Freud - Complete Works (120 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

696

   I must also refrain from any
detailed analysis of the two remaining episodes of the dream. I
will merely pick out the elements leading to the two childhood
scenes on whose account alone I embarked upon a discussion of this
dream. It will rightly be suspected that what compels me to make
this suppression is sexual material; but there is no need to rest
content with this explanation. After all, there are many things
which one has to keep secret from other people but of which one
makes no secret to oneself; and the question here is not as to why
I am obliged to conceal the solution but as to the motives for the
internal
censorship which hid the true content of the dream
from myself. I must therefore explain that the analysis of these
three episodes of the dream showed that they were impertinent
boastings, the issue of an absurd megalomania which had long been
suppressed in my waking life and a few of whose ramifications had
even made their way into the dream’s manifest content (e. g.
‘
I felt I was being very cunning
’), and which
incidentally accounted for my exuberant spirits during the evening
before I had the dream. The boasting extended to all spheres; for
instance, the mention of
Graz
went back to the slang phrase
‘What’s the price of Graz? ', which expresses the
self-satisfaction of a person who feels extremely well-off. The
first episode of the dream may also be included among the boastings
by anyone who will bear in mind the great Rabelais’
incomparable account of the life and deeds of Gargantua and his son
Pantagruel.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

697

   Here is the material relating to
the two childhood scenes which I have promised my readers. I had
bought a
new
trunk for the journey, of a
brownish
violet
colour. This colour appears more than once in the dream:
the
violet-brown violets made of a stiffish material
and
beside them a thing known as a
‘
Mädchenfänger
’
[‘girl-catcher’] - and the furniture in the ministerial
apartments. It is commonly believed by children that
people are
struck
by anything
new
. The following scene from my
childhood has been described to me, and my memory of the
description has taken the place of my memory of the scene itself.
It appears that when I was two years old I still occasionally
wetted the bed
, and when I was reproached for this I
consoled
my father by promising to buy him a nice
new
red
bed in N., the nearest town of any size. This was the
origin of the parenthetical phrase in the dream to the effect that
we bought or had to buy the
urinal in town: one must keep
one’s promises. (Notice, too, the juxtaposition in symbolism
of the male urinal and the female trunk or box.) This promise of
mine exhibited all the megalomania of childhood. We have already
come across the significant part played in dreams by
children’s difficulties in connection with micturition (cf.
the dream reported on
p. 685
). We have
also learned from the psycho-analysis of neurotic subjects the
intimate connection between bed-wetting and the character trait of
ambition.

   When I was seven or eight years
old there was another domestic scene, which I can remember very
clearly. One evening before going to sleep I disregarded the rules
which modesty lays down and obeyed the calls of nature in my
parents’ bedroom while they were present. In the course of
his reprimand, my father let fall the words: ‘The boy will
come to nothing.’ This must have been a frightful blow to my
ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly
recurring in my dreams and are always linked with an enumeration of
my achievements and successes, as though I wanted to say:
‘You see, I
have
come to something.’ This scene,
then, provided the material for the final episode of the dream, in
which - in revenge, of course - the roles were interchanged. The
older man (clearly my father, since his blindness in one eye
referred to his unilateral glaucoma¹ )was now micturating in
front of me, just as I had in front of him in my childhood. In the
reference to his glaucoma I was reminding him of the cocaine, which
had helped him in the operation, as though I had in that way kept
my promise. Moreover, I was making fun of him; I had to hand him
the urinal because he was blind, and I revelled in allusions to my
discoveries in connection with the theory of hysteria, of which I
felt so proud.²

  
¹
There is another interpretation. He was
one-eyed like Odin the father-god. -
Odhins Trost
. - The
consolation
I offered him in the first childhood scene of
buying him a new bed.

  
²
Here is some further interpretative
material. Handing him the glass reminded me of the story of the
peasant at the optician’s, trying glass after glass and still
not being able to read. - (Peasant-
catcher
[
Bauerfänger
, ‘sharper]: girl-
catcher
[
Mädchenfänger
] in the preceding episode of the
dream.) - The way in which the father in Zola’s
La
terre
was treated among the peasants after he had grown
feeble-minded. -The tragic requital that lay in my father’s
soiling his bed like a child during the last days of his life;
hence my appearance in the dream as a
sick-nurse
.
-’
Here it was as though thinking and experiencing were one
and the same thing
.’ This recalled a strongly
revolutionary literary play by Oskar Panizza, in which God the
Father is ignominiously treated as a paralytic old man. In his case
will and deed were represented as one and the same thing, and he
had to be restrained from cursing and swearing by one of his
archangels, a kind of Ganymede, because his imprecations would be
promptly fulfilled. - My making
plans
was a reproach against
my father dating from a later period. And indeed the whole
rebellious content of the dream, with its
lèse
majesté
and its derision of the higher authorities, went
back to rebellion against my father. A Prince is known as the
father of his country; the father is the oldest, first, and for
children the only authority, and from his autocratic power the
other social authorities have developed in the course of the
history of human civilization - except in so far as the
‘matriarchy’ calls for a qualification of this
assertion. -The phrase ‘
thinking and experiencing were one
and the same thing
’ had a reference to the explanation of
hysterical symptoms, and the ‘
male urinal
’
belonged in the same connection. I need not explain to a Viennese
the principle of the ‘
Gschnas
’. It consists in
constructing what appear to be rare, and precious objects out of
trivial and preferably comic and worthless materials (for instance,
in making armour out of saucepans, wisps of straw and dinner rolls)
- a favourite pastime at bohemian parties here in Vienna. I had
observed that this is precisely what hysterical subjects do:
alongside what has really happened to them, they unconsciously
build up frightful or perverse imaginary events which they
construct out of the most innocent and everyday material of their
experience. It is to these phantasies that their symptoms are in
the first instance attached and not to their recollections of real
events, whether serious or equally innocent. This revelation had
helped me over a number of difficulties and had given me particular
pleasure. What made it possible for me to refer to this by means of
the dream-element of the ‘ male urinal’ was as follows.
I had been told that at the latest
‘
Gschnas
’-night a poisoned chalice belonging to
Lucrezia Borgia had been exhibited; its central and principal
constituent had been a
male urinal
of the type used in
hospitals.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

