Freud - Complete Works (139 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1930:] Whether
rightly I am now uncertain.

  
²
Her accompanying hysterical symptoms were
amenorrhoea and great depression (which was this patient’s
chief symptom).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

801

   Glosses on a dream, or apparently
innocent comments on it, often serve to disguise a portion of what
has been dreamt in the subtlest fashion, though in fact betraying
it. For instance, a dreamer remarked that at one point ‘the
dream had been wiped away’; and the analysis led to an
infantile recollection of his listening to someone wiping himself
after defaecating. Or here is another example which deserves to be
recorded in detail. A young man had a very clear dream which
reminded him of some phantasies of his boyhood that had remained
conscious. He dreamt that it was evening and that he was in a hotel
at a summer resort. He mistook the number of his room and went into
one in which an elderly lady and her two daughters were undressing
and going to bed. He proceeded: ‘Here there are some gaps in
the dream; there’s something missing. Finally there was a man
in the room who tried to throw me out, and I had to have a struggle
with him.’ He made vain endeavours to recall the gist and
drift of the boyish phantasy to which the dream was evidently
alluding; until at last the truth emerged that what he was in
search of was already in his possession in his remark about the
obscure part of the dream. The ‘gaps’ were the genital
apertures of the women who were going to bed; and
‘there’s something missing’ described the
principal feature of the female genitalia. When he was young he had
had a consuming curiosity to see a woman’s genitals and had
been inclined to hold to the infantile sexual theory according to
which women have male organs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

802

   An analogous recollection of
another dreamer assumed a very similar shape. He dreamt as follows:
‘
I was going into the Volkgarten Restaurant with
Fräulein K
. . . . . then came an obscure
patch, an interruption . . .,
then I found myself in the salon
of a brothel, where I saw two or three women, one of them in her
chemise and drawers
.’

  
ANALYSIS
. - Fräulein K. was the
daughter of his former chief, and, as he himself admitted, a
substitute sister of his own. He had seldom had an opportunity of
talking to her, but they once had a conversation in which ‘it
was just as though we had become aware of our sex, it was as though
I were to say: "I’m a man and you’re a
woman."' He had only once been inside the restaurant in
question, with his brother-in-law’s sister, a girl who meant
nothing at all to him. Another time he had gone with a group of
three ladies as far as the entrance of the same restaurant. These
ladies were his sister, his sister-in-law and the
brother-in-law’s sister who has just been mentioned. All of
them were highly indifferent to him, but all three fell into the
class of ‘sister.’ He had only seldom visited a brothel
- only two or three times in his life.

   The interpretation was based on
the ‘obscure patch’ and the ‘interruption’
in the dream, and put forward the view that in his boyish curiosity
he had occasionally, though only seldom, inspected the genitals of
a sister who was a few years his junior. Some days later he had a
conscious recollection of the misdeed alluded to by the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

803

   The content of all dreams that
occur during the same night forms part of the same whole; the fact
of their being divided into several sections, as well as the
grouping and number of those sections - all of this has a meaning
and may be regarded as a piece of information arising from the
latent dream-thoughts. In interpreting dreams consisting of several
main sections or, in general, dreams occurring during the same
night, the possibility should not be overlooked that separate and
successive dreams of this kind may have the same meaning, and may
be giving expression to the same impulses in different material. If
so, the first of these homologous dreams to occur is often the more
distorted and timid, while the succeeding one will be more
confident and distinct.

   Pharaoh’s dreams in the
Bible of the kine and the ears of corn, which were interpreted by
Joseph, were of this kind. They are reported more fully by Josephus
(
Ancient History of the Jews
, Book 2, Chapter 5) than in the
Bible. After the King had related his first dream, he said:
‘After I had seen this vision, I awaked out of my sleep; and,
being in disorder, and considering with myself what this appearance
should be, I fell asleep again, and saw another dream, more
wonderful than the foregoing, which did more affright and disturb
me . . .’ After hearing the King’s
account of the dream, Joseph replied: ‘This dream, O King,
although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same event . .
.’

   In his ‘Contribution to the
Psychology of Rumour’, Jung (1910
b
) describes how the
disguised erotic dream of a school-girl was understood by her
school-friends without any interpreting and how it was further
elaborated and modified. He remarks in connection with one of these
dream stories: ‘The final thought in a long series of
dream-images contains precisely what the first image in the series
had attempted to portray. The censorship keeps the complex at a
distance as long as possible by a succession of fresh symbolic
screens, displacements, innocent disguises, etc.’ (Ibid.,
87.) Scherner (1861, 166) was well acquainted with this peculiarity
of the method of representation in dreams and describes it, in
connection with his theory of organic stimuli, as a special law:
‘Lastly, however, in all symbolic dream-structures which
arise from particular nervous stimuli, the imagination observes a
general law: at the beginning of a dream it depicts the object from
which the stimulus arises only by the remotest and most inexact
allusions, but at the end, when the pictorial effusion has
exhausted itself, it nakedly presents the stimulus itself, or, as
the case may be, the organ concerned or the function of that organ,
and therewith the dream, having designated its actual organic
cause, achieves its end . . .’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

804

   Otto Rank (1910) has produced a
neat confirmation of this law of Scherner’s. A girl’s
dream reported by him was composed of two separate dreams dreamt,
with an interval between them, during the same night, the second of
which ended with an orgasm. It was possible to carry out a detailed
interpretation of this second dream even without many contributions
from the dreamer; and the number of connections between the
contents of the two dreams made it possible to see that the first
dream represented in a more timid fashion the same thing as the
second. So that the second, the dream with the orgasm, helped
towards the complete explanation of the first. Rank rightly bases
upon this example a discussion of the general significance of
dreams of orgasm or emission for the theory of dreaming.

