Freud - Complete Works (119 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

692

  
A crowd of people, a meeting
of students. - A count (Thun or Taaffe) was speaking. He was
challenged to say something about the Germans, and declared with a
contemptuous gesture that their favourite flower was a colt’s
foot, and put some sort of dilapidated leaf - or rather the
crumpled skeleton of a leaf - into his buttonhole. I fired up - so
I fired up,
¹
though I was surprised at my taking such
an attitude
.

   (Then, less distinctly:)
It
was as though I was in the Aula, the entrances were cordoned off
and we had to escape. I made my way through a series of beautifully
furnished rooms, evidently ministerial or public apartments, with
furniture upholstered in a colour between brown and violet; at last
I came to a corridor, in which a housekeeper was sitting, an
elderly stout woman. I avoided speaking to her, but she evidently
thought I had a right to pass, for she asked whether she should
accompany me with the lamp. I indicated to her, by word or gesture,
that she was to stop on the staircase; and I felt I was being very
cunning in thus avoiding inspection at the exit. I got downstairs
and found a narrow and steep ascending path, along which I
went
.

   (Becoming indistinct
again) . . .
It was as though the second problem
was to get out of the town, just as the first one had been to get
out of the house. I was driving in a cab and had ordered the driver
to drive me to a station. ‘I can’t drive with you along
the railway-line itself’, I said, after he had raised some
objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if I had
already driven with him for some of the distance one normally
travels by train. The stations were cordoned off. I wondered
whether to go to Krems or Znaim, but reflected that the Court would
be in residence there, so I decided in favour of Graz, or some such
place. I was now sitting in the compartment, which was like a
carriage on the Stadtbahn; and in my buttonhole I had a peculiar
plaited, long-shaped object, and beside it some violet-brown
violets made of a stiff material. This greatly struck people
.
(At this point the scene broke off.)

  
Once more I was in front of
the station, but this time in the company of an elderly gentleman.
I thought of a plan for remaining unrecognized; and then saw that
this plan had already been put into effect. It was as though
thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing. He appeared
to be blind, at all events with one eye, and I handed him a male
glass urinal (which we had to buy or had bought in town). So I was
a sick-nurse and had to give him the urinal because he was blind.
If the ticket-collector were to see us like that, he would be
certain to let us get away without noticing us. Here the
man’s attitude and his micturating penis appeared in plastic
form
. (This was the point at which I awoke, feeling a need to
micturate.)

   The dream as a whole gives one
the impression of being in the nature of a phantasy in which the
dreamer was carried back to the Revolutionary year 1848. Memories
of that year had been recalled to me by the Jubilee in 1898, as
well as by a short trip which I had made to
the Wachau
, in
the course of which I had visited Emmersdorf,² the place of
retirement of the student-leader Fischhof, to whom certain elements
in the manifest content of the dream may allude. My associations
then led me to England and to my brother’s house there. He
used often to tease his wife with the words ‘Fifty Years
Ago’ (from the title of one of Lord Tennyson’s poems),
which his children used then to correct to ‘
fifteen
years
ago’. This revolutionary phantasy, however, which
was derived from ideas aroused in me by seeing Count Thun, was like
the façade of an Italian church in having no organic
relation with the structure lying behind it. But it differed from
those façades in being disordered and full of gaps, and in
the fact that portions of the interior construction had forced
their way through into it at many points.

  
¹
This repetition crept into my record of the
dream, apparently through inadvertence. I have let it stand, since
the analysis showed that it was significant.

  
²
(
Footnote added
1925:] This is a
mistake, but not a slip this time. I only learnt later that the
Emmersdorf in the Wachau is not to be identified with the place of
the same name which was the refuge of the revolutionary leader
Fischhof.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

693

   The first situation in the dream
was an amalgam of several scenes, which I can separate out. The
insolent attitude adopted by the Count in the dream was copied from
a scene at my secondary school when I was
fifteen years
old.
We had hatched a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant
master, the moving spirit of which had been one of my
school-fellows who since those days seemed to have taken
Henry
VIII
of
England
as his model. The leadership in the
chief assault was allotted to me, and the signal for open revolt
was a discussion on the significance of the Danube to Austria (cf.
the Wachau
). One of our fellow-conspirators had been the
only aristocratic boy in the class, who, on account of his
remarkable length of limb, was called ‘the Giraffe’. He
was standing up, like the Count in my dream, having been taken to
task by the school tyrant, the
German language
master. The
favourite flower
and the
putting into his buttonhole
of something in the nature of a flower (which last made me think of
some orchids which I had brought the same day for a woman friend
and also of a rose of Jericho) were a striking reminder of the
scene in one of Shakespeare’s historical plays which
represented the beginning of the Wars of the
Red
and
White
Roses. (The mention of
Henry VIII
opened the
way to this recollection.) - From there it was only a short step to
red and white carnations. (Two little couplets, one in
German
and the other in
Spanish
, slipped into the
analysis at this point:

