Freud - Complete Works (128 page)

                                               
But he, where is he? Where shall now be read

                                               
The fading record of this ancient guilt?

The action of the play consists in nothing
other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and
ever-mounting excitement - a process that can be likened to the
work of a psycho-analysis - that Oedipus himself is the murderer of
Laïus, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and
of Jocasta. Appalled at the abomination which he has unwittingly
perpetrated, Oedipus blinds himself and forsakes his home. The
oracle has been fulfilled.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

741

  
Oedipus Rex
is what is
known as a tragedy of destiny. Its tragic effect is said to lie in
the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain
attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them. The
lesson which, it is said, the deeply moved spectator should learn
from the tragedy is submission to the divine will and realization
of his own impotence. Modern dramatists have accordingly tried to
achieve a similar tragic effect by weaving the same contrast into a
plot invented by themselves. But the spectators have looked on
unmoved while a curse or an oracle was fulfilled in spite of all
the efforts of some innocent man: later tragedies of destiny have
failed in their effect.

   If
Oedipus Rex
moves a
modern audience no less than it did the contemporary Greek one, the
explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in the
contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in
the particular nature of the material on which that contrast is
exemplified. There must be something which makes a voice within us
ready to recognize the compelling force of destiny in the
Oedipus
, while we can dismiss as merely arbitrary such
dispositions as are laid down in
Die Ahnfrau
or other modern
tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is in fact involved
in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only because it
might have been ours - because the oracle laid the same curse upon
us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us,
perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and
our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.
Our dreams convince us that that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his
father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us
the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate
than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not
become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our
mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one
in whom these primaeval wishes of our childhood have been
fulfilled, and we shrink back from him with the whole force of the
repression by which those wishes have since that time been held
down within us. While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to
light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to
recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though
suppressed, are still to be found. The contrast with which the
closing Chorus leaves us confronted -

. . . Fix on Oedipus your eyes,

Who resolved the
dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise.

Like a star his
envied fortune mounted beaming far and wide:

Now he sinks in
seas of anguish, whelmed beneath a raging tide . . .

- strikes as a warning at ourselves and our pride, at us who since
our childhood have grown so wise and so mighty in our own eyes.
Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to
morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their
revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the
scenes of our childhood.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] None of the
findings of psycho-analytic research has provoked such embittered
denials, such fierce opposition - or such amusing contortions - on
the part of critics as this indication of the childhood impulses
towards incest which persist in the unconscious. An attempt has
even been made recently to make out, in the face of all experience,
that the incest should only be taken as ‘symbolic’. -
Ferenczi (1912) has proposed an ingenious
‘over-interpretation’ of the Oedipus myth, based on a
passage in one of Schopenhauer’s letters. - [
Added
1919:] Later studies have shown that the ‘Oedipus
complex’, which was touched upon for the first time in the
above paragraphs in the
Interpretation of Dreams
, throws a
light of undreamt-of importance on the history of the human race
and the evolution of religion and morality - (See my
Totem and
Taboo
, 1912-13.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

742

   There is an unmistakable
indication in the text of Sophocles’ tragedy itself that the
legend of Oedipus sprang from some primaeval dream-material which
had as its content the distressing disturbance of a child’s
relation to his parents owing to the first stirrings of sexuality.
At a point when Oedipus, though he is not yet enlightened, has
begun to feel troubled by his recollection of the oracle, Jocasta
consoles him by referring to a dream which many people dream,
though, as she thinks, it has no meaning:

                                               
Many a man ere now in dreams hath lain

                                               
With her who bare him. He hath least annoy

                                               
Who with such omens troubleth not his mind.

To-day, just as then, many men dream of having
sexual relations with their mothers, and speak of the fact with
indignation and astonishment. It is clearly the key to the tragedy
and the complement to the dream of the dreamer’s father being
dead. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to
these two typical dreams. And just as these dreams, when dreamt by
adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend
must include horror and self-punishment. Its further modification
originates once again in a misconceived secondary revision of the
material, which has sought to exploit it for theological purposes.
(Cf. the dream-material in dreams of exhibiting,
p. 721 f.
) The attempt to harmonize
divine omnipotence with human responsibility must naturally fail in
connection with this subject-matter just as with any other.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

