Freud - Complete Works (156 page)

   But I have also undertaken to
show that no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones.
So I must explain away the fact that in the present dream I made my
friend’s cause my own and put myself in his place. The
strength of my critical conviction in waking life is not enough to
account for this. The story of the eighteen-year-old patient,
however, and the different interpretations of his exclaiming
‘
Nature!
’ were allusions to the opposition in
which I found myself to most doctors on account of my belief in the
sexual aetiology of the psychoneuroses. I could say to myself:
‘The kind of criticism that has been applied to your friend
will be applied to you - indeed, to some extent it already
has
been.’ The ‘he’ in the dream can
therefore be replaced by ‘we’: ‘Yes, you’re
quite right, it’s
we
who are the
fools.’ There was a very clear reminder in the dream
that ‘
mea resagitur
’, in the allusion to
Goethe’s short but exquisitely written essay; for when at the
end of my school-days I was hesitating in my choice of a career, it
was hearing that essay read aloud at a public lecture that decided
me to take up the study of natural science.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

888

VI

   Earlier in this volume I
undertook to show that another dream in which my own ego did not
appear was nevertheless egoistic. On
p. 746
I reported a short dream to the
effect that Professor M. said: ‘
My son, the Myops
. .
.’, and I explained that the dream was only an introductory
one, preliminary to another in which I
did
play a part. Here
is the missing main dream, which introduces an absurd and
unintelligible verbal form which requires an explanation.

  
On account of certain events
which had occurred in the city of Rome, it had become necessary to
remove the children to safety, and this was done. The scene was
then in front of a gateway, double doors in the ancient style (the
‘Porta Romana’ at Siena, as I was aware during the
dream itself). I was sitting on the edge of a fountain and was
greatly depressed and almost in tears. A female figure - an
attendant or nun - brought two boys out and handed them over to
their father, who was not myself. The elder of the two was clearly
my eldest son; I did not see other one’s face. The woman who
brought out the boy asked him to kiss her good-bye. She was
noticeable for having a red nose. The boy refused to kiss her, but,
holding out his hand in farewell, said
‘
AUF GESERES’
to her, and
then
‘
AUF
UNGESERES’
to the two of us (or to one of us). I
had a notion that this last phrase denoted a
preference
.¹

  
¹
[The words ‘
Geseres
’ and
‘
Ungeseres
’, neither of them German, are
discussed below.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

889

   This dream was constructed on a
tangle of thoughts provoke by a play which I had seen, called
Das neue Ghetto
. The Jewish problem, concern about the
future of one’s children, to whom one cannot give a country
of their own, concern about educating them in such a way that they
can move freely across frontiers - all of this was easily
recognizable among the relevant dream-thoughts.

   ‘
By the waters of
Babylon we sat down and wept
.’ Siena, like Rome, is
famous for its beautiful fountains. If Rome occurred in one of my
dreams, it was necessary for me to find a substitute for it from
some locality known to me (see
p. 679 f.
). Near the Port Romana in
Siena we had seen a large and brightly lighted building. We learned
that it was the
Manicomio
, the insane asylum. Shortly before
I had the dream I had heard that a man of the same religious
persuasion as myself had been obliged to resign the position which
he had painfully achieved in a State asylum.

   Our interest is aroused by the
phrase ‘
Auf geseres
’ (at a point at which the
situation in the dream would have led one to expect ‘
Auf
Wiedersehen
’) as well as its quite meaningless opposite
‘
Auf Ungeseres
.’ According to information I have
received from philologists, ‘
Geseres
’ is a
genuine Hebrew word derived from a verb
‘
goiser
’, and is best translated by
‘imposed sufferings’ or ‘doom.’ The use of
the word in slang would incline one to suppose that it meant
‘weeping and wailing.’ ‘
Ungeseres
’
was a private neologism of my own and was the first word to catch
my attention, but to begin with I could make nothing of it. But the
short remark at the end of the dream to the effect that
‘
Ungeseres
’ denoted a preference over
‘
Geseres
’ opened the door to associations and at
the same time to an elucidation of the word. An analogous
relationship occurs in the case of caviare;
unsalted
[‘
ungesalzen
’] caviare is esteemed more highly
that
salted
[‘
gesalzen
’]. ‘Caviare
to the general’, aristocratic pretensions; behind this lay a
joking allusion to a member of my household who, since she was
younger than I, would, I hoped look after my children in the
future. This tallied with the fact that another member of my
household, our excellent nurse, was recognizably portrayed in the
female attendant or nun in the dream. There was still, however, no
transitional idea between ‘
salted - unsalted
’
and ‘
Geseres - Ungeseres
.’ This was provided by
‘
leavened - unleavened
’ [‘
gesäuert
- ungesäuert
’]. In their flight out of Egypt the
Children of Israel had not time to allow their dough to rise and,
in memory of this, they eat unleavened bread to this day at Easter.
At this point I may insert a sudden association that occurred to me
during this portion of the analysis. I remembered how, during the
previous Easter, my Berlin friend and I had been walking through
the streets of Breslau, a town in which we were strangers. A little
girl asked me the way to a particular street, and I was obliged to
confess that I did not know; and I remarked to my friend: ‘It
is to be hoped that when she grows up that little girl will show
more discrimination in her choice of the people whom she gets to
direct her.’ Shortly afterwards, I caught sight of a
door-plate bearing the words ‘Dr. Herodes. Consulting hours:.
. .’ ‘Let us hope’, I remarked, ‘that our
colleague does not happen to be a children’s doctor.’
At this same time my friend had been telling me his views on the
biological significance of
bilateral symmetry
and had begun
a sentence with the words ‘If we had an eye in the middle of
our foreheads like a Cyclops . . .’ This led to the
Professor’s remark in the introductory dream, ‘
My
son, the Myops
. . .’¹ and I had now been led to the
principal source of ‘
Geseres
’. Many years
before, when this son of Professor M.’s, to-day an
independent thinker, was still sitting at his school-desk, he was
attacked by a disease of the eyes which, the doctor declared, gave
cause for anxiety. He explained that so long as it remained
on
one side
it was of no importance, but that if it passed over to
the
other eye
it would be a serious matter. The affection
cleared up completely in the one eye; but shortly afterwards signs
in fact appeared of the other one being affected. The boy’s
mother, terrified, at once sent for the doctor to the remote spot
in the country where they were staying. The doctor, however, now
went over
to the other side
. ‘Why are you making such
a "
Geseres
"?’ he shouted at the mother,
‘if
one
side has got well, so will the
other
.’ And he was right.

