Freud - Complete Works (126 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

730

   Many people, therefore, who love
their brothers and sisters and would feel bereaved if they were to
die, harbour evil wishes against them in their unconscious, dating
from earlier times; and these are capable of being realized in
dreams.

   It is of quite particular
interest, however, to observe the behaviour of small children up to
the age of two or three or a little older towards their younger
brothers and sisters. Here, for instance, was a child who had so
far been the only one; and now he was told that the stork had
brought a new baby. He looked the new arrival up and down and then
declared decisively: ‘The stork can take him away
again!’¹ I am quite seriously of the opinion that a
child can form a just estimate of the set-back he has to expect at
the hands of the little stranger. A lady of my acquaintance, who is
on very good terms to-day with a sister four years her junior,
tells me that she greeted the news of her first arrival with this
qualification: ‘But all the same I shan’t give her my
red cap!’ Even if a child only comes to realize the situation
later on, his hostility will date from that moment. I know of a
case in which a little girl of less than three tried to strangle an
infant in its cradle because she felt that its continued presence
boded her no good. Children at that time of life are capable of
jealousy of any degree of intensity and obviousness. Again, if it
should happen that the baby sister does in fact disappear after a
short while, the elder child will find the whole affection of the
household once more concentrated upon himself. If after that the
stork should bring yet another baby, it seems only logical that the
little favourite should nourish a wish that his new competitor may
meet with the same fate as the earlier one, so that he himself may
be as happy as he was originally and during the interval.²
Normally, of course, this attitude of a child towards a younger
brother or sister is a simple function of the difference between
their ages. Where the gap in time is sufficiently long, an elder
girl will already begin to feel the stirring of her maternal
instincts towards the helpless new born baby.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] The
three-and-a-half-year-old Hans (whose phobia was the subject of the
analysis mentioned in the preceding footnote) exclaimed shortly
after the birth of a sister, while he was suffering from a feverish
sore throat: ‘I don’t
want
a baby sister!’
During his neurosis eighteen months later he frankly confessed to a
wish that his mother might drop the baby into the bath so that the
would die. At the same time, Hans was a good-natured and
affectionate child, who soon grew fond of this same sister and
particularly enjoyed taking her under his wing.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1914:] Deaths that
are experienced in this way in childhood may quickly be forgotten
in the family; but psycho-analytic research shows that they have a
very important influence on subsequent neuroses.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

731

   Hostile feelings towards brothers
and sisters must be far more frequent in childhood than the
unseeing eye of the adult observer can perceive.¹

   In the case of my own children,
who followed each other in rapid succession, I neglected the
opportunity of carrying out observations of this kind; but I am now
making up for this neglect by observing a small nephew, whose
autocratic rule was upset, after lasting for fifteen months, by the
appearance of a female rival. I am told, it is true, that the young
man behaves in the most chivalrous manner to his little sister,
that he kisses her hand and strokes her; but I have been able to
convince myself that even before the end of his second year he made
use of his powers of speech for the purpose of criticizing someone
whom he could not fail to regard as superfluous. Whenever the
conversation touched upon her he used to intervene in it and
exclaim petulantly: ‘Too ‘ickle! too
‘ickle!’ During the last few months the baby’s
growth has made enough progress to place her beyond this particular
ground for contempt, and the little boy has found a different basis
for his assertion that she does not deserve so much attention: at
every suitable opportunity he draws attention to the fact that she
has no teeth.² We all of us recollect how the eldest girl of
another of my sisters, who was then a child of six, spent half an
hour in insisting upon each of her aunts in succession agreeing
with her: ‘Lucie can’t understand that yet, can
she?’ she kept asking. Lucie was her rival - two and a half
years her junior.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Since this
was written, a large number of observations have been made and
recorded in the literature of psycho-analysis upon the originally
hostile attitude of children towards their brothers and sisters and
one of their parents. The author and poet Spitteler has given us a
particularly genuine and naïve account of this childish
attitude, derived from his own childhood: ‘Moreover there was
a second Adolf there: a little creature who they alleged was my
brother, though I could not see what use he was and still less why
they made as much fuss of him as of me myself. I was sufficient so
far as I was concerned; why should I want a brother? And he was not
merely useless, he was positively in the way. When I pestered my
grandmother, he wanted to pester her too. When I was taken out in
the perambulator, he sat opposite to me and took up half the space,
so that we were bound to kick each other with our
feet.’

  
²
[
Footnote added
1909:] Little Hans,
when he was three and a half, gave vent to a crushing criticism of
his sister in the same words. It was because of her lack of teeth,
he supposed, that she was unable to talk.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

