Freud - Complete Works (124 page)

  
ANALYSIS
. -The situation in the
dream is taken from everyday reality. I occupy two flats in a house
in Vienna, which are connected only by the public staircase. My
consulting-room and study are on the upper ground floor and my
living rooms are one storey higher. When, late in the evening, I
have finished my work down below, I go up the stairs to my bedroom.
On the evening before I had the dream, I had in fact made this
short journey in rather disordered dress - that is to say, I had
taken off my collar and tie and cuffs. In the dream this had been
turned into a higher degree of undress, but, as usual, an
indeterminate one. I usually go upstairs two or three steps at a
time; and this was recognized in the dream itself as a
wish-fulfilment: the ease with which I achieved it reassured me as
to the functioning of my heart. Further, this method of going
upstairs was an effective contrast to the inhibition in the second
half of the dream. It showed me - what needed no proving - that
dreams find no difficulty in representing motor acts carried out to
perfection. (One need only recall dreams of flying.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

718

   The staircase up which I was
going, however, was not the one in my house. At first I failed to
recognize it and it was only the identity of the person who met me
that made it clear to me what locality was intended. This person
was the maid-servant of the old lady whom I was visiting twice a
day in order to give her injections; and the staircase, too, was
just like the one in her house which I had to go up twice a
day.

   Now how did this staircase and
this female figure come to be in my dream? The feeling of shame at
not being completely dressed is no doubt of a sexual nature; but
the maid-servant whom I dreamt about was older than I am, surly and
far from attractive. The only answer to the problem that occurred
to me was this. When I paid my morning visits to this house I used
as a rule to be seized with a desire to clear my throat as I went
up the stairs and the product of my expectoration would fall on the
staircase. For on neither of these floors was there a spittoon; and
the view I took was that the cleanliness of the stairs should not
be maintained at my expense but should be made possible by the
provision of a spittoon. The concierge, an equally elderly and
surly woman (but of cleanly instincts, as I was prepared to admit),
looked at the matter in a different light. She would lie in wait
for me to see whether I should again make free of the stairs, and,
if she found that I did, I used to hear her grumbling audibly; and
for several days afterwards she would omit the usual greeting when
we met. The day before I had the dream the concierge’s party
had received a reinforcement in the shape of the maid-servant. I
had, as usual, concluded my hurried visit to the patient, when the
servant stopped me in the hall and remarked: ‘You might have
wiped your boots, doctor, before you came into the room to-day.
You’ve made the red carpet all dirty again with your
feet.’ This was the only claim the staircase and the
maid-servant had to appearing in my dream.

   There was an internal connection
between my running up the stairs and my spitting on the stairs.
Pharyngitis as well as heart trouble are both regarded as
punishments for the vice of smoking. And on account of that habit
my reputation for tidiness was not of the highest with the
authorities in my own house any more than in the other; so that the
two were fused into one in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

719

   I must postpone my further
interpretation of this dream till I can explain the origin of the
typical dream of being incompletely dressed. I will only point out
as a provisional conclusion to be drawn from the present dream that
a sensation of inhibited movement in dreams is produced whenever
the particular context requires it. The cause of this part of the
dream’s content cannot have been that some special
modification in my powers of movement had occurred during my sleep,
since only a moment earlier I had seen myself (almost as though to
confirm this fact) running nimbly up the stairs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

720

(D)

TYPICAL DREAMS

   We are not in general in a
position to interpret another person’s dream unless he is
prepared to communicate to us the unconscious thoughts that lie
behind its content. The practical applicability of our method of
interpreting dreams is in consequence severely restricted.¹ We
have seen that, as a general rule, each person is at liberty to
construct his dream-world according to his individual peculiarities
and so to make it unintelligible to other people. It now appears,
however, that, in complete contrast to this, there are a certain
number of dreams which almost everyone has dreamt alike and which
we are accustomed to assume must have the same meaning for
everyone. A special interest attaches, moreover, to these typical
dreams because they presumably arise from the same sources in every
case and thus seem particularly well qualified to throw light on
the sources of dreams.

   It is therefore with quite
particular anticipations that we shall attempt to apply our
technique of dream-interpretation to these typical dreams; and it
is with great reluctance that we shall have to confess that our art
disappoints our expectations precisely in relation to this
material. If we attempt to interpret a typical dream, the dreamer
fails as a rule to produce the associations which would in other
cases have led us to understand it, or else his associations become
obscure and insufficient so that we cannot solve our problem with
their help. We shall learn in a later portion of this work why this
is so and how we can make up for this defect in our technique. My
readers will also discover why it is that at the present point I am
able to deal only with a few members of the group of typical dreams
and must postpone my consideration of the rest until this later
point in my discussion.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] This
assertion that our method of interpreting dreams cannot be applied
unless we have access to the dreamer’s associative material
requires supplementing: our interpretative activity is in one
instance independent of these associations - if, namely, the
dreamer has employed symbolic elements in the content of the dream.
In such case we make use of what is, strictly speaking, a second
and auxiliary method of dream-interpretation. (See
below.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

721

(
a
) 
EMBARRASING DREAMS OF BEING
NAKED

   Dreams of being naked or
insufficiently dressed in the presence of strangers sometimes occur
with the additional feature of there being a complete absence of
any such feeling as shame on the dreamer’s part. We are only
concerned here, however, with those dreams of being naked in which
one
does
feel shame and embarrassment and tries to escape or
hide, and is then overcome by a strange inhibition which prevents
one from moving and makes one feel incapable of altering
one’s distressing situation. It is only with this
accompaniment that the dream is typical; without it, the gist of
its subject-matter may be included in every variety of context or
may be ornamented with individual trimmings. Its essence lies in a
distressing feeling in the nature of shame and in the fact that one
wishes to hide one’s nakedness, as a rule by locomotion, but
finds one is unable to do so. I believe the great majority of my
readers will have found themselves in this situation in dreams.

