Freud - Complete Works (145 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

834

   ‘"
Violets
"
was ostensibly quite asexual; but, very boldly, as it seemed to me,
I thought I could trace a secret meaning for the word in an
unconscious link with the French word "
viol
"
["rape"]. To my surprise the dreamer gave as an
association the English word "
violate
". The dream
had made use of the great chance similarity between the words
"
violet
" and "
violate
" - the
difference in their pronunciation lies merely in the different
stress upon their final syllables - in order to express "in
the language of flowers" the dreamer’s thoughts on the
violence of defloration (another term that employs flower
symbolism) and possibly also a masochistic trait in her character.
A pretty instance of the "verbal bridges" crossed by the
paths leading to the unconscious. The words "
one has to pay
for them
" signified having to pay with her life for being
a wife and a mother.

   ‘In connection with
"
pinks
", which she went on to call
"
carnations
", I thought of the connection between
that word and "carnal." But the dreamer’s
association to it was "
colour
". She added that
"
carnations
" were the flowers which her
fiancé
gave her frequently and in great numbers. At
the end of her remarks she suddenly confessed of her own accord
that she had not told the truth: what had occurred to her had not
been "
colour
" but "
incarnation
" -
the word I had expected. Incidentally "
colour
"
itself was not a very remote association, but was determined by the
meaning of "
carnation
" (flesh-colour) - was
determined, that is, by the same complex. This lack of
straightforwardness showed that it was at this point that
resistance was greatest, and corresponded to the fact that this was
where the symbolism was most clear and that the struggle between
libido and its repression was at its most intense in relation to
this phallic theme. The dreamer’s comment to the effect that
her
fiancé
frequently gave her flowers of that kind
was an indication not only of the double sense of the word:
carnation
" but also of their phallic meaning in the
dream. The gift of flowers, an exciting factor of the dream derived
from her current life, was used to express an exchange of sexual
gifts: she was making a gift of her virginity and expected a full
emotional and sexual life in return for it. At this point, too, the
words "
expensive flowers, one has to pay for them
"
must have had what was no doubt literally a financial meaning.
-Thus the flower symbolism in this dream included virginal
femininity, masculinity and an allusion to defloration by violence.
It is worth pointing out in this connection that sexual flower
symbolism, which, indeed, occurs very commonly in other
connections, symbolizes the human organs of sex by blossoms, which
are the sexual organs of plants. It may perhaps be true in general
that gifts of flowers between lovers have this unconscious
meaning.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

835

   ‘The birthday for which she
was preparing in the dream meant, no doubt, the birth of a baby.
She was identifying herself with her
fiancé
, and was
representing him as "arranging" her for a birth - that
is, as copulating with her. The latent thought may have run:
"If I were he, I wouldn’t wait - I would deflower my
fianceé
without asking her leave - I would use
violence." This was indicated by the word
"
violate
", and in this way the sadistic component
of the libido found expression.

   ‘In a deeper layer of the
dream, the phrase "
I arrange
. . ." must no doubt
have an auto-erotic, that is to say, an infantile,
significance.

   ‘The dreamer also revealed
an awareness, which was only possible to her in a dream, of her
physical deficiency: she saw herself like a table, without
projections, and on that account laid all the more emphasis on the
preciousness of the "
centre
" - on another occasion
she used the words, "
a centre-piece of flowers
" -
that is to say, on her virginity. The horizontal attribute of a
table must also have contributed something to the symbol.

   ‘The concentration of the
dream should be observed: there was nothing superfluous in it,
every word was a symbol.

