Freud - Complete Works (586 page)

  
⁵
Why
three times? He suddenly one day produced the statement that I had
discovered this detail by interpretation. This was not the case. It
was a spontaneous association, exempt from further criticism; in
his usual way he passed it off on to me, and by this projection
tried to make it seem more trustworthy.

  
⁶
I
mean that he understood it at the time of the dream where he was
four years old, not at the time of the observation. He received the
impressions when he was one and a half; his understanding of them
was deferred, but became possible at the time of the dream owing to
his development, his sexual excitations, and his sexual
researches.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3528

   There is at bottom nothing
extraordinary, nothing to give the impression of being the product
of an extravagant imagination, in the fact that a young couple who
had only been married a few years should have ended a
siesta
on a hot summer’s afternoon with a love-scene, and should
have disregarded the presence of their little boy of one and a
half, asleep in his cot. On the contrary, such an event would, I
think, be something entirely commonplace and
banal
; and even
the position in which we have inferred that the coitus took place
cannot in the least alter this judgement - especially as the
evidence does not require that the intercourse should have been
performed from behind each time. A single time would have been
enough to give the spectator an opportunity for making observations
which would have been rendered difficult or impossible by any other
attitude of the lovers. The content of the scene cannot therefore
in itself be an argument against its credibility. Doubts as to its
probability will turn upon three other points: whether a child at
the tender age of one and a half could be in a position to take in
the perceptions of such a complicated process and to preserve them
so accurately in his unconscious; secondly, whether it is possible
at the age of four for a deferred revision of the impressions so
received to penetrate the understanding; and finally, whether any
procedure could succeed in bringing into consciousness coherently
and convincingly the details of a scene of this kind which had been
experienced and understood in such circumstances.¹

  
¹
The first of these difficulties cannot be
reduced by assuming that the child at the time of his observation
was after all probably a year older, that is to say
two
and
a half, an age at which he may perhaps have been perfectly capable
of talking. All the minor details of my patient’s case almost
excluded the possibility of shifting the date in this way.
Moreover, the fact should be taken into account that these scenes
of observing parental intercourse are by no means rarely brought to
light in analysis. The condition of their occurrence, however, is
precisely that it should be in the earliest period of childhood.
The older the child is, the more carefully, with parents above a
certain social level, will the child be deprived of the opportunity
for this kind of observation.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3529

   Later on I shall carefully
examine these and other doubts; but I can assure the reader that I
am no less critically inclined than he towards an acceptance of
this observation of the child’s, and I will only ask him to
join me in adopting a
provisional
belief in the reality of
the scene. We will first proceed with the study of the relations
between this ‘primal scene’ and the patient’s
dream, his symptoms, and the history of his life; and we will trace
separately the effects that followed from the essential content of
the scene and from one of its visual impressions.

   By the latter I mean the postures
which he saw his parents adopt - the man upright, and the woman
bent down like an animal. We have already heard that during his
anxiety period his sister used to terrify him with a picture from
the fairy-book, in which the wolf was shown standing upright, with
one foot forward, with its claws stretched out and its ears
pricked. He devoted himself with tireless perseverance during the
treatment to the task of hunting in the second-hand book shops till
he had found the illustrated fairy-book of his childhood, and had
recognized his bogy in an illustration to the story of ‘The
Wolf and the Seven Little Goats’. He thought that the posture
of the wolf in this picture might have reminded him of that of his
father during the constructed primal scene. At all events the
picture became the point of departure for further manifestations of
anxiety. Once when he was in his seventh or eighth year he was
informed that next day a new tutor was coming for him. That night
he dreamt of this tutor in the shape of a lion that came towards
his bed roaring loudly and in the posture of the wolf in the
picture; and once again he awoke in a state of anxiety. The wolf
phobia had been overcome by that time, so he was free to choose
himself a new anxiety-animal, and in this late dream he was
recognizing the tutor as a father-surrogate. In the later years of
his childhood each of his tutors and masters played the part of his
father, and was endowed with his father’s influence both for
good and for evil.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3530

   While he was at his secondary
school the Fates provided him with a remarkable opportunity of
reviving his wolf phobia, and of using the relation which lay
behind it as an occasion for severe inhibitions. The master who
taught his form Latin was called Wolf. From the very first he felt
cowed by him, and he was once taken severely to task by him for
having made a stupid mistake in a piece of Latin translation. From
that time on he could not get free from a paralysing fear of this
master, and it was soon extended to other masters besides. But the
occasion on which he made his blunder in the translation was also
to the purpose. He had to translate the Latin word
‘
filius
’, and he did it with the French word
‘
fils
’ instead of with the corresponding word
from his own language. The wolf, in fact, was still his
father.¹

   The first ‘transitory
symptom’² which the patient produced during the
treatment went back once more to the wolf phobia and to the fairy
tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’. In the room in which
the first sessions were held there was a large grandfather clock
opposite the patient, who lay on a sofa facing away from me. I was
struck by the fact that from time to time he turned his face
towards me, looked at me in a very friendly way as though to
propitiate me, and then turned his look away from me to the clock.
I thought at the time that he was in this way showing his eagerness
for the end of the hour. A long time afterwards the patient
reminded me of this piece of dumb show, and gave me an explanation
of it; for he recalled that the youngest of the seven little goats
hid himself in the case of the grandfather clock while his six
brothers were eaten up by the wolf. So what he had meant was:
‘Be kind to me! Must I be frightened of you? Are you going to
eat me up? Shall I hide myself from you in the clock-case like the
youngest little goat?’

