Freud - Complete Works (134 page)

  
¹
Lasker died of tabes, that is, as a result
of an infection (syphilis) contracted from a woman; Lassalle, as
everyone knows, fell in a duel on account of a woman.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

773

   The play which I was making here
upon names and syllables had a still further sense, however. It
expressed a wish that my brother might have a happy domestic life,
and it did so in this way. In Zola’s novel of an
artist’s life,
L’oevre
, the subject of which
must have been close to my dream-thoughts, its author, as is well
known, introduced himself and his own domestic happiness as an
episode. He appears under the name of ‘Sandoz.’ The
transformation was probably arrived at as follows. If
‘Zola’ is written backwards (the sort of thing children
are so fond of doing), we arrive at ‘Aloz.’ No doubt
this seemed too undisguised. He therefore replaced
‘Al’, which is the first syllable of
‘Alexander’ by ‘Sand’, which is the third
syllable of the same name; and in this way ‘Sandoz’
came into being. My own ‘Autodidasker’ arose in much
the same fashion.

   I must now explain how my
phantasy of telling Professor N. that the patient we had both
examined was only suffering from a neurosis made its way into the
dream. Shortly before the end of my working year, I began the
treatment of a new patient who quite baffled my powers of
diagnosis. The presence of a grave organic disease - perhaps some
degeneration of the spinal cord - strongly suggested itself but
could not be established. It would have been tempting to diagnose a
neurosis (which would have solved every difficulty), if only the
patient had not repudiated with so much energy the sexual history
without which I refuse to recognize the presence of a neurosis. In
my embarrassment I sought help from the physician whom I, like many
other people, respect more than any as a man and before whose
authority I am readiest to bow. He listened to my doubts, told me
they were justified, and then gave his opinion: ‘Keep the man
under observation; it must be a neurosis.’ Since I knew he
did not share my views on the aetiology of the neuroses, I did not
produce my counter-argument, but I made no concealment of my
scepticism. A few days later I informed the patient that I could do
nothing for him and recommended him to seek other advice.
Whereupon, to my intense astonishment, he started apologizing for
having lied to me. He had been too much ashamed of himself, he
said, and went on to reveal precisely the piece of sexual aetiology
which I had been expecting and without which I had been unable to
accept his illness as a neurosis. I was relieved but at the same
time humiliated. I had to admit that my consultant, not being led
astray by considering the anamnesis, had seen more clearly than I
had. And I proposed to tell him as much when I next met him - to
tell him that
he
had been right and
I
wrong.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

774

   This was precisely what I did in
the dream. But what sort of a wish-fulfilment can there have been
in confessing that I was wrong?. To be wrong was, however, just
what I
did
wish. I wanted to be wrong in my fears, or, more
precisely, I wanted my wife, whose fears I had adopted in the
dream-thoughts, to be wrong. The subject round which the question
of right or wrong revolved in the dream was not far removed from
what the dream-thoughts were really concerned with. There was the
same alternative between organic and functional damage caused by a
woman, or, more properly, by sexuality: tabetic paralysis or
neurosis? (The manner of Lassalle’s death could be loosely
classed in the latter category.)

   In this closely knit and, when it
was carefully interpreted, very transparent dream, Professor N.
played a part not only on account of this analogy and of my wish to
be wrong, and on account of his incidental connections with Breslau
and with the family of our friend who had settled there after her
marriage but also on account of the following episode which
occurred at the end of our consultation. When he had given his
opinion and so concluded our medical discussion, he turned to more
personal subjects: ‘How many children have you got
now?’ - ‘Six.’ - He made a gesture of admiration
and concern. - ‘Girls or boys?’ - ‘Three and
three: they are my pride and my treasure.’ - ‘Well,
now, be on your guard! Girls are safe enough, but bringing up boys
leads to difficulties later on.’ - I protested that mine had
been very well behaved so far. Evidently this second diagnosis, on
the future of my boys, pleased me no more than the earlier one,
according to which my patient was suffering from a neurosis. Thus
these two impressions were bound up together by their contiguity,
by the fact of their having been experienced both at once; and in
taking the story of the neurosis into my dream, I was substituting
it for the conversation about upbringing, which had more connection
with the dream-thoughts, since it touched so closely upon the
worries later expressed by my wife. So even my fear that N. might
be right in what he said about the difficulty of bringing up boys
had found a place in the dream, for it lay concealed behind the
representation of my wish that I myself might be wrong in
harbouring such fears. The same phantasy served unaltered to
represent both of the opposing alternatives.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

