Freud - Complete Works (163 page)

   I do not propose at this point to
discuss how it is that in such circumstances as these a recent
occasion for the generation of an affect can hark back to an
infantile situation and be replaced by that situation as far as the
production of affect is concerned. This question forms part of the
psychology of unconscious thinking, and would find its proper place
in a psychological elucidation of the neuroses. For the purposes of
dream-interpretation let us assume that a childhood memory arose,
or was constructed in phantasy, with some such content as the
following. The two children had a dispute about some object. (What
the object was may be left an open question, though the memory or
pseudo-memory had a quite specific one in view.)  Each of them
claimed to have
got there before the other
and therefore to
have a better right to it. They came to blows and might prevailed
over right. On the evidence of the dream, I may myself have been
aware that I was in the wrong (‘
I myself noticed the
mistake
’). However, this time I was the stronger and
remained in possession of the field. The vanquished party hurried
to his grandfather - my father - and complained about me, and I
defended myself in the words which I know from my father’s
account: ‘I hit him ‘cos he hit me.’ This memory,
or more probably phantasy, which came into my mind while I was
analysing the dream - without further evidence I myself could not
tell how - constituted an intermediate element in the
dream-thoughts, which gathered up the emotions raging in them as a
well collects the water that flows into it. From this point the
dream-thoughts proceeded along some such lines as these: ‘It
serves you right if you had to make way for me. Why did you try to
push
me
out of the way? I don’t need you, I can easily
find someone else to play with’, and so on. These thoughts
now entered upon the paths which led to their representation in the
dream. There had been a time when I had had to reproach my friend
Josef for an attitude of this same kind: ‘
Ôte-toi
que je m’y mette!
’ He had followed in my footsteps
as demonstrator in Brücke’s laboratory, but promotion
there was slow and tedious. Neither of Brücke’s two
assistants was inclined to budge from his place, and youth was
impatient. My friend, who knew that he could not expect to live
long, and whom no bonds of intimacy attached to his immediate
superior, sometimes gave loud expression to his impatience, and,
since this superior was seriously ill, P.’s wish to have him
out of the way might have an uglier meaning than the mere hope for
the man’s promotion. Not unnaturally, a few years earlier, I
myself had nourished a still livelier wish to fill a vacancy.
Wherever there is rank and promotion the way lies open for wishes
that call for suppression. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal could
not, even at his father’s sick-bed, resist the temptation of
trying on the crown. But, as was to be expected, the dream punished
my friend, and not me, for this callous wish.²

   ‘As he was ambitious, I
slew him.’ As he could not wait for the removal of another
man, he was himself removed. These had been my thoughts immediately
after I attended the unveiling at the University of the memorial -
not to him but to the other man. Thus a part of the satisfaction I
felt in the dream was to be interpreted: ‘A just punishment!
It serves you right!’

  
¹
[‘. . . long since appeared before my
troubled gaze’]

  
²
It will be noticed that the name Josef
plays a great part in my dreams (cf. the dream about my uncle). My
own ego finds it very easy to hide itself behind people of that
name, since Joseph was the name of a man famous in the Bible as an
interpreter of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

925

   At my friend’s funeral, a
young man had made what seemed to be an inopportune remark to the
effect that the speaker who had delivered the funeral oration had
implied that without this one man the world would come to an end.
He was expressing the honest feelings of someone whose pain was
being interfered with by an exaggeration. But this remark of his
was the starting-point of the following dream-thoughts:
‘It’s quite true that no one’s irreplaceable. How
many people I’ve followed to the grave already! But I’m
still alive. I’ve survived them all; I’m left in
possession of the field.’ A thought of this kind, occurring
to me at a moment at which I was afraid might not find my friend
alive if I made the journey to him, could only be construed as
meaning that I was delighted because I had once more survived
someone, because it was
he
and not I who had died, because I
was left in possession of the field, as I had been in the
phantasied scene from my childhood. This satisfaction, infantile in
origin, at being in possession of the field constituted the major
part of the affect that appeared in the dream. I was delighted to
survive, and I gave expression to my delight with all the
naïve egoism shown in the anecdote of the married couple one
of whom said to the other: ‘If one of us dies, I shall move
to Paris.’ So obvious was it to me that I should not be the
one to die.

   It cannot be denied that to
interpret and report one’s dreams demands a high degree of
self-discipline. One is bound to emerge as the only villain among
the crowd of noble characters who share one’s life. Thus it
seemed to me quite natural that the
revenants
should only
exist for just so long as one likes and should be removable at a
wish. We have seen what my friend Josef was punished for. But the
revenants
were a series of reincarnations of the friend of
my childhood. It was therefore also a source of satisfaction to me
that I had always been able to find successive substitutes for that
figure; and I felt I should be able to find a substitute for the
friend whom I was now on the point of losing: no one was
irreplaceable.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

926

   But what had become of the
dream-censorship? Why had it not raised the most energetic
objections against this blatantly egoistic train of thought? And
why had it not transformed the satisfaction attached to that train
of thought into severe unpleasure? The explanation was, I think,
that other, unobjectionable, trains of thought in connection with
the same people found simultaneous satisfaction and screened with
their
affect the affect which arose from the forbidden
infantile source. In another stratum of my thoughts, during the
ceremonial unveiling of the memorial, I had reflected thus:
‘What a number of valued friends I have lost, some through
death, some through a breach of our friendship! How fortunate that
I have found a substitute for them and that I have gained one who
means more to me than ever the others could, and that, at a time of
life when new friendships cannot easily be formed, I shall never
lose his!’ My satisfaction at having found a substitute for
these lost friends could be allowed to enter the dream without
interference; but there slipped in, along with it, the hostile
satisfaction derived from the infantile source. It is no doubt true
that infantile affection served to reinforce my contemporary and
justified affection. But infantile hatred, too, succeeded in
getting itself represented.

