Freud - Complete Works (157 page)

II

   Here is a similar case. One of my
patients had a dream which struck him as interesting, for
immediately after waking he said to himself: ‘
I must tell
the doctor that
.’ The dream was analysed and produced the
clearest allusions to a
liaison
which he had started during
the treatment and which he had decided to himself
not to tell me
about
.²

  
¹
[’
Nicht auf meinem eigenen Mist
gewachsen
’ - meaning ‘I am not responsible for
that’, or ‘It’s not my baby.’ The German
word ‘
Mist
’, properly meaning manure, is used in
slang for ‘rubbish’ and occurs in this sense in the
Viennese term for a dust-bin:
‘
Misttrügerl
.’]

  
²
[
Footnote added
1909:] If in the
actual course of a dream dreamt during psycho-analytic treatment
the dreamer says to himself: ‘
I must tell the doctor
that
’, it invariably implies the presence of a strong
resistance against confessing the dream - which is not infrequently
thereupon forgotten.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

893

III

   Here is a third example, one from
my own experience.
I was going to the hospital with P. through a
district in which there were houses and gardens. At the same time I
had a notion that I had often seen this district before in dreams.
I did not know my way about very well. He showed me a road that led
round the corner to a restaurant (indoors, not a garden). There I
asked for Frau Doni and was told that she lived at the back in a
small room with three children. I went towards it, but before I got
there met an indistinct figure with my two little girls; I took
them with me after I had stood with them for a little while. Some
sort of reproach against my wife, for having left them
there
.

   When I woke up I had a feeling of
great
satisfaction
, the reason for which I explained to
myself as being that I was going to discover from this analysis the
meaning of ‘I’ve dreamt of that before.’¹ In
fact, however, the analysis taught me nothing of the kind; what it
did show me was that the satisfaction belonged to the latent
content of the dream and not to any judgement upon it. My
satisfaction was with the fact that my marriage had brought me
children. P. was a person whose course in life lay for some time
alongside mine, who then out distanced me both socially and
materially, but whose marriage was childless. The two events which
occasioned the dream will serve, instead of a complete analysis, to
indicate its meaning. The day before, I had read in a newspaper the
announcement of the death of Frau Dona A----y (which I turned into
‘Doni’ in the dream), who had died in childbirth. My
wife told me that the dead woman had been looked after by the same
midwife who had attended her at the birth of our two youngest
children. The name ‘Dona’ had struck me because I had
met it for the first time a short while before in an English novel.
The second occasion for the dream was provided by the date on which
it occurred. It was on the night before the birthday of my eldest
boy - who seems to have some poetic gifts.

  
¹
A protracted discussion on this subject has
run through recent volumes of the
Revue Philosophique
under
the title of ‘Paramnesia in Dreams.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

894

IV

   I was left with the same feeling
of satisfaction when I woke from the absurd dream of my father
having played a political part among the Magyars after his death;
and the reason I gave myself for this feeling was that it was a
continuation of the feeling that accompanied the last piece of the
dream.
I remembered how like Garibaldi he had looked on his
death-bed and felt glad that it had come true. . . .
(There was a continuation which I had forgotten)
. The analysis
enabled me to fill in this gap in the dream. It was a mention of my
second son, to who I had given the first name of a great historical
figure who had powerfully attracted me in my boyhood, especially
since my visit to England. During the year before the child’s
birth I had made up my mind to use this name if it were a son and I
greeted the new-born baby with it with a feeling of high
satisfaction
. (It is easy to see how the suppressed
megalomania of fathers is transferred in their thoughts on to their
children, and it seems quite probable that this is one of the ways
in which the suppression of that feeling, which becomes necessary
in actual life, is carried out.) The little boy’s right to
appear in the context of this dream was derived from the fact that
he had just had the same misadventure - easily forgivable both in a
child and in a dying man - of soiling his bed-clothes. Compare in
this connection
Stuhlrichter
[‘presiding judge’,
literally ‘chair-' or ‘stool-judge’] and the
wish expressed in the dream to stand before one’s
children’s eyes
great
and
unsullied
. ]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

