Freud - Complete Works (143 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] ‘One of
my patients, who was living in a boarding-house, dreamt that
he
met one of the maidservants and asked her what her number was. To
his surprise she answered
: "14". He had in fact
started a
liason
with this girl and had paid several visits
to her in her bedroom. She had not unnaturally been afraid that the
landlady might become suspicious, and, on the day before the dream,
she had proposed that they should meet in an unoccupied room. This
room was actually "No. 14", while in the dream it was the
woman herself who bore this number. It would hardly be possible to
imagine clearer proof of an identification between a woman and a
room.’ (Jones, 1914
a
.) Cf. Artemidorus,
Oneirocritica
, Book II, Chapter X: ‘Thus, for
instance, a bed chamber stands for a wife, if such there be in the
house.’ (Trans, F. S. Krauss, 1881, 110.)

  
²
[
Footnote added
1911:] I will repeat
here what I have written on this subject elsewhere (Freud,
1910
d
): ‘A little time ago I heard that a psychologist
whose views are somewhat different from ours had remarked to one of
us that, when all was said and done, we did undoubtedly exaggerate
the hidden sexual significance of dreams: his own commonest dream
was of going upstairs, and surely there could not be anything
sexual in
that
. We were put on the alert by this objection,
and began to turn our attention to the appearance of steps,
staircases and ladders in dreams, and were soon in a position to
show that staircases (and analogous things) were unquestionably
symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the
comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements
and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid
leaps, we can get to the bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern
of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs. Nor must we omit to
bring in the evidence of linguistic usage. It shows us that
"mounting" [German "
steigen
"] is used as
a direct equivalent for the sexual act. We speak of a man as a
"
Steiger
" [a "mounter"] and of
"
nachsteigen
" ["to run after", literally
"to climb after"]. In French the steps on a staircase are
called "
marches
" and "
un vieux
marcheur
" has the same meaning as our "
ein alter
Steiger
" ["an old rake"].’

  
³
[
Footnote added
1914:] Compare the
drawing made by a nineteen-year-old manic patient reproduced in
Zbl. Psychoanal
, 2, 675. It represents a man with a necktie
consisting of a snake which is turning in the direction of a girl.
See also the story of ‘The Bashful Man’ in
Anthropophyteia
, 6, 334: A lady went into a bathroom, and
there she came upon a gentleman who scarcely had time to put on his
shirt. He was very much embarrassed, but hurriedly covering his
throat with the front part of his shirt, he exclaimed:
‘Excuse me, but I’ve not got my necktie
on.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

822

   A number of other symbols have
been put forward, with supporting instances, by Stekel, but have
not yet been sufficiently verified. Stekel’s writings, and in
particular his
Die Sprache des Traumes
(1911), contain the
fullest collection of interpretations of symbols. Many of these
show penetration, and further examination has proved them correct:
for instance, his section on the symbolism of death. But this
author’s lack of a critical faculty and his tendency to
generalization at all costs throw doubts upon others of his
interpretations or render them unusable; so that it is highly
advisable to exercise caution in accepting his conclusions. I
therefore content myself with drawing attention to only a few of
his findings.

   According to Stekel,
‘right’ and ‘left’ in dreams have an
ethical sense. ‘The right-hand path always means the path of
righteousness and the left-hand one that of crime. Thus
"left" may represent homosexuality, incest or perversion,
and "right" may represent marriage, intercourse with a
prostitute and so on, always looked at from the subject’s
individual moral stand point.’ (Stekel, 1909, 466 ff.) -
Relatives in dreams usually play the part of genitals (ibid., 473).
I can only confirm this in the case of sons, daughters and younger
sisters - that is only so far as they fall into the category of
‘little ones.’ On the other hand I have come across
undoubted cases in which ‘sisters’ symbolized the
breasts and ‘brothers’ the larger hemispheres. -Stekel
explains failing to catch up with a carriage as regret at a
difference in age which cannot be caught up with (ibid., 479). -
Luggage that one travels with is a load of sin, he says, that
weighs one down (loc. cit.). But precisely luggage often turns out
to be an unmistakable symbol of the dreamer’s own genitals. -
Stekel also assigns fixed symbolic meanings to numbers, such as
often appear in dreams. But these explanations seem neither
sufficiently verified nor generally valid, though his
interpretations usually appear plausible in the individual cases.
In any case the number three has been confirmed from many sides as
a symbol of the male genitals.