   In addition to this, however, the
dream-contained a clear allusion to another train of thought which
could legitimately lead to satisfaction. A short time before, after
long expectation, a daughter had been born to my friend. I was
aware of how deeply he had mourned the sister he had so early lost
and I wrote and told him I was sure he would transfer the love he
felt for her on to the child, and that the baby girl would allow
him at last to forget his irreparable loss.

   Thus this group of thoughts was
connected once again with the intermediate thought in the latent
content of the dream from which the associative paths diverged in
contrary directions: ‘No one is irreplaceable!’
‘There are nothing but
revenants
: all those we have
lost come back!’ And now the associative links between the
contradictory components of the dream-thoughts were drawn closer by
the chance fact that my friend’s baby daughter had the same
name as the little girl I used to play with as a child, who was of
my age and the sister of my earliest friend and opponent. It gave
me great
satisfaction
when I heard that the baby was to be
called ‘Pauline.’ And as an allusion to this
coincidence, I had replaced one Josef by another in the dream and
found it impossible to suppress the similarity between the opening
letters of the names ‘Fleischl’ and ‘FI.’
From here my thoughts went on to the subject of the names of my own
children. I had insisted on their names being chosen, not according
to the fashion of the moment, but in memory of people I have been
fond of. Their names made the children into
revenants
. And
after all, I reflected, was not having children our only path to
immortality?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

927

   I have only a few more remarks to
add on the subject of affect in dreams from another point of view.
A dominating element in a sleeper’s mind may be constituted
by what we call a ‘mood’ - or
tendency
to some
affect - and this may then have a determining influence upon his
dreams. A mood of this kind may arise from his experiences or
thoughts during the preceding day, or its sources may be somatic.
In either case it will be accompanied by the trains of thought
appropriate to it. From the point of view of dream-construction it
is a matter of indifference whether, as sometimes happens, these
ideational contents of the dream-thoughts determine the mood in a
primary fashion, or whether they are themselves aroused secondarily
by the dreamer’s emotional disposition which is in its turn
to be explained on a somatic basis. In any case the construction of
dreams is subject to the condition that it can only represent
something which is the fulfilment of a wish and that it is only
from wishes that it can derive its psychical motive force. A
currently active mood is treated in the same way as a sensation
arising and becoming currently active during sleep (cf.
p. 714
), which can be either disregarded
or given a fresh interpretation in the sense of a wish-fulfilment.
Distressing moods during sleep can become the motive force of a
dream by arousing energetic wishes which the dream is supposed to
fulfil. The material to which moods are attached is worked over
until it can be used to express the fulfilment of a wish. The more
intense and dominating a part is played in the dream-thoughts by
the distressing mood, the more certain it becomes that the most
strongly suppressed wishful impulses will make use of the
opportunity in order to achieve representation. For, since the
unpleasure which they would otherwise necessarily produce
themselves is already present, they find the harder part of their
task - the task of forcing their way through to representation -
already accomplished for them. Here once more we are brought up
against the problem of anxiety-dreams; and these, as we shall find,
form a marginal case in the function of dreaming.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

928

(I)

SECONDARY REVISION

   And now at last we can turn to
the fourth of the factors concerned in the construction of dreams.
If we pursue our investigation of the content of dreams in the
manner in which we have begun it - that is, by comparing
conspicuous events in the dream-content with their sources in the
dream-thoughts, we shall come upon elements the explanation of
which calls for an entirely new assumption. What I have in mind are
cases in which the dreamer is surprised, annoyed or repelled in the
dream, and, moreover, by a piece of the dream-content itself. As I
have shown in a number of instances, the majority of these critical
feelings in dreams are not in fact directed against the content of
the dream, but turn out to be portions of the dream-thoughts which
have been taken over and used to an appropriate end. But some
material of this kind does not lend itself to this explanation; its
correlate in the material of the dream-thoughts is nowhere to be
found. What, for instance, is the meaning of a critical remark
found so often in dreams: ‘This is only a dream’? Here
we have a genuine piece of criticism of the dream, such as might be
made in waking life. Quite frequently, too, it is actually a
prelude to waking up; and still more frequently it has been
preceded by some distressing feeling which is set at rest by the
recognition that the state is one of dreaming. When the thought
‘this is only a dream’ occurs during a dream, it has
the same purpose in view as when the words are pronounced on the
stage by
la belle Hélène
in Offenbach’s
comic opera of that name: it is aimed at reducing the importance of
what has just been experienced and at making it possible to
tolerate what is to follow. It serves to lull a particular agency
to sleep which would have every reason at that moment to bestir
itself and forbid the continuance of the dream - or the scene in
the opera. It is more comfortable, however, to go on sleeping and
tolerate the dream, because, after all, ‘it
is
only a
dream.’ In my view the contemptuous critical judgement,
‘it’s only a dream’, appears in a dream when the
censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been
taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through.
It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses
these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused
by it. The phrase is an example of
esprit d’escalier
on the part of the psychical censorship.