895

V

   I now turn to consider
expressions of judgement passed in the dream itself but not
continued into waking life or transposed into it. In looking for
examples of these, my task will be greatly assisted if I may make
use of dreams which I have already recorded with other aims in
view. The dream of Goethe’s attack on Herr M. appears to
contain a whole number of acts of judgement. ‘
I tried to
throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me
improbable
.’ This has every appearance of being a
criticism of the absurd idea that Goethe should have made a
literary attack on a young man of my acquaintance. ‘
It
seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen
.’
This, again, sounds exactly like the outcome of a calculation,
though, it is true, of a feeble-minded one. Lastly, ‘
I was
not quite sure what year we were in
’ seems like an
instance of uncertainty or doubt in a dream.

   Thus all of these seemed to be
acts of judgement made for the first time in the dream. But
analysis showed that their wording can be taken in another way, in
the light of which they become indispensable for the dream’s
interpretation, while at the same time every trace of absurdity is
removed. The sentence ‘
I tried to throw a little light on
the chronological data
’ put me in the place of my friend
who was in fact seeking to throw light on the chronological data of
life. This deprives the sentence of its significance as a judgement
protesting against the absurdity of the preceding sentences. The
interpolated phrase, ‘
which seemed to me
improbable
’, belonged with the subsequent one,
‘
It seemed to be a plausible notion
’. I had used
almost these precise words to the lady who had told her
brother’s case-history. ‘
It seems to me an
improbable notion
that his cries of "Nature! Nature
!" had anything to do with Goethe;
it seems to me far more
plausible
that the words had the sexual meaning you are
familiar with.’ It is true that here a judgement was passed -
not in the dream, however, but in reality, and on an occasion which
was recollected and exploited by the dream-thoughts. The content of
the dream took over this judgement just like any other fragment of
the dream-thoughts. The number ‘18' to which the
judgement in the dream was senselessly attached, retains a trace of
the real context from which the judgement was torn. Lastly,
‘
I was not quite sure what year we were in
’ was
intended merely to carry further my identification with the
paralytic patient in my examination of whom this point had really
arisen.

   The resolution of what are
ostensibly acts of judgement in dreams may serve to remind us of
the rules laid down at the beginning of this book for carrying out
the work of interpretation: namely, that we should disregard the
apparent coherence between a dream’s constituents as an
unessential illusion, and that we should trace back the origin of
each of its elements on its own account. A dream is a conglomerate
which, for purposes of investigation, must be broken up once more
into fragments. On the other hand, however, it will be observed
that a psychical force is at work in dreams which creates this
apparent connectedness, which, that is to say, submits the material
produced by the dream-work to a ‘secondary revision’.
This brings us face to face with the manifestations of a force
whose importance we shall later assess as the fourth of the factors
concerned in the construction of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

896

VI

   Here is a further instance of a
process of judgement at work in a dream that I have already
recorded. In the absurd dream of the communication from the town
council I asked: ‘
Did you get married soon after
that?’ I calculated that, of course, I was born in 1856,
which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in
question
. All of this was clothed in the form of a set of
logical conclusions. My father had married in 1851, immediately
after his attack; I, of course, was the eldest of the family and
had been born in 1856; Q.E.D. As we know, this false conclusion was
drawn in the interests of wish-fulfilment; and the predominant
dream-thought ran: ‘
Four or five years; that’s no
time at all; it doesn’t count
.’ Every step in this
set of logical conclusions, however alike in their content and
their form, could be explained in another way as having been
determined by the dream-thoughts. It was the
patient
, of
whose long analysis my colleague had fallen foul, who had decided
to get married immediately the treatment was finished. The manner
of my interview with my father in the dream was like an
interrogation or examination, and reminded me too of a teacher at
the University who used to take down exhaustive particulars from
the students who were enrolling themselves for his lectures:
‘Date of birth?’ - ‘1856.’ -
‘
Patre
?’ In reply to this, one gave one’s
father’s first name with a Latin termination; and we students
assumed that the Hofrat
drew conclusions
from the first name
of the father which could not always be drawn from that of the
student himself. Thus the
drawing of the conclusion
in the
dream was no more than a repetition of the
drawing of a
conclusion
which appeared as a piece of the material of the
dream-thoughts. Something new emerges from this. If a conclusion
appears in the content of the dream there is no question that it is
derived from the dream-thoughts; but it may either be present in
these as a piece of recollected material or it may link a series of
dream-thoughts together in a logical chain. In any case, however, a
conclusion in a dream represents a conclusion in the
dream-thoughts.¹

