Freud - Complete Works (125 page)

   The core of a dream of exhibiting
lies in the figure of the dreamer himself (not as he was as a child
but as he appears at the present time) and his inadequate clothing
(which emerges indistinctly, whether owing to superimposed layers
of innumerable later memories of being in undress or as a result of
the censorship). Added to these are the figures of the people in
whose presence the dreamer feels ashamed. I know of no instance in
which the actual spectators of the infantile scene of exhibiting
have appeared in the dream; a dream is scarcely ever a simple
memory. Curiously enough, the people upon whom our sexual interest
was directed in childhood are omitted in all the reproductions
which occur in dreams, in hysteria and in obsessional neurosis. It
is only in paranoia that these spectators reappear and, though they
remain invisible, their presence is inferred with fanatical
conviction. What takes their place in dreams - ‘a lot of
strangers’ who take no notice of the spectacle that is
offered - is nothing more nor less than the wishful contrary of the
single familiar individual before whom the dreamer exposed himself.
Incidentally, ‘a lot of strangers’ frequently appear in
dreams in many other connections, and they always stand as the
wishful contrary of ‘secrecy’. It is to be noticed that
even in paranoia, where the original state of things is restored,
this reversal into a contrary is observed. The subject feels that
he is no longer alone, he has no doubt that he is being observed,
but the observers are ‘a lot of strangers’ whose
identity is left curiously vague.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] Ferenczi has
recorded a number of interesting dreams of being naked dreamt by
women
. There was no difficulty in tracing these back to the
infantile desire to exhibit; but they differed in some respects
from the ‘typical’ dreams of being naked which I have
discussed in the text.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

725

   In addition to this, repression
plays a part in dreams of exhibiting; for the distress felt in such
dreams is a reaction on the part of the second system against the
content of the scene of exhibiting having found expression in spite
of the ban upon it. If the distress was to be avoided, the scene
should never have been revived.

   We shall return later to the
feeling of being inhibited. It serves admirably in dreams to
represent a conflict in the will or a negative. The unconscious
purpose requires the exhibiting to proceed; the censorship demands
that it shall be stopped.

   There can be no doubt that the
connections between our typical dreams and fairy tales and the
material of other kinds of creative writing are neither few nor
accidental. It sometimes happens that the sharp eye of a creative
writer has an analytic realization of the process of transformation
of which he is habitually no more than the tool. If so, he may
follow the process in a reverse direction and so trace back the
imaginative writing to a dream. One of my friends has drawn my
attention to the following passage in Gottfried Keller’s
Der grüner Heinrich
: ‘I hope, my dear Lee, that
you may never learn from your own personal experience the peculiar
and
piquant
truth of the plight of Odysseus when he
appeared, naked and covered with mud, before the eyes of
Nausicaä and her maidens! Shall I tell you how that can
happen? Let us look into our example. If you are wandering about in
a foreign land, far from your home and from all that you hold dear,
if you have seen and heard many things, have known sorrow and care,
and are wretched and forlorn, then without fail you will dream one
night that you are coming near to your home; you will see it
gleaming and shining in the fairest colours, and the sweetest,
dearest and most beloved forms will move towards you. Then suddenly
you will become aware that you are in rags, naked and dusty. You
will be seized with a nameless shame and dread, you will seek to
find covering and to hide yourself, and you will awake bathed in
sweat. This, so long as men breathe, is the dream of the unhappy
wanderer; and Homer has evoked the picture of his plight from the
deepest and eternal nature of man.’

   The deepest and eternal nature of
man, upon whose evocation in his hearers the poet is accustomed to
rely, lies in those impulses of the mind which have their roots in
a childhood that has since become prehistoric. Suppressed and
forbidden wishes from childhood break through in the dream behind
the exile’s unobjectionable wishes which are capable of
entering consciousness; and that is why the dream which finds
concrete expression in the legend of Nausicaä ends as a rule
as an anxiety-dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

726

   My own dream (recorded on
p. 717
) of running upstairs and of soon
afterwards finding myself glued to the steps was equally a dream of
exhibiting, since it bears the essential marks of being one. It
should be possible, therefore, to trace it back to experiences
during my childhood, and if these could be discovered they should
enable us to judge how far the maid-servant’s behaviour to me
- her accusing me of dirtying the carpet - helped to give her her
place in my dream. I can, as it happens, provide the necessary
particulars. In a psycho-analysis one learns to interpret
propinquity in time as representing connection in subject-matter.
Two thoughts which occur in immediate sequence without any apparent
connection are in fact part of a single unity which has to be
discovered; in just the same way, if I write an
‘
a
’ and a ‘
b
’ in succession,
they have to be pronounced as a single syllable
‘
ab
’. The same is true of dreams. The staircase
dream to which I have referred was one of a series of dreams; and I
understood the interpretation of the other members of the series.
Since this particular dream was surrounded by the others it must
have dealt with the same subject. Now these other dreams were based
on a recollection of a nurse in whose charge I had been from some
date during my earliest infancy till I was two and a half. I even
retain an obscure conscious memory of her. According to what I was
told not long ago by my mother, she was old and ugly, but very
sharp and efficient. From what I can infer from my own dreams her
treatment of me was not always excessive in its amiability and her
words could be harsh if I failed to reach the required standard of
cleanliness. And thus the maid servant, since she had undertaken
the job of carrying on this educational work, acquired the right to
be treated in my dream as a reincarnation of the prehistoric old
nurse. It is reasonable to suppose that the child loved the old
woman who taught him these lessons, in spite of her rough treatment
of him.¹

