Freud - Complete Works (149 page)

BOOK: Freud - Complete Works

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[
Added
1925:] ‘
TYPICAL EXAMPLE OF A DISGUISED OEDIPUS
DREAM
: A man dreamt that
he
had a secret liaison with a lady whom someone else wanted to marry.
He was worried in case this other man might discover the liaison
and the proposed marriage came to nothing. He therefore behaved in
a very affectionate way to the man. He embraced him and kissed
him.
- There was only one point of contact between the
content of this dream and the facts of the dreamer’s life. He
had a secret
liaison
with a married woman; and an ambiguous
remark made by her husband, who was a friend of his, led him to
suspect that the husband might have noticed something. But in
reality there was something else involved, all mention of which was
avoided in the dream but which alone provided a key to its
understanding. The husband’s life was threatened by an
organic illness. His wife was prepared for the possibility of his
dying suddenly, and the dreamer was consciously occupied with an
intention to marry the young widow after her husband’s death.
This external situation placed the dreamer in the constellation of
the Oedipus dream. His wish was capable of killing the man in order
to get the woman as his wife. The dream expressed this wish in a
hypocritically distorted form. Instead of her being married
already, he made out that someone else wanted to marry her, which
corresponded to his
own
secret intentions; and his hostile
wishes towards her husband were concealed behind demonstrations of
affection which were derived from his memory of his relations with
his own father in childhood.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

856

In some dreams of landscapes or
other localities emphasis is laid in the dream itself on a
convinced feeling of having been there once before. (Occurrences of
‘
déjà vu
’ in dreams have a special
meaning.) These places are invariably the genitals of the
dreamer’s mother; there is indeed no other place about which
one can assert with such conviction that one has been there once
before.

On one occasion only I was
perplexed by an obsessional neurotic who told me a dream in which
he was visiting a house that he had been in
twice
before.
But this particular patient had told me a considerable time before
of an episode during his sixth year. On one occasion he had been
sharing his mother’s bed and misused the opportunity by
inserting his finger into her genitals while she was asleep.

A large number of dreams, often
accompanied by anxiety and having as their content such subjects as
passing though narrow spaces or being in water, are based upon
phantasies of intra-uterine life, of existence in the womb and of
the act of birth. What follows was the dream of a young man who, in
his imagination, had taken advantage of an intra-uterine
opportunity of watching his parents copulating.

He was in a deep pit with a
window in it like the one in the Semmering Tunnel. At first he saw
an empty landscape through the window, but then invented a picture
to fit the space, which immediately appeared and filled in the gap.
The picture represented a field which was being ploughed up deeply
by some implement; and the fresh air together with the idea of hard
work which accompanied the scene, and the blue-black clods of
earth, produced a lovely impression. He then went on further and
saw a book upon education open in front of him . . .
and was surprised that so much attention was devoted in it to the
sexual feelings (of children); and this led him to think of
me
.

And here is a pretty water dream,
dreamt by a woman patient, which served a special purpose in the
treatment.
At her summer holiday resort, by the Lake of ----,
she dived into the dark water just where the pale moon was mirrored
in it
.

Dreams like this one are birth
dreams. Their interpretation is reached by reversing the event
reported in the manifest dream; thus, instead of ‘diving into
the water’ we have ‘coming out of the water’,
i.e. being born.¹ We can discover the locality from which a
child is born by calling to mind the slang use of the word
‘
lune
’ in French. The pale moon was thus the
white bottom which children are quick to guess that they came out
of. What was the meaning of the patient’s wishing to be born
at her summer holiday resort? I asked her and she replied without
hesitation: ‘Isn’t it just as though I had been reborn
through the treatment?’ Thus the dream was an invitation to
me to continue treating her at the holiday resort - that is, to
visit her there. Perhaps there was a very timid hint in it, too, of
the patient’s wish to become a mother herself.²

¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] For the
mythological significance of birth from the water see Rank
(1909).

²
[
Footnote added
1909:] It was not
for a long time that I learned to appreciate the importance of
phantasies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They
contain an explanation of the remarkable dread that many people
have of being buried alive; and they also afford the deepest
unconscious basis for the belief in survival after death, which
merely represents a projection into the future of this uncanny life
before birth.
Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience
of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of
anxiety
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

857

I will quote another birth-dream,
together with its interpretation, from a paper by Ernest Jones.)
‘
She stood on the sea-shore watching a small boy, who
seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the
water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up and
down near the surface. The scene then changed into a crowded hall
of an hotel. Her husband left her, and she "entered into a
conversation" with a stranger
. The second half of the
dream revealed itself in the analysis as representing a flight from
her husband and the entering into intimate relations with a third
person . . . . The first part of the dream was a
fairly evident birth-phantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the
delivery of the child
from
the uterine waters is commonly
presented by distortion as the entry of the child
into
water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and
Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and
down of the head into the water at once recalled to the patient the
sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy.
Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a reverie in which
she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him to a
nursery, washing him and dressing him, and installing him in her
household.

