Freud - Complete Works (160 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

909

   I take this opportunity of making
a somewhat detailed analysis of the ‘breakfast-ship’,
the appearance of which in the dream brought such a nonsensical
conclusion to a situation which had up to then been kept at a
rational level. When subsequently I called the dream-object more
precisely to mind, it struck me that it was black and that, owing
to the fact that it was cut off short where it was broadest in the
middle, it bore a great resemblance at that end to a class of
objects which had attracted our interest in the museums in the
Etruscan towns. These were rectangular trays of black pottery, with
two handles, on which there stood things like coffee- or tea-cups,
not altogether unlike one of our modern
breakfast-sets
. In
response to our enquiries we learned that this was the
‘
toilette
’ [toilet-set] of an Etruscan lady,
with receptacles for cosmetics and powder on it, and we had
jokingly remarked that it would be a good idea to take one home
with us for the lady of the house. The object in the dream meant,
accordingly, a black ‘toilette’, i.e. mourning dress,
and made a direct reference to a death. The other end of the
dream-object reminded me of the funeral boats¹ in which in
early times dead bodies were placed and committed to the sea for
burial. This led on to the point which explained why the ships
returned
in the dream:

Still, auf gerettetem Boot, treibt in den
Hafen der Greis.
²

It was the return after a shipwreck
[‘
Schiffbruch
’, literally
‘ship-break’] - the breakfast-ship was broken off short
in the middle. But what was the origin of the name
‘breakfast’-ship? It was here that the word
‘English’ came in, which was left over from the
warships. The English word ‘breakfast’ means
‘breaking fast’. The ‘breaking’ related
once more to the shipwreck [‘ship-break’] and the
fasting was connected with the black dress or
toilette
.

   But it was only the
name
of the breakfast-ship that was newly constructed by the dream. The
thing
had existed and reminded me of one of the most
enjoyable parts of my last trip. Mistrusting the food that would be
provided at Aquileia, we had brought provisions with us from
Gorizia and had bought a bottle of excellent Istrian wine at
Aquileia. And while the little mail steamer made its way slowly
through the ‘
Canale delle Mee
’ across the empty
lagoon to Grado we, who were the only passengers, ate our breakfast
on deck in the highest spirits, and we had rarely tasted a better
one. This, then, was the ‘breakfast-ship’, and it was
precisely behind this memory of the most cheerful
joie de
vivre
that the dream-concealed the gloomiest thoughts of an
unknown and uncanny future.

  
¹
‘
Nachen
’ [in German], a
word which is derived, as a philological friend tells me, from the
root ‘
n
e
c
n
x
‘ [corpse].

  
²
[Safe on his ship, the old man quietly
sails into port.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

910

   The detachment of affects from
the ideational material which generated them is the most striking
thing which occurs to them during the formation of dreams; but it
is neither the only nor the most essential alteration undergone by
them on their path from the dream-thoughts to the manifest dream.
If we compare the affects of the dream-thoughts with those in the
dream, one thing at once becomes clear. Whenever there is an affect
in the dream, it is also to be found in the dream-thoughts. But the
reverse is not true. A dream is in general poorer in affect than
the psychical material from the manipulation of which it has
proceeded. When I have reconstructed the dream-thoughts, I
habitually find the most intense psychical impulses in them
striving to make themselves felt and struggling as a rule against
others that are sharply opposed to them. If I then turn back to the
dream, it not infrequently appears colourless, and without
emotional tone of any great intensity. The dream-work has reduced
to a level of indifference not only the content but often the
emotional tone of my thoughts as well. It might be said that the
dream-work brings about a
suppression of affects
. Let us,
for instance, take the dream of the botanical monograph. The
thoughts corresponding to it consisted of a passionately agitated
plea on behalf of my liberty to act as I chose to act and to govern
my life as seemed right to me and me alone. The dream that arose
from them has an indifferent ring about it: ‘I had written a
monograph; it lay before me; it contained coloured plates; dried
plants accompanied each copy.’ This reminds one of the peace
that has descended upon a battle field strewn with corpses; no
trace is left of the struggle which raged over it.

