Freud - Complete Works (146 page)

   ‘We should expect that at
the end of an infantile masturbation phantasy, which included the
theme of prohibition, the child would wish that the people in
authority in his environment should learn nothing of what had
happened. In the dream this wish was represented by its opposite, a
wish to report to the King immediately what had happened. But this
reversal fitted in excellently and quite unobtrusively into the
phantasy of victory contained in the superficial layer of
dream-thoughts and in a portion of the manifest content of the
dream. A dream such as this of victory and conquest is often a
cover for a wish to succeed in an
erotic
conquest; certain
features of the dream, such as, for instance, that an obstacle was
set in the way of the dreamer’s advance but that after he had
made use of the extensible whip a broad path opened out, might
point in that direction, but they afford an insufficient basis for
inferring that a definite trend of thoughts and wishes of that kind
ran though the dream. We have here a perfect example of completely
successful dream-distortion. Whatever was obnoxious in it was
worked over so that it never emerged through the surface layer that
was spread over it as a protective covering. In consequence of this
it was possible to avoid any release of anxiety. The dream was an
ideal case of a wish successfully fulfilled without infringing the
censorship; so that we may well believe that the dreamer awoke from
it "rejoiced and strengthened".’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

839

As a last example here is

XII

A CHEMIST’S DREAM

   This was dreamt by a young man
who was endeavouring to give up his habit of masturbating in favour
of sexual relations with women.

  
PREAMBLE
. - On the day before he had
the dream he had been instructing a student on the subject of
Grignard’s reaction, in which magnesium is dissolved in
absolutely pure ether through the catalytic action of iodine. Two
days earlier, when the same reaction was being carried out, an
explosion had occurred which had burnt the hand of one of the
workers.

  
DREAM
. - (I)
He was supposed to
be making phenyl-magnesium-bromide. He saw the apparatus with
particular distinctness, but had substituted himself for the
magnesium. He now found himself in a singularly unstable state. He
kept on saying to himself: ‘This is all right, things are
working, my feet are beginning to dissolve already, my knees are
getting soft.’ Then he put out his hands and felt his feet.
Meanwhile (how, he could not tell) he pulled his legs out of the
vessel and said to himself once more: ‘This can’t be
right. Yes it is, though.’ At this point he partly woke up
and went through the dream to himself, so as to be able to report
it to me. He was positively frightened of the solution) of the
dream. He felt very much excited during this period of semi-sleep
and kept repeating: ‘Phenyl, phenyl
.’

   (II)
He was at -----ing with
his whole family and was due to be at the Schottentor at half-past
eleven to meet a particular lady. But he only woke at half-past
eleven, and said to himself: ‘It’s too late. You
can’t get there before half-past twelve.’ The next
moment he saw the whole family sitting round the table; he saw his
mother particularly clearly and the maidservant carrying the
sour-tureen. So he thought: ‘Well, as we’ve started
dinner, its too late for me to go out
.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

840

  
ANALYSIS
. - He had no doubt that
even the first part of the dream had some connection with the lady
whom he was to meet. (He had had the dream during the night before
the expected
rendez-vous
.) He thought the student to whom he
had given the instructions a particularly unpleasant person. He had
said to him: ‘That’s not right’, because the
magnesium showed no signs of being affected. And the student had
replied, as though he were quite unconcerned: ‘No, nor it
is.’ The student must have stood for himself (the patient),
who was just as indifferent about the analysis as the student was
about the synthesis. The ‘he’ in the dream who carried
out the operation stood for me. How unpleasant I must think him for
being so indifferent about the result!

