Freud - Complete Works (542 page)

   He himself was the traveller: I
was the customs officer. As a rule he was very straightforward in
making admissions; but he had intended to keep silent to me about a
new connection he had formed with a lady, because he rightly
supposed that she was not unknown to me. He displaced the
distressing situation of being detected on to a stranger, so that
he himself did not seem to appear in the dream.

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   (9) Here is an example of a
symbol which I have not yet mentioned:

  
He met his sister in the
company of two women friends who were themselves sisters. He shook
hands with both of them but not with his sister
.

   No connection with any real
occurrence. But his thoughts took him back, rather, to a period in
which his observations led him to reflect on how late girls’
breasts developed. So the two sisters were breasts; he would have
liked to take hold of them with his hand - if only it were not his
sister.

   (10) Here is an example of
death-symbolism in a dream:

  
He was walking with two people
whose names he knew but had forgotten when he woke up, across a
very high, steep iron bridge. Suddenly they had both gone, and he
saw a ghost-like man in a cap and linen clothes. He asked him if he
was the telegraph-boy. No. Was he the driver? No. Then he walked on
further
. . . . While he was still dreaming he
felt acute anxiety, and after he had woken up he continued the
dream with a phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and he
fell into the abyss.

   People of whom one insists that
they are unknown or that one has forgotten their names are mostly
people very near to one. The dreamer had a brother and sister; and
if he had wished that these two were dead, it would be only fair
that in return
he
should be victimized by a fear of death.
Of the telegraph boy he remarked that such people always bring bad
news. By his uniform he might equally have been the lamp-lighter;
but he puts out the lamps as well, just as the Spirit of Death puts
out the torch. The driver made him think of Uhland’s poem
about King Charles’s Voyage, and reminded him of a dangerous
sea-voyage with two companions during which he had played the part
of the King in the poem. The iron bridge made him think of a recent
accident and of the foolish saying: ‘Life is a suspension
bridge’.

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   (11) The following dream may
count as another representation of death:

  
An unknown gentleman left a
black-edged visiting-card on him
.

   (12) You will be interested in
the following dream in a number of ways, though a neurotic state in
the dreamer was one of its preconditions:

  
He was travelling in a
railway-train. The train came to a stop in open country. He thought
there was going to be an accident and that he must think of getting
away. He went through all the coaches in the train and killed
everyone he met - the guard, the engine-driver, and so on.

   In connection with this he
thought of a story told him by a friend. A lunatic was being
conveyed in a compartment on an Italian line, but through
carelessness a traveller was allowed in with him. The madman killed
the other traveller. Thus he was identifying himself with the
madman, and based his right to do so on an obsession by which he
was tormented from time to time that he must ‘get rid of all
accessory witnesses’. But then he himself found a better
reason, and this led to the precipitating cause of the dream. At
the theatre the night before he had once more seen the girl whom he
had wanted to marry but had withdrawn from because she had given
him ground for being jealous. In view of the intensity reached by
his jealousy he would, he thought, really be mad to want to marry
her. This meant that he regarded her as so untrustworthy that, in
his jealousy, he would have to kill everyone who came his way. We
have already come across walking through a series of rooms (here,
railway coaches) as a symbol of marriage (a reversal of
‘monogamy’).

   In connection with the train
coming to a stop in open country and his being afraid of an
accident, he said that once when he was on a railway journey there
had been a sudden stop of this kind when they were not in a
station. A young lady who was travelling with him had said that
there might be a collision and that the safest thing to do was to
lift one’s legs up high. But this ‘lifting the legs
high’ had also played a part in the many walks and excursions
in the country which he had taken with the other girl in the happy
early days of their love. This was a fresh argument for thinking he
would be mad to marry her now. But my knowledge of the situation
made me feel certain that he nevertheless wished he were mad enough
to do it.

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LECTURE XIII

THE
ARCHAIC FEATURES AND INFANTILISM OF DREAMS

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - Let us start out once more from the conclusion
we arrived at that the dream-work, under the influence of the
dream-censorship, transposes the latent dream-thoughts into a
different mode of expression. The latent thoughts do not differ
from our familiar conscious thoughts of waking life. The new mode
of expression is incomprehensible to us owing to many of its
features. We have said that it harks back to states of our
intellectual development which have long since been superseded - to
picture-language, to symbolic connections, to conditions, perhaps,
which existed before our thought-language had developed. We have on
that account described the mode of expression of the dream-work as
archaic
or
regressive
.

   You may conclude from this that
if we study the dream-work further we must succeed in gaining
valuable light on the little known beginnings of our intellectual
development. I hope it will be so; but this work has not so far
been started upon. The prehistory into which the dream-work leads
us back is of two kinds - on the one hand, into the
individual’s prehistory, his childhood, and on the other, in
so far as each individual some how recapitulates in an abbreviated
form the entire development of the human race, into phylogenetic
prehistory too. Shall we succeed in distinguishing which portion of
the latent mental processes is derived from the individual
prehistoric period and which portion from the phylogenetic one? It
is not, I believe, impossible that we shall. It seems to me, for
instance, that symbolic connections, which the individual has never
acquired by learning, may justly claim to be regarded as a
phylogenetic heritage.

