Freud - Complete Works (161 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

915

   We have already come across an
excellent example of a reversal of affect of this kind carried out
in a dream on behalf of the dream-censorship. In the dream of
‘my uncle with the yellow beard’ I felt the
greatest affection for my friend R., whereas and because the
dream-thoughts called him a simpleton. It was from this example of
reversal of affect that we derived our first hint of the existence
of a dream-censorship. Nor is it necessary to assume, in such cases
either, that the dream-work
creates
contrary affects of this
kind out of nothing; it finds them as a rule lying ready to hand in
the material of the dream-thoughts, and merely intensifies them
with the psychical force arising from a motive of defence, till
they can predominate for the purposes of dream-formation. In the
dream of my uncle which I have just mentioned, the antithetical,
affectionate affect probably arose from an infantile source (as was
suggested by the later part of the dream), for the uncle-nephew
relationship, owing to the peculiar nature of the earliest
experiences of my childhood (cf. the analysis on
p. 876 f.
) had become the source of
all my friendships and all my hatreds.

   An excellent example of a
reversal of affect of this kind will be found in a dream recorded
by Ferenczi (1916): ‘An elderly gentleman was awakened one
night by his wife, who had become alarmed because he was laughing
so loudly and unrestrainedly in his sleep. Subsequently the man
reported that he had had the following dream:
I was lying in bed
and a gentleman who was known to me entered the room; I tried to
turn on the light but was unable to: I tried over and over again,
but in vain. Thereupon my wife got out of bed to help me, but she
could not manage it either. But as she felt awkward in front of the
gentleman owing to being "en négligé", she
finally gave it up and went back to bed. All of this was so funny
that I couldn’t help roaring with laughter at it. My wife
said, ‘Why are you laughing? why are you laughing?’ but
I went on laughing till I woke up
. - Next day the gentleman was
very depressed and had a headache: so much laughing had upset him,
he thought.

   ‘The dream seems less
amusing when it is considered analytically. The "gentleman
known to him" who entered the room was, in the latent
dream-thoughts, the picture of Death as the "great
Unknown" - a picture which had been called up in his mind
during the previous day. The old gentleman, who suffered from
arterio-sclerosis, had had good reason the day before for thinking
of dying. The unrestrained laughter took the place of sobbing and
weeping at the idea that he must die. It was the light of life that
he could no longer turn on. This gloomy thought may have been
connected with attempts at copulation which he had made shortly
before but which had failed even with the help of his wife
en
négligé
. He realized that he was already going
down hill. The dream-work succeeded in transforming the gloomy idea
of impotence and death into a comic scene, and his sobs into
laughter.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

916

   There is one class of dreams
which have a particular claim to be described as
‘hypocritical’ and which offer a hard test to the
theory of wish-fulfilment. My attention was drawn to them when Frau
Dr. M. Hilferding brought up the following record of a dream of
Peter Rosegger’s for discussion by the Vienna
Psycho-Analytical Society.

   Rosegger writes in his story
‘
Fremd gemacht!
’
[‘Dismissed!’]¹ ‘As a rule I am a sound
sleeper but many a night I have lost my rest - for, along with my
modest career as a student and man of letters, I have for many
years dragged around with me, like a ghost from which I could not
set myself free, the shadow of a tailor’s life.

   ‘It is not as though in the
day-time I had reflected very often or very intensely on my past.
One who had cast off the skin of a Philistine and was seeking to
conquer Earth and Heaven had other things to do. Nor would I, when
I was a dashing young fellow, have given more than a thought to my
nightly dreams. Only later, when the habit had come to me of
reflecting upon everything, or when the Philistine within me began
to stir a trifle, did I ask myself why it should be that, if I
dreamt at all, I was always a journeyman tailor and that I spent so
long a time as such with my master and worked without pay in his
workshop. I knew well enough, as I sat like that beside him, sewing
and ironing, that my right place was no longer there and that as a
townsman I had other things to occupy me. But I was always on
vacation, I was always having summer holidays, and so it was that I
sat beside my master as his assistant. It often irked me and I felt
sad at the loss of time in which I might well have found better and
more useful things to do. Now and then, when something went awry, I
had to put up with a scolding from my master, though there was
never any talk of wages. Often, as I sat there with bent back in
the dark workshop, I thought of giving notice and taking my leave.
Once I even did so; but my master paid no heed and I was soon
sitting beside him again and sewing.

  
¹
  In the second volume of
Waldheimat
, p. 303.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

917

   ‘After such tedious hours,
what a joy it was to wake! And I determined that if this persistent
dream should come again I would throw it from me with energy and
call aloud: "This is mere hocus-pocus, I am lying in bed and
want to sleep. . . ." But next night I was once more sitting
in the tailor’s workshop.

   ‘And so it went on for
years with uncanny regularity. Now it happened once that my master
and I were working at Alpelhofer’s (the peasant in whose
house I had worked when I was first apprenticed) and my master
showed himself quite especially dissatisfied with my work.
"I’d like to know where you’re
wool-gathering," he said, and looked at me darkly. The most
reasonable thing to do, I thought, would be to stand up and tell
him that I was only with him to please him and then go off. But I
did not do so. I made no objection when my master took on an
apprentice and ordered me to make room for him on the bench. I
moved into the corner and sewed. The same day another journeyman
was taken on as well, a canting hypocrite - he was a Bohemian - who
had worked at our place nineteen years before, and had fallen into
the brook once on his way back from the inn. When he looked for a
seat there was no more room. I turned to my master questioningly,
and he said to me: "You’ve no gift for tailoring, you
can go! you’re dismissed!" My fright at this was so
overpowering that I awoke.

