Freud - Complete Works (132 page)

761

   Just as the author of the novel,
in choosing the name ‘Sappho’, had in mind an allusion
to Lesbian practices, so too the pieces of the dream that spoke of
people ‘
up above
’ and ‘
down
below
’ alluded to phantasies of a sexual nature which
occupied the patient’s mind and, as suppressed desires, were
not without a bearing on his neurosis. (The interpretation of the
dream did not itself show us that what were thus represented in the
dream were phantasies and not recollections of real events; an
analysis only gives us the
content
of a thought and leaves
it to us to determine its reality. Real and imaginary events appear
in dreams at first sight as of equal validity; and that is so not
only in dreams but in the production of more important psychical
structures.)

   A ‘large party’
meant, as we already know, a secret. His brother was simply the
representative (introduced into the childhood scene by a
‘retrospective phantasy’) of all his later rivals for a
woman’s affection. The episode of the gentleman who abused
the King of Italy related once again,
via
the medium of a
recent and in itself indifferent experience, to people of lower
rank pushing their way into higher society. It was just as though
the child at the breast was being given a warning parallel to the
one which Daudet had given to young men.¹

  
¹
The imaginary nature of the situation
relating to the dreamer’s wet-nurse was proved by the
objectively established fact that in his case the wet-nurse had
been his mother. I may recall in this connection the anecdote,
which I repeated on
p. 688
, of the
young man who regretted that he had not made better use of his
opportunities with his wet-nurse. A regret of the same kind was no
doubt the source of the present dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

762

   To provide a third opportunity
for studying condensation in the formation of dreams, I will give
part of the analysis of another dream, which I owe to an elderly
lady undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. As was to be expected
from the severe anxiety-states from which the patient suffered, her
dreams contained a very large number of sexual thoughts, the first
realization of which both surprised and alarmed her. Since I shall
not be able to pursue the interpretation of the dream to the end,
its material will appear to fall into several groups without any
visible connection.

III

‘THE MAY-BEETLE
DREAM’

  
CONTENT OF THE DREAM
. -
She
called to mind that she had two may-beetles in a box and that she
must set them free or they would suffocate. She opened the box and
the may-beetles were in an exhausted state. One of them flew out of
the open window; but the other was crushed by the casement while
she was shutting it at someone’s request. (Signs of
disgust.)

  
ANALYSIS
. - Her husband was
temporarily away from home, and her fourteen-year-old daughter was
sleeping in the bed beside her. The evening before, the girl had
drawn her attention to a moth which had fallen into her tumbler of
water; but she had not taken it out and felt sorry for the poor
creature next morning. The book she had been reading during the
evening had told how some boys had thrown a cat into boiling water,
and had described the animal’s convulsions. These were the
two precipitating causes of the dream - in themselves indifferent.
She then pursued the subject of
cruelty to animals
further.
Some years before, while they were spending the summer at a
particular place, her daughter had been very cruel to animals. She
was collecting butterflies and asked the patient for some
arsenic
to kill them with. On one occasion a moth with a pin
through its body had gone on flying about the room for a long time;
another time some caterpillars which the child was keeping to turn
into chrysalises starved to death. At a still more tender age the
same child used to tear the wings off
beetles
and
butterflies. But to-day she would be horrified at all these cruel
actions she had grown so kind-hearted.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

763

   The patient reflected over this
contradiction. It reminded her of another contradiction, between
appearance and character, as George Eliot displays it in
Adam
Bede
: one girl who was pretty, but vain and stupid, and another
who was ugly, but of high character; a nobleman who seduced the
silly girl, and a working man who felt and acted with true
nobility. How impossible it was, she remarked, to recognize that
sort of thing in people! Who would have guessed, to look at
her
, that she was tormented by sensual desires?

   In the same year in which the
little girl had begun collecting butterflies, the district they
were in had suffered from a serious plague of
may-beetles
.
The children were furious with the beetles and
crushed
them
unmercifully. At that time my patient had seen a man who tore the
wings off may-beetles and then ate their bodies. She herself had
been born in
May
and had been married in
May
. Three
days after her marriage she had written to her parents at home
saying how happy she was. But it had been far from true.

   The evening before the dream she
had been rummaging among some old letters and had read some of them
- some serious and some comic - aloud to her children. There had
been a most amusing letter from a piano-teacher who had courted her
when she was a girl, and another from an admirer of
noble
birth
.¹

  
¹
This had been the true instigator of the
dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

764

   She blamed herself because one of
her daughters had got hold of a ‘bad’ book by
Maupassant.¹ The
arsenic
that the girl had asked for
reminded her of the
arsenic pills
which restored the Duc de
Mora’s youthful strength in
Le Nabab
.

