Freud - Complete Works (153 page)

  
¹
[‘For the well-being of his country
he lived not long but wholly.’  -
Footnote added
1925:] The actual wording of the inscription is:

                                                               
Saluti publicae vixit

                                                               
non diu sed totus.

The reason for
my mistake in putting ‘
patriae
’ for
‘
publicae
’ has probably been rightly guessed by
Wittels.

  
²
I may add as an example of
over-determination that my excuse for arriving too late at the
laboratory lay in the fact that after working far into the night I
had in the morning to cover the long distance between the
Kaiser
Josef
Strasse and the Währinger Strasse.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

875

   By the rules of
dream-interpretation I was even now not entitled to pass from the
Non vixit
derived from my recollection of the Kaiser Josef
Memorial to the
Non vixit
required by the sense of the
dream-thoughts. There must have been some other element in the
dream-thoughts which would help to make the transition possible. It
then struck me as noticeable that in the scene in the dream there
was a convergence of a hostile and an affectionate current of
feeling towards my friend P., the former being on the surface and
the latter concealed, but both of them being represented in the
single phrase
Non vixit
. As he had deserved well of science
I built him a memorial; but as he was guilty of an evil wish (which
was expressed at the end of the dream) I annihilated him. I noticed
that this last sentence had a quite special cadence, and I must
have had some model in my mind. Where was an antithesis of this
sort to be found, a juxtaposition like this of two opposite
reactions towards a single person, both of them claiming to be
completely justified and yet not incompatible? Only in one passage
in literature - but a passage which makes a profound impression on
the reader: in Brutus’s speech of self-justification in
Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, ‘As Caesar loved
me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was
valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’
Were not the formal structure of these sentences and their
antithetical meaning precisely the same as in the dream-thought I
had uncovered? Thus I had been playing the part of Brutus in the
dream. If only I could find one other piece of evidence in the
content of the dream to confirm this surprising collateral
connecting link! A possible one occurred to me. ‘
My friend
Fl. came to Vienna in July
.’ There was no basis in
reality for this detail of the dream. So far as I knew, my friend
Fl. had never been in Vienna in July. But the month of July was
named after Julius Caesar and might therefore very well represent
the allusion I wanted to the intermediate thought of my playing the
part of Brutus.¹

  
¹
There was the further connection between
‘Caesar’ and ‘Kaiser’ .

The Interpretation Of Dreams

876

   Strange to say, I really did once
play the part of Brutus. I once acted in the scene between Brutus
and Caesar from Schiller before an audience of children. I was
fourteen years old at the time and was acting with a nephew who was
a year my senior. He had come to us on a visit from England; and
he, too, was a
revenant
, for it was the playmate of my
earliest years who had returned in him. Until the end of my third
year we had been inseparable. We had loved each other and fought
with each other; and this childhood relationship, as I have already
hinted above, had a determining influence on all my subsequent
relations with contemporaries. Since that time my nephew John has
had many reincarnations which revived now one side and now another
of his personality, unalterably fixed as it was in my unconscious
memory. There must have been times when he treated me very badly
and I must have shown courage in the face of my tyrant; for in my
later years I have often been told of a short speech made by me in
my own defence when my father, who was at the same time
John’s grandfather, had said to me accusingly: ‘Why are
you hitting John? My reply - I was not yet two years old at the
time - was ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me.’ It must
have been this scene from my childhood which diverted ‘
Non
vivit
’ into ‘
Non vixit
’, for in the
language of later childhood the word for to hit is
‘
wichsen
’. The dream-work is not ashamed to make
use of links such as this one. There was little basis in reality
for my hostility to my friend P., who was very greatly my superior
and for that reason was well fitted to appear as a new edition of
my early playmate. This hostility must therefore certainly have
gone back to my complicated childhood relations to John.

   As I have said, I shall return to
this dream later.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

877

(G)

ABSURD DREAMS - INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY IN
DREAMS

   In the course of our
dream-interpretations we have so often come across the element of
absurdity that we cannot postpone any longer the moment of
investigating its source and significance, if it has any. For it
will be remembered that the absurdity of dreams has provided those
who deny the value of dreams with one of their principal arguments
in favour of regarding them as the meaningless product of a reduced
and fragmentary mental activity.

   I shall begin by giving a few
examples in which the absurdity is only an apparent one and
disappears as soon as the meaning of the dream is more closely
examined. Here are two or three dreams which deal (by chance, as it
may seem at first sight) with the dreamer’s dead father.

I

   This is the dream of a patient
who had lost his father six years earlier.
His father had met
with a grave calamity. He had been travelling by the night train,
which had been derailed. The carriage seats were forced together
and his head was compressed from side to side. The dreamer then saw
him lying in bed with a wound over his left eyebrow which ran in a
vertical direction. He was surprised at his father’s having
met with a calamity (since he was already dead,
as he added in
telling me the dream).
How clear his eyes were!

