Freud - Complete Works (141 page)

  
¹
[ No
fire
, no
coal

       So
hotly glows

       As
secret love

       Of
which no one knows.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

813

   The foregoing discussion has led
us at last to the discovery of a third factor whose share in the
transformation of the dream thoughts into the dream-content is not
to be underrated: namely,
considerations of representability in
the peculiar psychical material of which dreams make use
 
- for the most part, that is, representability in visual images. Of
the various subsidiary thoughts attached to the essential
dream-thoughts, those will be preferred which admit of visual
representation; and the dream-work does not shrink from the effort
of recasting unadaptable thoughts into a new verbal form - even
into a less usual one - provided that that process facilitates
representation and so relieves the psychological pressure caused by
constricted thinking. This pouring of the content of a thought into
another mould may at the same time serve the purposes of the
activity of condensation and may create connections, which might
not otherwise have been present, with some other thought; while
this second thought itself may already have had its original form
of expression changed, with a view to meeting the first one
half-way.

   Herbert Silberer (1909) has
pointed out a good way of directly observing the transformation of
thoughts into pictures in the process of forming dreams and so of
studying this one factor of the dream-work in isolation. If, when
he was in a fatigued and sleepy condition, he set himself some
intellectual task, he found that it often happened that the thought
escaped him and that in its place a picture appeared, which he was
then able to recognize as a substitute for the thought. Silberer
describes these substitutes by the not very appropriate term of
‘auto-symbolic.’ I will here quote a few examples from
Silberer’s paper, and I shall have occasion, on account of
certain characteristics of the phenomena concerned, to return to
them later.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

814

    ‘
Example
1. - I
thought of having to revise an uneven passage in an essay.

    ‘
Symbol
. - I
saw myself planing a piece of wood.’

    ‘
Example
5. -
I endeavoured to bring home to myself the aim of certain
metaphysical studies which I was proposing to make. Their aim, I
reflected, was to work one’s way through to ever higher forms
of consciousness and layers of existence, in one’s search for
the bases of existence.

    ‘
Symbol
. - I
was pushing a long knife under a cake, as though to lift out a
slice.

   ‘
Interpretation
. -
My motion with the knife meant the "working my way
through" which was in question. . . . Here is
the explanation of the symbolism. It is from time to time my
business at meals to cut up a cake and distribute the helpings. I
perform the task with a long, flexible knife - which demands some
care. In particular, to lift out the slices cleanly after they have
been cut offers certain difficulties; the knife must be pushed
carefully
under
the slice (corresponding to the slow
"working my way through" to reach the "bases").
But there is yet more symbolism in the picture. For the cake in the
symbol was a "Dobos" cake - a cake with a number of
"layers" through which, in cutting it, the knife has to
penetrate (the "layers" of consciousness and
thought).’

   ‘
Example
9. - I had
lost the thread in a train of thought. I tried to find it again,
but had to admit that the starting-point had completely escaped
me.

   ‘
Symbol
. - Part of a
compositor’s forme, with the last lines of type fallen
away.’

   In view of the part played by
jokes, quotations, songs and proverbs in the mental life of
educated people, it would fully agree with our expectations if
disguises of such kinds were used with extreme frequency for
representing dream-thoughts. What, for instance, is the meaning in
a dream of a number of carts, each filled with a different sort of
vegetable? They stand for a wishful contrast to ‘
Kraut und
Rüben
’, that is to say to
‘higgledy-piggledy’, and accordingly signify
‘disorder.’ I am surprised that this dream has only
been reported to me once.¹ A dream-symbolism of universal
validity has only emerged in the case of a few subjects, on the
basis of generally familiar allusions and verbal substitutes.
Moreover a good part of this symbolism is shared by dreams with
psychoneuroses, legends and popular customs.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] I have in
fact never met with this image again; so I have lost confidence in
the correctness of the interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

815

   Indeed, when we look into the
matter more closely, we must recognize the fact that the dream-work
is doing nothing original in making substitutions of this kind. In
order to gain its ends - in this case the possibility of a
representation hampered by censorship - it merely follows the paths
which it finds already laid down in the unconscious; and it gives
preference to those transformations of the repressed material which
can also become conscious in the form of jokes or allusions and of
which the phantasies of neurotic patients are so full. At this
point we suddenly reach an understanding of Scherner’s dream
interpretations, whose essential correctness I have defended
elsewhere. The imagination’s pre-occupation with the
subject’s own body is by no means peculiar to dreams or
characteristic only of them. My analyses have shown me that it is
habitually present in the unconscious thoughts of neurotics, and
that it is derived from sexual curiosity, which, in growing youths
or girls, is directed to the genitals of the other sex, and to
those of their own as well. Nor, as Scherner and Volkelt have
rightly insisted, is a house the only circle of ideas employed for
symbolizing the body; and this is equally true of dreams and of the
unconscious phantasies of neurosis. It is true that I know patients
who have retained an architectural symbolism for the body and the
genitals. ( Sexual interest ranges far beyond the sphere of the
external genitalia.) For these patients pillars and columns
represent the legs (as they do in the
Song of Solomon
),
every gateway stands for one of the bodily orifices (a
‘hole’), every water-pipe is a reminder of the urinary
apparatus, and so on. But the circle of ideas centring round
plant-life or the kitchen may just as readily be chosen to conceal
sexual images.¹ In the former case the way has been well
prepared by linguistic usage, itself the precipitate of imaginative
similes reaching back to remote antiquity: e.g. the Lord’s
vineyard, the seed, and the maiden’s garden in the
Song of
Solomon
. The ugliest as well as the most intimate details of
sexual life may be thought and dreamt of in seemingly innocent
allusions to activities in the kitchen; and the symptoms of
hysteria could never be interpreted if we forgot that sexual
symbolism can find its best hiding-place behind what is commonplace
and inconspicuous. There is a valid sexual meaning behind the
neurotic child’s intolerance of blood or raw meat, or his
nausea at the sight of eggs or macaroni, and behind the enormous
exaggeration in neurotics of the natural human dread of snakes.
Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following
paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest periods of
civilization - paths of whose continued existence today, under the
thinnest of veils, evidence is to be found in linguistic usages,
superstitions and customs.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Abundant
evidence of this is to be found in the three supplementary volumes
to Fuchs (1909-12).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