   ‘Set them free’ made
her think of a passage in the
Magic Flute
:

                                               
Zur Liebe kann ich dich nicht zwingen,

                                               
Doch geb ich dir
die Freiheit
nicht.
²

   ‘May-beetles’ also
made her think of Kätchen’s words:

                                               
Verliebt ja wie ein
Käfer
bist du mir.
³

   And in the middle of all this
came a quotation from
Tannhäuser
:

                                               
Weil du von
böser
Lust beseelt . . .
⁴

   She was living in a perpetual
worry about her absent husband. Her fear that something might
happen to him on his journey was expressed in numerous waking
phantasies. A short time before, in the course of her analysis, she
had lighted among her unconscious thoughts upon a complaint about
her husband ‘growing senile’. The wishful thought
concealed by her present dream will perhaps best be conjectured if
I mention that, some days before she dreamt it, she was horrified,
in the middle of her daily affairs, by a phrase in the imperative
mood which came into her head and was aimed at her husband:
‘Go and hang yourself!’ It turned out that a few hours
earlier she had read somewhere or other that when a man is hanged
he gets a powerful erection. The wish for an erection was what had
emerged from repression in this horrifying disguise. ‘Go and
hang yourself!’ was equivalent to: ‘Get yourself an
erection at any price!’ Dr. Jenkins’s arsenic pills in
Le Nabab
fitted in here. But my patient was also aware that
the most powerful aphrodisiac, cantharides (commonly known as
‘Spanish flies’), was prepared from
crushed
beetles
. This was the drift of the principal part of the
dream’s content.

   The opening and shutting of
windows
was one of the main subjects of dispute between her
and her husband. She herself was aerophilic in her sleeping habits;
her husband was aerophobic.
Exhaustion
was the chief symptom
which she complained of at the time of the dream.

  
¹
An interpolation is required at this point:
‘books of that kind are
poison
to a girl.’ The
patient herself had dipped into forbidden books a great deal when
she was young.

  
² [Fear not, to love I’II ne’er compel
thee;

      Yet `tis too
soon to
set thee free
.]

  
³ [‘You are madly in love with me.’ Literally:
`You are in love with me like a
beetle
.’ ] - A further
train of thought led to the same poet’s
Penthesilia
,
and to the idea of
cruelty
to a lover.

  
⁴
[Literally: ‘Because thou wast
inspired by such
evil pleasure
.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

765

   In all three of the dreams which
I have just recorded, I have indicated by italics the points at
which one of the elements of the dream-content reappears in the
dream-thoughts, so as to show clearly the multiplicity of
connections arising from the former. Since, however, the analysis
of none of these dreams has been traced to its end, it will perhaps
be worth while to consider a dream whose analysis has been recorded
exhaustively, so as to show how its content is over-determined. For
this purpose I will take the dream of Irma’s injection. It
will be easy to see from that example that the work of condensation
makes use of more than one method in the construction of
dreams.

   The principal figure in the
dream-content was my patient Irma. She appeared with the features
which were hers in real life, and thus, in the first instance,
represented herself. But the position in which I examined her by
the window was derived from someone else, the lady for whom, as the
dream-thoughts showed, I wanted to exchange my patient. In so far
as Irma appeared to have a diphtheritic membrane, which recalled my
anxiety about my eldest daughter, she stood for that child and,
behind her, through her possession of the same name as my daughter,
was hidden the figure of my patient who succumbed to poisoning. In
the further course of the dream the figure of Irma acquired still
other meanings, without any alteration occurring in the visual
picture of her in the dream. She turned into one of the children
whom we had examined in the neurological department of the
children’s hospital, where my two friends revealed their
contrasting characters. The figure of my own child was evidently
the stepping-stone towards this transition. The same
‘Irma’s’ recalcitrance over opening her
mouth brought an allusion to another lady whom I had once examined,
and, through the same connection, to my wife. Moreover, the
pathological changes which I discovered in her throat involved
allusions to a whole series of other figures.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

766

   None of these figures whom I
lighted upon by following up  ‘Irma’ appeared in
the dream in bodily shape. They were concealed behind the dream
figure of ‘Irma’, which was thus turned into a
collective image with, it must be admitted, a number of
contradictory characteristics. Irma became the representative of
all these other figures which had been sacrificed to the work of
condensation, since I passed over to
her
, point by point,
everything that reminded me of
them
.

   There is another way in which a
‘collective figure’ can be produced for purposes of
dream-condensation, namely by uniting the actual features of two or
more people into a single dream-image. It was in this way that the
Dr. M. of my dream was constructed. He bore the name of Dr. M., he
spoke and acted like him; but his physical characteristics and his
malady belonged to someone else, namely to my eldest brother. One
single feature, his pale appearance, was doubly determined, since
it was common to both of them in real life.

   Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle
with the yellow beard was a similar composite figure. But in his
case the dream-image was constructed in yet another way. I did not
combine the features of one person with those of another and in the
process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of
them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which
Galton produced family by portraits: namely by projecting two
images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to
both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one
another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture.
In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from
a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently
blurred; incidentally, the beard further involved an allusion to my
father and myself through the intermediate idea of growing
grey.

   The construction of collective
and composite figures is one of the chief methods by which
condensation operates in dreams. I shall presently have occasion to
deal with them in another context.

   The occurrence of the idea of
‘dysentery’ in the dream of Irma’s injection also
had a multiple determination: first owing to its phonetic
similarity to ‘diphtheria’, and secondly owing to its
connection with the patient whom I had sent to the East and whose
hysteria was not recognized.