   According to the ruling theory of
dreams we should have to explain the content of this dream as
follows. To begin with, we should suppose, while the dreamer was
imagining the accident, he must have forgotten that his father had
been in his grave for several years; but, as the dream proceeded,
the recollection must have emerged, and led to his astonishment at
his own dream while he was still asleep. Analysis teaches us,
however, that it is eminently useless to look for explanations of
this kind. The dreamer had commissioned a bust of his father from a
sculptor and had seen it for the first time two days before the
dream. It was this that he had thought of as a calamity. The
sculptor had never seen his father and had worked from photographs.
On the day immediately before the dream the dreamer, in his filial
piety, had sent an old family servant to the studio to see whether
he would form the same opinion of the marble head, namely, that it
was too narrow from side to side at the temples. He now proceeded
to recall from his memory the material which had gone to the
construction of the dream. Whenever his father was tormented by
business worries or family difficulties, he had been in the habit
of pressing his hands to the sides of his forehead, as though he
felt that his head was too wide and wanted to compress it. -When
the patient was four years old he had been present when a pistol,
which had been accidentally loaded, had been discharged and had
blackened his father’s eyes. (‘
How clear his eyes
were!
’) - At the spot on his forehead at which the dream
located his father’s injury, a deep furrow showed during his
lifetime whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that this
furrow was replaced in the dream by a wound led back to the second
exciting cause of the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of
his little daughter. The plate had slipped through his fingers, and
when he picked it up showed a crack which ran perpendicularly down
the little girl’s forehead as far as her eyebrow. He could
not help feeling superstitious about this, since a few days before
his mother’s death he had broken a photographic plate with
her portrait on it.

   The absurdity of this dream was
thus no more than the result of a piece of carelessness in verbal
expression which failed to distinguish the bust and the photograph
from the actual person. We might any of us say:
‘There’s something wrong with Father, don’t you
think?’ The appearance of absurdity in the dream could easily
have been avoided; and if we were to judge from this single
example, we should be inclined to think that the apparent absurdity
had been permitted or even designed.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

878

II

   Here is another, almost exactly
similar, example from a dream of my own. (I lost my father in
1896.)
After his death my father played a political part among
the Magyars and brought them together politically
. Here I saw a
small and indistinct picture:
a crowd of men as though they were
in the Reichstag; someone standing on one or two chairs, with other
people round him. I remembered how like Garibaldi he had looked on
his death-bed, and fell glad that that promise had come
true
.

   What could be more absurd than
this? It was dreamt at a time at which the Hungarians had been
driven by parliamentary
obstruction
into a state of
lawlessness and were plunged into the crisis from which they were
rescued by Koloman Széll. The trivial detail of the scene in
the dream appearing in pictures of such a small size was not
without relevance to its interpretation. Our dream-thoughts are
usually represented in visual pictures which appear to be more or
less life-size. The picture which I saw in my dream, however, was a
reproduction of a woodcut inserted in an illustrated history of
Austria, which showed Maria Theresa at the Reichstag of Pressburg
in the famous episode of ‘
Moriamur pro rege
nostro
’. [‘We will die for our king!’]¹
Like Maria Theresa in the picture, so my father stood in the dream
surrounded by the crowd. But he was
standing on one or two
chairs
[‘chair’ =
‘
Stuhl
’]
.
He had
brought them
together
, and was thus a presiding judge
[‘
Stuhlrichter
’, literally
‘chair-judge’]. (A connecting link was provided by the
common phrase ‘we shall need no judge.’) -Those of us
who were standing round had in fact remarked how like Garibaldi my
father looked on his death bed. He had had a
post mortem
rise of temperature, his cheeks had been flushed more and more
deeply red. . . . As I recalled this, my thoughts
involuntarily ran on:

                                                               
Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheine

                                                               
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.
²

  
¹
I cannot remember where I read an account
of a dream which was filled with unusually small figures, and the
source of which turned out to be one of Jacques Callot’s
etchings seen by the dreamer during the day. These etchings do in
fact contain a large number of very small figures. One series of
them depicts the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.

  
²
[‘Behind him, a shadowy illusion, lay
what holds us all in bondage - the things that are
common.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

879

   These elevated thoughts prepared
the way for the appearance of something that was common
[‘
gemein
’] in another sense. My father’s
post mortem
rise of temperature corresponded to the words
‘after his death’ in the dream. His most severe
suffering had been caused by a complete paralysis
(
obstruction
) of the intestines during his last weeks.
Disrespectful thoughts of all kinds followed from this. One of my
contemporaries who lost his father while he was still at his
secondary school - on that occasion I myself had been deeply moved
and had offered to be his friend - once told me scornfully of how
one of his female relatives had had a painful experience. Her
father had fallen dead in the street and had been brought home;
when his body was undressed it was found that at the moment of
death, or
post mortem
, he had passed a stool
[‘
Stuhl
’]. His daughter had been so unhappy
about this that she could not prevent this ugly detail from
disturbing her memory of her father. Here we have reached the wish
that was embodied in this dream. ‘To stand before one’s
children’s eyes, after one’s death, great and
unsullied’ - who would not desire this? What has become of
the absurdity of the dream? Its apparent absurdity is due only to
the fact that it gave a literal picture of a figure of speech which
is itself perfectly legitimate and in which we habitually overlook
any absurdity involved in the contradiction between its parts. In
this instance, once again, it is impossible to escape an impression
that the apparent absurdity is intentional and has been
deliberately produced.