   The nature of the undress
involved is customarily far from clear. The dreamer may say
‘I was in my chemise’, but this is rarely a distinct
picture. The kind of undress is usually so vague that the
description is expressed as an alternative: ‘I was in my
chemise or petticoat.’ As a rule the defect in the
dreamer’s toilet is not so grave as to appear to justify the
shame to which it gives rise. In the case of a man who has worn the
Emperor’s uniform, nakedness is often replaced by some breach
of the dress regulations: ‘I was walking in the street
without my sabre and saw some officers coming up’, or
‘I was without my necktie’, or ‘I was wearing
civilian check trousers’, and so on.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

722

   The people in whose presence one
feels ashamed are almost always strangers, with their features left
indeterminate. In the typical dream it never happens that the
clothing which causes one so much embarrassment is objected to or
so much as noticed by the onlookers. On the contrary, they adopt
indifferent or (as I observed in one particularly clear dream)
solemn and stiff expressions of face. This is a suggestive
point.

   The embarrassment of the dreamer
and the indifference of the onlookers offer us, when taken
together, a contradiction of the kind that is so common in dreams.
It would after all be more in keeping with the dreamer’s
feelings if strangers looked at him in astonishment and derision or
with indignation. But this objectionable feature of the situation
has, I believe, been got rid of by wish-fulfilment, whereas some
force has led to the retention of the other features; and the two
portions of the dream are consequently out of harmony with each
other. We possess an interesting piece of evidence that the dream
in the form in which it appears - partly distorted by
wish-fulfilment - has not been rightly understood. For it has
become the basis of a fairy tale which is familiar to us all in
Hans Andersen’s version,
The Emperor’s New
Clothes
, and which has quite recently been put into verse by
Ludwig Fulda in his
Der Talisman
. Hans Andersen’s
fairy tale tells us how two impostors weave the Emperor a costly
garment which, they say, will be visible only to persons of virtue
and loyalty. The Emperor walks out in this invisible garment, and
all the spectators, intimidated by the fabric’s power to act
as a touchstone, pretend not to notice the Emperor’s
nakedness.

   This is just the situation in our
dream. It is hardly rash to assume that the unintelligibility of
the dream’s content, as it exists in the memory has led to
its being recast in a form designed to make sense of the situation.
That situation, however, is in the process deprived of its original
meaning and put to extraneous uses. But, as we shall see later, it
is a common thing for the conscious thought-activity of a second
psychical system to misunderstand the content of a dream in this
way, and this misunderstanding must be regarded as one of the
factors in determining the final form assumed by dreams. Moreover
we shall learn that similar misunderstandings (taking place, once
again, within one and the same psychical personality) play a major
part in the construction of obsessions and phobias.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

723

   In the case of our dream we are
in a position to indicate the material upon which the
misinterpretation is based. The impostor is the dream and the
Emperor is the dreamer himself; the moralizing purpose of the dream
reveals an obscure knowledge of the fact that the latent
dream-content is concerned with forbidden wishes that have fallen
victim to repression. For the context in which dreams of this sort
appear during my analyses of neurotics leaves no doubt that they
are based upon memories from earliest childhood. It is only in our
childhood that we are seen in inadequate clothing both by members
of our family and by strangers - nurses, maid-servants, and
visitors; and it is only then that we feel no shame at our
nakedness.¹ We can observe how undressing has an almost
intoxicating effect on many children even in their later years,
instead of making them feel ashamed. They laugh and jump about and
slap themselves, while their mother, or whoever else may be there,
reproves them and says: ‘Ugh! Shocking! You mustn’t
ever do that!’ Children frequently manifest a desire to
exhibit. One can scarcely pass through a country village in our
part of the world without meeting some child of two or three who
lifts up his little shirt in front of one - in one’s honour,
perhaps. One of my patients has a conscious memory of a scene in
his eighth year, when at bed-time he wanted to dance into the next
room where his little sister slept, dressed in his night-shirt, but
was prevented by his nurse. In the early history of neurotics an
important part is played by exposure to children of the opposite
sex; in paranoia delusions of being observed while dressing and
undressing are to be traced back to experiences of this kind; while
among persons who have remained at the stage of perversion there is
one class in which this infantile impulse has reached the pitch of
a symptom - the class of ‘exhibitionists’.

  
¹
A child plays a part in the fairy tale as
well; for it was a small child who suddenly exclaimed: ‘But
he has nothing on!’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

724

   When we look back at this
unashamed period of childhood it seems to us a Paradise; and
Paradise itself is no more than a group phantasy of the childhood
of the individual. That is why mankind were naked in Paradise and
were without shame in one another’s presence; till a moment
arrived when shame and anxiety awoke, expulsion followed, and
sexual life and the tasks of cultural activity began. But we can
regain this Paradise every night in our dreams. I have already
expressed a suspicion that impressions of earliest childhood (that
is, from the prehistoric epoch until about the end of the third
year of life) strive to achieve reproduction, from their very
nature and irrespectively perhaps of their actual content, and that
their repetition constitutes the fulfilment of a wish. Thus dreams
of being naked are dreams of exhibiting.¹