816

   I will now append the
‘flowery’ dream dreamt by one of my women patients
which I have already promised to record. I have indicated in small
capitals those elements in it that are to be given a sexual
interpretation. The dreamer quite lost her liking for this pretty
dream after it had been interpreted.

   (
a
)
INTRODUCTORY DREAM
:
She went into
the kitchen where her two maidservants were, and found fault with
them for not having got her ‘bite of food’ ready. At
the same time she saw quite a quantity of crockery standing upside
down to drain, common crockery piled up in heaps
. Later
addition:
The two maidservants went to fetch some water and had
to step into a kind of river which came right up to the house into
the yard
.¹

   (
b
)
MAIN DREAM
²:
She was
descending from a height
³
over some strangely
constructed pallisades or fences, which were put together into
large panels, and consisted of small squares of wattling
⁴
. It was not intended for
climbing over; she had trouble in finding a place to put her feet
in and felt glad that her dress had not been caught anywhere, so
that she had stayed respectable as she went along.
⁵
She was holding a
BIG BRANCH
in her hand
⁶
;
actually, it was like a tree,
covered over with
RED
BLOSSOMS
,
branching and spreading out.
⁷
There was an idea of their
being cherry
-
BLOSSOMS
;
but they also looked like double
CAMELLIAS
,
though of course those
do not grow on trees. As she went down, first she had
ONE
,
then suddenly
TWO
,
and later again
ONE
.
⁸
When she got down, the
lower
BLOSSOMS
were
already a good deal
FADED
.
Then she saw, after she had got down, a manservant who - she
felt inclined to say - was combing a similar tree, that is to say,
he was using a similar
PIECE OF
WOOD
to drag out some
THICK TUFTS OF HAIR
that were
hanging down from it like moss. Some other workmen had cut down
some similar
BRANCHES
from a
GARDEN
and
thrown them into the
ROAD
,
where they
LAY ABOUT
,
so that
A LOT OF PEOPLE TOOK SOME
.
But
she asked whether that was alright - whether she might
TAKE ONE TOO
.
⁹
A young
MAN
(someone she knew, a stranger)
was standing in the garden; she went up to him to ask him
how
BRANCHES
of that
kind could be
TRANSPLANTED INTO
HER OWN GARDEN.
¹⁰
He
embraced her; whereupon she struggled and asked him what he was
thinking of and whether he thought people could embrace her like
that. He said there was no harm in that: it was allowed.
¹¹
He then said that he was
willing to go up into the
OTHER
GARDEN
with her, to show her how the planting was done,
and added something she could not quite understand: ‘Anyhow,
I need three
YARDS
(later
she gave it as:
three square yards
)
or three fathoms of
ground.’ It was as though he were asking her for something in
return for his willingness, as though he intended to
COMPENSATE HIMSELF IN HER GARDEN
,
or as though he wanted to
CHEAT
some law or other, to get
some advantage from it without causing her harm. Whether he really
showed her something, she had no idea
.

  
¹
For the interpretation of this introductory
dream, which is to be interpreted as a causal dependent clause, see
p. 786
.

  
²
Describing the course of her
life.

  
³
Her high descent: a wishful antithesis to
the introductory dream.

  
⁴
A
composite picture, uniting two localities: what were known as the
‘attics’ of her family home, where she used to play
with her brother, the object of her later phantasies, and a farm
belonging to a bad uncle who used to tease her.

  
⁵
A
wishful antithesis to a real recollection of her uncle’s
farm, where she used to throw off her clothes in her
sleep.

  
⁶
Just
as the angel carries a sprig of lilies in pictures of the
Annunciation.

  
⁷
For
the explanation of this composite image see
p. 789
: innocence, menstruation,
La
dame aux camélias
.

  
⁸
Referring to the multiplicity of the people
involved in her phantasy

  
⁹
That
is whether she might pull one down, i. e. masturbate.