   ‘Later on the dreamer
produced an addendum to the dream: "
I decorate the flowers
with green crinkled paper
". She added that it was
"
fancy paper
" of the sort used for covering common
flower pots. She went on: "
to hide untidy things, whatever
was to be seen, which was not pretty to the eye; there is a gap, a
little space in the flowers. The paper looks like velvet or
moss
." - To "
decorate
" she gave the
association "
decorum
", as I had expected. She said
the green colour predominated, and her association to it was
"
hope
" - another link with pregnancy. -In this
part of the dream the chief factor was not identification with a
man; ideas of shame and self-revelation came to the fore. She was
making herself beautiful for him and was admitting physical defects
which she felt ashamed of and was trying to correct. Her
associations "
velvet
" and "
moss
"
were a clear indication of a reference to pubic hair.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

836

   ‘This dream, then, gave
expression to thoughts of which the girl was scarcely aware in her
waking life - thoughts concerned with sensual love and its organs.
She was being "arranged for a birthday" - that is, she
was being copulated with. The fear of being deflowered was finding
expression, and perhaps, too, ideas of pleasurable suffering. She
admitted her physical deficiencies to herself and overcompensated
for them by an over-valuation of her virginity. Her shame put
forward as an excuse for the signs of sensuality the fact that its
purpose was the production of a baby. Material considerations, too,
alien to a lover’s mind, found their way to expression. The
affect attaching to this simple dream - a feeling of happiness -
indicated that powerful emotional complexes had found satisfaction
in it.’

   Ferenczi (1917) has justly
pointed out that the meaning of symbols and the significance of
dreams can be arrived at with particular ease from the dreams of
precisely those people who are uninitiated into
psycho-analysis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

837

   At this point I shall interpose a
dream dreamt by a contemporary historical figure. I am doing so
because in it an object that would in any case appropriately
represent a male organ has a further attribute which established it
in the clearest fashion as a phallic symbol. The fact of a riding
whip growing to an endless length could scarcely be taken to mean
anything but an erection. Apart from this, too, the dream is an
excellent instance of the way in which thoughts of a serious kind,
far removed from anything sexual, can come to be represented by
infantile sexual material.

XI

A DREAM OF
BISMARCK’S
¹

   ‘In his
Gedanken und
Errinnerungen
Bismarck quotes a letter written by him to the
Emperor William I on December 18th 1881, in the course of which the
following passage occurs: "Your Majesty’s communication
encourages me to relate a dream which I had in the Spring of 1863,
in the hardest days of the Conflict, from which no human eye could
see any possible way out. I dreamt (as I related the first thing
next morning to my wife and other witnesses) that I was riding on a
narrow Alpine path, precipice on the right, rocks on the left. The
path grew narrower, so that the horse refused to proceed, and it
was impossible to turn round or dismount, owing to lack of space.
Then, with my whip in my left hand, I struck the smooth rock and
called on God. The whip grew to an endless length, the rocky wall
dropped like a piece of stage scenery and opened out a broad path,
with a view over hills and forests, like a landscape in Bohemia;
there were Prussian troops with banners, and even in my dream the
thought came to me at once that I must report it to your Majesty.
This dream was fulfilled, and I woke up rejoiced and strengthened.
. . ."'

   ‘The action of this dream
falls into two sections. In the first part the dreamer found
himself in an
impasse
from which he was miraculously rescued
in the second part. The difficult situation in which the horse and
its rider were placed is an easily recognizable dream-picture of
the statesman’s critical position, which he may have felt
with particular bitterness as he thought over the problems of his
policy on the evening before the dream. In the passage quoted above
Bismarck himself uses the same simile in describing the
hopelessness of his position at the time. The meaning of the dream
picture must therefore have been quite obvious to him. We are at
the same time presented with a fine example of Silberer’s
"functional phenomenon". The process taking place in the
dreamer’s mind - each of the solutions attempted by his
thoughts being met in turn by insuperable obstacles, while
nevertheless he could not and might not tear himself free from the
consideration of those problems - were most appropriately depicted
by the rider who could neither advance not retreat. His pride,
which forbade his thinking of surrendering or resigning, was
expressed in the dream by the words "it was impossible to turn
round or dismount." In his quality of a man of action who
exerted himself unceasingly and toiled for the good of others,
Bismarck must have found it easy to liken himself to a horse; and
in fact he did so on many occasions, for instance, in his
well-known saying: "A good horse dies in harness." In
this sense the words "the horse refused to proceed" meant
nothing more nor less than that the over-tired statesman felt a
need to turn away from the cares of the immediate present, or, to
put it another way, that he was in the act of freeing himself from
the bonds of the reality principle by sleeping and dreaming. The
wish-fulfilment, which became so prominent in the second part of
the dream, was already hinted at in the words "Alpine
path." No doubt Bismarck already knew at that time that he was
going to spend his next vacation in the Alps - at Gastein; thus the
dream, by conveying him thither, set him free at one blow from all
the burdens of State business.

