Freud - Complete Works (154 page)
The frequency with which dead
people appear in dreams and act and associate with us as though
they were alive has caused unnecessary surprise and has produced
some remarkable explanations which throw our lack of understanding
of dreams into strong relief. Yet the explanation of these dreams
is a very obvious one. It often happens that we find ourselves
thinking: ‘If my father were alive, what would he say to
this?’ Dreams are unable to express an ‘if’ of
this kind except by representing the person concerned as present in
some particular situation. Thus, for instance, a young man who had
been left a large legacy by his grandfather, dreamt, at a time when
he was feeling self-reproaches for having spent a considerable sum
of money, that his grandfather was alive again and calling him to
account. And when, from our better knowledge, we protest that after
all the person in question is dead, what we look upon as a
criticism of the dream is in reality either a consoling thought
that the dead person has not lived to witness the event, or a
feeling of satisfaction that he can no longer interfere in it.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
880
There is another kind of
absurdity, which occurs in dreams of dead relatives but which does
not express ridicule and derision. It indicates an extreme degree
of repudiation, and so makes it possible to represent a repressed
thought which the dreamer would prefer to regard as utterly
unthinkable. It seems impossible to elucidate dreams of this kind
unless one bears in mind the fact that dreams do not differentiate
between what is wished and what is real. For instance, a man who
had nursed his father during his last illness and had been deeply
grieved by his death, had the following senseless dream some time
afterwards.
His father was alive once more and talking to him in
his usual way, but
(the remarkable thing was that)
he had
really died, only he did not know it
. This dream only becomes
intelligible if, after the words ‘but he had really
died’ we insert ‘in consequence of the dreamer’s
wish’, and if we explain that what ‘he did not
know’ was that the dreamer had had this wish. While he was
nursing his father he had repeatedly wished his father were dead;
that is to say, he had had what was actually a merciful thought
that death might put an end to his sufferings. During his mourning,
after his father’s death, even this sympathetic wish became a
subject of unconscious self-reproach, as though by means of it he
had really helped to shorten the sick man’s life. A stirring
up of the dreamer’s earliest infantile impulses against his
father made it possible for this self-reproach to find expression
as a dream; but the fact that the instigator of the dream and the
daytime thoughts were such worlds apart was precisely what
necessitated the dream’s absurdity.¹
It is true that dreams of dead
people whom the dreamer has loved raise difficult problems in
dream-interpretation and that these cannot always be satisfactorily
solved. The reason for this is to be found in the particularly
strongly marked emotional ambivalence which dominates the
dreamer’s relation to the dead person. It very commonly
happens that in dreams of this kind the dead person is treated to
begin with as though he were alive, that he then suddenly turns out
to be dead and that in a subsequent part of the dream he is alive
once more. This has a confusing effect, It eventually occurred to
me that this alternation between death and life is intended to
represent
indifference
on the part of the dreamer.
(‘It’s all the same to me whether he’s alive or
dead.’) This indifference is, of course, not real but merely
desired; it is intended to help the dreamer to repudiate his very
intense and often contradictory emotional attitudes and it thus
becomes a dream-representation of his
ambivalence
. -In other
dreams in which the dreamer associates with dead people, the
following rule often helps to give us our bearings. If there is no
mention in the dream of the fact that the dead man is dead, the
dreamer is equating himself with him: he is dreaming of his own
death. If, in the course of the dream, the dreamer suddenly says to
himself in astonishment, ‘why, he died ever so long
ago’, he is repudiating this equation and is denying that the
dream signifies his own death. - But I willingly confess to a
feeling that dream-interpretation is far from having revealed all
the secrets of dreams of this character.
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] Cf. my paper
on the two principles of mental functioning (1911
b
).
The Interpretation Of Dreams
881
III
In the example which I shall next
bring forward I have been able to catch the dream-work in the very
act of intentionally fabricating an absurdity for which there was
absolutely no occasion in the material. It is taken from the dream
which arose from my meeting with Count Thun as I was starting for
my holidays.
I was driving in a cab and ordered the driver to
drive me to a station. ‘Of course I can’t drive with
you along the railway line itself’, I said, after he had
raised some objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if
I had already driven with him for some of the distance one normally
travels by train
. The analysis produced the following
explanations of this confused and senseless story. The day before,
I had hired a cab to take me to an out-of-the-way street in
Dornbach. The driver, however, had not known where the street was
and, as these excellent people are apt to do, had driven on and on
until at last I had noticed what was happening and had told him the
right way, adding a few sarcastic comments. A train of thought, to
which I was later in the analysis to return, led from this
cab-driver to aristocrats. For the moment it was merely the passing
notion that what strikes us bourgeois plebs about the aristocracy
is the preference they have for taking the driver’s seat.
Count Thun, indeed, was the driver of the State Coach of Austria.
The next sentence in the dream, however, referred to my brother,
whom I was thus identifying with the cab-driver. That year I had
called off a trip I was going to make with him to Italy. (‘I
can’t drive with you along the railway line itself.’)