                                                               
Rosen, Tulpen, Nelken,

                                                               
alle Blumen welken.
¹

                                                               
Isabelita
, no
Ilores,

                                                               
que se marchitan las flores.
²

The appearance of a
Spanish
couplet led
back to
Figaro
.) Here in Vienna white carnations had become
an emblem of anti-semitism, and red ones of the Social Democrats.
Behind this lay a recollection of a piece of anti-semitic
provocation during a railway journey in the lovely Saxon
countryside (cf.
Anglo
-Saxon). -The third scene which
contributed to the formation of the first situation in the dream
dated from my early student days. There was a discussion in a
German
students’ club on the relation of philosophy to
the natural sciences. I was a green youngster, full of
materialistic theories, and thrust myself forward to give
expression to an extremely one-sided point of view. Thereupon
someone who was my senior and my superior, someone who has since
then shown his ability as a leader of men and an organizer of large
groups (and who also, incidentally, bears a name derived from the
Animal Kingdom), stood up and gave us a good talking-to: he too, he
told us, had fed swine in his youth and returned repentant to his
father’s house.
I fired up
(as I did in the dream) and
replied boorishly that since I now knew that he had fed
swine
in his youth I was no longer
surprised
at the
tone of his speeches. (In the dream I was
surprised
at my
German-nationalist attitude.) There was a general uproar and I was
called upon from many sides to withdraw my remarks, but I refused
to do so. The man I had insulted was too sensible to look upon the
incident as a
challenge
, and let the affair drop.

  
¹
[‘Roses, tulips, carnations: every
flower fades.’]

  
²
[‘
Isabelita
, do not weep because the flowers
fade.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

694

   The remaining elements of this
first situation in the dream were derived from deeper layers. What
was the meaning of the Count’s pronouncement about
colt’s foot? To find the answer, I followed a train of
associations: colt’s foot [‘
Huflattich
’,
literally ‘hoof lettuce’] - lettuce - salad -
dog-in-the-manger [‘
Salathund
’, literally
‘salad dog’]. Here was a whole collection of terms of
abuse: ‘Gir-affe’ [‘
Affe
’ is the
German for ‘ape’], ‘swine’,
‘dog’ - and I could have arrived at
‘donkey’ if I had made a detour through another name
and insulted yet another academic teacher. Moreover, I translated
‘colt’s foot’ - whether rightly or wrongly I
could not tell - by the French ‘
pisse-en-lit
’.
This information was derived from Zola’s
Germinal
, in
which a child was told to pick some of that plant for salad. The
French word for ‘dog’ - ‘
chien
’ -
reminded me of the major function (‘
chier
’ in
French, compared with ‘
pisser
’ for the minor
one). Soon, I thought, I should have collected examples of
impropriety in all three states of matter - solid, liquid and
gaseous; - for this same book,
Germinal
, which had plenty to
do with the approaching revolution, contained an account of a very
peculiar sort of competition - for the production of a gaseous
excretion known by the name of ‘
flatus
’.¹ I
now saw that the path leading to
flatus
had been prepared
far ahead: from
flowers
, through the
Spanish
couplet,
Isabelita
,
Isabella
and Ferdinand,
Henry VIII
,
English
history, and the Armada which sailed against
England
, after whose defeat a medal was struck, bearing the
inscription ‘
Flavit
et dissipati sunt’²,
since the storm-blast had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had
thought, half seriously, of using those words as the heading to the
chapter on ‘Therapy’, if ever I got so far as producing
a detailed account of my theory and treatment of hysteria.

  
¹
Not in fact in
Germinal
but in
La
terre
: a mistake which I only observed after I had completed
the analysis. - Notice the occurrence of the same letters in
‘
Huflat
tich’ [‘colt’s foot’]
and ‘
flatus
’.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1925:] An
unsolicited biographer, Dr. Fritz Wittels has charged me with
having omitted the name of Jehovah from the above motto.
[
Added
1930:] The English medallion bears the deity’s
name in Hebrew lettering on a cloud in the background. It is so
placed that it can be taken as being part either of the design or
of the inscription.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

695

   Turning now to the second episode
of the dream, I am unable to deal with it in such detail - out of
consideration for the censorship. For I was putting myself in the
place of an exalted personage of those revolutionary times, who
also had an adventure with an eagle [
Adler
] and is said to
have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, and so on. I thought
to myself that
I should not be justified in passing
the
censorship at this point, even though the greater part of the story
was told me by a Hofrat (a
consiliarius aulicus
[court
councillor] - cf.
Aula
). The series of public rooms in the
dream were derived from His Excellency’s saloon carriage, of
which I had succeeded in getting a glimpse. But the
‘rooms’ [
Zimmer
] also meant ‘women’
[
Frauenzimmer
], as is often the case in dreams - in this
instance ‘public women’. In the figure of the
housekeeper I was showing my lack of gratitude towards a witty
elderly lady and ill repaying her hospitality and the many good
stories that I heard while I was stopping in her house. -The
allusion to the lamp went back to Grillparzer, who introduced a
charming episode of a similar kind, which he had actually
experienced, into his tragedy about Hero and Leander,
Des Meeres
und der Liebe Wellen
[‘The
Waves of the Sea
and of
Love’] - the Armada and the
storm
.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] In an
interesting paper, Silberer (1910) has tried to show from this part
of my dream that the dream-work can succeed in reproducing not only
the latent dream-thoughts but also the psychical processes that
take place during the formation of dreams. (This is what he terms
‘the functional phenomenon’.) [
Added
1914:] But
he is, I think, overlooking the fact that ‘the psychical
processes that take place during the formation of dreams’
were, like the rest, part of the
material
of my thoughts. In
this boastful dream I was evidently proud of having discovered
those processes.