Freud - Complete Works (585 page)

   ‘I shall discuss on another
occasion the explanation of these animal phobias and the
significance attaching to them. I will only remark in anticipation
that this explanation is in complete harmony with the principal
characteristic shown by the neurosis from which the present dreamer
suffered later in his life. His fear of his father was the
strongest motive for his falling ill, and his ambivalent attitude
towards every father-surrogate was the dominating feature of his
life as well as of his behaviour during the treatment.

   ‘If in my patient’s
case the wolf was merely a first father surrogate, the question
arises whether the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf
that ate up the little goats and of "Little Red
Riding-Hood" may not simply be infantile fear of the
father.¹ Moreover, my patient’s father had the
characteristic, shown by so many people in relation to their
children, of indulging in "affectionate abuse"; and it is
possible that during the patient’s earlier years his father
(though he grew severe later on) may more than once, as he caressed
the little boy or played with him, have threatened in fun to
"gobble him up". One of my patients told me that her two
children could never get to be fond of their grandfather, because
in the course of his affectionate romping with them he used to
frighten them by saying he would cut open their tummies.’

  
¹
‘Compare the similarity between these
two fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out
by Rank (1912).’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3524

   Leaving on one side everything in
this quotation that anticipates the dream’s remoter
implications, let us return to its immediate interpretation. I may
remark that this interpretation was a task that dragged on over
several years. The patient related the dream at a very early stage
of the analysis and very soon came to share my conviction that the
causes of his infantile neurosis lay concealed behind it. In the
course of the treatment we often came back to the dream, but it was
only during the last months of the analysis that it became possible
to understand it completely, and only then thanks to spontaneous
work on the patient’s part. He had always emphasized the fact
that two factors in the dream had made the greatest impression on
him: first, the perfect stillness and immobility of the wolves, and
secondly, the strained attention with which they all looked at him.
The lasting sense of reality, too, which the dream left behind it,
seemed to him to deserve notice.

   Let us take this last remark as a
starting-point. We know from our experience in interpreting dreams
that this sense of reality carries a particular significance along
with it. It assures us that some part of the latent material of the
dream is claiming in the dreamer’s memory to possess the
quality of reality, that is, that the dream relates to an
occurrence that really took place and was not merely imagined. It
can naturally only be a question of the reality of something
unknown; for instance, the conviction that his grandfather really
told him the story of the tailor and the wolf, or that the stories
of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ and of ‘The Seven
Little Goats’ were really read aloud to him, would not be of
a nature to be replaced by this sense of reality that outlasted the
dream. The dream seemed to point to an occurrence the reality of
which was very strongly emphasized as being in marked contrast to
the unreality of the fairy tales.

   If it was to be assumed that
behind the content of the dream there lay some such unknown scene -
one, that is, which had already been forgotten at the time of the
dream - then it must have taken place very early. The dreamer, it
will be recalled, said: ‘I was three, four, or at most five
years old at the time I had the dream.’ And we can add:
‘And I was reminded by the dream of something that must have
belonged to an even earlier period.’

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3525

   The parts of the manifest content
of the dream which were emphasized by the dreamer, the factors of
attentive looking and of motionlessness, must lead to the content
of this scene. We must naturally expect to find that this material
reproduces the unknown material of the scene in some distorted
form, perhaps even distorted into its opposite.

   There were several conclusions,
too, to be drawn from the raw material which had been produced by
the patient’s first analysis of the dream, and these had to
be fitted into the collocation of which we were in search. Behind
the mention of the sheep-breeding, evidence was to be expected of
his sexual researches, his interest in which he was able to gratify
during his visits with his father; but there must also have been
allusions to a fear of death, since the greater part of the sheep
had died of the epidemic. The most obtrusive thing in the dream,
the wolves on the tree, led straight to his grandfather’s
story; and what was fascinating about this story and capable of
provoking the dream can scarcely have been anything but its
connection with the theme of castration.

   We also concluded from the first
incomplete analysis of the dream that the wolf may have been a
father-surrogate; so that, in that case, this first anxiety-dream
would have brought to light the fear of his father which from that
time forward was to dominate his life. This conclusion, indeed, was
in itself not yet binding. But if we put together as the result of
the provisional analysis what can be derived from the material
produced by the dreamer, we then find before us for reconstruction
some such fragments as these:

  
A real occurrence - dating
from a very early period - looking - immobility - sexual problems -
castration - his father - something terrible
.

   One day the patient began to
continue with the interpretation of the dream. He thought that the
part of the dream which said that ‘suddenly the window opened
of its own accord’ was not completely explained by its
connection with the window at which the tailor was sitting and
through which the wolf came into the room. ‘It must mean:
"My eyes suddenly opened." I was asleep, therefore, and
suddenly woke up, and as I woke I saw something: the tree with the
wolves.’ No objection could be made to this; but the point
could be developed further. He had woken up and had seen something.
The attentive looking, which in the dream was ascribed to the
wolves, should rather be shifted on to him. At a decisive point,
therefore, a transposition has taken place; and moreover this is
indicated by another transposition in the manifest content of the
dream. For the fact that the wolves were sitting on the tree was
also a transposition, since in his grandfather’s story they
were underneath, and were unable to climb on to the tree.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3526

   What, then, if the other factor
emphasized by the dreamer were also distorted by means of a
transposition or reversal? In that case instead of immobility (the
wolves sat there motionless; they looked at him, but did not move)
the meaning would have to be: the most violent motion. That is to
say, he suddenly woke up, and saw in front of him a scene of
violent movement at which he looked with strained attention. In the
one case the distortion would consist in an interchange of subject
and object, of activity and passivity: being looked at instead of
looking. In the other case it would consist in a transformation
into the opposite; rest instead of motion.

