Freud - Complete Works (537 page)

   Here, then, is material used for
symbolism in dreams. It is not complete and could be carried deeper
as well as further. But I fancy it will seem to you more than
enough and may even have exasperated you. ‘Do I really live
in the thick of sexual symbols?’ you may ask. ‘Are all
the objects around me, all the clothes I put on, all the things I
pick up, all of them sexual symbols and nothing else?’ There
is really ground enough for raising astonished questions, and, as a
first one, we may enquire how we in fact come to know the meaning
of these dream symbols, upon which the dreamer himself gives us
insufficient information or none at all.

   My reply is that we learn it from
very different sources from fairy tales and myths, from buffoonery
and jokes, from folklore (that is, from knowledge about popular
manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and
colloquial linguistic usage. In all these directions we come upon
the same symbolism, and in some of them we can understand it
without further instruction. If we go into these sources in detail,
we shall find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we cannot
fail to be convinced of our interpretations.

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   According to Scherner, as we have
said, the human body is often represented in dreams by the symbol
of a house. Carrying this representation further, we found that
windows, doors and gates stood for openings in the body and that
façades of houses were either smooth or provided with
balconies and projections to hold on to. But the same symbolism is
found in our linguistic usage - when we greet an acquaintance
familiarly as an ‘
altes haus
’ [‘old
house’], when we speak of giving someone ‘
eins aufs
Dachl
’ [a knock on the head, literally, ‘one
on the roof’], or when we say of someone else that
‘he’s not quite right in the upper storey’. In
anatomy the orifices of the body are in so many words termed
‘
Leibespforten
’ [literally, ‘portals of
the body’].

   It seems surprising at first to
find one’s parents in dreams as an imperial or royal couple.
But it has its parallel in fairy tales. It begins to dawn on us
that the many fairy tales which begin ‘Once upon a time there
were a King and Queen’ only mean to say that there were once
a father and mother. In a family the children are jokingly called
‘princes’ and the eldest ‘crown prince’.
The King himself calls himself the father of his country. We speak
of small children jokingly as ‘
Würmer
’
[‘worms’] and speak sympathetically of a child as
‘
der areme Wurm
’ [‘the poor
worm’].

   Let us go back to
house-symbolism. When in a dream we make use of the projections on
houses for catching hold of, we may be reminded of a common vulgar
expression for well developed breasts: ‘She’s got
something to catch hold of.’ There is another popular
expression in such cases: ‘She’s got plenty of wood in
front of the house’, which seems to confirm our
interpretation of wood as a female, maternal symbol.

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   And, speaking of wood, it is hard
to understand how that material came to represent what is maternal
and female. But here comparative philology may come to our help.
Our German word –‘
Holz
’ seems to come from
the same root as the Greek ‘
ύλη
[hule]’, meaning ‘stuff ’ ‘raw
material’. This seems to be an instance of the not uncommon
event of the general name of a material eventually coming to be
reserved for some particular material. Now there is an island in
the Atlantic named ‘Madeira’. This name was given to it
by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it
was covered all over with woods. For in the Portuguese language
‘
madeira
’ means ‘wood’. You will
notice, however, that ‘
madeira
’ is only a
slightly modified form of the Latin word
‘
materia
’, which once more means
‘material’ in general. But ‘
materia
’
is derived from ‘
mater
’, ‘mother’:
the material out of which anything is made is, as it were, a mother
to it. This ancient view of the thing survives, therefore, in the
symbolic use of wood for ‘woman’ or
‘mother’.

   Birth is regularly expressed in
dreams by some connection with water: one falls into the water or
one comes out of the water - one gives birth or one is born. We
must not forget that this symbol is able to appeal in two ways to
evolutionary truth. Not only are all terrestrial mammals, including
man’s ancestors, descended from aquatic creatures (this is
the more remote of the two facts), but every individual mammal,
every human being, spent the first phase of its existence in water
- namely as an embryo in the amniotic fluid in its mother’s
uterus, and came out of that water when it was born. I do not say
that the dreamer knows this; on the other hand, I maintain that he
need not know it. There is something else that the dreamer probably
knows from having been told it in his childhood; and I even
maintain of that too that his knowledge of it contributed nothing
to the construction of the symbol. He was told in his nursery that
the stork brings the babies. But where does it fetch them from?
From the pond, or from the stream - once again, then, from the
water. One of my patients after he had been given this information
- he was a little Count at the time - disappeared for a whole
afternoon. He was found at last lying by the edge of the castle
pool, with his little face bending over the surface of the water
eagerly peering down to try and see the babies at the bottom.

