Freud - Complete Works (127 page)

   Before this idea is rejected as a
monstrous one, it is as well in this case, too, to consider the
real relations obtaining - this time between parents and children.
We must distinguish between what the cultural standards of filial
piety demand of this relation and what everyday observation shows
it in fact to be. More than one occasion for hostility lies
concealed in the relation between parents and children - a relation
which affords the most ample opportunities for wishes to arise
which cannot pass the censorship.

   Let us consider first the
relation between father and son. The sanctity which we attribute to
the rules laid down in the Decalogue has, I think, blunted our
powers of perceiving the real facts. We seem scarcely to venture to
observe that the majority of mankind disobey the Fifth Commandment.
Alike in the lowest and in the highest strata of human society
filial piety is wont to give way to other interests. The obscure
information which is brought to us by mythology and legend from the
primaeval ages of human society gives an unpleasing picture of the
father’s despotic power and of the ruthlessness with which he
made use of it. Kronos devoured his children, just as the wild boar
devours the sow’s litter; while Zeus emasculated his
father² and made himself ruler in his place. The more
unrestricted was the rule of the father in the ancient family, the
more must the son, as his destined successor, have found himself in
the position of an enemy, and the more impatient must he have been
to become ruler himself though his father’s death. Even in
our middle-class families fathers are as a rule inclined to refuse
their sons independence and the means necessary to secure it and
thus to foster the growth of the germ of hostility which is
inherent in their relation. A physician will often be in a position
to notice how a son’s grief at the loss of his father cannot
suppress his satisfaction at having at length won his freedom. In
our society to-day fathers are apt to cling desperately to what is
left of a now sadly antiquated
protestas patris familias
;
and an author who, like Ibsen, brings the immemorial struggle
between fathers and sons into prominence in his writings may be
certain of producing his effect.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] The situation
is often obscured by the emergence of a self-punitive impulse,
which threatens the dreamer, by way of a moral reaction, with the
loss of the parent whom he loves.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1909:] Or so he is
reported to have done according to some myths. According to others,
emasculation was only carried out by Kronos on his father Uranus.
For the mythological significance of this theme, cf. Rank, 1909,
[
added
1914:] and Rank, 1912
c
, Chapter IX, Section
2.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

736

   Occasions for conflict between a
daughter and her mother arise when the daughter begins to grow up
and long for sexual liberty, but finds herself under her
mother’s tutelage; while the mother, on the other hand, is
warned by her daughter’s growth that the time has come when
she herself must abandon her claims to sexual satisfaction.

   All of this is patent to the eyes
of everyone. But it does not help us in our endeavour to explain
dreams of a parent’s death in people whose piety towards
their parents has long been unimpeachably established. Previous
discussions, moreover, will have prepared us to learn that the
death-wish against parents dates back to earliest childhood.

   This supposition is confirmed
with a certainty beyond all doubt in the case of psychoneurotics
when they are subjected to analysis. We learn from them that a
child’s sexual wishes - if in their embryonic stage they
deserve to be so described - awaken very early, and that a
girl’s first affection is for her father and a boy’s
first childish desires are for his mother. Accordingly, the father
becomes a disturbing rival to the boy and the mother to the girl;
and I have already shown in the case of brothers and sisters how
easily such feelings can lead to a death-wish. The parents too give
evidence as a rule of sexual partiality: a natural predilection
usually sees to it that a man tends to spoil his little daughters,
while his wife take her sons’ part; though both of them,
where their judgement is not disturbed by the magic of sex, keep a
strict eye upon their children’s education. The child is very
well aware of this partiality and turns against that one of his
parents who is opposed to showing it. Being loved by an adult does
not merely bring a child the satisfaction of a special need; it
also means that he will get what he wants in every other respect as
well. Thus he will be following his own sexual instinct and at the
same time giving fresh strength to the inclination shown by his
parents if his choice between them falls in with theirs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

737

   The signs of these infantile
preferences are for the most part overlooked; yet some of them are
to be observed even after the first years of childhood. An
eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, if her mother is called
away from the table, makes use of the occasion to proclaim herself
her successor: ‘
I
’m going to be Mummy now. Do
you want some more greens, Karl? Well, help yourself, then!’
and so on. A particularly gifted and lively girl of four, in whom
this piece of child psychology is especially transparent, declared
quite openly: ‘Mummy can go away now. Then Daddy must marry
me and I’II be his wife.’ Such a wish occurring in a
child is not in the least inconsistent with her being tenderly
attached to her mother. If a little boy is allowed to sleep beside
his mother when his father is away from home, but has to go back to
the nursery and to someone of whom he is far less fond as soon as
his father returns, he may easily begin to form a wish that his
father should
always
be away, so that he himself could keep
his place beside his dear, lovely Mummy. One obvious way of
attaining this wish would be if his father were dead; for the child
has learnt one thing by experience namely that ‘dead’
people, such as Grandaddy, are always away and never come back.

