Freud - Complete Works (249 page)

   Naturally Dora would not follow
me in this part of the interpretation. I myself, however, had been
able to arrive at a further step in the interpretation, which
seemed to me indispensable both for the anamnesis of the case and
for the theory of dreams. I promised to communicate this to Dora at
the next session.

  
¹
We shall be able later on to interpret even
the drops in a way which will fit in with the context.

  
²
I added: ‘Moreover, the re-appearance
of the dream in the last few days forces me to the conclusion that
you consider that the same situation has arisen once again, and
that you have decided to give up the treatment - to which, after
all, it is only your father who makes you come.’ The sequel
showed how correct my guess had been. At this point my
interpretation touches for a moment upon the subject of
‘transference’ - a theme which is of the highest
practical and theoretical importance, but into which I shall not
have much further opportunity of entering in the present
paper.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1408

   The fact was that I could not
forget the hint which seemed to be conveyed by the ambiguous words
already noticed -
that it might be necessary to leave the room;
that an accident might happen in the night
. Added to this was
the fact that the elucidation of the dream seemed to me incomplete
so long as a particular requirement remained unsatisfied; for,
though I do not wish to insist that this requirement is a universal
one, I have a predilection for discovering a means of satisfying
it. A regularly formed dream stands, as it were, upon two legs, one
of which is in contact with the main and current exciting cause,
and the other with some momentous event in the years of childhood.
The dream sets up a connection between those two factors - the
event during childhood and the event of the present day - and it
endeavours to re-shape the present on the model of the remote past.
For the wish which creates the dream always springs from the period
of childhood; and it is continually trying to summon childhood back
into reality and to correct the present day by the measure of
childhood. I believed that I could already clearly detect those
elements of Dora’s dream which could be pieced together into
an allusion to an event in childhood.

   I opened the discussion of the
subject with a little experiment, which was, as usual, successful.
There happened to be a large match-stand on the table. I asked Dora
to look round and see whether she noticed anything special on the
table, something that was not there as a rule. She noticed nothing.
I then asked her if she knew why children were forbidden to play
with matches.

   ‘Yes; on account of the
risk of fire. My uncle’s children are very fond of playing
with matches.’

   ‘Not only on that account.
They are warned not to "play with fire", and a particular
belief is associated with the warning.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1409

   She knew nothing about it. -
‘Very well, then; the fear is that if they do they will wet
their bed. The antithesis of "water" and "fire"
must be at the bottom of this. Perhaps it is believed that they
will dream of fire and then try and put it out with water. I cannot
say exactly. But I notice that the antithesis of water and fire has
been extremely useful to you in the dream. Your mother wanted to
save the jewel-case so that it should not be
burnt
; while in
the dream-thoughts it is a question of the "jewel-case"
not being
wetted
. But fire is not only used as the contrary
of water, it also serves directly to represent love (as in the
phrase "to be
consumed
with love"). So that from
"fire" one set of rails runs by way of this symbolic
meaning to thoughts of love; while the other set runs by way of the
contrary "water", and, after sending off a branch line
which provides another connection with "love" (for love
also makes things wet), leads in a different direction. And what
direction can that be? Think of the expressions you used: that
an accident might happen in the night
, and that
it might
be necessary to leave the room
. Surely the allusion must be to
a physical need? And if you transpose the accident into childhood
what can it be but bed-wetting? But what is usually done to prevent
children from wetting their bed? Are they not woken up in the night
out of their sleep,
exactly as your father woke you up in the
dream
? This, then, must be the actual occurrence which enabled
you to substitute your father for Herr K., who really, woke you up
out of your sleep. I am accordingly driven to conclude that you
were addicted to bed-wetting up to a later age than is usual with
children. The same must also have been true of your brother; for
your father said: "
I refuse to let my two children
go
to their destruction. . . ." Your brother has
no other sort of connection with the real situation at the
K.’s; he had not gone with you to L--. And now, what have
your recollections to say to this?’

   ‘I know nothing about
myself,’ was her reply, ‘but my brother used to wet his
bed up till his sixth or seventh year; and it used sometimes to
happen to him in the daytime too.’