   On the other hand, he (the
patient) was the material which was being used for the analysis (or
synthesis). What was in question was the success of the treatment.
The reference to his legs in the dream reminded him of an
experience of the previous evening. He had been having a
dancing-lesson and had met a lady of whom he had been eager to make
a conquest. He clasped her to himself so tightly that on one
occasion she gave a scream. As he relaxed his pressure against her
legs, he felt her strong responsive pressure against the lower part
of his thighs as far down as his knees - the point mentioned in his
dream. So that in this connection it was the woman who was the
magnesium in the retort - things were working at last. He was
feminine in relation to me, just as he was masculine in relation to
the woman. If it was working with the lady it was working with him
in the treatment. His feeling himself and the sensations in his
knees pointed to masturbation and fitted in with his fatigue on the
previous day. -His appointment with the lady had in fact been for
half-past eleven. His wish to miss it by oversleeping and to stay
with his sexual objects at home (that is, to keep to masturbation)
corresponded to his resistance.

   In connection with his repeating
the word ‘phenyl’, he told me that he had always been
very fond of all these radicals ending in ‘-yl’,
because they were so easy to use: benzyl, acetyl, etc. This
explained nothing. But when I suggested
‘
Schlemihl
’ to him as another radical in the
series, he laughed heartily and told me that in the course of the
summer he had read a book by Marcel Prevost in which there was a
chapter on ‘
Les exclus de l’amour
’ which
in fact included some remarks upon ‘
les
Schlémiliés
’. When he read them he had said
to himself: ‘This is just what I’m like.’ - If he
had missed the appointment it would have been another example of
his ‘Schlemihlness’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

841

   It would seem that the occurrence
of sexual symbolism in dreams has already been experimentally
confirmed by some work carried out by K. Schrötter, on lines
proposed by H. Swoboda. Subjects under deep hypnosis were given
suggestions by Schrötter, and these led to the production of
dreams a large part of whose content was determined by the
suggestions. If he gave a suggestion that the subject should dream
of normal or abnormal sexual intercourse, the dream, in obeying the
suggestion, would make use of symbols familiar to us from
psycho-analysis in place of the sexual material. For instance, when
a suggestion was made to a female subject that she should dream of
having homosexual intercourse with a friend, the friend appeared in
the dream carrying a shabby hand-bag with a label stuck on to it
bearing the words ‘Ladies only.’ The woman who dreamt
this was said never to have had any knowledge of symbolism in
dreams or of their interpretation. Difficulties are, however,
thrown in the way of our forming an opinion of the value of these
interesting experiments by the unfortunate circumstance that Dr.
Schrötter committed suicide soon after making them. The only
record of them is to be found in a preliminary communication
published in the
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse
(Schrötter, 1912).

   Similar findings were published
by Roffenstein in 1923. Some experiments made by Betlheim and
Hartmann (1924) were of particular interest, since they made no use
of hypnosis. These experimenters related anecdotes of a coarsely
sexual character to patients suffering from Korsakoff’s
syndrome and observed the distortions which occurred when the
anecdotes were reproduced by the patients in these confusional
states. They found that the symbols familiar to us from the
interpretation of dreams made their appearance (e.g. going
upstairs, stabbing and shooting as symbols of copulation, and
knives and cigarettes as symbols of the penis). The authors
attached special importance to the appearance of the symbol of a
staircase, for, as they justly observed, ‘no conscious desire
to distort could have arrived at a symbol of such a
kind.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

842

   It is only now, after we have
properly assessed the importance of symbolism in dreams, that it
becomes possible for us to take up the theme of typical dreams,
which was broken off on
p. 541
above.
I think we are justified in dividing such dreams roughly into two
classes: those which really always have the same meaning, and those
which, in spite of having the same or a similar content, must
nevertheless be interpreted in the greatest variety of ways. Among
typical dreams of the first class I have already dealt in some
detail with examination dreams.

   Dreams of missing a train deserve
to be put alongside examination dreams on account of the similarity
of their affect, and their explanation shows that we shall be right
in doing so. They are dreams of consolation for another kind of
anxiety felt in sleep - the fear of dying. ‘Departing’
on a journey is one of the commonest and best authenticated symbols
of death. These dreams say in a consoling way: ‘Don’t
worry, you won’t die (depart)’, just as examination
dreams say soothingly: ‘Don’t be afraid, no harm will
come to you this time either.’ The difficulty of
understanding both these kinds of dreams is due to the fact that
the feeling of anxiety is attached precisely to the expression of
consolation.