   Though observations of this kind
on small children fit in perfectly with the interpretation I have
proposed, they do not carry such complete conviction as is forced
upon the physician by psycho-analyses of adult neurotics. In the
latter case dreams of the sort we are considering are introduced
into the analysis in such a context that it is impossible to avoid
interpreting them as
wishful
dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

738

   One day one of my women patients
was in a distressed and tearful mood. ‘I don’t want
ever to see my relations again’, she said, ‘they must
think me horrible.’ She then went on, with almost no
transition, to say that she remembered a dream, though of course
she had no idea what it meant. When she was four years old she had
a dream that
a lynx or a fox was walking on the roof; then
something had fallen down or she had fallen down; and then her
mother was carried out of the house dead
- and then she wept
bitterly. I told her that this dream must mean that when she was a
child she had wished she could see her mother dead, and that it
must be on account of the dream that she felt her relations must
think her horrible. I had scarcely said this when she produced some
material which threw light on the dream. ‘Lynx eye’ was
a term of abuse that had been thrown at her by a street-urchin when
she was a very small child. When she was three years old, a tile
off the roof had fallen on her mother’s head and made it
bleed violently.

   I once had an opportunity of
making a detailed study of a young woman who passed through a
variety of psychical conditions. Her illness began with a state of
confusional excitement during which she displayed a quite special
aversion to her mother, hitting and abusing her whenever she came
near her bed, while at the same period she was docile and
affectionate towards a sister who was many years her senior. This
was followed by a state in which she was lucid but somewhat
apathetic and suffered from badly disturbed sleep. It was during
this phase that I began treating her and analysing her dreams. An
immense number of these dreams were concerned, with a greater or
less degree of disguise, with the death of her mother: at one time
she would be attending an old woman’s funeral, at another she
and her sister would be sitting at table dressed in mourning. There
could be no question as to the meaning of these dreams. As her
condition improved still further, hysterical phobias developed. The
most tormenting of these was a fear that something might have
happened to her mother. She was obliged to hurry home, wherever she
might be, to convince herself that her mother was still alive. This
case, taken in conjunction with what I had learnt from other
sources, was highly instructive: it exhibited, translated as it
were into different languages, the various ways in which the
psychical apparatus reacted to one and the same exciting idea. In
the confusional state, in which, as I believe, the second psychical
agency was overwhelmed by the normally suppressed first one, her
unconscious hostility to her mother found a powerful
motor
expression. When the calmer condition set in, when the rebellion
was suppressed and the domination of the censorship re-established,
the only region left open in which her hostility could realize the
wish for her mother’s death was that of dreaming . When a
normal state was still more firmly established, it led to the
production of her exaggerated worry about her mother as a
hysterical counter-reaction and defensive phenomenon. In view of
this it is no longer hard to understand why hysterical girls are so
often attached to their mothers with such exaggerated
affection.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

739

   On another occasion I had an
opportunity of obtaining a deep insight into the unconscious mind
of a young man whose life was made almost impossible by an
obsessional neurosis. He was unable to go out into the street
because he was tortured by the fear that he would kill everyone he
met. He spent his days in preparing his alibi in case he might be
charged with one of the murders committed in the town. It is
unnecessary to add that he was a man of equally high morals and
education. The analysis (which, incidentally, led to his recovery)
showed that the basis of this distressing obsession was an impulse
to murder his somewhat over-severe father. This impulse, to his
astonishment, had been consciously expressed when he was seven
years old, but it had, of course, originated much earlier in his
childhood. After his father’s painful illness and death, the
patient’s obsessional self-reproaches appeared - he was in
his thirty-first year at the time - taking the shape of a phobia
transferred on to strangers. A person, he felt, who was capable of
wanting to push his own father over a precipice from the top of a
mountain was not to be trusted to respect the lives of those less
closely related to him; he was quite right to shut himself up in
his room.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

740

   In my experience, which is
already extensive, the chief part in the mental lives of all
children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their
parents. Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are
among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses
which is formed at that time and which is of such importance in
determining the symptoms of the later neurosis. It is not my
belief, however, that psychoneurotics differ sharply in this
respect from other human beings who remain normal - that they are
able, that is, to create something absolutely new and peculiar to
themselves. It is far more probable - and this is confirmed by
occasional observations on normal children - that they are only
distinguished by exhibiting on a magnified scale feelings of love
and hatred to their parents which occur less obviously and less
intensely in the minds of most children.

   This discovery is confirmed by a
legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity: a legend
whose profound and universal power to move can only be understood
if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychology of
children has an equally universal validity. What I have in mind is
the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ drama which bears
his name.

   Oedipus, son of Laïus, King
of Thebes, and of Jocasta, was exposed as an infant because an
oracle had warned Laius that the still unborn child would be his
father’s murderer. The child was rescued, and grew up as a
prince in an alien court, until, in doubts as to his origin, he too
questioned the oracle and was warned to avoid his home since he was
destined to murder his father and take his mother in marriage. On
the road leading away from what he believed was his home, he met
King Laïus and slew him in a sudden quarrel. He came next to
Thebes and solved the riddle set him by the Sphinx who barred his
way. Out of gratitude the Thebans made him their king and gave him
Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He reigned long in peace and
honour, and she who, unknown to him, was his mother bore him two
sons and two daughters. Then at last a plague broke out and the
Thebans made enquiry once more of the oracle. It is at this point
that Sophocles’ tragedy opens. The messengers bring back the
reply that the plague will cease when the murderer of Laïus
has been driven from the land.