  
¹
After this reprimand from the
schoolmaster-wolf he learnt that it was the general opinion of his
companions that, to be pacified, the master expected money from
him. We shall return to this point later. - I can see that it would
greatly facilitate a rationalistic view of such a history of a
child’s development as this if it could be supposed that his
whole fear of the wolf had really originated from the Latin master
of that name, that it had been projected back into his childhood,
and, supported by the illustration to the fairy tale, had caused
the phantasy of the primal scene. But this is untenable; the
chronological priority of the wolf phobia and its reference to the
period of his childhood spent upon the first estate is far too
securely attested. And his dream at the age of four?

  
²
Ferenczi (1912).

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3531

   The wolf that he was afraid of
was undoubtedly his father; but his fear of the wolf was
conditional upon the creature being in an upright posture. His
recollection asserted most definitely that he had not been
terrified by pictures of wolves going on all fours or, as in the
story of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, lying in bed. The
posture which, according to our construction of the primal scene,
he had seen the woman assume, was of no less significance; though
in this case the significance was limited to the sexual sphere. The
most striking phenomenon of his erotic life after maturity was his
liability to compulsive attacks of falling physically in love which
came on and disappeared again in the most puzzling succession.
These attacks released a tremendous energy in him even at times
when he was otherwise inhibited, and they were quite beyond his
control. I must, for a specially important reason, postpone a full
consideration of this compulsive love; but I may mention here that
it was subject to a definite condition, which was concealed from
his consciousness and was discovered only during the treatment. It
was necessary that the woman should have assumed the posture which
we have ascribed to his mother in the primal scene. From his
puberty he had felt large and conspicuous buttocks as the most
powerful attraction in a woman; to copulate except from behind gave
him scarcely any enjoyment. At this point a criticism may justly be
raised: it may be objected that a sexual preference of this kind
for the hind parts of the body is a general characteristic of
people who are inclined to an obsessional neurosis, and that its
presence does not justify us in referring it back to a special
impression in childhood. It is part of the fabric of the
anal-erotic disposition and is one of the archaic traits which
distinguish that constitution. Indeed, copulation from behind -
more ferarum
[in the fashion of animals] - may, after all,
be regarded as phylogenetically the older form. We shall return to
this point too in a later discussion, when we have brought forward
the supplementary material which showed the basis of the
unconscious condition upon which his falling in love depended.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3532

   Let us now proceed with our
discussion of the relations between his dream and the primal scene.
We should so far have expected the dream to present the child (who
was rejoicing at Christmas in the prospect of the fulfilment of his
wishes) with this picture of sexual satisfaction afforded through
his father’s agency, just as he had seen it in the primal
scene, as a model of the satisfaction that he himself was longing
to obtain from his father. Instead of this picture, however, there
appeared the material of the story which he had been told by his
grandfather shortly before: the tree, the wolves, and the
taillessness (in the over-compensated form of the bushy tails of
the putative wolves). At this point some connection is missing,
some associative bridge to lead from the content of the primal
scene to that of the wolf story. This connection is provided once
again by the postures and only by them. In his grandfather’s
story the tailless wolf asked the others
to climb upon him
.
It was this detail that called up the recollection of the picture
of the primal scene; and it was in this way that it became possible
for the material of the primal scene to be represented by that of
the wolf story, and at the same time for the
two
parents to
be replaced, as was desirable, by
several
wolves. The
content of the dream met with a further transformation, and the
material of the wolf story was made to fit in with the content of
the fairy tale of ‘The Seven Little Goats’, by
borrowing from it the number seven.¹

   The steps in the transformation
of the material, ‘primal scene - wolf story - fairy tale of
"The Seven Little Goats"’, are a reflection of the
progress of the dreamer’s thoughts during the construction of
the dream: ‘longing for sexual satisfaction from his father -
realization that castration is a necessary condition of it - fear
of his father’. It is only at this point, I think, that we
can regard the anxiety-dream of this four-year-old boy as being
exhaustively explained.²

  
¹
It says ‘six or seven’ in the
dream. Six is the number of the children that were eaten; the
seventh escaped into the clock-case. It is always a strict law of
dream-interpretation that an explanation must be found for every
detail.

  
²
Now that we have succeeded in making a
synthesis of the dream, I will try to give a comprehensive account
of the relations between the manifest content of the dream and the
latent dream-thoughts.

  
It was night, I was lying in my bed
. The latter part of this
is the beginning of the reproduction of the primal scene. ‘It
was night’ is a distortion of I had been asleep’. The
remark, ‘I know it was winter when I had the dream, and
night-time’, refers to the patient’s recollection of
the dream and is not part of its content. It is correct, for it was
one of the nights before his birthday, that is, Christmas
Day.

  
Suddenly the window opened of its own accord
. That is to be
translated: ‘Suddenly I woke up of my own accord’, a
recollection of the primal scene. The influence of the wolf story,
in which the wolf leapt in through the window, is making itself
felt as a modifying factor, and transforms a direct expression into
a plastic one. At the same time the introduction of the window
serves the purpose of providing a contemporary reference for the
subsequent content of the dream. On Christmas Eve the door opens
suddenly and one sees before one the tree with the presents. Here
therefore the influence of the actual expectation of Christmas
(which comprises the wish for sexual satisfaction) is making itself
felt.