Freud - Complete Works (152 page)
The Interpretation Of Dreams
872
When we take together these and
some other examples which I shall give later, we may safely say
that the dream-work does not in fact carry out any calculations at
all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it merely throws into the
form
of a calculation numbers which are present in the
dream-thoughts and can serve as allusions to matter that cannot be
represented in any other way. In this respect the dream-work is
treating numbers as a medium for the expression of its purpose in
precisely the same way as it treats any other idea, including
proper names and speeches that occur recognizably as verbal
presentations.
For the dream-work cannot
actually
create
speeches. However much speeches and
conversations, whether reasonable or unreasonable in themselves,
may figure in dreams, analysis invariably proves that all that the
dream has done is to extract from the dream-thoughts fragments of
speeches which have really been made or heard. It deals with these
fragments in the most arbitrary fashion. Not only does it drag them
out of their context and cut them in pieces, incorporating some
portions and rejecting others, but it often puts them together in a
new order, so that a speech which appears in the dream to be a
connected whole turns out in analysis to be composed of three or
four detached fragments. In producing this new version, a dream
will often abandon the meaning that the words originally had in the
dream-thoughts and give them a fresh one.¹ If we look closely
into a speech that occurs in a dream, we shall find that it
consists on the one hand of relatively clear and compact portions
and on the other hand of portions which serve as connecting matter
and have probably been filled in at a later stage, just as, in
reading, we fill in any letters or syllables that may have been
accidentally omitted. Thus speeches in dreams have a structure
similar to that of breccia, in which largish blocks of various
kinds of stone are cemented together by a binding medium.
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] In this
respect neuroses behave exactly like dreams. I know a patient one
of whose symptoms is that, involuntarily and against her will she
hears - i.e. hallucinates - songs or fragments of songs,
without being able to understand what part they play in her mental
life. (Incidentally, she is certainly not paranoic.) Analysis has
shown that, by allowing herself a certain amount of licence, she
puts the text of these songs to false uses. For instance in the
lines ‘
Leise, leise, Fromme Weise!
’ [literally,
‘Softly, softly, devout melody’] the last word was
taken by her unconscious as though it was spelt
‘
Waise
’ [= ‘orphan’, thus making the
lines read ‘Softly, softly, pious orphan’], the orphan
being herself. Again ‘
O du selige, o du
fröhliche
’ [‘Oh thou blessed and happy . .
.’] is the opening of a Christmas carol; by not continuing
the quotation to the word ‘Christmastide’ she turned it
into a bridal song. -The same mechanism of distortion can also
operate in the occurrence of an idea
unaccompanied
by
hallucination. Why was it that one of my patients was pestered by
the recollection of a poem that he had had to learn in his youth:
‘
Nächtlich am Busento lispeln
. . .’
[‘By night on the Busento whispering . . .’]? Because
his imagination went no further than the first part of this
quotation: ‘
Nächtlich am Busen
’ [‘By
night on the bosom’].
We
are familiar with the fact that this same technical trick is used
by parodists. Included in a series of ‘Illustrations to the
German Classics’ published in
Fliegende Blätter
was one which illustrated Schiller’s
‘
Siegesfest
’, with the following quotation
attached to it:
Und des frisch erkämpften Weibes
Freut sich der Atrid und strickt. . .
[The conqu’ring son of Atreus sits
At his fair captive’s side and knits . . .]
Here the
quotation broke off. In the original the lines continue:
. . . Um den Reiz des schönen Leibes
Seine Arme hochbeglückt.
[. . . His joyful and triumphant arms
About her body’s lovely charms. ]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
873
Strictly speaking, this
description applies only to such speeches in dreams as possess
something of the sensory quality of speech, and which are described
by the dreamer himself as being speeches. Other sorts of speeches,
which are not, as it were, felt by him as having been heard or
spoken (that is, which have no acoustic or motor accompaniments in
the dream), are merely thoughts such as occur in our waking
thought-activity and are often carried over unmodified into our
dreams. Another copious source of undifferentiated speeches of this
kind, though one which it is difficult to follow up, seems to be
provided by material that has been
read
. But whatever stands
out markedly in dreams as a speech can be traced back to real
speeches which have been spoken or heard by the dreamer.
Instances showing that speeches
in dreams have this origin have already been given by me in the
course of analysing dreams which I have quoted for quite other
purposes. Thus, in the ‘innocent’ market dream reported
on
p. 670
, the spoken words
‘that’s not obtainable any longer’ served to
identify me with the butcher, while one portion of the other
speech, ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take
it’, was actually responsible for making the dream an
‘innocent’ one. The dreamer, it will be remembered,
having had some suggestion made to her on the previous day by her
cook, had replied with the words: ‘I don’t recognize
that; behave yourself properly!’ The innocent-sounding
first
part of this speech was taken into the dream by way of
allusion to its
second
part, which fitted excellently into
the phantasy underlying the dream, but would at the same time have
betrayed it.
Here is another example, which
will serve instead of many, all of them leading to the same
conclusion.
The dreamer was in a big
courtyard in which some dead bodies were being burnt.
‘I’m off’, he said, ‘I can’t bear the
sight of it.’
(This was definitely a speech.