   ‘The grey light of morning
was glimmering through the uncurtained windows into my familiar
home. Works of art surrounded me; there in my handsome book-case
stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic Dante, the incomparable
Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe-all the magnificent immortals.
From the next room rang out the clear young voices of the awakening
children joking with their mother. I felt as though I had found
afresh this idyllically sweet, this peaceful, poetic, spiritual
life in which I had so often and so deeply felt a meditative human
happiness. Yet it vexed me that I had not been beforehand with my
master in giving him notice, but had been dismissed by him.

   ‘And how astonished I was!
From the night on which my master dismissed me, I enjoyed peace; I
dreamt no more of the tailoring days which lay so far back in my
past-days which had been so cheerfully unassuming but had thrown
such a long shadow over my later years.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

918

   In this series of dreams dreamt
by an author who had been a journeyman tailor in his youth, it is
hard to recognize the dominance of wish-fulfilment. All the
dreamer’s enjoyment lay in his day-time existence, whereas in
his dreams he was still haunted by the shadow of an unhappy life
from which he had at last escaped. Some dreams of my own of a
similar kind have enabled me to throw a little light on the
subject. As a young doctor I worked for a long time at the Chemical
Institute without ever becoming proficient in the skills which that
science demands; and for that reason in my waking life I have never
liked thinking of this barren and indeed humiliating episode in my
apprenticeship. On the other hand I have a regularly recurring
dream of working in the laboratory, of carrying out analyses and of
having various experiences there. These dreams are disagreeable in
the same way as examination dreams and they are never very
distinct. While I was interpreting one of them, my attention was
eventually attracted by the word ‘
analysis
’,
which gave me a key to their understanding. Since those days I have
become an ‘analyst’, and I now carry out analyses which
are very highly spoken of, though it is true that they are
‘
psycho
-analyses’. It was now clear to me: if I
have grown proud of carrying out analyses of that kind in my
daytime life and feel inclined to boast to myself of how successful
I have become, my dreams remind me during the night of those other,
unsuccessful analyses of which I have no reason to feel proud. They
are the punishment dreams of a
parvenu
, like the dreams of
the journeyman tailor who had grown into a famous author. But how
does it become possible for a dream, in the conflict between a
parvenu
’
s
pride and his self-criticism, to side
with the latter, and choose as its content a sensible warning
instead of an unlawful wish-fulfilment? As I have already said, the
answer to this question raises difficulties. We may conclude that
the foundation of the dream was formed in the first instance by an
exaggeratedly ambitious phantasy, but that humiliating thoughts
that poured cold water on the phantasy found their way into the
dream instead. It may be remembered that there are masochistic
impulses in the mind, which may be responsible for a reversal such
as this. I should have no objection to this class of dreams being
distinguished from ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’ under the
name of ‘punishment dreams’. I should not regard this
as implying any qualification of the theory of dreams which I have
hitherto put forward; it would be no more than a linguistic
expedient for meeting the difficulties of those who find it strange
that opposites should converge. But a closer examination of some of
these dreams brings something more to light. In an indistinct part
of the background of one of my laboratory dreams I was of an age
which placed me precisely in the gloomiest and most unsuccessful
year of my medical career. I was still without a post and had no
idea how I could earn my living; but at the same time I suddenly
discovered that I had a choice open to me between several women
whom I might marry! So I was once more young, and, more than
everything,
she
was once more young - the woman who had
shared all these difficult years with me. The unconscious
instigator of the dream was thus revealed as one of the constantly
gnawing wishes of a man who is growing older. The conflict raging
in other levels of the mind between vanity and self-criticism had,
it is true, determined the content of the dream; but it was only
the more deeply-rooted wish for youth that had made it possible for
that conflict to appear as a dream. Even when we are awake we
sometimes say to ourselves: ‘Things are going very well
to-day and times were hard in the old days; all the same, it was
lovely then - I was still young.’¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1930:] Since
psycho-analysis has divided the personality into an ego and a
super-ego (Freud, 1921
c
), it has become easy to recognize
in these punishment dreams fulfilments of the wishes of the
super-ego.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

919

   Another group of dreams, which I
have often come across in myself and recognized as hypocritical,
have as their content a reconciliation with people with whom
friendly relations have long since ceased. In such cases analysis
habitually reveals some occasion which might urge me to abandon the
last remnant of consideration for these former friends and to treat
them as strangers or enemies. The dream, however, prefers to depict
the opposite relationship.

   In forming any judgement upon
dreams recorded by an imaginative writer it is reasonable to
suppose that he may have omitted from his account details in the
content of the dream which he regards as unessential or
distracting. His dreams will in that case raise problems which
would be quickly solved if their content were reported in full.

   Otto Rank has pointed out to me
that the Grimms’ fairy tale of ‘The Little Tailor, or
Seven at a Blow’ contains an exactly similar dream of a
parvenu
. The tailor, who has become a hero and the
son-in-law of the King, dreams one night of his former handicraft,
as he lies beside his wife, the Princess. She, becoming suspicious,
posts armed guards the next night to listen to the dreamer’s
words and to arrest him. But the little tailor is warned, and sees
to it that his dream is corrected.

   The complicated process of
elimination, diminution and reversal, by means of which the affects
in the dream-thoughts are eventually turned into those in the
dream, can be satisfactorily followed in suitable syntheses of
dreams that have been completely analysed. I will quote a few more
examples of affects in dreams where some of the possibilities I
have enumerated will be found realized.