732

   In none of my women patients, to
take an example, have I failed to come upon this dream of the death
of a brother or sister, which tallies with an increase in
hostility. I have only found a single exception; and it was easy to
interpret this as a confirmation of the rule. On one occasion
during an analytic session I was explaining this subject to a lady,
since in view of her symptom its discussion seemed to me relevant.
To my astonishment she replied that she had never had such a dream.
Another dream, however, occurred to her, which ostensibly had no
connection with the topic - a dream which she had first dreamt when
she was four years old and at that time the youngest of the family,
and which she had dreamt repeatedly since:
A whole crowd of
children - all her brothers, sisters and cousins of both sexes -
were romping in a field. Suddenly they all grew wings, flew away
and disappeared
. She had no idea what this dream meant; but it
is not hard to recognize that in its original form it had been a
dream of the death of all her brothers and sisters, and had been
only slightly influenced by the censorship. I may venture to
suggest the following analysis. On the occasion of the death of one
of this crowd of children (in this instance the children of two
brothers had been brought up together as a single family) the
dreamer, not yet four years old at the time, must have asked some
wise grown-up person what became of children when they were dead.
The reply must have been: ‘They grow wings and turn into
little angels.’ In the dream which followed upon this piece
of information all the dreamer’s brothers and sisters had
wings like angels and - which is the main point - flew away. Our
little baby-killer was left alone, strange to say: the only
survivor of the whole crowd! We can hardly be wrong in supposing
that the fact of the children romping in
field
before flying
away points to butterflies. It is as though the child was led by
the same chain of thought as the peoples of antiquity to picture
the soul as having a butterfly’s wings.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

733

   At this point someone will perhaps
interrupt: ‘Granted that children have hostile impulses
towards their brothers and sisters, how can a child’s mind
reach such a pitch of depravity as to wish for the
death
of
his rivals or of playmates stronger than himself, as though the
death penalty were the only punishment for every crime?’
Anyone who talks like this has failed to bear in mind that a
child’s idea of being ‘dead’ has nothing much in
common with ours apart from the word. Children know nothing of the
horrors of corruption, of freezing in the ice-cold grave, of the
terrors of eternal nothingness - ideas which grown-up people find
it so hard to tolerate, as is proved by all the myths of a future
life. The fear of death has no meaning to a child; hence it is that
he will play with the dreadful word and use it as a threat against
a playmate: ‘If you do that again, you’ll die, like
Franz!’ Meanwhile the poor mother gives a shudder and
remembers, perhaps, that the greater half of the human race fail to
survive their childhood years. It was actually possible for a
child, who was over eight years old at the time, coming home from a
visit to the Natural History Museum, to say to his mother:
‘I’m so fond of you, Mummy: when you die I’II
have you stuffed and I’II keep you in this room, so that I
can see you
all
the time.’ So little resemblance is
there between a child’s idea of being dead and our
own!¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] I was
astonished to hear a highly intelligent boy often remark after the
sudden death of his father: ‘I know father’s dead, but
what I can’t understand is why he doesn’t come home to
supper.' - [
Added
1919:] Further material on this
subject will be found in the first volumes of the periodical
Imago
, under the standing rubric of ‘
Vom wahren
Wesen der Kinderseele
'.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

734

   To children, who, moreover, are
spared the sight of the scenes of suffering which precede death,
being ‘dead’ means approximately the same as being
‘gone’ - not troubling the survivors any longer. A
child makes no distinction as to how this absence is brought about:
whether it is due to a journey, to a dismissal, to an estrangement,
or to death.¹ If, during a child’s prehistoric epoch,
his nurse has been dismissed, and if soon afterwards his mother has
died, the two events are superimposed on each other in a single
series in his memory as revealed in analysis. When people are
absent, children do not miss them with any great intensity; many
mothers have learnt this to their sorrow when, after being away
from home for some weeks on a summer holiday, they are met on their
return by the news that the children have not once asked after
their mummy. If their mother does actually make the journey to that
‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller
returns’, children seem at first to have forgotten her, and
it is only later on that they begin to call their dead mother to
mind.

   Thus if a child has reasons for
wishing the absence of another, there is nothing to restrain him
from giving his wish the form of the other child being dead. And
the psychical reaction to dreams containing death-wishes proves
that, in spite of the different content of these wishes in the case
of children, they are nevertheless in some way or other the same as
wishes expressed in the same terms by adults.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] An
observation made by a parent who had a knowledge of psycho-analysis
caught the actual moment at which his highly intelligent
four-year-old daughter perceived the distinction between being
‘gone’ and being ‘dead’. The little girl
had been troublesome at meal-time and noticed that one of the maids
at the pension where they were staying was looking at her askance.
‘I wish Josefine was dead’, was the child’s
comment to her father. ‘Why dead?’ enquired her father
soothingly; ‘wouldn’t it do if she went away?’
‘No’, replied the child; ‘then she’d come
back again.’ The unbounded self-love (the narcissism) of
children regards any interference as an act of
lèse
majesté
; and their feelings demand (like the Draconian
code) that any such crime shall receive the one form of punishment
which admits of no degrees.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

735

   If, then, a child’s
death-wishes against his brothers and sisters are explained by the
childish egoism which makes him regard them as his rivals, how are
we to explain his death-wishes against his parents, who surround
him with love and fulfil his needs and whose preservation that same
egoism should lead him to desire?

   A solution of this difficulty is
afforded by the observation that dreams of the death of parents
apply with preponderant frequency to the parent who is of the same
sex as the dreamer: that men, that is, dream mostly of their
father’s death and women of their mother’s. I cannot
pretend that this is universally so, but the preponderance in the
direction I have indicated is so evident that it requires to be
explained by a factor of general importance.¹ It is as though
- to put it bluntly - a sexual preference were making itself felt
at an early age: as though boys regarded their fathers and girls
their mothers as their rivals in love, whose elimination could not
fail to be to their advantage.