775

VI

   ‘Early this morning,¹
between dreaming and waking, I experienced a very nice example of
verbal condensation. In the course of a mass of dream-fragments
that I could scarcely remember, I was brought up short, as it were,
by a word which I saw before me as though it were half written and
half printed. The word was "
erzefilisch
", and it
formed part of a sentence which slipped into my conscious memory
apart from any context and in complete isolation: "That has an
erzefilisch
influence on the sexual emotions." I knew
at once that the word ought really to have been
"
erzieherisch
" ["educational"]. And I
was in doubt for some time whether the second "
e
"
in "
erzefilisch
" should not have been an
"
i
". In that connection the word
"syphilis" occurred to me and, starting to analyse the
dream while I was still half asleep, I racked my brains in an
effort to make out how that word could have got into my dream,
since I had nothing to do with the disease either personally or
professionally. I then thought of "
erzehlerisch
[another nonsense word], and this explained the
"
e
" of the second syllable of
"
erzefilisch
" by reminding me that the evening
before I had been asked by our governess [
Erzieherin
] to say
something to her on the problem of prostitution, and had given her
Hesse’s book on prostitution in order to influence her
emotional life - for this had not developed quite normally; after
which I had talked [
erzählt
] a lot to her on the
problem. I then saw all at once that the word "syphilis"
was not to be taken literally, but stood for "poison" -
of course in relation to sexual life. When translated, therefore,
the sentence in the dream ran quite logically: "My talk
[
Erzählung
] was intended to have an educational
[
erzieherisch
] influence on the emotional life of our
governess [
Erzieherin
]; but I fear it may at the same time
have had a poisonous effect." "
Erzefilisch
"
was compounded from "
erzäh
-" and
"
erzieh
-".’

  
¹
Quoted from Marcinowski.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

776

   The verbal malformations in
dreams greatly resemble those which are familiar in paranoia but
which are also present in hysteria and obsessions. The linguistic
tricks performed by children, who sometimes actually treat words as
though they were objects and moreover invent new languages and
artificial syntactic forms, are the common source of these things
in dreams and psychoneuroses alike.

   The analysis of the nonsensical
verbal forms that occur in dreams is particularly well calculated
to exhibit the dream work’s achievements in the way of
condensation. The reader should not conclude from the paucity of
the instances which I have given that material of this kind is rare
or observed at all exceptionally. On the contrary, it is very
common. But as a result of the fact that dream-interpretation is
dependent upon psycho-analytic treatment, only a very small number
of instances are observed and recorded and the analyses of such
instances are as a rule only intelligible to experts in the
pathology of the neuroses. Thus a dream of this kind was reported
by Dr. von Karpinska (1914) containing the nonsensical verbal form:
‘
Svingnum elvi
.’ It is also worth mentioning
those cases in which a word appears in a dream which is not in
itself meaningless but which has lost its proper meaning and
combines a number of other meanings to which it is related in just
the same way as a ‘meaningless’ word would be. This is
what occurred, for instance, in the ten-year-old boy’s dream
of a ‘category’ which was recorded by Tausk (1913).
‘Category’ in that case meant ‘female
genitals’, and to ‘categorate’ meant the same as
‘to micturate.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