   One of the generalizations put
forward by Stekel concerns the double significance of genital
symbols. ‘Where’, he asks, ‘is there a symbol
which - provided that the imagination by any means admits of it -
cannot be employed both in a male and in a female
sense?’ In any case the clause in parenthesis removes
much of the certainty from this assertion, since in fact the
imagination does not always admit of it. But I think it is worth
while remarking that in my experience Stekel’s generalization
cannot be maintained in the face of the greater complexity of the
facts. In addition to symbols which can stand with equal frequency
for the male and for the female genitals, there are some which
designate one of the sexes predominantly or almost exclusively, and
yet others which are known
only
with a male or a female
meaning. For it is a fact that the imagination does not admit of
long, stiff objects and weapons being used as symbols of the female
genitals, or of hollow objects, such as chests, cases, boxes, etc.,
being used as symbols for the male ones. It is true that the
tendency of dreams and of unconscious phantasies to employ sexual
symbols bisexually betrays an archaic characteristic; for in
childhood the distinction between the genitals of the two sexes is
unknown and the same kind of genitals are attributed to both of
them. But it is possible, too, to be misled into wrongly supposing
that a sexual symbol is bisexual, if one forgets that in some
dreams there is a general inversion of sex, so that what is male is
represented as female and
vice versa
. Dreams of this kind
may, for instance, express a woman’s wish to be a man.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

823

   The genitals can also be
represented in dreams by other parts of the body: the male organ by
a hand or a foot and the female genital orifice by the mouth or an
ear or even an eye. The secretions of the human body - mucus,
tears, urine, semen, etc. - can replace one another in dreams. This
last assertion of Stekel’s, which is on the whole correct,
has been justifiably criticized by Reitler (1913
b
) as
requiring some qualification: what in fact happens is that
significant secretions, such as semen, are replaced by indifferent
ones.

   It is to be hoped that these very
incomplete hints may serve to encourage others to undertake a more
painstaking general study of the subject.¹ I myself have
attempted to give a more elaborate account of dream-symbolism in my
Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
(1916-17).

   I shall now append a few examples
of the use of these symbols in dreams, with the idea of showing how
impossible it becomes to arrive at the interpretation of a dream if
one excludes dream-symbolism, and how irresistibly one is driven to
accept it in many cases. At the same time, however, I should like
to utter an express warning against over-estimating the importance
of symbols in dream-interpretation, against restricting the work of
translating dreams merely to translating symbols and against
abandoning the technique of making use of the dreamer’s
associations. The two techniques of dream-interpretation must be
complementary to each other; but both in practice and in theory the
first place continues to be held by the procedure which I began by
describing and which attributes a decisive significance to the
comments made by the dreamer, while the translation of symbols, as
I have explained it, is also at our disposal as an auxiliary
method.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] However much
Scherner’s view of dream-symbolism may differ from the one
developed in these pages, I must insist that he is to be regarded
as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams, and that the
investigations of psycho-analysis have at last brought recognition
to his book, published as it was so many years ago (in 1861), and
for so long regarded as fantastic.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

824

I

A HAT AS A SYMBOL OF A MAN (OR OF MALE
GENITALS)

   (Extract from the dream of a
young woman suffering from agoraphobia as a result of fears of
seduction.)