  
¹
From a paper by Hanns Sachs.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

838

   ‘In the second part of the
dream, the dreamer’s wishes were represented as fulfilled in
two ways: undisguisedly and obviously, and, in addition,
symbolically. Their fulfilment was represented symbolically by the
disappearance of the obstructive rock and the appearance in its
place of a broad path - the "way out", which he was in
search of, in its most convenient form; and, it was represented
undisguisedly in the picture of the advancing Prussian troops. In
order to explain this prophetic vision there is no need whatever
for constructing mystical hypotheses; Freud’s theory of
wish-fulfilment fully suffices. Already at the time of this dream
Bismarck desired a victorious war against Austria as the best
escape from Prussia’s internal conflicts. Thus the dream was
representing this wish as fulfilled, just as is postulated by
Freud, when the dreamer saw the Prussian troops with their banners
in Bohemia, that is, in enemy country. The only peculiarity of the
case was that the dreamer with whom we are here concerned was not
content with the fulfilment of his wish in a
dream
but knew
how to achieve it in
reality
. One feature which cannot fail
to strike anyone familiar with the psycho-analytic technique of
interpretation is the riding whip - which grew to an "endless
length." Whips, sticks, lances and similar objects are
familiar to us as phallic symbols; but when a whip further
possesses the most striking characteristic of a phallus, its
extensibility, scarcely a doubt can remain. The exaggeration of the
phenomenon, its growing to an "endless length," seems to
hint at a hypercathexis from infantile sources. The fact that the
dreamer took the whip in his hand was a clear allusion to
masturbation, though the reference was not, of course, to the
dreamer’s contemporary circumstances but to childish desires
in the remote past. The interpretation discovered by Dr. Stekel
that in dreams "left" stands for what is wrong, forbidden
and sinful is much to the point here, for it might very well be
applied to masturbation carried out in childhood in the face of
prohibition. Between this deepest infantile stratum and the most
superficial one, which was concerned with the statesman’s
immediate plans, it is possible to detect an intermediate layer
which was related to both the others. The whole episode of a
miraculous liberation from need by striking a rock and at the same
time calling on God as a helper bears a remarkable resemblance to
the Biblical scene in which Moses struck water from a rock for the
thirsting Children of Israel. We may unhesitatingly assume that
this passage was familiar in all its details to Bismarck, who came
of a Bible-loving Protestant family. It would not be unlikely that
in this time of conflict Bismarck should compare himself with
Moses, the leader, whom the people he sought to free rewarded with
rebellion, hatred and ingratitude. Here, then, we should have the
connection with the dreamer’s contemporary wishes. But on the
other hand the Bible passage contains some details which apply well
to a masturbation phantasy. Moses seized the rod in the face of
God’s command and the Lord punished him for this
transgression by telling him that he must die without entering the
Promised Land. The prohibited seizing of the rod (in the dream an
unmistakably phallic one), the production of fluid from its blow,
the threat of death - in these we find all the principal factors of
infantile masturbation united. We may observe with interest the
process of revision which has welded together these two
heterogeneous pictures (originating, the one from the mind of a
statesman of genius, and the other from the impulse: of the
primitive mind of a child) and which has by that means succeeded in
eliminating all the distressing factors. The fact that seizing the
rod was a forbidden and rebellious act was no longer indicated
except symbolically by the "left" hand which performed
it. On the other hand, God was called on in the manifest content of
the dream as though to deny as ostentatiously as possible any
thought of a prohibition or secret. Of the two prophecies made by
God to Moses - that he should see the Promised Land but that he
should not enter it - the first is clearly represented as fulfilled
("the view over hills and forests"), while the second,
highly distressing one was not mentioned at all. The water was
probably sacrificed to the requirements of secondary revision,
which successfully endeavoured to make this scene and the former
one into a single unity; instead of water, the rock itself
fell.