‘The second half of the
dream therefore represented thoughts concerning the elopement, that
belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the
first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the
latent content, the birth-phantasy. Besides this inversion in
order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In
the first half the child
entered
the water, and then his
head bobbed; in the underlying dream-thoughts first the quickening
occurred and then the child
left
the water (a double
inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the
dream-thoughts she left her husband.’

Abraham (1909, 22 ff.) has
reported another birth-dream, dreamt by a young woman who was
facing her first confinement. A subterranean channel led direct
into the water from a place in the floor of her room (genital
canal-amniotic fluid). She raised a trap-door in the floor and a
creature dressed in brown fur, very much resembling a seal,
promptly appeared. This creature turned out to be the
dreamer’s younger brother, to whom she had always been like a
mother.

Rank has shown from a series of
dreams that birth-dreams make use of the same symbolism as dreams
with a urinary stimulus. The erotic stimulus is represented in the
latter as a urinary stimulus; and the stratification of meaning in
these dreams corresponds to a change that has come over the meaning
of the symbol since infancy.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

858

This is an appropriate point at
which to return to a topic that was broken off in an earlier
chapter (
p. 716
): the problem of the
part played in the formation of dreams by organic stimuli which
disturb sleep. Dreams which come about under their influence openly
exhibit not only the usual tendency to wish-fulfilment and to
serving the end of convenience, but very often a perfectly
transparent symbolism as well; for it not infrequently happens that
a stimulus awakens a dreamer
after a vain attempt has been made
to deal with it in a dream under a symbolic disguise
. This
applies to dreams of emission or orgasm as well as to those
provoked by a need to micturate or defaecate. ‘The peculiar
nature of emission dreams not only puts us in a position to reveal
directly certain sexual symbols which are already known as being
typical, but which have nevertheless been violently disputed; it
also enables us to convince ourselves that some apparently innocent
situations in dreams are no more than a symbolic prelude to crudely
sexual scenes. The latter are as a rule represented undisguisedly
in the relatively rare emission dreams, whereas they culminate
often enough in anxiety dreams, which have the same result of
awakening the sleeper.’

The symbolism of dreams with a
urinary stimulus is especially transparent and has been recognized
from the earliest times. The view was already expressed by
Hippocrates that dreams of fountains and springs indicate a
disorder of the bladder (Havelock Ellis). Scherner studied the
multiplicity of the symbolism of urinary stimuli and asserted that
‘any urinary stimulus of considerable strength invariably
passes over into stimulation of the sexual regions and symbolic
representations of them. . . . Dreams with a urinary
stimulus are often at the same time representatives of sexual
dreams.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

859

Otto Rank, whose discussion in
his paper on the stratification of symbols in arousal dreams I am
here following, has made it seem highly probable that a great
number of dreams with a urinary stimulus have in fact been caused
by a
sexual
stimulus which has made a first attempt to find
satisfaction regressively in the infantile form of urethral
erotism. Those cases are particularly instructive in which the
urinary stimulus thus set up leads to awakening and emptying the
bladder, but in which the dream is nevertheless continued and the
need then expressed in undisguisedly erotic imagery.¹

Dreams with an intestinal
stimulus throw light in an analogous fashion on the symbolism
involved in them, and at the same time confirm the connection
between gold and faeces which is also supported by copious evidence
from social anthropology. (See Freud, 1908
b
; Rank,
1912
a
; Dattner, 1913; and Reik, 1915.) ‘Thus, for
instance, a woman who was receiving medical treatment for an
intestinal disorder dreamt of someone who was burying a treasure in
the neighbourhood of a little wooden hut which looked like a rustic
out-door closet. There was a second part to the dream in which she
was wiping the behind of her little girl who had dirtied
herself.’

Rescue dreams are connected with
birth dreams. In women’s dreams, to rescue, and especially to
rescue from the water, has the same significance as giving birth;
but the meaning is modified if the dreamer is a man.²

Robbers, burglars and ghosts, of
whom some people feel frightened before going to bed, and who
sometimes pursue their victims after they are asleep, all originate
from one and the same class of infantile reminiscence. They are the
nocturnal visitors who rouse children and take them up to prevent
their wetting their beds, or who lift the bed-clothes to make sure
where they have put their hands in their sleep. Analyses of some of
these anxiety-dreams have made it possible for me to identify these
nocturnal visitors more precisely. In every case the robbers stood
for the sleeper’s father, whereas the ghosts corresponded to
female figures in white night-gowns.

¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] ‘The
same symbols which occur in their infantile aspect in bladder
dreams, appear with an eminently sexual meaning in their
"recent" aspects: Water = urine = semen = amniotic fluid;
ship = "pump ship" (micturate) = uterus (box); to get wet
= enuresis = copulation = pregnancy; to swim = full bladder = abode
of the unborn; rain = micturate = symbol of fertility; travel
(starting, getting out) = getting out of bed = sexual intercourse
(honeymoon); micturate = emission.’ (Rank, 1912
a
,
95.)

²
[
Footnote added
1911:] A dream of
this kind has been reported by Pfister (1909). For the symbolic
meaning of rescuing see Freud, 1910
d
, and Freud,
1910
h
. [
Added
1914:] See also Rank (1911
b
) and
Reik (1911). [
Added
1919:] See further, Rank
(1914).