777

   Where spoken sentences occur in
dreams and are expressly distinguished as such from thoughts, it is
an invariable rule that the words spoken in the dream are derived
from spoken words remembered in the dream-material. The text of the
speech is either retained unaltered or expressed with some slight
displacement. A speech in a dream is often put together from
various recollected speeches, the text remaining the same but being
given, if possible, several meanings, or one different from the
original one. A spoken remark in a dream is not infrequently no
more than an allusion to an occasion on which the remark in
question was made.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] Not long ago
I found a single exception to this rule in the case of a young man
who suffered from obsessions while retaining intact his highly
developed intellectual powers. The spoken words which occurred in
his dreams were not derived from remarks which he had heard or made
himself. They contained the undistorted text of his obsessional
thoughts, which in his waking life only reached his consciousness
in a modified form.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

778

(B)

THE WORK OF DISPLACEMENT

   In making our collection of
instances of condensation in dreams, the existence of another
relation, probably of no less importance, had already become
evident. It could be seen that the elements which stand out as the
principal components of the manifest content of the dream are far
from playing the same part in the dream-thoughts. And, as a
corollary, the converse of this assertion can be affirmed: what is
clearly the essence of the dream-thoughts need not be represented
in the dream at all. The dream is, as it were, differently centred
from the dream thoughts - its content has different elements as its
central point. Thus in the dream of the botanical monograph, for
instance, the central point of the dream-content was obviously the
element ‘botanical’; whereas the dream-thoughts were
concerned with the complications and conflicts arising between
colleagues from their professional obligations, and further with
the charge that I was in the habit of sacrificing too much for the
sake of my hobbies. The element ‘botanical’ had no
place whatever in this core of the dream-thoughts, unless it was
loosely connected with it by an antithesis - the fact that botany
never had a place among my favourite studies. In my patient’s
Sappho
dream the central position was occupied by climbing
up and down and being up above and down below; the dream-thoughts,
however, dealt with the dangers of sexual relations with people of
an inferior social class. So that only a single element of the
dream-thoughts seems to have found its way into the dream-content,
though that element was expanded to a disproportionate extent.
Similarly, in the dream of the may-beetles, the topic of which was
the relations of sexuality to cruelty, it is true that the factor
of cruelty emerged in the dream-content; but it did so in another
connection and without any mention of sexuality, that is to say,
divorced from its context and consequently transformed into
something extraneous. Once again, in my dream about my uncle, the
fair beard which formed its centre-point seems to have had no
connection in its meaning with my ambitious wishes which, as we
saw, were the core of the dream-thoughts. Dreams such as these give
a justifiable impression of ‘displacement.’ In complete
contrast to these examples, we can see that in the dream of
Irma’s injection the different elements were able to retain,
during the process of constructing the dream, the approximate place
which they occupied in the dream-thoughts. This further relation
between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content, wholly variable
as it is in its sense or direction, is calculated at first to
create astonishment. If we are considering a psychical process in
normal life and find that one out of its several component ideas
has been picked out and has acquired a special degree of vividness
in consciousness, we usually regard this effect as evidence that a
specially high amount of psychical value - some particular degree
of interest - attaches to this predominant idea. But we now
discover that, in the case of the different elements of the
dream-thoughts, a value of this kind does not persist or is
disregarded in the process of dream-formation. There is never any
doubt as to which of the elements of the dream-thoughts have the
highest psychical value, we learn that by direct judgement. In the
course of the formation of a dream these essential elements,
charged, as they are, with intense interest, may be treated as
though they were of small value, and their place may be taken in
the dream by other elements, of whose small value in the
dream-thoughts there can be no question. At first sight it looks as
though no attention whatever is paid to the psychical
intensity¹ of the various ideas in making the choice among
them for the dream, and as though the only thing considered is the
greater or less degree of multiplicity of their determination. What
appears in dreams, we might suppose, is not what is important in
the dream-thoughts but what occurs in them several times over. But
this hypothesis does not greatly assist our understanding of
dream-formation, since from the nature of things it seems clear
that the two factors of multiple determination and inherent
psychical value must necessarily operate in the same sense. The
ideas which are most important among the dream-thoughts will almost
certainly be those which occur most often in them, since the
different dream-thoughts will, as it were, radiate out from them.
Nevertheless a dream can reject elements which are thus both highly
stressed in themselves and reinforced from many directions, and can
select for its content other elements which possess only the second
of these attributes.