) He then
met two butcher’s boys. ‘Well’, he asked,
‘did it taste nice?’ ‘No’, one of them
answered, ‘not a bit nice’ - as though it had been
human flesh
.
The innocent occasion of the
dream was as follows. The dreamer and his wife had paid a visit
after supper to their neighbours, who were excellent people but not
precisely
appetizing
. The hospitable old lady was just
having her supper and had tried to
force
him (there is a
phrase with a sexual sense used jokingly among men to render this
idea¹) to taste some of it. He had declined, saying he had no
appetite left: ‘Get along!’ she had replied,
‘you can manage it’, or words to that effect. He had
therefore been obliged to taste it and had complimented her on it
saying: ‘that was very nice.’ When he was once more
alone with his wife he had grumbled at his neighbour’s
insistence and also at the quality of the food. The thought,
‘I can’t bear the sight of it’, which in the
dream too failed to emerge as a speech in the strict sense, was an
allusion to the physical charms of the lady from which the
invitation had come, and it must be taken as meaning that he had no
desire to look at them.
¹
[‘
Notzüchtigen
’,
‘to force sexually’, ‘to rape’, is so used
in place of ‘
nötigen
’, ‘to
force’ (in the ordinary sense).]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
874
More instruction can be derived
from another dream, which I shall report in this connection on
account of the very distinct speech which formed its centre-point,
although I shall have to put off explaining it fully till I come to
discuss affect in dreams. I had a very clear dream.
I had gone
to Brücke’s laboratory at night, and, in response to a
gentle knock on the door, I opened it to
(the late
)
Professor Fleischl, who came in with a number of strangers and,
after exchanging a few words, sat down at his table
. This was
followed by a second dream.
My friend Fl. had come to Vienna
unobtrusively in July. I met him in the street in conversation with
my
(deceased
) friend P., and went with them to some place
where they sat opposite each other as though they were at a small
table. I sat in front at its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his sister
and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and added
some such words as ‘that was the threshold.’ As P.
failed to understand him, Fl. turned to me and asked me how much I
had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon, overcome by strange
emotions, I tried to explain to Fl, that P. (could not understand
anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I
actually said - and I myself noticed the mistake - was
,
‘
NON VIXIT’
.
I
then gave P. a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned pale; his
form grew indistinct and his eyes a sickly blue - and finally he
melted away. I was highly delighted at this and I now realized that
Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no more than an apparition, a
‘revenant’
;
and it seemed to me quite possible
that people of that kind only existed as long as one liked and
could be got rid of if someone else wished it
.
This fine specimen includes many
of the characteristics of dreams - the fact that I exercised my
critical faculties during the dream and myself noticed my mistake
when I said ‘
Non vixit
’ instead of ‘
Non
vivit
’, my unconcerned dealings with people who were dead
and were recognized as being dead in the dream itself, the
absurdity of my final inference and the great satisfaction it gave
me. This dream exhibits so many of these puzzling features, indeed,
that I would give a great deal to be able to present the complete
solution of its conundrums. But in point of fact I am incapable of
doing so - of doing, that is to say, what I did in the dream, of
sacrificing to my ambition people whom I greatly value. Any
concealment, however, would destroy what I know very well to be the
dream’s meaning; and I shall therefore content myself, both
here and in a later context, with selecting only a few of its
elements for interpretation.
The central feature of the dream
was a scene in which I annihilated P. with a look. His eyes changed
to a strange and uncanny blue and he melted away. This scene was
unmistakably copied from one which I had actually experienced. At
the time I have in mind I had been a demonstrator at the
Physiological Institute and was due to start work early in the
morning. It came to Brücke’s ears that I sometimes
reached the students’ laboratory late. One morning he turned
up punctually at the hour of opening and awaited my arrival. His
words were brief and to the point. But it was not they that
mattered. What overwhelmed me were the terrible blue eyes with
which he looked at me and by which I was reduced to nothing - just
as P. was in the dream, where, to my relief, the roles were
reversed. No one who can remember the great man’s eyes, which
retained their striking beauty even in his old age, and who has
ever seen him in anger, will find it difficult to picture the young
sinner’s emotions.
It was a long time, however,
before I succeeded in tracing the origin of the ‘
Non
vixit
’ with which I passed judgement in the dream. But at
last it occurred to me that these two words possessed their high
degree of clarity in the dream, not as words heard or spoken, but
as words
seen
. I then knew at once where they came from. On
the pedestal of the Kaiser Josef Memorial in the Hofburg in Vienna
the following impressive words are inscribed:
Saluti patriae vixit
non diu sed totus.
¹
I extracted from this inscription just enough
to fit in with hostile train of ideas among the dream-thoughts,
just enough to imply that ‘this fellow has no say in the
matter - he isn’t even alive.’ And this reminded me
that I had the dream only a few days after the unveiling of the
memorial to Fleischl in the cloisters of the University. At that
time I had seen the Brücke memorial once again and must have
reflected (unconsciously) with regret on the fact that the
premature death of my brilliant friend P., whose whole life had
been devoted to science, had robbed him of a well-merited claim to
a memorial in these same precincts. Accordingly, I gave him this
memorial in my dream; and, incidentally, as I remembered, his first
name was Josef.²