   I was on the point of remarking
to her how much easier it is to remember things of that kind about
one’s brother than about oneself, when she continued the
train of recollections which had been revived: ‘Yes. I used
to do it too, for some time, but not until my seventh or eighth
year. It must have been serious, because I remember now that the
doctor was called in. It lasted till a short time before my nervous
asthma.’

   ‘And what did the doctor
say to it?’

   ‘He explained it as nervous
weakness; it would soon pass off, he thought; and he prescribed a
tonic.’¹

  
¹
This physician was the only one in whom she
showed any confidence, because this episode showed her that he had
not penetrated her secret. She felt afraid of any other doctor
about whom she had not yet been able to form a judgement, and we
can now see that the motive of her fear was the possibility that he
might guess her secret.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1410

   The interpretation of the dream
now seemed to me to be complete.¹ But Dora brought me an
addendum to the dream on the very next day. She had forgotten to
relate, she said, that each time after waking up she had smelt
smoke. Smoke, of course, fitted in well with fire, but it also
showed that the dream had a special relation to myself; for when
she used to assert that there was nothing concealed behind this or
that, I would often say by way of rejoinder: ‘There can be no
smoke without fire!’ Dora objected, however, to such a purely
personal interpretation, saying that Herr K. and her father were
passionate smokers - as I am too, for the matter of that. She
herself had smoked during her stay by the lake, and Herr K. had
rolled a cigarette for her before he began his unlucky proposal.
She thought, too, that she clearly remembered having noticed the
smell of smoke on the three occasions of the dream’s
occurrence at L--, and not for the first time at its recent
reappearance. As she would give me no further information, it was
left to me to determine how this addendum was to be introduced into
the texture of the dream-thoughts. One thing which I had to go upon
was the fact that the smell of smoke had only come up as an
addendum to the dream, and must therefore have had to overcome a
particularly strong effort on the part of repression. Accordingly
it was probably related to the thoughts which were the most
obscurely presented and the most successfully repressed in the
dream, to the thoughts, that is, concerned with the temptation to
show herself willing to yield to the man. If that were so, the
addendum to the dream could scarcely mean anything else than the
longing for a kiss, which, with a smoker, would necessarily smell
of smoke. But a kiss had passed between Herr K. and Dora some two
years further back, and it would certainly have been repeated more
than once if she had given way to him. So the thoughts of
temptation seemed in this way to have harked back to the earlier
scene, and to have revived the memory of the kiss against whose
seductive influence the little ‘thumb-sucker’ had
defended herself at the time, by the feeling of disgust. Taking
into consideration, finally, the indications which seemed to point
to there having been a transference on to me - since I am a smoker
too - I came to the conclusion that the idea had probably occurred
to her one day during a session that she would like to have a kiss
from me. This would have been the exciting cause which led her to
repeat the warning dream and to form her intention of stopping the
treatment. Everything fits together very satisfactorily upon this
view; but owing to the characteristics of
‘transference’ its validity is not susceptible of
definite proof.

  
¹
The essence of the dream might perhaps be
translated into words such as these: ‘The temptation is so
strong. Dear Father, protect me again as you used to in my
childhood, and prevent my bed from being wetted!’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1411

   I might at this point hesitate
whether I should first consider the light thrown by this dream on
the history of the case, or whether I should rather begin by
dealing with the objection to my theory of dreams which may be
based on it interpretation. I shall take the former course.