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   In myths about the birth of
heroes - to which Otto Rank has devoted a comparative study, the
oldest being that of King Sargon of Agade (about 2800 B.C.) - a
predominant part is played by exposure in the water and rescue from
the water. Rank has perceived that these are representations of
birth, analogous to those that are usual in dreams. If one rescues
someone from the water in a dream, one is making one self into his
mother, or simply into
a
mother. In myths a person who
rescues a baby from the water is admitting that she is the
baby’s true mother. There is a well-known comic anecdote
according to which an intelligent Jewish boy was asked who the
mother of Moses was. He replied without hesitation: ‘The
Princess.’ ‘No’, he was told, ‘she only
took him out of the water.’ ‘That’s what
she
says’, he replied, and so proved that he had found
the correct interpretation of the myth.

   Departure in dreams means dying.
So, too, if a child asks where someone is who has died and whom he
misses, it is common nursery usage to reply that he has gone on a
journey. Once more I should like to contradict the belief that the
dream symbol is derived from this evasion. The dramatist is using
the same symbolic connection when he speaks of the after-life as
‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no
traveller
returns’. Even in ordinary life it is common
to speak of ‘the last journey’. Every one acquainted
with ancient rituals is aware of how seriously (in the religion of
Ancient Egypt, for instance) the idea is taken of a journey to the
land of the dead. Many copies have survived of
The Book of the
Dead
, which was supplied to the mummy like a Baedeker to take
with him on the journey. Ever since burial-places have been
separated from dwelling-places the dead person’s last journey
has indeed become a reality.

   It is just as little the case
that genital symbolism is something that is found only in dreams.
Every one of you has probably at one time or another spoken
impolitely of a woman as an ‘
alte Schachtel
’
[‘old box’], perhaps without knowing that you were
using a genital symbol. In the New Testament we find woman referred
to as ‘the weaker vessel’. The Hebrew scriptures,
written in a style that comes close to poetry, are full of sexually
symbolic expressions, which have not always been correctly
understood and whose exegesis (for instance, in the case of the
Song of Solomon) has led to some misunderstandings. In later Hebrew
literature it is very common to find a woman represented by a
house, whose door stands for the sexual orifice. A man complains,
for instance, in a case of lost virginity, that he has ‘found
the door open’. So, too, the symbol of a table for a woman in
these writings. Thus, a woman says of her husband: ‘I laid
the table for him, but he turned it round.’ Lame children are
said to come about through the man’s ‘turning the table
round’. I take these examples from a paper by Dr. L. Levy of
Brünn.

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   The fact that ships, too, in
dreams stand for women is made credible by the etymologists, who
tell us that ‘
Schiff
[ship]’ was originally the
name of an earthenware vessel and is the same word as
‘
Schaff
’ [a dialect word meaning
‘tub’]. That ovens represent women and the uterus is
confirmed by the Greek legend of Periander of Corinth and his wife
Melissa. The tyrant, according to Herodotus, conjured up the shade
of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had murdered out of
jealousy, to obtain some information from her. The dead woman
proved her identity by saying that he (Periander) had
pushed his
bread into a cold oven
’, as a disguise for an event which
no one else could know of. In the periodical
Anthropophyteia
, edited by F. S. Krauss, an invaluable
source of knowledge of sexual anthropology, we learn that in a
particular part of Germany they say of a woman who has given birth
to a child that ‘
her oven has come to pieces
’.
Kindling fire, and everything to do with it, is intimately
interwoven with sexual symbolism. Flame is always a male genital,
and the fireplace, the hearth is its female counterpart.

