Freud - Complete Works (252 page)

  
¹
This is a reference to the analysis of a
dream quoted in the book as an example.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1424

    I should like, further, to
draw special attention to the fact that the analysis of this dream
has given us access to certain details of the pathogenically
operative events which had otherwise been inaccessible to memory,
or at all events to reproduction. The recollection of the
bed-wetting in childhood had, as we have seen, already been
repressed. And Dora had never mentioned the details of her
persecution by Herr K.; they had never occurred to her mind.

   I add a few remarks which may
help towards the synthesis of this dream. The dream-work began on
the afternoon of the day after the scene in the wood, after Dora
had noticed that she was no longer able to lock the door of her
room. She then said to herself: ‘I am threatened by a serious
danger here,’ and formed her intention of not stopping on in
the house alone but of going off with her father. This intention
became capable of forming a dream, because it succeeded in finding
a continuation in the unconscious. What corresponded to it there
was her summoning up her infantile love for her father as a
protection against the present temptation. The change which thus
took place in her became fixed and brought her into the attitude
shown by her supervalent train of thought - jealousy of Frau K. on
her father’s account, as though she herself were in love with
him. There was a conflict within her between a temptation to yield
to the man’s proposal and a composite force rebelling against
that feeling. This latter force was made up of motives of
respectability and good sense, of hostile feelings caused by the
governess’s disclosures (jealousy and wounded pride, as we
shall see later), and of a neurotic element, namely, the tendency
to a repudiation of sexuality which was already present in her and
was based on her childhood history. Her love for her father, which
she summoned up to protect her against the temptation, had its
origin in this same childhood history.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1425

   Her intention of flying to her
father, which, as we have seen, reached down into the unconscious,
was transformed by the dream into a situation which presented as
fulfilled the wish that her father should save her from the danger.
In this process it was necessary to put on one side a certain
thought which stood in the way; for it was her father himself who
had brought her into the danger. The hostile feeling against her
father (her desire for revenge), which was here suppressed, was, as
we shall discover, one of the motive forces of the second
dream.

   According to the necessary
conditions of dream-formation the imagined situation must be chosen
so as to reproduce a situation in infancy. A special triumph is
achieved if a recent situation, perhaps even the very situation
which is the exciting cause of the dream, can be transformed into
an infantile one. This has actually been achieved in the present
case, by a purely chance disposition of the material. Just as Herr
K. had stood beside her sofa and woken her up, so her father had
often done in her childhood. The whole trend of her thoughts could
be most aptly symbolized by her substitution of her father for Herr
K. in that situation.

   But the reason for which her
father used to wake her up long ago had been to prevent her from
making her bed wet.

   This ‘wet’ had a
decisive influence on the further content of the dream; though it
was represented in it only by a distant allusion and by its
opposite.

   The opposite of ‘wet’
and ‘water’ can easily be ‘fire’ and
‘burning’. The chance that, when they arrived at the
place, her father had expressed his anxiety at the risk of fire,
helped to decide that the danger from which her father was to
rescue her should be a fire. The situation chosen for the
dream-picture was based upon this chance, and upon the opposition
to ‘wet’: ‘There was a fire. Her father was
standing beside her bed to wake her.’ Her father’s
chance utterance would, no doubt, not have obtained such an
important position in the dream if it had not fitted in so
excellently with the dominating current of feeling, which was
determined to regard him at any cost as a protector and saviour.
‘He foresaw the danger from the very moment of our
arrival!  He was in the right!’ (In actual fact, it was
he who had brought the girl into danger.)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1426

   In consequence of certain
connections which can easily be made from it, the word
‘wet’ served in the dream-thoughts as a nodal point
between several groups of ideas. ‘Wet’ was connected
not only with the bed-wetting, but also with the group of ideas
relating to sexual temptation which lay suppressed behind the
content of the dream. Dora knew that there was a kind of getting
wet involved in sexual intercourse, and that during the act of
copulation the man presented the woman with something liquid
in
the form of drops
. She also knew that the danger lay precisely
in that, and that it was her business to protect her genitals from
being moistened.

   ‘Wet’ and
‘drops’ at the same time opened the way to the other
group of associations - the group relating to the disgusting
catarrh, which in her later years had no doubt possessed the same
mortifying significance for her as the bed-wetting had in her
childhood. ‘Wet’ in this connection had the same
meaning as ‘dirtied’. Her genitals, which ought to have
been kept clean, had been dirtied already by the catarrh - and this
applied to her mother no less than to herself (
p. 1412
). She seemed to understand that
her mother’s mania for cleanliness was a reaction against
this dirtying.

   The two groups of ideas met in
this one thought: ‘Mother got both things from father: the
sexual wetness and the dirtying discharge.’ Dora’s
jealousy of her mother was inseparable from the group of thoughts
relating to her infantile love for her father which she summoned up
for her protection. But this material was not yet capable of
representation. If, however, a recollection could be found which
was equally closely connected with both the groups related to the
word ‘wet’, but which avoided any offensiveness, then
such a recollection would be able to take over the representation
in the dream of the material in question.

   A recollection of this sort was
furnished by the episode of the ‘drops’ - the jewellery
[‘
Schmuck
’] that Dora’s mother wanted to
have. In appearance the connection between this reminiscence and
the two groups of thoughts relating to sexual wetness and to being
dirtied was a purely external and superficial one, of a verbal
character. For ‘drops’ was used ambiguously as a
‘switch-word’, while ‘jewellery’
[‘
Schmuck
’] was taken as an equivalent to
‘clean’, and thus as a rather forced contrary of
‘dirtied’.¹ But in reality the most substantial
connections can be shown to have existed between the things denoted
themselves. The recollection originated from the material connected
with Dora’s jealousy of her mother, which, though its roots
were infantile, had persisted far beyond that period. By means of
these two verbal bridges it was possible to transfer on to the
single reminiscence of the ‘jewel-drops’ the whole of
the significance attaching to the ideas of her parents’
sexual intercourse, and of her mother’s gonorrhoea and
tormenting passion for cleanliness.