  
¹
Here is an
‘over-interpretation’ of the same dream. Since
‘
spuken
[haunting]’ is an activity of
spirits
, ‘
spucken
[spitting] on the
stairs’ might be loosely rendered as ‘
esprit
d’escalier
’. This last phrase is equivalent to lack
of ready repartee [‘
Schlagfertigkeit
’, literally
‘readiness to strike’] - a failing to which I must in
fact plead guilty. Was my nurse, I wonder, equally wanting in that
quality?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

727

(
b
) 
DREAMS OF THE DEATH OF PERSONS OF WHOM THE
DREAMER IS FOND

   Another group of dreams which may
be described as typical are those containing the death of some
loved relative - for instance, of a parent, of a brother or sister,
or of a child. Two classes of such dreams must at once be
distinguished: those in which the dreamer is unaffected by grief,
so that on awakening he is astonished at his lack of feeling, and
those in which the dreamer feels deeply pained by the death and may
even weep bitterly in his sleep.

   We need not consider the dreams
of the first of these classes, for they have no claim to be
regarded as ‘typical’. If we analyse them, we find that
they have some meaning other than their apparent one, and that they
are intended to conceal some other wish. Such was the dream of the
aunt who saw her sister’s only son lying in his coffin. (See
p. 647.
)  It did not mean that
she wished her little nephew dead; as we have seen, it merely
concealed a wish to see a particular person of whom she was fond
and whom she had not met for a long time - a person whom she had
once before met after a similarly long interval beside the coffin
of another nephew. This wish, which was the true content of the
dream, gave no occasion for grief, and no grief, therefore, was
felt in the dream. It will be noticed that the affect felt in the
dream belongs to its latent and not to its manifest content, and
that the dream’s
affective
content has remained
untouched by the distortion which has overtaken its
ideational
content.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

728

   Very different are the dreams of
the other class - those in which the dreamer imagines the death of
a loved relative and is at the same time painfully affected. The
meaning of such dreams, as their content indicates, is a wish that
the person in question may die. And since I must expect that the
feelings of all of my readers and any others who have experienced
similar dreams will rebel against my assertion, I must try to base
my evidence for it on the broadest possible foundation.

   I have already discussed a dream
which taught us that the wishes which are represented in dreams as
fulfilled are not always present-day wishes. They may also be
wishes of the past which have been abandoned, overlaid and
repressed, and to which we have to attribute some sort of continued
existence only because of their re-emergence in a dream. They are
not dead in our sense of the word but only like the shades in the
Odyssey, which awoke to some sort of life as soon as they had
tasted blood. In the dream of the dead child in the
‘case’ (p. 154) what was involved was a wish which had
been an immediate one fifteen years earlier and was frankly
admitted as having existed at that time. I may add - and this may
not be without its bearing upon the theory of dreams - that even
behind this wish there lay a memory from the dreamer’s
earliest childhood. When she was a small child - the exact date
could not be fixed with certainty - she had heard that her mother
had fallen into a deep depression during the pregnancy of which she
had been the fruit and had passionately wished that the child she
was bearing might die. When the dreamer herself was grown-up and
pregnant, she merely followed her mother’s example.

   If anyone dreams, with every sign
of pain, that his father or mother or brother or sister has died, I
should never use the dream as evidence that he wishes for that
person’s death of
at the present time
. The theory of
dreams does not require as much as that; it is satisfied with the
inference that this death has been wished for at some time or other
during the dreamer’s childhood. I fear, however, that this
reservation will not appease the objectors; they will deny the
possibility of their
ever
having had such a thought with
just as much energy as they insist that they harbour no such wishes
now. I must therefore reconstruct a portion of the vanished mental
life of children on the basis of the evidence of the
present.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] Cf. my
‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year Old Boy’
(1909
b
) and my paper ‘On the Sexual Theories of
Children’ (1908
c
).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

729

   Let us first consider the
relation of children to their brothers and sisters. I do not know
why we presuppose that that relation must be a loving one; for
instances of hostility between adult brothers and sisters force
themselves upon everyone’s experience and we can often
establish the fact that the disunity originated in childhood or has
always existed. But it is further true that a great many adults,
who are on affectionate terms with their brothers and sisters and
are ready to stand by them to-day, passed their childhood on almost
unbroken terms of enmity with them. The elder child ill-treats the
younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys; while the younger is
consumed with impotent rage against the elder, envies and fears
him, or meets his oppressor with the first stirrings of a love of
liberty and a sense of justice. Their parents complain that the
children do not get on with one another, but cannot discover why.
It is easy to see that the character of even a good child is not
what we should wish to find it in an adult. Children are completely
egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to
satisfy them - especially as against the rivals, other children,
and first and foremost as against their brothers and sisters. But
we do not on that account call a child ‘bad’, we call
him ‘naughty’; he is no more answerable for his evil
deeds in our judgement than in the eyes of the law. And it is right
that this should be so; for we may expect that, before the end of
the period which we count as childhood, altruistic impulses and
morality will awaken in the little egoist and (to use
Meynert’s terms) a secondary ego will overlay and inhibit the
primary one. It is true, no doubt, that morality does not set in
simultaneously all along the line and that the length of non-moral
childhood varies in different individuals. If this morality fails
to develop, we like to talk of ‘degeneracy’, though
what in fact faces us is an inhibition in development. After the
primary character has already been overlaid by later development,
it can still be laid bare again, at all events in part, in cases of
hysterical illness. There is a really striking resemblance between
what is known as the hysterical character and that of a naughty
child. Obsessional neurosis, on the contrary, corresponds to a
super-morality imposed as a reinforcing weight upon fresh stirrings
of the primary character.