   If you may have felt surprised at
the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to represent
the female genitals, you can learn from mythology the part played
by
Mother Earth
in the concepts and cults of the peoples of
antiquity and how their view of agriculture was determined by this
symbolism. You will perhaps be inclined to trace the fact that in
dreams a room represents a woman to the common usage in our
language by which ‘
Frau
’ is replaced by
‘
Frauenzimmer
’¹ - the human being is
replaced by the apartment allotted to her. Similarly we speak of
the ‘Sublime Porte’, meaning the Sultan and his
government. So too the title of the Ancient Egyptian ruler,
‘Pharaoh’, means simply ‘Great Courtyard’.
(In the Ancient East the courts between the double gateways of a
city were public meeting-places like the market-places of the
classical world.) This derivation, however, appears to be too
superficial. It seems to me more likely that a room became the
symbol of a woman as being the space which encloses human beings.
We have already found ‘house’ used in a similar sense;
and mythology and poetical language enable us to add
‘city’, ‘citadel’, ‘castle’ and
‘fortress’ as further symbols for ‘woman’.
The question could be easily settled from the dreams of people who
do not speak or understand German. During the last few years I have
mainly treated foreign-speaking patients, and I seem to remember
that in their dreams too ‘
Zimmer
’
[‘room’] meant ‘
Frauenzimmer
’,
though they had no similar usage in their languages. There are
other indications that the symbolic relation can go beyond the
limits of language - which, incidentally was asserted long ago by
an old investigator of dreams, Schubert. However, none of my
dreamers were completely ignorant of German, so the decision must
be left to psycho-analysts who can collect data from unilingual
people in other countries.

  
¹
[Literally ‘woman’s
apartment’. The word is very often used in German as a
slightly derogatory synonym for ‘woman’.]

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   There is scarcely one of the
symbolic representations of the male genitals which does not recur
in joking, vulgar or poetic usage, especially in the ancient
classical dramatists. But here we meet not only the symbols which
appear in dreams, but others besides - for instance tools employed
in various operations, and particularly the plough. Moreover, the
symbolic representation of masculinity leads us to a very extensive
and much disputed region, which, on grounds of economy, we shall
avoid. I should like, however, to devote a few words to one symbol,
which, as it were, falls outside this class - the number 3. Whether
this number owes its sacred character to this symbolic connection
remains undecided. But what seems certain is that a number of
tripartite things that occur in nature - the clover leaf, for
instance - owe their use for coats of arms and emblems to this
symbolic meaning. Similarly, the tripartite lily - the so-called
fleur-de-lis
- and the remarkable heraldic device of two
islands so far apart as Sicily and the Isle of Man - the
triskeles
(three bent legs radiating from a centre) - seem
to be stylized versions of the male genitals. Likenesses of the
male organ were regarded in antiquity as the most powerful
apotropaic
(means of defence) against evil influences, and,
in conformity with this, the lucky charms of our own day can all be
easily recognized as genital or sexual symbols. Let us consider a
collection of such things - as they are worn, for instance, in the
form of small silver hanging trinkets: a four-leaved clover, a pig,
a mushroom, a horse-shoe, a ladder, a chimney-sweep. The
four-leaved clover has taken the place of the three-leaved one
which is really suited to be a symbol. The pig is an ancient
fertility symbol. The mushroom is an undoubted penis-symbol: there
are mushrooms which owe their systematic name (
Phallus
impudicus
) to their unmistakable resemblance to the male organ.
The horseshoe copies the outline of the female genital orifice,
while the chimney-sweep, who carries the ladder, appears in this
company on account of his activities, with which sexual intercourse
is vulgarly compared. (Cf.
Anthropophyteia
.) We have made
the acquaintance of his ladder in dreams as a sexual symbol; here
German linguistic usage comes to our help and shows us how the word
‘
steigen
’ [‘to climb’, or ‘to
mount’] is used in what is
par excellence
a sexual
sense. We say ‘
den Frauen nachsteigen
[‘to
run’ (literally ‘climb’) ‘after
women’], and ‘
ein alter Steiger
’
[‘an old rake’ (literally ‘climber’)]. In
French, in which the word for steps on a staircase is
‘
marches
’, we find a precisely analogous term
‘
un vieux marcheur
’. The fact that in many large
animals climbing or ‘mounting’ on the female is a
necessary preliminary to sexual intercourse probably fits into this
context.