Freud - Complete Works (162 page)

V

   If we turn back to the dream
about the strange task set me by old Brücke of making a
dissection of my own pelvis, it will be recalled that in the dream
itself I missed the gruesome feeling [‘
Grauen
’]
appropriate to it. Now this was a wish-fulfilment in more than one
sense. The dissection meant the self-analysis which I was carrying
out, as it were, in the publication of this present book about
dreams - a process which had been so distressing to me in reality
that I had postponed the printing of the finished manuscript for
more than a year. A wish then arose that I might get over this
feeling of distaste; hence it was that I had no gruesome feeling
[‘
Grauen
’] in the dream. But I should also have
been very glad to miss growing grey - ‘
Grauen
’
in the other sense of the word. I was already growing quite grey,
and the grey of my hair was another reminder that I must not delay
any longer. And, as we have seen, the thought that I should have to
leave it to my children to reach the goal of my difficult journey
forced its way through to representation at the end of the
dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

920

   Let us next consider the two
dreams in which an expression of satisfaction was transposed to the
moment after waking. In the one case the reason given for the
satisfaction was an expectation that I should now discover what was
meant by ‘I’ve dreamt of that before’, while the
satisfaction really referred to the birth of my first children. In
the other case the ostensible reason was my conviction that
something that had been ‘prognosticated’ was now coming
true, while the real reference was similar to that in the former
dream: it was the satisfaction with which I greeted the birth of my
second son. Here the affects which dominated the dream-thoughts
persisted in the dreams; but it is safe to say that in
no
dream can things be as simple as all that. If we go a little more
deeply into the two analyses we find that this satisfaction which
had escaped censorship had received an accession from another
source. This other source had grounds for fearing the censorship,
and its affect would undoubtedly have aroused opposition if it had
not covered itself by the similar, legitimate affect of
satisfaction, arising from the permissible source, and slipped in,
as it were, under its wing.

   Unfortunately, I cannot
demonstrate this in the actual case of these dreams, but an
instance taken from another department of life will make my meaning
clear. Let us suppose the following case. There is a person of my
acquaintance whom I hate, so that I have a lively inclination to
feel glad if anything goes wrong with him. But the moral side of my
nature will not give way to this impulse. I do not dare to express
a wish that he should be unlucky, and if he meets with some
undeserved misfortune, I suppress my satisfaction at it and force
myself to manifestations and thoughts of regret. Everyone must have
found himself in this situation at some time or other. What now
happens, however, is that the hated person, by a piece of
misconduct of his own, involves himself in some well-deserved
unpleasantness; when that happens, I may give free rein to my
satisfaction that he has met with a just punishment and in this I
find myself in agreement with many other people who are impartial.
I may observe, however, that my satisfaction seems more intense
than that of these other people; it has received an accession from
the source of my hatred, which till then has been prevented from
producing its affect, but in the altered circumstances is no longer
hindered from doing so. In social life this occurs in general
wherever antipathetic people or members of an unpopular minority
put themselves in the wrong. Their punishment does not as a rule
correspond to their wrongdoing but to their wrongdoings
plus
the ill-feeling directed against them which has previously been
without any consequences. It is no doubt true that those who
inflict the punishment are committing an injustice in this; but
they are prevented from perceiving it by the satisfaction resulting
from the removal of a suppression which has long been maintained
within them. In cases such as this the affect is justified in its
quality
but not in its
quantity
; and self-criticism
which is set at rest on the one point is only too apt to neglect
examination of the second one. When once a door has been opened, it
is easy for more people to push their way through it than there had
originally been any intention of letting in.

   A striking feature in neurotic
characters - the fact that a cause capable of releasing an affect
is apt to produce in them a result which is qualitatively justified
but quantitatively excessive is to be explained along these same
lines, in so far as it admits of any psychological explanation at
all. The excess arises from sources of affect which had previously
remained unconscious and suppressed. These sources have succeeded
in setting up an associative link with the
real
releasing
cause, and the desired path from the release of their own affect
has been opened by the
other
source of affect, which is
unobjectionable and legitimate. Our attention is thus drawn to the
fact that in considering the suppressed and suppressing agencies,
we must not regard their relation as being exclusively one of
mutual inhibition. Just as much regard must be paid to cases in
which the two agencies bring about a pathological effect by working
side by side and by intensifying each other.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

921

   Let us now apply these hints upon
psychical mechanisms to an understanding of the expressions of
affect in
dreams
. A satisfaction which is exhibited in a
dream and can, of course, be immediately referred to its proper
place in the dream-thoughts is not always completely elucidated by
this reference alone. It is as a rule necessary to look for
another
source of it in the dream-thoughts, a source which
is under the pressure of the censorship. As a result of that
pressure, this source would normally have produced, not
satisfaction, but the contrary affect. Owing to the presence of the
first source of affect, however, the second source is enabled to
withdraw its affect of satisfaction from repression and allow it to
act as an intensification of the satisfaction from the first
source. Thus it appears that affects in dreams are fed from a
confluence of several sources and are over-determined in their
reference to the material of the dream-thoughts.
During the
dream-work, sources of affect which are capable of producing the
same affect come together in generating it
.¹