  
¹
[The German word
‘
Schmuck
’ has a much wider meaning than the
English ‘jewellery’, though that is the sense in which
it occurs in the compound
‘
Schmuckkästchen
’,
‘jewel-case’. As a substantive,
‘
Schmuck
’ denotes ‘finery’ of all
kinds, not only personal adornments, but embellishments of objects
and decorations in general. In an adjectival sense, it can mean
‘smart’, ‘ tidy’, or
‘neat’.]

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1427

   But a still further displacement
had to be effected before this material appeared in the dream.
Though ‘drops’ is nearer to the original
‘wet’, it was the more distant ‘jewellery’
that found a place in the dream. When, therefore, this element had
been inserted into the dream-situation which had already been
established, the account might have run: ‘Mother wanted to
stop and save her jewellery.’ But a subsequent influence now
made itself felt, and led to the further alteration of
‘jewellery’ into ‘jewel-case’. This
influence came from elements in the underlying group relating to
the temptation offered by Herr K. He had never given her jewellery,
but he had given her a ‘case’ for it, which meant for
her all the marks of preference and all the tenderness for which
she felt she ought now to have been grateful. And the composite
word thus formed, ‘jewel-case’, had beyond this a
special claim to be used as a representative element in the dream.
Is not ‘jewel-case’
[‘
Schmuckkästen
’] a term commonly used to
describe female genitals that are immaculate and intact? And is it
not, on the other hand, an innocent word? Is it not, in short,
admirably calculated both to betray and to conceal the sexual
thoughts that lie behind the dream?

   ‘Mother’s
jewel-case’ was therefore introduced in two places in the
dream; and this element replaced all mention of Dora’s
infantile jealousy, of the drops (that is, of the sexual wetness),
of being dirtied by the discharge, and, on the other hand, of her
present thoughts connected with the temptation - the thoughts which
were urging her to reciprocate the man’s love, and which
depicted the sexual situation (alike desirable and menacing) that
lay before her. The element of ‘jewel-case’ was more
than any other a product of condensation and displacement, and a
compromise between contrary mental currents. The multiplicity of
its origin - both from infantile and contemporary sources - is no
doubt pointed to by its double appearance in the content of the
dream.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1428

   The dream was a reaction to a
fresh experience of an exciting nature; and this experience must
inevitably have revived the memory of the only previous experience
which was at all analogous to it. The latter was the scene of the
kiss in Herr K.’s place of business, when she had been seized
with disgust. But this same scene was associatively accessible from
other directions too, namely, from the group of thoughts relating
to the catarrh (p. 83), and from her present temptation. The scene
therefore brought to the dream a contribution of its own, which had
to be made to fit in with the dream situation that had already been
laid down: ‘There was a fire’ . . . no doubt the kiss
smelt of smoke; so she smelt smoke in the dream, and the smell
persisted till after she was awake.

   By inadvertence, I unfortunately
left a gap in the analysis of the dream. Dora’s father was
made to say, ‘I refuse to let my two children go to their
destruction . . .’ (‘as a result of
masturbation’ should no doubt be added from the
dream-thoughts). Such speeches in dreams are regularly constructed
out of pieces of actual speeches which have either been made or
heard. I ought to have made enquiries as to the actual source of
this speech. The results of my enquiry would no doubt have shown
that the structure of the dream was still more complicated, but
would at the same time have made it easier to penetrate.

   Are we to suppose that when this
dream occurred at L-- it had precisely the same content as when it
recurred during the treatment? It does not seem necessary to do so.
Experience shows that people often assert that they have had the
same dream, when as a matter of fact the separate appearances of
the recurrent dream have differed from one another in numerous
details and in other respects that were of no small importance.
Thus one of my patients told me that she had had her favourite
dream again the night before, and that it always recurred in the
same form: she had dreamed of swimming in the blue sea, of joyfully
cleaving her way through the waves, and so on. On closer
investigation it turned out that upon a common background now one
detail and now another was brought out; on one occasion, even, she
was swimming in a frozen sea and was surrounded by icebergs. This
patient had other dreams, which turned out to be closely connected
with the recurrent one, though even she made no attempt to claim
that they were identical with it. Once, for instance, she was
looking at a view of Heligoland (based on a photograph, but
life-size) which showed the upper and lower parts of the island
simultaneously; on the sea was a ship, in which were two people
whom she had known in her youth, and so on.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1429

   What is certain is that in
Dora’s case the dream which occurred during the treatment had
gained a new significance connected with the present time, though
perhaps its manifest content had not changed. The dream-thoughts
behind it included a reference to my treatment, and it corresponded
to a renewal of the old intention of withdrawing from a danger. If
her memory was not deceiving her when she declared that even at L--
she had noticed the smoke after she woke up, it must be
acknowledged that she had brought my proverb, ‘There can be
no smoke without fire’, very ingeniously into the completed
form of the dream, in which it seemed to serve as an
overdetermination of the last element. It was undeniably a mere
matter of chance that the most recent exciting cause - her
mother’s locking the dining-room door so that her brother was
shut into his bedroom - had provided a connection with her
persecution by Herr K. at L--, where her decision had been made
when she found she could not lock her bedroom door. It is possible
that her brother did not appear in the dream on the earlier
occasions, so that the words ‘my two children’ did not
form part of its content until after the occurrence of its latest
exciting cause.