   ‘
I was walking in the
street in the summer, wearing a straw hat of peculiar shape; its
middle-piece was bent upwards and its side-pieces hung
downwards
’ (the description became hesitant at this
point)
‘in such a way that one side was lower than the
other. I was cheerful and in a self-confident frame of mind; and,
as I passed a group of young officers, I thought: "None of you
can do me any harm!
"'

   Since nothing occurred to her in
connection with the hat in the dream, I said: ‘No doubt the
hat was a male genital organ, with its middle-piece sticking up and
its two side-pieces hanging down. It may seem strange, perhaps,
that a hat should be a man, but you will remember the phrase
"
Unter die Haube kommen
" ["to find a
husband" (literally "to come under the
cap")].’ I intentionally gave her no interpretation of
the detail about the two side-pieces hanging down unevenly; though
it is precisely details of this kind that must point the way in
determining an interpretation. I went on to say that as she had a
husband with such fine genitals there was no need for her to be
afraid of the officers - no need, that is, for her to wish for
anything from them, since as a rule she was prevented from going
for a walk unprotected and unaccompanied owing to her phantasies of
being seduced. I had already been able to give her this last
explanation of her anxiety on several occasions upon the basis of
other material.

   The way in which the dreamer
reacted to this material was most remarkable. She withdrew her
description of the hat and maintained that she had never said that
the two side-pieces hung down. I was too certain of what I had
heard to be led astray, and stuck to my guns. She was silent for a
while and then found enough courage to ask what was meant by one of
her husband’s testes hanging down lower than the other and
whether it was the same in all men. In this way the remarkable
detail of the hat was explained and the interpretation accepted by
her.

   At the time my patient told me
this dream I had long been familiar with the hat-symbol. Other,
less transparent cases had led me to suppose that a hat can also
stand for female genitals.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] Cf. an
example of this in Kirchgraber (1912). Stekel (1909, 475) records a
dream in which a hat with a feather standing up crooked in the
middle of it symbolized an (impotent) man.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

825

II

A ‘LITTLE ONE’ AS THE GENITAL
ORGAN -

‘BEING RUN OVER’ AS A SYMBOL OF
SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

(Another dream of the same agoraphobic patient.)

  
Her mother sent her little
daughter away, so that she had to go by herself. Then she went in a
train with her mother and saw her little one walk straight on to
the rails so that she was bound to be run over. She heard the
cracking of her bones. (This produced an uncomfortable feeling in
her but no real horror.) Then she looked round out of the window of
the railway-carriage to see whether the parts could no be seen
behind. Then she reproached her mother for having made the little
one go by herself.

  
ANALYSIS
. - It is no easy matter to
give a complete interpretation of the dream. It formed part of a
cycle of dreams and can only be fully understood if it is taken in
connection with the others. There is difficulty in obtaining in
sufficient isolation the material necessary for establishing the
symbolism. - In the first place, the patient declared that the
train journey was to be interpreted historically, as an allusion to
a journey she had taken when she was leaving a sanatorium for
nervous diseases, with whose director, needless to say, she had
been in love. Her mother had fetched her away, and the doctor had
appeared at the station and handed her a bouquet of flowers as a
parting present. It had been very awkward that her mother should
have witnessed this tribute. At this point, then, her mother
figured as interfering with her attempts at a love affair; and this
had in fact been the part played by that severe lady during the
patient’s girlhood. - Her next association related to the
sentence: ‘she looked round to see whether the parts could
not be seen from behind.’ The façade of the dream
would of course lead one to think of the parts of her little
daughter who had been run over and mangled. But her association led
in quite another direction. She recollected having once seen her
father naked in the bath room from behind; she went on to talk of
the distinctions between the sexes, and laid stress on the fact
that a man’s genitals can be seen even from behind but a
woman’s cannot. In this connection she herself interpreted
‘the little one’ as meaning the genitals and ‘her
little one’ - she had a four-year-old daughter - as her own
genitals. She reproached her mother with having expected her to
live as though she had no genitals, and pointed out that the same
reproach was expressed in the opening sentence of the dream:
‘her mother sent her little one away, so that she had to go
by herself.’ In her imagination ‘going by herself in
the streets’ meant not having a man, not having any sexual
relations (‘
coire
’ in Latin means literally
‘to go with’) - and she disliked that. Her accounts all
went to show that when she was a girl she had in fact suffered from
her mother’s jealousy owing to the preference shown her by
her father.