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   This, however, is not the only
archaic characteristic of dreams. You are all familiar, of course,
from your own experience, with the remarkable amnesia of childhood.
I mean the fact that the earliest years of life, up to the age of
five, six or eight, have not left behind them traces in our memory
like later experiences. Here and there, it is true, we come upon
people who can boast of a continuous memory from the first
beginnings to the present day; but the other alternative, of gaps
in the memory, is by far the more frequent. There has not, in my
opinion, been enough astonishment over this fact. By the time a
child is two he can speak well, and soon shows that he is at home
in complicated mental situations; and he makes remarks which, if
they are reported to him many years later, he himself will have
forgotten. Moreover, the memory is more efficient at an early age,
since it is less overburdened than it is later. Nor is there any
reason for regarding the function of memory as a particularly high
or difficult mental activity; on the contrary, we can find a good
memory in people of very low intellectual standing.

   A second remarkable fact to which
I must draw your attention, and which comes on top of the first
one, is that out of the void of memories that covers the earliest
years of childhood there stand out a few well-preserved
recollections, mostly perceived in plastic form, which cannot
justify their survival. Our memory deals with the material of the
impressions which impinge on us in later life by making a selection
among them. It retains what is of any importance and drops what is
unimportant. But this is not true of the childhood memories that
have been retained. They do not necessarily correspond to the
important experiences of childhood years, nor even to those which
must have seemed important from the child’s point of view.
They are often so commonplace and insignificant that we can only
ask ourselves in astonishment why this particular detail has
escaped oblivion. I attempted long ago, with the help of analysis,
to attack the enigma of childhood amnesia and of the residual
memories which interrupt it, and I arrived at the conclusion that
even in the case of children it is true in spite of everything that
only what is important remains in the memory. But through the
processes, already familiar to you, of condensation and more
especially of displacement, what is important is replaced in memory
by something else which appears unimportant. For this reason I have
called these childhood memories ‘screen memories’, and
with a thorough analysis everything that has been forgotten can be
extracted from them.

   In psycho-analytic treatments we
are invariably faced by the task of filling up these gaps in the
memory of childhood; and in so far as the treatment is to any
extent successful - that is to say, extremely frequently - we also
succeed in bringing to light the content of these forgotten years
of childhood. Those impressions had never been really forgotten,
they were only inaccessible, latent, and had formed part of the
unconscious. But it can come about that they emerge from the
unconscious spontaneously, and this happens in connection with
dreams. It appears that dream-life knows how to find access to
these latent, infantile experiences. Excellent examples of this
have been reported in the literature and I myself have been able to
provide a contribution of the kind. I once dreamt in a certain
connection of a person who must have done me a service and whom I
saw clearly be fore me. He was a one-eyed man of small stature,
stout, and with his head sunk deep in his shoulders. I concluded
from the context that he was a doctor. Luckily I was able to
enquire from my mother, who was still alive, what the doctor at my
birth-place (which I had left when I was three) had looked like;
and I learnt from her that he was one-eyed, short, stout and with
his head sunk deep in his shoulders; and I also learnt what the
accident was for which he had come to my help and which I myself
had forgotten. This fact of dreams having at their disposal the
forgotten material of the first years of childhood is thus a
further archaic feature.

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   This same piece of information
can be further applied to another of the riddles we have come up
against. You recall the amazement which was caused by our discovery
that what instigates dreams are actively evil and extravagantly
sexual wishes, which have made the censorship and distortion of
dreams necessary. When we have interpreted a dream of this sort to
the dreamer and if, to take the most favourable case, he does not
actually attack the interpretation, he nevertheless regularly
raises the question of where these wishes come from, since they
feel alien to him and their opposite is what he is conscious of. We
need have no hesitation in pointing out their origin. These evil
wishful impulses arise from the past, and often from a past that is
not very remote. It can be shown that there was a time when they
were familiar and conscious, even if they are no longer so to-day.
A woman, whose dream meant that she would like to see her only
daughter, now seventeen years old, dead before her eyes, found
under our guidance that she had indeed at one time harboured this
death wish. The child was the fruit of an unhappy marriage which
was soon dissolved. Once, while she still bore her daughter in her
womb, in a fit of rage after a violent scene with her husband she
had beaten with her fists on her body in order to kill the child
inside it. How many mothers, who love their children tenderly,
perhaps over-tenderly, to-day, conceived them unwillingly and
wished at that time that the living thing within them might not
develop further! They may even have expressed that wish in various,
fortunately harmless, actions. Thus their death-wish against
someone they love, which is later so mysterious, originates from
the earliest days of their relationship to that person.

   In the same way, a father had a
dream which justified the interpretation that he wished for the
death of his favourite eldest child. He too was led to remember
that there had been a time when this wish was not strange to him.
When the child was still an infant in arms, the father,
discontented with his choice of a wife, often thought that if the
little creature, who meant nothing to him, were to die, he would be
free once more and would make better use of his freedom. The same
origin can be shown in the case of a great number of similar
impulses of hatred; they are recollections of something belonging
to the past, which was once conscious and played its part in mental
life. You will be inclined to conclude from this that such wishes
and such dreams ought not to arise in cases where transformations
of this kind in one’s relation to someone never occurred,
where the relation was of the same kind from the first. I am
prepared to admit this; but I must remind you that what you must
take into consideration is not the
wording
of the dream but
its sense after it has been interpreted. It is possible that a
manifest dream of the death of someone loved has merely assumed a
horrifying mask and may mean something quite different, or that the
loved person is intended as a misleading substitute for someone
else.