   The meaning of dreams ‘with
a dental stimulus’, which I often had to analyse in patients,
escaped me for a long time because, to my surprise, there were
invariably too strong resistances against their interpretation.
Overwhelming evidence left me at last in no doubt that in males the
motive force of these dreams was derived from nothing other than
the masturbatory desires of the pubertal period. I will analyse two
dreams of this kind, one of which is also a ‘flying
dream.’ They were both dreamt by the same person, a young man
with strong homosexual leanings, which were, however, inhibited in
real life.

  
He was attending a performance
of ‘Fidelio’ and was sitting in the stalls at the Opera
besides L., a man who was congenial to him and with whom he would
have liked to make friends. Suddenly he flew through the air right
across the stalls, put his hand in his mouth and pulled out two of
his teeth
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

843

   He himself said of the flight
that it was as though he was being ‘thrown’ into the
air. Since it was a performance of
Fidelio
, the words:

                                                               
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen . . .

might have seemed appropriate. But the gaining
of even the loveliest woman was not among the dreamer’s
wishes. Two other lines were more to the point:

                                                               
Wem der
grosse Wurf
gelungen,

                                                               
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein . . .
¹

The dream in fact contained this ‘great
throw’, which, however, was not only a wish-fulfilment. It
also concealed the painful reflection that the dreamer had often
been unlucky in his attempts at friendship, and had been
‘thrown out’. It concealed, too, his fear that this
misfortune might be repeated in relation to the young man by whose
side he was enjoying the performance of
Fidelio
. And now
followed what the fastidious dreamer regarded as a shameful
confession: that once, after being rejected by one of his friends,
he had masturbated twice in succession in the state of sensual
excitement provoked by his desire.

   Here is the second dream:
He
was being treated by two University professors of his acquaintance
instead of by me. One of them was doing something to his penis. He
was afraid of an operation. The other was pushing against his mouth
with an iron rod, so that he lost one or two of his teeth. He was
tied up with four silk cloths
.

   It can scarcely be doubted that
this dream had a sexual meaning. The silk cloths identified him
with a homosexual whom he knew. The dreamer had never carried out
coitus and had never aimed at having sexual intercourse with men in
real life; and he pictured sexual intercourse on the model of the
pubertal masturbation with which he had once been familiar.

  
¹
[ Wem der grosse Wurf gelungen,

       
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein,

       
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen . . .

      ‘He
who has won the
great throw
of becoming the friend of a
friend, he who has gained a lovely woman . . .!’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

844

   The many modifications of the
typical dream with a dental stimulus (dreams, for instance, of a
tooth being pulled out by someone else, etc.) are, I think, to be
explained in the same way.¹ It may, however, puzzle us to
discover how ‘dental stimuli’ have come to have this
meaning. But I should like to draw attention to the frequency with
which sexual repression makes use of transpositions from a lower to
an upper part of the body. Thanks to them it becomes possible in
hysteria for all kinds of sensations and intentions to be put into
effect, if not where they properly belong - in relation to the
genitals, at least in relation to other, unobjectionable parts of
the body. One instance of a transposition of this kind is the
replacement of the genitals by the face in the symbolism of
unconscious thinking. Linguistic usage follows the same line in
recognizing the buttocks as homologous to the cheeks, and by
drawing a parallel between the ‘
labia
’ and the
lips which frame the aperture of the mouth. Comparisons between
nose and penis are common, and the similarity is made more complete
by the presence of hair in both places. The one structure which
affords no possibility of an analogy is the teeth; and it is
precisely this combination of similarity and dissimilarity which
makes the teeth so appropriate for representational purposes when
pressure is being exercised by sexual repression.