   The significance of enuresis in
the early history of neurotics is worth going into thoroughly. For
the sake of clearness I will confine myself to remarking that
Dora’s case of bed-wetting was not the usual one. The
disorder was not simply that the habit had persisted beyond what is
considered the normal period, but, according to her explicit
account, it had begun by disappearing and had then returned at a
relatively late age - after her sixth year. Bed-wetting of this
kind has, to the best of my knowledge, no more likely cause than
masturbation, a habit whose importance in the aetiology of
bed-wetting in general is still insufficiently appreciated. In my
experience, the children concerned have themselves at one time been
very well aware of this connection, and all its psychological
consequences follow from it as though they had never forgotten it.
Now, at the time when Dora reported the dream, we were engaged upon
a line of enquiry which led straight towards an admission that she
had masturbated in childhood. A short while before, she had raised
the question of why it was that precisely she had fallen ill, and,
before I could answer, had put the blame on her father. The
justification for this was forthcoming not out of her unconscious
thoughts but from her conscious knowledge. It turned out, to my
astonishment, that the girl knew what the nature of her
father’s illness had been. After his return from consulting
me she had overheard a conversation in which the name of the
disease had been mentioned. At a still earlier period - at the time
of the detached retina - an oculist who was called in must have
hinted at a luetic aetiology; for the inquisitive and anxious girl
overheard an old aunt of hers saying to her mother: ‘He was
ill before his marriage, you know’, and adding something
which she could not understand, but which she subsequently
connected in her mind with improper subjects.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1412

   Her father, then, had fallen ill
through leading a loose life, and she assumed that he had handed on
his bad health to her by heredity. I was careful not to tell her
that, as I have already mentioned, I too was of opinion that the
offspring of luetics were very specially predisposed to severe
neuropsychoses. The line of thought in which she brought this
accusation against her father was continued in her unconscious
material. For several days on end she identified herself with her
mother by means of slight symptoms and peculiarities of manner,
which gave her an opportunity for some really remarkable
achievements in the direction of intolerable behaviour. She then
allowed it to transpire that she was thinking of a stay she had
made at Franzensbad, which she had visited with her mother - I
forget in what year. Her mother was suffering from abdominal pains
and from a discharge (a catarrh) which necessitated a cure at
Franzensbad. It was Dora’s view - and here again she was
probably right - that this illness was due to her father, who had
thus handed on his venereal disease to her mother. It was quite
natural that in drawing this conclusion she should, like the
majority of laymen, have confused gonorrhoea and syphilis, as well
as what is contagious and what is hereditary. The persistence with
which she held to this identification with her mother almost forced
me to ask her whether she too was suffering from a venereal
disease; and I then learnt that she was afflicted with a catarrh
(leucorrhoea) whose beginning, she said, she could not
remember.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1413

   I then understood that behind the
train of thought in which she brought these open accusations
against her father there lay concealed as usual a
self
-accusation. I met her half-way by assuring her that in
my view the occurrence of leucorrhoea in young girls pointed
primarily to masturbation, and I considered that all the other
causes which were commonly assigned to that complaint were put in
the background by masturbation.¹ I added that she was now on
the way to finding an answer to her own question of why it was that
precisely she had fallen ill - by confessing that she had
masturbated, probably in childhood. Dora denied flatly that she
could remember any such thing. But a few days later she did
something which I could not help regarding as a further step
towards the confession. For on that day she wore at her waist - a
thing she never did on any other occasion before or after - a small
reticule of a shape which had just come into fashion; and, as she
lay on the sofa and talked, she kept playing with it - opening it,
putting a finger into it, shutting it again, and so on. I looked on
for some time, and then explained to her the nature of a
‘symptomatic act’.² I give the name of symptomatic
acts to those acts which people perform, as we say, automatically,
unconsciously, without attending to them, or as if in a moment of
distraction. They are actions to which people would like to deny
any significance, and which, if questioned about them, they would
explain as being indifferent and accidental. Closer observation,
however, will show that these actions, about which consciousness
knows nothing or wishes to know nothing, in fact give expression to
unconscious thoughts and impulses, and are therefore most valuable
and instructive as being manifestations of the unconscious which
have been able to come to the surface. There are two sorts of
conscious attitudes possible towards these symptomatic acts. If we
can ascribe inconspicuous motives to them we recognize their
existence; but if no such pretext can be found for conscious use we
usually fail altogether to notice that we have performed them. Dora
found no difficulty in producing a motive: ‘Why should I not
wear a reticule like this, as it is now the fashion to do?’
But a justification of this kind does not dismiss the possibility
of the action in question having an unconscious origin. Though on
the other hand the existence of such an origin and the meaning
attributed to the act cannot be conclusively established. We must
content ourselves with recording the fact that such a meaning fits
in quite extraordinarily well with the situation as a whole and
with the programme laid down by the unconscious.