   Things can be otherwise: lively
manifestations of affect can make their way into the dream itself.
For the moment, however, I will dwell upon the incontestable fact
that large numbers of dreams appear to be indifferent, whereas it
is never possible to enter into the dream-thoughts without being
deeply moved.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

911

   No complete theoretical
explanation can here be given of this suppression of affect in the
course of the dream-work. It would require to be preceded by a most
painstaking investigation of the theory of affects and of the
mechanism of repression. I will only permit myself a reference to
two points. I am compelled - for other reasons - to picture the
release of affects as a centrifugal process directed towards the
interior of the body and analogous to the processes of motor and
secretory innervation. Now just as in the state of sleep the
sending out of motor impulses towards the external world appears to
be suspended, so it may be that the centrifugal calling-up of
affects by unconscious thinking may become more difficult during
sleep. In that case the affective impulses occurring during the
course of the dream-thoughts would from their very nature be weak
impulses, and consequently those which found their was into the
dream would be no less weak. On this view, then, the
‘suppression of affect’ would not in any way be the
consequence of the dream-work but would result from the state of
sleep. This may be true, but it cannot be the whole truth. We must
also bear in mind that any relatively complex dream turns out to be
a compromise produced by a conflict between psychical forces. For
one thing, the thoughts constructing the wish are obliged to
struggle against the opposition of a censoring agency; and for
another thing, we have often seen that in unconscious thinking
itself every train of thought is yoked with its contradictory
opposite. Since all of these trains of thought are capable of
carrying an affect, we shall by and large scarcely be wrong if we
regard the suppression of affect as a consequence of the inhibition
which these contraries exercise upon each other and which the
censorship exercises upon the impulsions suppressed by it.
The
inhibition of affect, accordingly, must be considered as the second
consequence of the censorship of dreams, just as dream-distortion
is its first consequence
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

912

   I will here give as an instance a
dream in which the indifferent feeling-tone of the content of the
dream can be explained by the antithesis between the
dream-thoughts. It is a short dream, which will fill every reader
with disgust.

IV

  
A hill, on which there was
something like an open-air closet: a very long seat with a large
hole at the end of it. Its back edge was thickly covered with small
heaps of faeces of all sizes and degrees of freshness. There were
bushes behind the seat. I micturated on the seat; a long stream of
urine washed everything clean; the lumps of faeces came away easily
and fell into the opening. It was as though at the end there was
still some left
.

   Why did I feel no disgust during
this dream?

   Because, as the analysis showed,
the most agreeable and satisfying thoughts contributed to bringing
the dream about. What at once occurred to me in the analysis were
the Augean stables which were cleansed by Hercules. This Hercules
was I. The hill and bushes came from Aussee, where my children were
stopping at the time. I had discovered the infantile aetiology of
the neuroses and had thus saved my own children from falling ill.
The seat (except, of course, for the hole) was an exact copy of a
piece of furniture which had been given to me as a present by a
grateful woman patient. It thus reminded me of how much my patients
honoured me. Indeed, even the museum of human excrement could be
given an interpretation to rejoice my heart. However much I might
be disgusted by it in reality, in the dream it was a reminiscence
of the fair land of Italy where, as we all know, the W.C.s in the
small towns are furnished in precisely this way. The stream of
urine which washed everything clean was an unmistakable sign of
greatness. It was in that way that Gulliver extinguished the great
fire in Lilliput though incidentally this brought him into
disfavour with its tiny queen. But Gargantua, too, Rabelais’
superman, revenged himself in the same way on the Parisians by
sitting astride on Notre Dame and turning his stream of urine upon
the city. It was only on the previous evening before going to sleep
that I had been turning over Garnier’s illustrations to
Rabelais. And, strangely enough, here was another piece of evidence
that I was the superman. The platform of Notre Dame was my
favourite resort in Paris; every free afternoon I used to clamber
about there on the towers of the church between the monsters and
the devils. The fact that all the faeces disappeared so quickly
under the stream recalled the motto: ‘
Afflavit et
dissipati sunt
’, which I intended one day to put at the
head of a chapter upon the therapy of hysteria.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

