Freud - Complete Works (587 page)

  
The big walnut tree
. The representative of the Christmas
tree, and therefore belonging to the current situation. But also
the tree out of the wolf story, on which the tailor took refuge
from pursuit, and under which the wolves were on the watch.
Moreover, as I have often been able to satisfy myself, a high tree
is a symbol of observing, of scopophilia. A person sitting on a
tree can see everything that is going on below him and cannot
himself be seen. Compare Boccaccio’s well-known story, and
similar
facetiae
.

  
The wolves
. Their number:
six or seven
. In the wolf
story there was a pack, and no number was given. The fixing of the
number shows the influence of the fairy tale of ‘The Seven
Little Goats’, six of whom were eaten up. The fact that the
number two in the primal scene is replaced by a larger number,
which would be absurd in the primal scene, is welcomed by the
resistance as a means of distortion. In the illustration to the
dream the dreamer brings forward the number five, which is probably
meant to correct the statement ‘It was
night’.

  
They were sitting on the tree
. In the first place they
replace the Christmas presents hanging on the tree. But they are
also transposed on to the tree because that can mean that they are
looking. In his grandfather’s story they were posted
underneath the tree. Their relation to the tree has therefore been
reversed in the dream; and from this it may be concluded that there
are further reversals of the latent material to be found in the
content of the dream.

  
They were looking at him with strained attention
. This
feature comes entirely from the primal scene, and has got into the
dream at the price of being turned completely round.

  
They were quite white
. This feature is unessential in
itself, but is strongly emphasized in the dreamer’s
narrative. It owes its intensity to a copious fusion of elements
from all the strata of the material, and it combines unimportant
details from the other sources of the dream with a fragment of the
primal scene which is more significant. This last part of its
determination goes back to the white of his parents’
bedclothes and underclothes, and to this is added the white of the
flocks of sheep, and of the sheep-dogs, as an allusion to his
sexual researches among animals, and the white in the fairy tale of
‘The Seven Little Goats’, in which the mother is
recognized by the white of her hand. Later on we shall see that the
white clothes are also an allusion to death.

  
They sat there motionless
. This contradicts the most
striking feature of the observed scene, namely, its agitated
movement, which, in virtue of the postures to which it led,
constitutes the connection between the primal scene and the wolf
story.

  
They had tails like foxes
. This must be the contradiction of
a conclusion which was derived from the action of the primal scene
on the wolf story, and which must be recognized as the most
important result of the dreamer’s sexual researches:
‘So there really is such a thing as castration.’ The
terror with which this conclusion was received finally broke out in
the dream and brought it to an end.

  
The fear of being eaten up by the wolves
. It seemed to the
dreamer as though the motive force of this fear was not derived
from the content of the dream. He said he need not have been
afraid, for the wolves looked more like foxes or dogs, and they did
not rush at him as though to bite him, but were very still and not
at all terrible. We observe that the dream-work tries for some time
to make the distressing content harmless by transforming it into
its opposite. (‘They aren’t moving, and, only look,
they have the loveliest tails!’) Until at last this expedient
fails, and the fear breaks out. It expresses itself by the help of
the fairy tale, in which the goat-children are eaten up by the
wolf-father. This part of the fairy tale may perhaps have acted as
a reminder of threats made by the child’s father in fun when
he was playing with him; so that the fear of being eaten up by the
wolf may be a reminiscence as well as a substitute by
displacement.

   The
wishes which act as motive forces in this dream are obvious. First
there are the superficial wishes of the day, that Christmas with
its presents may already be here (a dream of impatience) and
accompanying these is the deeper wish, now permanently present, for
sexual satisfaction from the dreamer’s father. This is
immediately replaced by the wish to see once more what was then so
fascinating. The mental process then proceeds on its way. Starting
from the fulfilment of this last wish with the conjuring up of the
primal scene, it passes on to what has now become inevitable - the
repudiation of that wish and its repression.

   The
diffuseness and elaboration of this commentary have been forced on
me by the effort to present the reader with some sort of equivalent
for the convincing power of an analysis carried through by oneself;
perhaps they may also serve to discourage him from asking for the
publication of analyses which have stretched over several
years.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3533

   After what has already been said
I need only deal shortly with the pathogenic effect of the primal
scene and the alteration which its revival produced in his sexual
development. We will only trace that one of its effects to which
the dream gave expression. Later on we shall have to make it clear
that it was not only a single sexual current that started from the
primal scene but a whole set of them, that his sexual life was
positively splintered up by it. We shall further bear in mind that
the activation of this scene (I purposely avoid the word
‘recollection’) had the same effect as though it were a
recent experience. The effects of the scene were deferred, but
meanwhile it had lost none of its freshness in the interval between
the ages of one and a half and four years. We shall perhaps find in
what follows reason to suppose that it produced certain effects
even at the time of its perception, that is, from the age of one
and a half onwards.

