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Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3281

   The remaining phrases in the
manifest dream can be explained now in relation to the masturbation
complex. ‘
He looked bad
’ is indeed an allusion
to another remark of the dentist’s to the effect that it
looks bad if one has lost a tooth in that part of the mouth; but it
relates at the same time to the ‘looking bad’ by which
a young man at puberty betrays, or is afraid he betrays, his
excessive sexual activity. It was not without relief to his own
feelings that in the manifest content the dreamer displaced the
‘looking bad’ from himself on to his father - one of
the kinds of reversal by the dream-work which is familiar to you.
‘
He had been living since then
’ coincides with
the wish to bring back to life as well as with the dentist’s
promise that the tooth would survive. The sentence ‘the
dreamer was doing all he could
to prevent him (his father)
noticing it
’ is very subtly devised to mislead us into
thinking that it should be completed by the words ‘that he
was dead’. The only completion, however, that makes sense
comes once more from the masturbation complex; in that connection
it is self-evident that the young man did all he could to conceal
his sexual life from his father. And finally, remember that we must
always interpret what are called ‘dreams with a dental
stimulus’ as relating to masturbation and the dreaded
punishment for it.

   You can see now how this
incomprehensible dream came about. It was done by producing a
strange and misleading condensation, by disregarding all the
thoughts that were in the centre of the latent thought-process and
by creating ambiguous substitutes for the deepest and
chronologically most remote of those thoughts.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   (4) We have already tried
repeatedly to come to understand the matter-of-fact and commonplace
dreams which have nothing senseless or strange about them but which
raise the question of why one should dream about such indifferent
stuff. I will therefore offer you another example of this kind -
three interconnected dreams dreamt by a young lady in one
night.

   (
a
)
She was walking
across the hall of her house and struck her head against a
low-hanging chandelier and drew blood
.

   No reminiscence, nothing that had
really happened. The information she produced in response to it led
in quite other directions. ‘You know how badly my
hair’s falling out. "My child," my mother said to
me yesterday, "if this goes any further you’ll have a
head as smooth as a bottom."' So here the head stands for
the other end of the body. We can understand the chandelier,
without any help, as a symbol: all objects capable of being
lengthened are symbols of the male organ. It was therefore a matter
of bleeding at the lower end of the body, which had arisen from
contact with a penis. This might still be ambiguous. Her further
associations showed that what was in question concerned a belief
that menstrual bleeding arises from sexual intercourse with a man -
a piece of sexual theory which counts many faithful believers among
immature girls.

   (
b
)
She saw a deep pit
in the vineyard, which she knew had been caused by a tree being
torn out
. She added a remark that the tree
was missing
.
She meant that she had not seen the tree in her dream; but the same
wording served to express another thought which made the symbolic
interpretation quite certain. The dream referred to another piece
of infantile sexual theory - to the belief that girls originally
had the same genitals as boys and that their later shape was the
result of castration (the tearing out of a tree).

   (
c
)
She was standing in
front of the drawer of her writing-table which she was so familiar
with that she could tell at once if anyone had been into it
.
Like all drawers, chests and cases, the writing-table drawer stood
for the female genitals. She knew that indications of sexual
intercourse (and, as she thought, of touching) could be observed on
the genitals and had long feared such a discovery. In all these
three dreams, I think, the accent is to be placed on
knowledge
. She was recalling the period of her sexual
researches when she was a child, of whose outcome she had been
quite proud at the time.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3283

   (5) Here is a little more
symbolism. But this time I must start with a short preamble on the
psychical situation. A gentleman who had passed a night in
intercourse with a lady described her as one of those motherly
characters in whom the wish for a child breaks irresistibly through
in intercourse with a man. The circumstances of this meeting,
however, called for a precaution which prevented the fertilizing
semen from reaching the woman’s uterus. On waking up after
this night the woman reported the following dream:

  
An officer in a red cap was
running after her in the street. She fled from him, and ran up the
stairs with him still after her. Breathless, she reached her flat,
slammed the door behind her and locked it. He stayed outside, and
when she looked through the peep-hole, he was sitting on a bench
outside and weeping
.

   You will no doubt recognize the
pursuit by the officer in the red cap and the breathless climbing
upstairs as representing the sexual act. The fact that it was the
dreamer who locked herself up against her pursuer will serve as an
example of the reversals that are used so commonly in dreams, for
it was the man who had avoided the consummation of the sexual act.
In the same way, her grief was displaced on to the man, for it was
he who wept in the dream - and this was simultaneously a
representation of the emission of semen.

   I feel sure that you have heard
some time or other that it is asserted by psycho-analysis that
every dream has a sexual meaning. Well, you yourselves are in a
position to form a judgement of the incorrectness of this reproach.
You have become acquainted with wishful dreams dealing with the
satisfaction of the most obvious needs - hunger and thirst and the
longing for freedom - with dreams of convenience and of impatience,
and also with purely covetous and egoistic dreams. But at the same
time you should bear in mind, as one of the results of
psycho-analytic research, that greatly distorted dreams give
expression mainly (though, again, not exclusively) to sexual
wishes.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3284