743

   Another of the great creations of
tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, has its roots in
the same soil as
Oedipus Rex
. But the changed treatment of
the same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life
of these two widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular
advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind. In the
Oedipus
the child’s wishful phantasy that underlies it
is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In
Hamlet
it remains repressed; and - just as in the case of a
neurosis - we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting
consequences. Strangely enough, the overwhelming effect produced by
the more modern tragedy has turned out to be compatible with the
fact that people have remained completely in the dark as to the
hero’s character. The play is built up on Hamlet’s
hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to
him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these
hesitations and an immense variety of attempts at interpreting them
have failed to produce a result. According to the view which was
originated by Goethe and is still the prevailing one to-day, Hamlet
represents the type of man whose power of direct action is
paralysed by an excessive development of his intellect. (He is
‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.’)
According to another view, the dramatist has tried to portray a
pathologically irresolute character which might be classed as
neurasthenic. The plot of the drama shows us, however, that Hamlet
is far from being represented as a person incapable of taking any
action. We see him doing so on two occasions: first in a sudden
outburst of temper, when he runs his sword through the eavesdropper
behind the arras, and secondly in a premeditated and even crafty
fashion, when, with all the callousness of a Renaissance prince, he
sends the two courtiers to the death that had been planned for
himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task
set him by his father’s ghost? The answer, once again, is
that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do
anything - except take vengeance on the man who did away with his
father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man
who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized.
Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced
in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind
him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he
is to punish. Here I have translated into conscious terms what was
bound to remain unconscious in Hamlet’s mind; and if any one
is inclined to call him a hysteric, I can only accept the fact as
one that is implied by my interpretation. The distaste for
sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation with Ophelia fits
in very well with this: the same distaste which was destined to
take possession of the poet’s mind more and more during the
years that followed, and which reached its extreme expression in
Timon of Athens
. For it can of course only be the
poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. I observe in a
book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) a statement that
Hamlet
was written immediately after the death of
Shakespeare’s father (in 1601), that is, under the immediate
impact of his bereavement and, as we may well assume, while his
childhood feelings about his father had been freshly revived. It is
known, too, that Shakespeare’s own son who died at an early
age bore the name of ‘Hamnet’, which is identical with
‘Hamlet’. Just as
Hamlet
deals with the relation
of a son to his parents, so
Macbeth
(written at
approximately the same period) is concerned with the subject of
childlessness. But just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that
matter, dreams, are capable of being ‘over-interpreted’
and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully understood, so all
genuinely creative writings are the product of more than a single
motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and
are open to more than a single interpretation. In what I have
written I have only attempted to interpret the deepest layer of
impulses in the mind of the creative writer.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] The above
indications of a psycho-analytic explanation of
Hamlet
have
since been amplified by Ernest Jones and defended against the
alternative views put forward in the literature of the subject.
(See Jones, 1910
a
.) - [
Added
1930:] Incidentally, I
have in the meantime ceased to believe that the author of
Shakespeare’s works was the man from Stratford. -
[
Added
1919:] Further attempts at an analysis of
Macbeth
will be found in a paper of mine and in one by
Jekels (1917).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

744

   I cannot leave the subject of
typical dreams of the death of loved relatives, without adding a
few more words to throw light on their significance for the theory
of dreams in general. In these dreams we find the highly unusual
condition realized of a dream-thought formed by a repressed wish
entirely eluding censorship and passing into the dream without
modification. There must be special factors at work to make this
event possible, and I believe that the occurrence of these dreams
is facilitated by two such factors. Firstly, there is no wish that
seems more remote from us than this one: ‘we couldn’t
even
dream
’ - so we believe - of wishing such a thing.
For this reason the dream-censorship is not armed to meet such a
monstrosity, just as Solon’s penal code contained no
punishment for parricide. Secondly, in this case the repressed and
unsuspected wish is particularly often met half-way by a residue
from the previous day in the form of a
worry
about the
safety of the person concerned. This worry can only make its way
into the dream by availing itself of the corresponding wish; while
the wish can disguise itself behind the worry that has become
active during the day. We may feel inclined to think that things
are simpler than this and that one merely carries on during the
night and in dreams with what one has been turning over in
one’s mind during the day; but if so we shall be leaving
dreams of the death of people of whom the dreamer is fond
completely in the air and without any connection with our
explanation of dreams in general, and we shall thus be clinging
quite unnecessarily to a riddle which is perfectly capable of
solution.

   It is also instructive to
consider the relation of these dreams to anxiety-dreams. In the
dreams we have been discussing, a repressed wish has found a means
of evading censorship - and the distortion which censorship
involves. The invariable concomitant is that painful feelings are
experienced in the dream. In just the same way anxiety-dreams only
occur if the censorship has been wholly or partly overpowered; and,
on the other hand, the overpowering of the censorship is
facilitated if anxiety has already been produced as an immediate
sensation arising from somatic sources. We can thus plainly see the
purpose for which the censorship exercises its office and brings
about the distortion of dreams: it does so
in order to prevent
the generation of anxiety or other forms of distressing
affect
.