Freud - Complete Works (147 page)

   I cannot pretend that the
interpretation of dreams with a dental stimulus as dreams of
masturbation - an interpretation whose correctness seems to me
beyond doubt - has been entirely cleared up.² I have given
what explanation I can and must leave what remains unsolved. But I
may draw attention to another parallel to be found in linguistic
usage. In our part of the world the act of masturbation is vulgarly
described as ‘
sich einen ausreissen
’ or
‘
sich einen herunterreissen
’.³ I know
nothing of the source of this terminology or of the imagery on
which it is based; but ‘a tooth’ would fit very well
into the first of the two phrases.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] A tooth being
pulled out by someone else in a dream is as a rule to be
interpreted as castration (like having one’s hair cut by a
barber, according to Stekel). A distinction must in general be made
between dreams with a dental stimulus and dentist dreams, such as
those recorded by Coriat (1913).

  
²
[
Footnote added
1909:] A
communication by C. G. Jung informs us that dreams with a dental
stimulus occurring in women have the meaning of birth dreams. -
[
Added
  1919:] Ernest Jones has brought forward clear
confirmation of this. The element in common between this
interpretation and the one put forward above lies in the fact that
in both cases (castration and birth) what is in question is the
separation of a part of the body from the whole.

  
³
[
Footnote added
1911:] Cf. the
‘biographical’ dream on
p. 817
,
n
. 2.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

845

   According to popular belief
dreams of teeth being pulled out are to be interpreted as meaning
the death of a relative, but psycho-analysis can at most confirm
this interpretation only in the joking sense I have alluded to
above. In this connection, however, I will quote a dream with a
dental stimulus that has been put at my disposal by Otto Rank.

   ‘A colleague of mine, who
has for some time been taking a lively interest in the problems of
dream-interpretation, has sent me the following contribution to the
subject of dreams with a dental stimulus.

   ‘"A short time ago I
had a dream that
I was at the dentist’s and he was
drilling a back tooth in my lower jaw. He worked on it so long that
the tooth became useless. He then seized it with a forceps and
pulled it out with an effortless ease that excited my astonishment.
He told me not to bother about it, for it was not the tooth that he
was really treating, and put it on the table, where the tooth (as
it now seemed to me, an upper incisor) fell apart into several
layers. I got up from the dentist’s chair, went closer to it
with a feeling of curiosity, and raised a medical question which
interested me. The dentist explained to me, while he separated out
the various portions of the strikingly white tooth and crushed them
up (pulverized them) with an instrument, that it was connected with
puberty and that it was only before puberty that teeth came out so
easily, and that in the case of women the decisive factor was the
birth of a child
.

   ‘"I then became aware
(while I was half asleep, I believe) that the dream had been
accompanied by an emission, which I could not attach with
certainty, however, to any particular part of the dream; I was most
inclined to think that it had already occurred while the tooth was
being pulled out.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

846

   ‘"I then went on to
dream of an occurrence which I can no longer recall, but which
ended
with my leaving my hat and coat somewhere (possibly in the
dentist’s cloakroom) in the hope that someone would bring
them after me, and with my hurrying off, dressed only in my
overcoat, to catch a train which was starting. I succeeded at the
last moment in jumping on to the hindmost carriage where someone
was already standing. I was not able, though, to make my way into
the inside of the carriage, but was obliged to travel in an
uncomfortable situation, from which I tried, successfully in the
end, to escape. We entered a big tunnel and two trains, going in
the opposite direction to us, passed through our train as if it
were the tunnel. I was looking into a carriage window as though I
were outside
.

   ‘"The following
experiences and thoughts from the previous day provide material for
an interpretation of the dream:

   ‘"(I.) I had in fact
been having dental treatment recently, and at the time of the dream
I was having continual pain in the tooth in the lower jaw which was
being drilled in the dream and at which the dentist had, again in
reality, worked longer than I liked. On the morning of the
dream-day I had once more been to the dentist on account of the
pain; and he had suggested to me that I should have another tooth
pulled out in the same jaw as the one he had been treating, saying
that the pain probably came from this other one. This was a
‘wisdom tooth’ which I was cutting just then. I had
raised a question touching his medical conscience in that
connection.

   ‘"(II.) On the
afternoon of the same day, I had been obliged to apologize to a
lady for the bad temper I was in owing to my toothache; whereupon
she had told me she was afraid of having a root pulled out, the
crown of which had crumbled away almost entirely. She thought that
pulling out ‘eye-teeth’ was especially painful and
dangerous, although on the other hand one of her acquaintances had
told her that it was easier to pull out teeth in the upper jaw,
which was where hers was. This acquaintance had also told her that
he had once had the wrong tooth pulled out under an anaesthetic,
and this had increased her dread of the necessary operation. She
had then asked me whether ‘eye-teeth’ were molars or
canines, and what was known about them. I pointed out to her on the
one hand the superstitious element in all these opinions, though at
the same time I emphasized the nucleus of truth in certain popular
views. She was then able to repeat to me what she believed was a
very old and wide-spread popular belief - that if a pregnant woman
had toothache she would have a boy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