698

   The two scenes of micturition
from my childhood were in any case closely linked to the topic of
megalomania; but their emergence while I was travelling to Aussee
was further assisted by the chance circumstance that there was no
lavatory attached to my compartment and that I had reason to
anticipate the predicament which in fact arose in the morning. I
awoke with the sensations of a physical need. One might, I think,
be inclined to suppose that these sensations were the actual
provoking agent of the dream; but I would prefer to take another
view, namely that the desire to micturate was only called up by the
dream-thoughts. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in my
sleep by physical needs of any kind, especially at the hour at
which I awoke on this occasion - a quarter to three in the morning.
And I may meet a further objection by remarking that upon other
journeys under more comfortable conditions I have scarcely ever
felt a need to micturate when I have woken up early. But in any
case it will do no harm to leave the point unresolved.

   My experiences in analysing
dreams have drawn my attention to the fact that trains of thought
reaching back to earliest childhood lead off even from dreams which
seem at first sight to have been completely interpreted, since
their sources and instigating wish have been discovered without
difficulty. I have therefore been compelled to ask myself whether
this characteristic may not be a further essential precondition of
dreaming. Stated in general terms, this would imply that every
dream was linked in its manifest content with recent experiences
and in its latent content with the most ancient experiences. And I
have in fact been able to show in my analysis of hysteria that
these ancient experiences have remained recent in the proper sense
of the word up to the immediate present. It is still extremely hard
to demonstrate the truth of this suspicion; and I shall have to
return in another connection (Chapter VII) to a consideration of
the probable part played by the earliest experiences of childhood
in the formation of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

699

   Of the three characteristics of
memory in dreams enumerated at the beginning of this chapter, one -
the preference for non-essential material in the content of dreams
- has been satisfactorily cleared up by being traced back to
dream-distortion. We have been able to confirm the existence of the
other two - the emphasis upon recent and upon infantile material -
but we have not been able to account for them on the basis of the
motives that lead to dreaming. These two characteristics inclusion
of both recent and infantile material, whose explanation and
appreciation remain to be discovered, must be kept in mind. Their
proper place must be looked for elsewhere - either in the
psychology of the state of sleep or in the discussion of the
structure of the mental apparatus upon which we shall later embark,
after we have learnt that the interpretation of dreams is like a
window through which we can get a glimpse of the interior of that
apparatus.

   There is, however, another
inference following from these last dream-analyses to which I will
draw attention at once. Dreams frequently seem to have more than
one meaning. Not only, as our examples have shown, may they include
several wish-fulfilments one alongside the other; but a succession
of meanings or wish-fulfilments may be superimposed on one another,
the bottom one being the fulfilment of a wish dating from earliest
childhood. And here again the question arises whether it might not
be more correct to assert that this occurs ‘invariably’
rather than ‘frequently.’¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] The fact that
the meanings of dreams are arranged in superimposed layers is one
of the most delicate, though also one of the most interesting,
problems of dream-interpretation. Anyone who forgets this
possibility will easily go astray and be led into making untenable
assertions upon the nature of dreams. Yet it is still a fact that
far too few investigations have been made into this matter.
Hitherto the only thorough piece of research has been Otto
Rank’s into the fairly regular stratification of symbols in
dreams provoked by pressure of the bladder.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

700

(C)

THE SOMATIC SOURCES OF DREAMS

   If one tries to interest an
educated layman in the problem of dreams and, with that end in
view, asks him what in his opinion are the sources from which they
arise, one finds as a rule that he feels confident of possessing
the answer to this part of the question. He thinks at once of the
effects produced on the construction of dreams by digestive
disturbances or difficulties - ‘dreams come from
indigestion’ -, by postures accidentally assumed by the body
and by other small incidents during sleep. It never seems to occur
to him that when all these factors have been taken into account
anything is left over that needs explaining.

   I have already discussed at
length in the opening chapter (Section C) the part assigned by
scientific writers to somatic sources of stimulation in the
formation of dreams; so that here I need only recall the results of
that enquiry. We found that three different kinds of somatic
sources of stimulation were distinguished: objective sensory
stimuli arising from external objects, internal states of
excitation of the sense organs having only a subjective basis, and
somatic stimuli derived from the interior of the body . We noticed
moreover that the authorities were inclined to push into the
background, or to exclude entirely, any possible
psychical
sources of dreams, as compared with these somatic stimuli (cf.
p. 552
). In our examination of the claims
made on behalf of somatic sources of stimulation we arrived at the
following conclusions. The significance of
objective
excitations of the sense organs (consisting partly of chance
stimuli during sleep and partly of excitations such as cannot fail
to impinge even upon a sleeping mind) is established from numerous
observations and has been experimentally confirmed (cf.
p. 538
). The part played by
subjective
sensory excitations seems to be demonstrated by
the recurrence in dreams of hypnagogic sensory images (cf.
p. 543 f.
). And lastly it appears that,
though it is impossible to prove that the images and ideas
occurring in our dreams can be traced back to
internal
somatic stimuli to the extent to which this has been asserted to be
the case, nevertheless this origin finds support in the universally
recognized influence exercised upon our dreams by states of
excitation in our digestive, urinary and sexual organs.