  
¹
[The German ‘
Myop
’ is an
ad hoc
form constructed on the pattern of
‘
Zyklop
’.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

890

   And now we must consider the
relation of all this to me and my family. The school-desk at which
Professor M.’s son took his first steps in knowledge was
handed over by his mother as a gift to my eldest son, into whose
mouth I put the farewell phrases in the dream. It is easy to guess
one of the wishes to which this transference gave rise. But the
construction of the desk was also intended to save the child from
being
short-sighted
and
one-sided
. Hence the
appearance in the dream of ‘
Myops
’ (and, behind
it, ‘
Cyclops
’) and the reference to
bilaterality
. My concern about one-sidedness had more than
one meaning: it would refer not only to physical one-sidedness but
also to one sidedness of intellectual development. May it not even
be that it was precisely this concern which, in its crazy way, the
scene in the dream was contradicting? After the child had turned to
one side
to say farewell words, he turned to the
other
side
to say the contrary, as though to restore the balance.
It was as though he was acting with due attention to bilateral
symmetry!

   Dreams, then, are often most
profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those
who have had something to say but could not say it without peril
have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their
forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could
at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection
that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical. The Prince in
the play, who had to disguise himself as a madman, was behaving
just as dreams do in reality; so that we can say of dreams what
Hamlet said of himself, concealing the true circumstances under a
cloak of wit and unintelligibility: ‘I am but mad
north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a
hand-saw!’¹

   Thus I have solved the problem of
absurdity in dreams by showing that the dream-thoughts are never
absurd - never, at all events, in the dreams of sane people - and
that the dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing
individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of
representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be
present in the dream-thoughts.

  
¹
This dream also provides a good example of
the generally valid truth that dreams which occur during the same
night, even though they are recollected as separate, spring from
the ground-work of the same thoughts. Incidentally, the situation
in the dream of my removing my children to safety from the City of
Rome was distorted by being related back to an analogous event that
occurred in my own childhood: I was envying some relatives who,
many years earlier, had had an opportunity of removing their
children to another country.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

891

   My next task is to show that the
dream-work consists in nothing more than a combination of the three
factors I have mentioned - and of a fourth which I have still to
mention; that it carries out no other function than the translation
of dream-thoughts in accordance with the four conditions to which
it is subject; and that the question whether the mind operates in
dreams with all its intellectual faculties or with only a part of
them is wrongly framed and disregards the facts. Since, however,
there are plenty of dreams in whose content judgements are passed,
criticisms made, and appreciations expressed, in which surprise is
felt at some particular element of the dream, in which explanations
are attempted and argumentations embarked upon, I must now proceed
to meet the objections arising from facts of this kind by producing
some chosen examples.

   My reply is as follows:
Everything that appears in dreams as the ostensible activity of
the function of judgement is to be regarded not as an intellectual
achievement of the dream-work but as belonging to the material of
the dream-thoughts and as having been lifted from them into the
manifest content of the dream as a ready-made structure
. I can
even carry this assertion further. Even the judgements made
after waking
upon a dream that has been remembered, and the
feelings called up in us by the reproduction of such a dream, form
part, to a great extent, of the latent content of the dream and are
to be included in its interpretation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

892

I

   I have already quoted a striking
example of this. A woman patient refused to tell me a dream of hers
because ‘it was not clear enough.’ She had seen someone
in the dream but did not know whether it was her husband or her
father. There then followed a second piece of dream in which a
dust-bin [
Misttrügerl
] appeared, and this gave rise to
the following recollection. When she had first set up house she had
jokingly remarked on one occasion in the presence of a young
relative who was visiting in the house that her next job was to get
hold of a new dust-bin. The next morning one arrived for her, but
it was filled with lilies of the valley. This piece of the dream
served to represent a common phrase ‘not grown on my own
manure’.¹ When the analysis was completed, it turned out
that the dream-thoughts were concerned with the after-effects of a
story, which the dreamer had heard when she was young, of how a
girl had had a baby and of how it was
not clear who the father
really was
. Here, then, the dream-representation had overflowed
into the waking thoughts: one of the elements of the dream-thoughts
had found representation in a waking judgement passed upon the
dream as a whole.