847

   ‘"(III.) This saying
interested me in connection with what Freud says in his
Interpretation of Dreams
on the typical meaning of dreams
with a dental stimulus as substitutes for masturbation, since in
the popular saying a tooth and male genitals (or a boy) were also
brought into relation with each other. On the evening of the same
day, therefore, I read through the relevant passage in the
Interpretation of Dreams
and found there amongst other
things the following statements whose influence upon my dream may
be observed just as clearly as that of the other two experiences I
have mentioned. Freud writes of dreams with a dental stimulus that
‘in males the motive force of these dreams was derived from
nothing other than the masturbatory desires of the pubertal
period’. And further: ‘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. It may, however, puzzle us to discover
how "dental stimuli" should 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.’ (In the present dream from the
lower jaw to the upper jaw.) ‘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’. And again: ‘But I may draw
attention to another parallel to be found in linguistic usage. In
our part of the world the act of masturbation is vulgarly described
as "
sich einen ausreissen
" or "
sich einen
herunterreissen
"'. I was already familiar with this
expression in my early youth as a description of masturbation, and
no experienced dream-interpreter will have any difficulty in
finding his way from here to the infantile material underlying the
dream. I will only add that the ease with which the tooth in the
dream, which after its extraction turned into an upper incisor,
came out, reminded me of an occasion in my childhood on which I
myself pulled out a loose upper front tooth easily and without
pain. This event, which I can still remember clearly to-day in all
its details, occurred at the same early period to which my first
conscious attempts at masturbation go back. (This was a screen
memory.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

848

   ‘"Freud’s
reference to a statement by C. G. Jung to the effect that
‘dreams with a dental stimulus occurring in women have the
meaning of birth dreams’, as well as the popular belief in
the significance of toothache in pregnant women, accounted for the
contrast drawn in the dream between the decisive factor in the case
of females and of males (puberty). In this connection I recall an
earlier dream of mine which I had soon after a visit to the dentist
and in which I dreamt that the gold crowns which had just been
fixed fell out; this annoyed me very much in the dream on account
of the considerable expense in which I had been involved and which
I had not yet quite got over at the time. This other dream now
became intelligible to me (in view of a certain experience of mine)
as a recognition of the material advantages of masturbation over
object-love: the latter, from an economic point of view, was in
every respect less desirable (cf. the gold crowns); and I believe
that the lady’s remark about the significance of toothache in
pregnant women had re-awakened these trains of thought in
me."

   ‘So much for the
interpretation put forward by my colleague, which is most
enlightening and to which, I think, no objections can be raised. I
have nothing to add to it, except, perhaps, a hint at the probable
meaning of the second part of the dream. This seems to have
represented the dreamer’s transition from masturbation to
sexual intercourse, which was apparently accomplished with great
difficulty - (cf. the tunnel through which the trains went in and
out in various directions) as well as the danger of the latter (cf.
pregnancy and the overcoat). The dreamer made use for this purpose
of the verbal bridges "
Zahn-ziehen (Zug)
" and
"
Zahn-reissen (Reisen)
".

   ‘On the other hand,
theoretically, the case seems to me interesting in two respects. In
the first place, it brings evidence in favour of Freud’s
discovery that ejaculation in a dream accompanies the act of
pulling out a tooth. In whatever form the emission may appear, we
are obliged to regard it as a masturbatory satisfaction brought
about without the assistance of any mechanical stimulation.
Moreover, in this case, the satisfaction accompanying the emission
was not, as it usually is, directed to an object, even if only to
an imaginary one, but had no object, if one may say so; it was
completely auto-erotic, or at the most showed a slight trace of
homosexuality (in reference to the dentist).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

849

   ‘The second point which
seems to me to deserve emphasis is the following. It may plausibly
be objected that there is no need at all to regard the present case
as confirming Freud’s view, since the events of the previous
day would be sufficient in themselves to make the content of the
dream intelligible. The dreamer’s visit to the dentist, his
conversation with the lady and his reading of the
Interpretation
of Dreams
would quite sufficiently explain how he came to
produce this dream, especially as his sleep was disturbed by
toothache; they would even explain, if need be, how the dream
served to dispose of the pain which was disturbing his sleep - by
means of the idea of getting rid of the painful tooth and by
simultaneously drowning with libido the painful sensation which the
dreamer feared. But even if we make the greatest possible allowance
for all this, it cannot be seriously maintained that the mere
reading of Freud’s explanations could have established in the
dreamer the connection between pulling out a tooth and the act of
masturbation, or could even have put that connection into
operation, unless it had been laid down long since, as the dreamer
himself admits it was (in the phrase "
sich einen
ausreissen
"). This connection may have been revived not
only by his conversation with the lady but by a circumstance which
he reported subsequently. For in reading the
Interpretation of
Dreams
he had been unwilling, for comprehensible reasons, to
believe in this typical meaning of dreams with a dental stimulus,
and had felt a desire to know whether that meaning applied to
all
dreams of that sort. The present dream confirmed the
fact that this was so, at least as far as he was concerned, and
thus showed him why it was that he had been obliged to feel doubts
on the subject. In this respect too, therefore, the dream was the
fulfilment of a wish namely, the wish to convince himself of the
range of application and the validity of this view of
Freud’s.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

850

   The second group of typical
dreams include those in which the dreamer flies or floats in the
air, falls, swims, etc. What is the meaning of such dreams? It is
impossible to give a general reply. As we shall hear, they mean
something different in every instance; it is only the raw material
of sensations contained in them which is always derived from the
same source.