   On another occasion an
association which suddenly occurred to him carried us another step
forward in our understanding of the dream: ‘The tree was a
Christmas-tree.’ He now knew that he had dreamt the dream
shortly before Christmas and in expectation of it. Since Christmas
Day was also his birthday, it now became possible to establish with
certainty the date of the dream and of the change in him which
proceeded from it. It was immediately before his fourth birthday.
He had gone to sleep, then, in tense expectation of the day which
ought to bring him a double quantity of presents. We know that in
such circumstances a child may easily anticipate the fulfilment of
his wishes. So it was already Christmas in his dream; the content
of the dream showed him his Christmas box, the presents which were
to be his were hanging on the tree. But instead of presents they
had turned into - wolves, and the dream ended by his being overcome
by fear of being eaten by the wolf (probably his father), and by
his flying for refuge to his nurse. Our knowledge of his sexual
development before the dream makes it possible for us to fill in
the gaps in the dream and to explain the transformation of his
satisfaction into anxiety. Of the wishes concerned in the formation
of the dream the most powerful must have been the wish for the
sexual satisfaction which he was at that time longing to obtain
from his father. The strength of this wish made it possible to
revive a long-forgotten trace in his memory of a scene which was
able to show him what sexual satisfaction from his father was like;
and the result was terror, horror of the fulfilment of the wish,
the repression of the impulse which had manifested itself by means
of the wish, and consequently a flight from his father to his less
dangerous nurse.

   The importance of this date of
Christmas Day had been preserved in his supposed recollection of
having had his first fit of rage because he was dissatisfied with
his Christmas presents. The recollection combined elements of truth
and of falsehood. It could not be entirely right, since according
to the repeated declarations of his parents his naughtiness had
already begun on their return in the autumn and it was not a fact
that they had not come on till Christmas. But he had preserved the
essential connection between his unsatisfied love, his rage, and
Christmas.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3527

   But what picture can the nightly
workings of his sexual desire have conjured up that could frighten
him away so violently from the fulfilment for which he longed? The
material of the analysis shows that there is one condition which
this picture must satisfy. It must have been calculated to create a
conviction of the reality of the existence of castration. Fear of
castration could then become the motive power for the
transformation of the affect.

   I have now reached the point at
which I must abandon the support I have hitherto had from the
course of the analysis. I am afraid it will also be the point at
which the reader’s belief will abandon me.

   What sprang into activity that
night out of the chaos of the dreamer’s unconscious
memory-traces was the picture of copulation between his parents,
copulation in circumstances which were not entirely usual and were
especially favourable for observation. It gradually became possible
to find satisfactory answers to all the questions that arose in
connection with this scene; for in the course of the treatment the
first dream returned in innumerable variations and new editions, in
connection with which the analysis produced the information that
was required. Thus in the first place the child’s age at the
date of the observation was established as being about one and a
half years.¹ He was suffering at the time from malaria, an
attack of which used to come on every day at a particular
hour.² From his tenth year onwards he was from time to time
subject to moods of depression, which used to come on in the
afternoon and reached their height at about five o’clock.
This symptom still existed at the time of the analytic treatment.
The recurring fits of depression took the place of the earlier
attacks of fever or languor; five o’clock was either the time
of the highest fever or of the observation of the intercourse,
unless the two times coincided.³ Probably for the very reason
of this illness, he was in his parents’ bedroom. The illness,
the occurrence of which is also corroborated by direct tradition,
makes it reasonable to refer the event to the summer, and, since
the child was born on Christmas Day, to assume that his age was
n
+ 1½ years. He had been sleeping in his cot, then,
in his parents’ bedroom, and woke up, perhaps because of his
rising fever, in the afternoon, possibly at five o’clock, the
hour which was later marked out by depression. It harmonizes with
our assumption that it was a hot summer’s day, if we suppose
that his parents had retired, half undressed,
⁴
for an afternoon
siesta
.
When he woke up, he witnessed a coitus
a tergo
[from
behind], three times repeated;
⁵
he was able to see his
mother’s genitals as well as his father’s organ; and he
understood the process as well as its significance.
⁶
Lastly he interrupted his
parents’ intercourse in a manner which will be discussed
later.

  
¹
The age of six months came under
consideration as a far less probable, and indeed scarcely tenable,
alternative.

  
²
Compare the subsequent metamorphoses of
this factor during the obsessional neurosis. In the patient’s
dreams during the treatment it was replaced by a violent wind.
[
Added
1924:] ‘Ayia’ equals
‘air’.

  
³
We may remark in this connection that the
patient drew only
five
wolves in his illustration to the
dream, although the text mentioned six or seven.

  
In
white underclothes: the
white
wolves.