen standing
out
.

   The dream had made copious use of
trivial events of the previous day. He had in fact seen two boys in
the street, one of whom threw the other down. When he hurried up to
stop the fight they had both taken to their heels.
-
Barrel-maker’s boys
. This was only explained by a
subsequent dream in which he used the phrase ‘
knocking the
bottom out of a barrel
’. -From his experience he believed
that
earrings with blue stones
were mostly worn by
prostitutes. A line from a well-known piece of doggerel about
two boys
then occurred to him: ‘The other boy was
called Marie’ (i.e. was a girl). -
The woman standing
.
After the scene with the two boys he had gone for a walk along the
bank of the Danube and had profited by the loneliness of the spot
to micturate against
a wooden fence
. Further on, a
respectably dressed elderly lady had smiled at him in a very
friendly manner and had wanted to give him her visiting-card. Since
the woman in the dream was standing in the same position as he had
been in when he was micturating, it must have been a question of a
micturating woman. This tallies with her terrible
look
and
the
red flesh standing out
, which could only relate to the
gaping of the genitals caused by stooping. This, seen in his
childhood, reappeared in later memory as ‘
proud
flesh
’ - as a wound.

   The dream combined two
opportunities he had had as a little boy of seeing little
girls’ genitals: when they were
thrown down
and when
they were
micturating
. And from the other part of the
context it emerged that he had a recollection of being
chastised
or threatened by his father for the sexual
curiosity he had evinced on these occasions.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

686

IV

   Behind the following dream
(dreamt by an elderly lady) there lay a whole quantity of childhood
memories, combined, as best they might be, into a single
phantasy.

  
She went out in a violent rush
to do some commissions. In the Graben she sank down on her knees,
as though she was quite broken-down. A large number of people
collected round her, especially cab-drivers; but no one helped her
up. She made several vain attempts, and she must at last have
succeeded, for she was put into a cab which was to take her home.
Someone threw a big, heavily-laden basket (like a shopping-basket)
in through the window after her
.

   This was the same lady who always
felt ‘rushed’ in her dreams, just as she had rushed and
romped about when she was a child. The first scene in the dream was
evidently derived from the sight of a horse fallen down; in the
same way the word ‘
broken-down
’ referred to
horse-racing. In her youth she had ridden horses, and no doubt when
she was still younger she had actually
been
a horse. The
falling down
was related to a memory from very early
childhood of the seventeen year-old son of the house-porter who had
fallen down in the street in an epileptic fit and been brought home
in a carriage. She had of course only
heard
about this, but
the idea of epileptic fits (of the ‘
falling
sickness’) had obtained a hold on her imagination and had
later influenced the form taken by her own hysterical attacks. - If
a woman dreams of falling, it almost invariably has a sexual sense:
she is imagining herself as a ‘
fallen woman
’.
The present dream in particular scarcely left any room for doubt,
since the place where my patient fell was the Graben, a part of
Vienna notorious as a promenade for prostitutes. The
shopping-basket
[
Korb
] led to more than one
interpretation. It reminded her of the numerous
rebuffs
[
Körbe
] which she had dealt out to her suitors, as well
as of those which she complained of having later received herself.
This also connected with the fact that
no one helped her up
,
which she herself explained as a rebuff. The
shopping-basket
further reminded her of phantasies which had already come up in her
analysis, in which she was married far beneath her and had to go
marketing herself. And lastly it might serve as the mark of a
servant. At this point further childhood recollections emerged.
First, of a cook who had been dismissed for stealing, and who had
fallen on her knees
and begged to be forgiven. She herself
had been twelve at the time. Then, of a housemaid who had been
dismissed on account of a love-affair with the family
coachman
(who incidentally married her subsequently). Thus
this memory was also one of the sources of the coachmen
(
drivers
) in the dream (who, in contradistinction to the
actual coachman, failed to raise the fallen woman). There remained
to be explained the fact of the basket being
thrown in after
her
and
through the window
. This reminded her of
handing in
luggage to be
sent off
by rail, of the
country custom of lovers climbing in through their
sweethearts’
window
and of other little episodes from
her life in the country: how a gentleman had thrown some
blue
plums
to a lady
through the window
of her room, and how
her own younger sister had been scared by the village idiot looking
in
through her window
. An obscure memory from her tenth year
then began to emerge, of a nurse in the country who had had
love-scenes (which the girl might have seen something of) with one
of the servants in the house and who, along with her lover, had
been
sent off, thrown out
(the opposite of the dream-image
‘
thrown in
) - a story that we had already approached
from several other directions. A servant’s luggage or trunk
is referred to contemptuously in Vienna as ‘seven
plums
: ‘pack up your seven plums and out you
go!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

687

   My records naturally include a
large collection of patients’ dreams the analysis of which
led to obscure or entirely forgotten impressions of childhood,
often going back to the first three years of life. But it would be
unsafe to apply any conclusions drawn from them to dreams in
general. The persons concerned were in every instance neurotics and
in particular hysterics; and it is possible that the part played by
childhood scenes in their dreams might be determined by the nature
of their neurosis and not by the nature of dreams. Nevertheless, in
analysing my own dreams - and, after all, I am not doing so on
account of any gross pathological symptoms - it happens no less
frequently that in the latent content of a dream I come
unexpectedly upon a scene from childhood, and that all at once a
whole series of my dreams link up with the associations branching
out from some experience of my childhood. I have already given some
instances of this, and I shall have others to give in a variety of
connections. I cannot, perhaps, bring this section to a better
close than by reporting one or two dreams of mine in which recent
occasions and long-forgotten experiences of childhood came together
as sources of the dream.