   At this point we may resume our
analysis of the dream. The interrogation by the professor led to a
recollection of the register of University Students (which in my
time was drawn up in Latin). It led further to thoughts upon the
course of my academic studies. The
five years
which are
prescribed for medical studies were once again too few for me. I
quietly went on with my work for several more years; and in my
circle of acquaintances I was regarded as an idler and it was
doubted whether I should ever get through. Thereupon I
quickly
decided to take my examinations and I got through
them
in spite of the delay
. Here was a fresh reinforcement
of the dream-thoughts with which I was defiantly confronting my
critics: ‘Even though you won’t believe it because
I’ve taken my time, I
shall
get through: I
shall
bring my medical training to a
conclusion
.
Things have often turned out like that before.’

  
¹
These findings are in some respects a
correction of what I have said above (
p. 783
) on the representation of logical
relations in dreams. This earlier passage describes the general
behaviour of the dream-work but takes no account of the finer and
more precise details of its functioning.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

897

   This same dream in its opening
passage contained some sentences which could hardly be refused the
name of an argument. This argument was not even absurd; it might
just as well have occurred in waking thought:
I was amused in
the dream at the communication from the town council since, in the
first place, I was not yet in the world in 1851 and, in the second
place, my father, to whom it might have related, was already
dead.
Both of these statements were not only correct in
themselves but agreed precisely with the real arguments that I
should bring up if I were actually to receive a communication of
that kind. My earlier analysis of the dream showed that it grew out
of deeply embittered and derisive dream-thoughts. If we may also
assume that there were strong reasons present for the activity of
the censorship, we shall understand that the dream-work had every
motive for producing
a perfectly valid refutation of an absurd
suggestion
on the model contained in the dream-thoughts. The
analysis showed, however, that the dream-work did not have a free
hand in framing this parallel but was obliged, for that purpose, to
use material from the dream-thoughts. It was just as though there
were an algebraic equation containing (in addition to numerals)
plus and minus signs, indices and radical signs, and as though
someone were to copy out the equation without understanding it,
taking over both the operational symbols and the numerals into his
copy but mixing them all up together. The two arguments could be
traced back to the following material. It was distressing to me to
think that some of the premises which underlay my psychological
explanations of the psychoneuroses were bound to excite scepticism
and laughter when they were first met with. For instance, I had
been driven to assume that impressions from the second year of
life, and sometimes even from the first, left a lasting trace on
the emotional life of those who were later to fall ill, and that
these impressions - though distorted and exaggerated in many ways
by the memory - might constitute the first and deepest foundation
for hysterical symptoms. Patients, to whom I explained this at some
appropriate moment, used to parody this newly gained knowledge by
declaring that they were ready to look for recollections dating
from a time
at which they were not yet alive
. My discovery
of the unexpected part played by their
father
in the
earliest sexual impulses of female patients might well be expected
to meet with a similar reception (see the discussion on
p. 736 f.
). Nevertheless, it was my
well-grounded conviction that both of these hypotheses were true.
By way of confirmation I called to mind some instances in which the
death of the father occurred while the child was at a very early
age and in which later events, otherwise inexplicable, proved that
the child had nevertheless retained unconsciously recollections of
the figure which had disappeared so early in his life. I was aware
that these two assertions of mine rested on
the drawing of
conclusions
whose validity would be disputed. It was therefore
an achievement of wish-fulfilment when the material of precisely
those conclusions which I was afraid would be contested
was
employed by the dream-work for drawing
conclusions which it was
impossible to contest
.