   Nevertheless in my experience it
is only rarely that one is in a position to interpret the clarity
or confusion of a dream by the presence of certainty or doubt in
its material. Later on I shall have to disclose a factor in
dream-formation which I have not yet mentioned and which exercises
the determining influence upon the scale of these qualities in any
particular dream.

   Sometimes, in a dream in which
the same situation and setting have persisted for some time, an
interruption will occur which is described in these words:
‘But then it was as though at the same time it was another
place, and there such and such a thing happened.’ After a
while the main thread of the dream may be resumed, and what
interrupted it turns out to be a subordinate clause in the
dream-material - an interpolated thought. A conditional in the
dream-thoughts has been represented in the dream by simultaneity:
‘if’ has become ‘when’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

805

   What is the meaning of the
sensation of inhibited movement which appears so commonly in dreams
and verges so closely upon anxiety? One tries to move forward but
finds oneself glued to the spot, or one tries to reach something
but is held up by a series of obstacles. A train is on the point of
departure but one is unable to catch it. One raises one’s
hand to avenge an insult but finds it powerless and so forth. We
have already met with this sensation in dreams of exhibiting, but
have not as yet made any serious attempt to interpret it. An easy
but insufficient answer would be to say that motor paralysis
prevails in sleep and that we become aware of it in the sensation
we are discussing. But it may be asked why in that case we are not
perpetually dreaming of these inhibited movements; and it is
reasonable to suppose that this sensation, though one which can be
summoned up at any moment during sleep, serves to facilitate some
particular kind of representation, and is only aroused when the
material of the dream-thoughts needs to be represented in that
way.

   This ‘not being able to do
anything’ does not always appear in dreams as a sensation but
is sometimes simply a part of the content of the dream. A case of
this sort seems to me particularly well qualified to throw light on
the meaning of this feature of dreaming. Here is an abridged
version of a dream in which I was apparently charged with
dishonesty.
The place was a mixture of a private sanatorium and
several other institutions. A man-servant appeared to summon me to
an examination. I knew in the dream that something had been missed
and that the examination was due to a suspicion that I had
appropriated the missing article
. (The analysis showed that the
examination was to be taken in two senses and included a medical
examination.)
Conscious of my innocence and of the fact that I
held the position of a consultant in the establishment, I
accompanied the servant quietly. At the door we were met by another
servant who said, pointing to me: ‘Why have you brought him?
He’s a respectable person.’ I then went, unattended,
into a large hall, with machines standing in it, which reminded me
of an Inferno with its hellish instruments of punishment. Stretched
out on one apparatus I saw one of my colleagues, who had every
reason to take some notice of me; but he paid no attention. I was
then told I could go. But I could not find my hat and could not go
after all
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

806

   The wish-fulfilment of the dream
evidently lay in my being recognized as an honest man and told I
could go. There must therefore have been all kinds of material in
the dream-thoughts containing a contradiction of this. That I could
go was a sign of my absolution. If therefore something happened at
the end of the dream which prevented my going, it seems plausible
to suppose that the suppressed material containing the
contradiction was making itself felt at that point. My not being
able to find my hat meant accordingly: ‘After all
you’re
not
an honest man.’ Thus the ‘not
being able to do something’ in this dream was a way of
expressing a contradiction - a ‘no’- so that my earlier
statement that dreams cannot express a ‘no’ requires
correction.¹

   In other dreams, in which the
‘not carrying out’ of a movement occurs as a
sensation
and not simply as a
situation
, the
sensation of the inhibition of a movement gives a more forcible
expression to the same contradiction - it expresses a volition
which is opposed by a counter-volition. Thus the sensation of the
inhibition of a movement represents a
conflict of will
. We
shall learn later that the motor paralysis accompanying sleep is
precisely one of the fundamental determinants of the psychical
process during dreaming. Now an impulse transmitted along the motor
paths is nothing other than a volition, and the fact of our being
so certain that we shall feel that impulse inhibited during sleep
is what makes the whole process so admirably suited for
representing an act of volition and a ‘no’ which
opposes it. It is also easy to see, on my explanation of anxiety,
why the sensation of an inhibition of will approximates so closely
to anxiety and is so often linked with it in dreams. Anxiety is a
libidinal impulse which has its origin in the unconscious and is
inhibited by the preconscious.² When, therefore, the sensation
of inhibition is linked with anxiety in a dream, it must be a
question of an act of volition which was at one time capable of
generating libido - that is, it must be a question of a sexual
impulse.

  
¹
In the complete analysis there was a
reference to an event in my childhood, reached by the following
chain of association. ‘Der Mohr hat seine Schuldigkeit getan,
der Mohr
kahn gehen
.’ [‘The Moor has done his
duty, the Moor
can go
.’] Then came a facetious
conundrum: ‘How old was the Moor when he had done his
duty?’ - ‘One year old, because then he could go
[‘
gehen
’ - both ‘to go’ and ‘
to walk’].’ (It appears that I came into the world with
such a tangle of black hair that my young mother declared I was a
little Moor.) - My not being able to find my hat was an occurrence
from waking life which was used in more than one sense. Our
housemaid, who was a genius at putting things away, had hidden it.
-The end of this dream also concealed a rejection of some
melancholy thoughts about death: ‘I am far from having done
my duty, so I must not go yet.’ - Birth and death were dealt
with in it, just as they had been in the dream of Goethe and the
paralytic patient, which I had dreamt a short time before. (See
pp. 
797
,
886
 ff.)