   (6) I have a particular reason
for piling up instances of the use of symbols in dreams. At our
first meeting I lamented the difficulty of providing demonstrations
and so of carrying conviction in giving instruction in
psycho-analysis. And I have no doubt that you have since come to
agree with me. But the different theses of psycho-analysis are so
intimately connected that conviction can easily be carried over
from a single point to a larger part of the whole. It might be said
of psycho-analysis that if anyone holds out a little finger to it
it quickly grasps his whole hand. No one, even, who has accepted
the explanation of parapraxes can logically withhold his belief in
all the rest. A second, equally accessible position is offered by
dream-symbolism. Here is the dream of an uneducated woman whose
husband was a policeman and who had certainly never heard anything
about dream-symbolism or psycho-analysis. Then judge for yourselves
whether its explanation by the help of sexual symbols can be called
arbitrary and forced:

   ‘
. . . Then someone
broke into the house and she was frightened and called out for a
policeman. But he had gone into a church, to which a number of
steps led up, accompanied amicably by two tramps. Behind the church
there was a hill and above it a thick wood. The policeman was
dressed in a helmet, gorget and cloak. He had a brown beard. The
two tramps, who went along peaceably with the policeman, had
sack-like aprons tied round their middles. In front of the church a
path led up to the hill; on both sides of it there grew grass and
brushwood, which became thicker and thicker and, at the top of the
hill, turned into a regular wood
.’

   You will have no trouble in
recognizing the symbols used. The male genitals are represented by
a triad of figures, and the female ones by a landscape with a
chapel, hill and wood. Once again you find steps as a symbol for
the sexual act. What is called a hill in the dream is also called
one in anatomy - the Mons Veneris.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3285

   (7) And here is yet another dream
that must be solved by the insertion of symbols. It is notable and
convincing from the fact that the dreamer himself translated all
the symbols, though he had no sort of previous theoretical
knowledge of dream-interpretation. Such an attitude is quite
unusual and its determinants are not precisely understood:

   ‘
He was going for a walk
with his father in a place which must certainly have been the
Prater, since he saw the Rotunda, with a small annex in front of it
to which a captive balloon was attached, though it looked rather
limp. His father asked him what all this was for; he was surprised
at his asking, but explained it to him. Then they came into a
courtyard which had a large sheet of tin laid out in it. His father
wanted to pull off a large piece of it, but first looked around to
see if anyone was watching. He told him that he need only tell the
foreman and he could take some without any bother. A staircase led
down from this yard into a shaft, whose walls were cushioned in
some soft material, rather like a leather armchair. At the end of
the shaft was a longish platform and then another shaft
started
. . . .’

   The dreamer himself interpreted:
‘The Rotunda was my genitals and the captive balloon in front
of it was my penis, whose limpness I have reason to complain
of.’ Going into greater detail, then, we may translate the
Rotunda as the bottom (habitually regarded by children as part of
the genitals) and the small annex in front of it as the scrotum.
His father asked him in the dream what all this was - that is, what
was the purpose and function of the genitals. It seemed plausible
to reverse this situation and turn the dreamer into the questioner.
Since he had in fact never questioned his father in this way, we
had to look upon the dream-thought as a wish, or take it as a
conditional clause, such as: ‘If I had asked my father for
sexual enlightenment. . . .’ We shall
presently find the continuation of this thought in another part of
the dream.

   The courtyard in which the sheet
of tin was spread out is not to be taken symbolically in the first
instance. It was derived from the business premises of the
dreamer’s father. For reasons of discretion I have
substituted ‘tin’ for another material in which his
father actually dealt: but I have made no other change in the
wording of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s
business and had taken violent objection to the somewhat dubious
practices on which the firm’s earnings in part depended.
Consequently the dream-thought I have just interpreted may have
continued in this way: ‘(If I had asked him), he would have
deceived me just as he deceives his customers.’ As regards
the ‘pulling off’ which served to represent his
father’s dishonesty in business, the dreamer himself produced
a second explanation - namely that it stood for masturbating. Not
only have we long been familiar with this interpretation, but there
was something to confirm it in the fact that the secret nature of
masturbation was represented by its reverse: it might be done
openly. Just as we should expect, the masturbatory activity was
once again displaced on to the dreamer’s father, like the
questioning in the first scene of the dream. He promptly
interpreted the shaft as a vagina, having regard to the soft
cushioning of its walls. I added on my own authority that climbing
down, like climbing up in other cases, described sexual intercourse
in the vagina.

   The dreamer himself gave a
biographical explanation of the further details - that the first
shaft was followed by a longish platform and then by another shaft.
He had practised intercourse for a time but had then given it up on
account of inhibitions, and he now hoped to be able to resume it by
the help of the treatment.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3286

   (8) The two following dreams were
dreamt by a foreigner of a highly polygamous disposition. I repeat
them to you as evidence for my assertion that the dreamer’s
own ego appears in every dream even if it is concealed in the
manifest content. The trunks in the dreams were symbols of
women:

   (
a
)
He was starting on
a journey; his luggage was taken to the station on a carriage, a
number of trunks piled up on it, and among them two big black ones,
like boxes of samples. He said to someone consolingly:
‘
Well, they’re only going with me as far as the
station
.’

   He did in fact travel with a
great deal of luggage; but he also brought a great many stories
about women into the treatment. The two black trunks corresponded
to two dark women who were at the time playing the main part in his
life. One of them had wanted to follow him to Vienna; and on my
advice he had telegraphed to put her off.

   (
b
) A scene at the
customs-house:
Another traveller opened his box and, coolly
smoking a cigarette, said: ‘There’s nothing in
it.’ The customs officer seemed to believe him, but felt
about once more inside it, and found something quite particularly
prohibited. The traveller said in a resigned voice:
‘There’s nothing to be done about it.
’