And this cancellation had been a kind of punishment for the
complaints he used to make that I was in the habit of overtiring
him on such trips (this appeared in the dream unaltered) by
insisting upon moving too rapidly from place to place and seeing
too many beautiful things in a single day. On the evening of the
dream my brother had accompanied me to the station; but he had
jumped out shortly before we got there, at the suburban railway
station adjoining the main line terminus, in order to travel to
Purkersdorf by the suburban line. I had remarked to him that he
might have stayed with me a little longer by travelling to
Purkersdorf by the main line instead of the suburban one. This led
to the passage in the dream in which I drove in the cab
for some
of the distance one normally travels by train
. This was an
inversion of what had happened in reality - a kind of ‘
tu
quoque
’ argument. What I had said to my brother was:
‘you can travel on the main line in my company for the
distance you would travel by the suburban line.’ I brought
about the whole confusion in the dream by putting ‘cab’
instead of ‘suburban line’ (which, incidentally, was of
great help in bringing together the figures of the cab-driver and
my brother). In this way I succeeded in producing something
senseless in the dream, which it seems scarcely possible to
disentangle and which was almost a direct contradiction of an
earlier remark of mine in the dream (‘I can’t drive
with you along the railway line itself.’) Since, however,
there was no necessity whatever for me to confuse the suburban
railway and a cab, I must have arranged the whole of this enigmatic
business in the dream on purpose.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
882
But for
what
purpose? We are now to discover the significance of absurdity
in dreams and the motives which lead to its being admitted or even
created. The solution of the mystery in the present dream was as
follows. It was necessary for me that there should be something
absurd and unintelligible in this dream in connection with the word
‘
fahren
’¹ because the dream-thoughts
included a particular judgement which called for representation.
One evening, while I was at the house of the hospitable and witty
lady who appeared as the ‘housekeeper’ in one of the
other scenes in the same dream, I had heard two riddles which I had
been unable to solve. Since they were familiar to the rest of the
company, I cut a rather ludicrous figure in my vain attempts to
find the answers. They depended upon puns on the words
‘
Nachkommen
’ and ‘
Vorfahren
’
and, I believe, ran as follows:
Der Herr befiehlt’s,
Der Kutscher tut’s.
Ein jeder hat’s,
Im Grabe ruht’s.
[With the master’s request
The driver complies:
By all men possessed
In the graveyard it lies.]
(Answer: ‘
Vorfahren
’
[‘Drive up’ and ‘Ancestry’; more literally
‘go in front’ and ‘predecessors’].)
It was particularly confusing
that the first half of the second riddle was identical with that of
the first:
Der Herr befiehlt’s,
Der Kutscher tut’s.
Nicht jeder hat’s,
In der Wiege ruht’s.
[With the master’s request
The driver complies:
Not by all men possessed
In the cradle it lies.]
(Answer: ‘
Nachkommen
’
[‘Follow after’
and ‘Progeny’; more literally ‘come after’
and ‘successors’].)
¹
[The German word
‘
fahren
’’, which has already been used
repeatedly in the dream and the analysis, is used for the English
‘drive’ (in a cab) and ‘travel’ (in a
train) and has had to be translated by both of those words in
different contexts.]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
883
When I saw Count Thun
drive
up
so impressively and when I thereupon fell into the mood of
Figaro, with his remarks on the goodness of great gentlemen in
having taken the trouble to be born (to become
progeny
),
these two riddles were adopted by the dream-work as intermediate
thoughts. Since aristocrats could easily be confused with drivers
and since there was a time in our part of the world when a driver
was spoken of as ‘
Schwager
’
[‘coachman’ and ‘brother-in-law’], the work
of condensation was able to introduce my brother into the same
picture. The dream-thought, however, which was operating behind all
this ran as follows: ‘It is absurd to be proud of one’s
ancestry; it is better to be an ancestor oneself.’ This
judgement, that something ‘is absurd’, was what
produced the absurdity in the dream. And this also clears up the
remaining enigma in this obscure region of the dream, namely why it
was that I thought I had already driven with the driver
before
[
vorhergefahren
(‘driven before’)
-
vorgefahren
(‘driven up’)
-’
Vorfahren
’ (‘ancestry’)].
A dream is made absurd, then, if
a judgement that something ‘is absurd’ is among the
elements included in the dream thoughts - that is to say, if any
one of the dreamer’s unconscious trains of thought has
criticism or ridicule as its motive. Absurdity is accordingly one
of the methods by which the dream-work represents a contradiction -
alongside such other methods as the reversal in the dream-content
of some material relation in the dream-thoughts, or the
exploitation of the sensation of motor inhibition. Absurdity in a
dream, however, is not to be translated by a simple
‘no’; it is intended to reproduce the
mood
of
the dream-thoughts, which combines derision or laughter with the
contradiction. It is only with such an aim in view that the
dream-work produces anything ridiculous. Here once again
it is a
giving a manifest form to a portion of the latent
content
.¹
Actually we have
already come across a convincing example of an absurd dream with
this kind of meaning: the dream - I interpreted it without any
analysis - of the performance of a Wagner opera which lasted till a
quarter to eight in the morning and in which the orchestra was
conducted from a tower, and so on (see
p. 811 f.
). It evidently meant to
say: ‘This is a
topsy-turvy
world and a
crazy
society; the person who deserves something doesn’t get it,
and the person who doesn’t care about something
does
get it’ - and there the dreamer was comparing her fate with
her cousin’s. - Nor is it by any means a matter of chance
that our first examples of absurdity in dreams related to a dead
father. In such cases, the conditions for creating absurd dreams
are found together in characteristic fashion. The authority wielded
by a father provokes criticism from his children at an early age,
and the severity of the demands he makes upon them leads them, for
their own relief, to keep their eyes open to any weakness of their
father’s; but the filial piety called up in our minds by the
figure of a father, particularly after his death, tightens the
censorship which prohibits any such criticism from being
consciously expressed.