   We can gain a little insight into
these complications from the analysis of that fine specimen of a
dream of which the words ‘
Non Vixit
’ formed the
centre-point. (See
p. 874 ff.
) In
that dream manifestations of affect of various qualities were
brought together at two points in its manifest content. Hostile and
distressing feelings - ‘overcome by strange emotions’
were the words used in the dream itself - were piled up at the
point at which I annihilated my opponent and friend with two words.
And again, at the end of the dream, I was highly delighted, and I
went on to approve the possibility, which in waking life I knew was
absurd, of there being
revenants
who could be eliminated by
a mere wish.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] I have given
an analogous explanation of the extraordinarily powerful
pleasurable effect of tendentious jokes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

922

   I have not yet related the
exciting cause of the dream. It was of great importance and led
deep into an understanding of the dream. I had heard from my friend
in Berlin, whom I have referred to as ‘Fl.’, that he
was about to undergo an operation and that I should get further
news of his condition from some of his relatives in Vienna. The
first reports I received after the operation were not reassuring
and made me feel anxious. I should have much preferred to go to him
myself, but just at that time I was the victim of a painful
complaint which made movement of any kind a torture to me. The
dream-thoughts now informed me that I feared for my friend’s
life. His only sister, whom I had never known, had, as I was aware,
died in early youth after a very brief illness. (In the dream
Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an
hour she was dead
.) I must have imagined that his constitution
was not much more resistant than his sister’s and that, after
getting some much worse news of him, I should make the journey
after all - and arrive
too late
, for which I might never
cease to reproach myself.¹ This reproach for coming too late
became the central point of the dream but was represented by a
scene in which Brücke, the honoured teacher of my student
years, levelled this reproach at me with a terrible look from his
blue eyes. It will soon appear what it was that caused the
situation to be switched on to these lines. The scene itself could
not be reproduced by the dream in the form in which I experienced
it. The other figure in the dream was allowed to keep the blue
eyes, but the annihilating role was allotted to me - a reversal
which was obviously the work of wish-fulfilment. My anxiety about
my friend’s recovery, my self-reproaches for not going to see
him, the shame I felt about this -
he had come to Vienna
(to
see me) ‘
unobtrusively
’ - the need I felt to
consider that I was excused by my illness - all of this combined to
produce the emotional storm which was clearly perceived in my sleep
and which raged in this region of the dream-thoughts.

  
¹
It was this phantasy, forming part of the
unconscious dream-thoughts, which so insistently demanded
‘
Non vivit
’ instead of ‘
Non
vixit
’: ‘You have come too late, he is no longer
alive’. I have already explained on
pp. 874‑875
that ‘
Non
vivit
’ was also required by the
manifest
situation
in the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

923

   But there was something else in
the exciting cause of the dream, which had a quite opposite effect
upon me. Along with the unfavourable reports during the first few
days after the operation, I was given a warning not to discuss the
matter with anyone. I had felt offended by this because it implied
an unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I was quite aware that
these instructions had not emanated from my friend but were due to
tactlessness or over-anxiety on the part of the intermediary, but I
was very disagreeably affected by the veiled reproach because it
was - not wholly without justification. As we all know, it is only
reproaches which have something in them that ‘stick’;
it is only they that upset us. What I have in mind does not relate,
it is true, to this friend, but to a much earlier period of my
life. On that occasion I caused trouble between two friends (both
of whom had chosen to honour me, too, with that name ) by quite
unnecessarily telling one of them, in the course of conversation,
what the other had said about him. At that time, too, reproaches
had been levelled at me, and they were still in my memory. One of
the two friends concerned was Professor Fleischl; I may describe
the other by his first name of ‘Josef’ - which was
also that of P., my friend and opponent in the dream.

   The reproach of being unable to
keep anything to myself was attested in the dream by the element
‘unobtrusive’ and by Fl.’s question as to
how
much I had told P. about his affairs
. But it was the
intervention of this memory that transported the reproach against
me for coming too late from the present time to the period at which
I had worked in Brücke’s laboratory. And, by turning the
second person in the scene of annihilation in the dream into a
Josef, I made the scene represent not only the reproach against me
for coming too late but also the far more strongly repressed
reproach that I was unable to keep a secret. Here the processes of
condensation and displacement at work in the dream, as well as the
reasons for them, are strikingly visible.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

924

   My present-day anger, which was
only slight, over the warning I had been given not to give anything
away received reinforcements from sources in the depth of my mind
and thus swelled into a current of hostile feelings against persons
of whom I was in reality fond. The source of this reinforcement
flowed from my childhood. I have already shown how my warm
friendships as well as my enmities with contemporaries went back to
my relations in childhood with a nephew who was a year my senior;
how he was my superior, how I early learned to defend myself
against him, how we were inseparable friends, and how, according to
the testimony of our elders, we sometimes fought with each other
and - made complaints to them about each other. All my friends have
in a certain sense been re-incarnations of this first figure who
‘früh sich einst dem trüben Blick
gezeigt’¹: they have been
revenants
. My nephew
himself re-appeared in my boyhood, and at that time we acted the
parts of Caesar and Brutus together. My emotional life has always
insisted that I should have an intimate friend and a hated enemy. I
have always been able to provide myself afresh with both, and it
has not infrequently happened that the ideal situation of childhood
has been so completely reproduced that friend and enemy have come
together in a single individual - though not, of course, both at
once or with constant oscillations, as may have been the case in my
early childhood.