   When the patient entered more
deeply into the situation of the primal scene, he brought to light
the following pieces of self-observation. He assumed to begin with,
he said, that the event of which he was a witness was an act of
violence, but the expression of enjoyment which he saw on his
mother’s face did not fit in with this; he was obliged to
recognize that the experience was one of gratification.¹ What
was essentially new for him in his observation of his
parents’ intercourse was the conviction of the reality of
castration - a possibility with which his thoughts had already been
occupied previously. (The sight of the two girls micturating, his
Nanya’s threat, the governess’ interpretation of the
sugar-sticks, the recollection of his father having beaten a snake
to pieces.) For now he saw with his own eyes the wound of which his
Nanya had spoken, and understood that its presence was a necessary
condition of intercourse with his father. He could no longer
confuse it with the bottom, as he had in his observation of the
little girls.²

  
¹
We might perhaps best do justice to this
statement of the patient’s by supposing that the object of
his observation was in the first instance a coitus in the normal
position, which cannot fail to produce the impression of being a
sadistic act, and that only after this was the position altered, so
that he had an opportunity for making other observations and
judgements. This hypothesis, however, was not confirmed with
certainty, and moreover does not seem to me indispensable. We must
not forget the actual situation which lies behind the abbreviated
description given in the text: the patient under analysis, at an
age of over twenty-five years, was putting the impressions and
impulses of his fourth year into words which he would never have
found at that time. If we fail to notice this, it may easily seem
comic and incredible that a child of four should be capable of such
technical judgements and learned notions. This is simply another
instance of
deferred action
. At the age of one and a half
the child receives an impression to which he is unable to react
adequately; he is only able to understand it and to be moved by it
when the impression is revived in him at the age of four; and only
twenty years later, during the analysis, is he able to grasp with
his conscious mental processes what was then going on in him. The
patient justifiably disregards the three periods of time, and puts
his present ego into the situation which is so long past. And in
this we follow him, since with correct self-observation and
interpretation the effect must be the same as though the distance
between the second and third periods of time could be neglected.
Moreover, we have no other means of describing the events of the
second period.

  
²
We shall learn later on, when we come to
trace out his anal erotism, how he further dealt with this portion
of the problem.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3534

   The dream ended in a state of
anxiety, from which he did not recover until he had his Nanya with
him. He fled, therefore, from his father to her. His anxiety was a
repudiation of the wish for sexual satisfaction from his father -
the trend which had put the dream into his head. The form taken by
the anxiety, the fear of ‘being eaten by the wolf’, was
only the (as we shall hear, regressive) transposition of the wish
to be copulated with by his father, that is, to be given sexual
satisfaction in the same way as his mother. His last sexual aim,
the passive attitude towards his father, succumbed to repression,
and fear of his father appeared in its place in the shape of the
wolf phobia.

   And the driving force of this
repression? The circumstances of the case show that it can only
have been his narcissistic genital libido which, in the form of
concern for his male organ, was fighting against a satisfaction
whose attainment seemed to involve the renunciation of that organ.
And it was from his threatened narcissism that he derived the
masculinity with which he defended himself against his passive
attitude towards his father.

   We now observe that at this point
in our narrative we must make an alteration in our terminology.
During the dream he had reached a new phase in his sexual
organization. Up to then the sexual opposites had been for him
active
and
passive
. Since his seduction his sexual
aim had been a passive one, of being touched on the genitals; it
was then transformed, by regression to the earlier stage of the
sadistic-anal organization, into the masochistic aim of being
beaten or punished. It was a matter of indifference to him whether
he reached this aim with a man or with a woman. He had travelled,
without considering the difference of sex, from his Nanya to his
father; he had longed to have his penis touched by his Nanya, and
had tried to provoke a beating from his father. Here his genitals
were left out of account; though the connection with them which had
been concealed by the regression was still expressed in his
phantasy of being beaten
on the penis
. The activation of the
primal scene in the dream now brought him back to the genital
organization. He discovered the vagina and the biological
significance of masculine and feminine. He understood now that
active was the same as masculine, while passive was the same as
feminine. His passive sexual aim should now have been transformed
into a feminine one, and have expressed itself as ‘being
copulated with by his father’ instead of ‘being beaten
by him on the genitals or on the bottom’. This feminine aim,
however, underwent repression and was obliged to let itself be
replaced by fear of the wolf.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis

3535

   We must here break off the
discussion of his sexual development until new light is thrown from
the later stages of his history upon these earlier ones. For the
proper appreciation of the wolf phobia we will only add that both
his father and mother became wolves. His mother took the part of
the castrated wolf, which let the others climb upon it; his father
took the part of the wolf that climbed. But his fear, as we have
heard him assure us, related only to the standing wolf, that is, to
his father. It must further strike us that the fear with which the
dream ended had a model in his grandfather’s story. For in
this the castrated wolf, which had let the others climb upon it,
was seized with fear as soon as it was reminded of the fact of its
taillessness. It seems, therefore, as though he had identified
himself with his castrated mother during the dream, and was now
fighting against that fact. ‘If you want to be sexually
satisfied by Father’, we may perhaps represent him as saying
to himself, ‘you must allow yourself to be castrated like
Mother; but I won’t have that.’ In short, a clear
protest on the part of his masculinity! Let us, however, plainly
understand that the sexual development of the case that we are now
examining has a great disadvantage from the point of view of
research, for it was by no means undisturbed. It was first
decisively influenced by the seduction, and was then diverted by
the scene of observation of the coitus, which in its deferred
action operated like a second seduction.

From The History Of An Infantile Neurosis