913

   And now for the true exciting
cause of the dream. It had been a hot summer afternoon; and during
the evening I had delivered my lecture on the connection between
hysteria and the perversions, and everything I had had to say
displeased me intensely and seemed to me completely devoid of any
value. I was tired and felt no trace of enjoyment in my difficult
work; I longed to be away from all this grubbing about in human
dirt and to be able to join my children and afterwards visit the
beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the lecture room to a
café, where I had a modest snack in the open air, since I
had no appetite for food. One of my audience, however, went with me
and he begged leave to sit by me while I drank my coffee and choked
over my crescent roll. He began to flatter me: telling me how much
he had learnt from me, how he looked at everything now with fresh
eyes, how I had cleansed the
Augean stables
of errors and
prejudices in my theory of the neuroses. He told me, in short, that
I was a very great man. My mood fitted ill with this paean of
praise; I fought against my feeling of disgust, went home early to
escape from him, and before going to sleep turned over the pages of
Rabelais and read one of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s short
stories, ‘
Die Leiden eines Knaben
’ [‘A
Boy’s Sorrows’].

   Such was the material out of
which the dream emerged. Meyer’s short story brought up in
addition a recollection of scenes from my childhood. (Cf. the last
episode in the dream about Count Thun.) The day-time mood of
revulsion and disgust persisted into the dream in so far as it was
able to provide almost the entire material of its manifest content.
But during the night a contrary mood of powerful and even
exaggerated self-assertiveness arose and displaced the former one.
The content of the dream had to find a form which would enable it
to express both the delusions of inferiority and the megalomania in
the same material. The compromise between them produced an
ambiguous dream-content; but it also resulted in an indifferent
feeling-tone owing to the mutual inhibition of these contrary
impulses.

   According to the theory of
wish-fulfilment, this dream would not have become possible if the
antithetical megalomanic train of thought (which, it is true, was
suppressed, but had a pleasurable tone) had not emerged in addition
to the feeling of disgust. For what is distressing may not be
represented in a dream; nothing in our dream-thoughts which is
distressing can force an entry into a dream unless it at the same
time lends a disguise to the fulfilment of a wish.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

914

   There is yet another alternative
way in which the dream-work can deal with affects in the
dream-thoughts, in addition to allowing them through or reducing
them to nothing. It can
turn them into their opposite
. We
have already become acquainted with the interpretative rule
according to which every element in a dream can, for purposes of
interpretation, stand for its opposite just as easily as for
itself. We can never tell beforehand whether it stands for the one
or for the other; only the context can decide. A suspicion of this
truth has evidently found its way into popular consciousness:
‘dream books’ very often adopt the principle of
contraries in their interpretation of dreams. This turning of a
thing into its opposite is made possible by the intimate
associative chain which links the idea of a thing with its opposite
in our thoughts. Like my other kind of displacement it can serve
the ends of the censorship; but it is also frequently a product of
wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists in nothing else than
a replacement of a disagreeable thing by its opposite. Just as
ideas of things can make their appearance in dreams turned into
their opposite, so too can the
affects
attaching to
dream-thoughts; and it seems likely that this reversal of affect is
brought about as a rule by the dream-censorship. In social life,
which has provided us with our familiar analogy with the
dream-censorship, we also make use of the suppression and reversal
of affect, principally for purposes of dissimulation. If I am
talking to someone whom I am obliged to treat with consideration
while wishing to say something hostile to him, it is almost more
important that I should conceal any expression of my
affect
from him than that I should mitigate the verbal form of my
thoughts. If I were to address him in words that were not impolite,
but accompanied them with a look or gesture of hatred and contempt,
the effect which I should produce on him would not be very
different from what it would have been if I had thrown my contempt
openly in his face. Accordingly, the censorship bids me above all
suppress my affects; and, if I am a master of dissimulation, I
shall assume the
opposite
affect - smile when I am angry and
seem affectionate when I wish to destroy.