Freud - Complete Works (646 page)

   (1) ‘. . . My doctor, Herr
Dr. N., advises me to give you an account of a dream that has
pursued me for some thirty or thirty-two years. I am following his
advice, and perhaps the dream may possess interest for you in some
scientific respect. Since, in your opinion, such dreams are to be
traced to an experience of a sexual nature in the first years of my
childhood, I relate some reminiscences of childhood. They are
experiences whose impression on me still persists and which were of
so marked a character as to have determined my religion for me.

   ‘May I beg of you to send
me word in what way you explain this dream and whether it is not
possible to banish it from my life, for it haunts me like a ghost,
and the circumstances that always accompany it - I always fall out
of bed, and have inflicted on myself not inconsiderable injuries -
make it particularly disagreeable and distressing.’

   (2)  ‘I am
thirty-seven years old, very strong and in good physical health,
but in childhood I had, besides measles and scarlet fever, an
attack of nephritis. Furthermore, in my fifth year I had a very
severe inflammation of the eyes, which left double vision. The
images are at an angle to each other and their outline is blurred,
as the scars from the ulcers affect clearness of vision. In the
specialist’s opinion there is nothing more to be done to the
eyes and no chance of improvement. The left side of my face is
drawn up from having screwed up my left eye to see better. By dint
of practice and determination I can do the finest needlework; and,
similarly, when a six-year old child, I broke myself of squinting
by practising in front of a looking-glass, so that now there is no
external sign of the defect in vision.

   ‘From my very earliest
years I was always solitary. I kept apart from other children, and
had visions (clairvoyance and clairaudience). I was not able to
distinguish these from reality, and in consequence often found
myself in conflict with other people in embarrassing positions,
with the result that I have become a very reserved and shy person.
Since as a quite small child I already knew far more than I could
have learnt, I simply did not understand children of my own age. I
am myself the eldest of a family of twelve.

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   ‘From six to ten years old
I attended the parish school and up to sixteen the high-school of
the Ursuline Nuns in B--. At ten I had taken in as much French in
four weeks, in eight lessons, as other children learn in two years.
I had only to say it over. It was just as if I had already learnt
it and only forgotten it. I have never had any need to learn
French, in contradistinction to English, which gave me no trouble,
certainly, but which was not known to me beforehand. The same thing
happened to me with Latin as with French and I have never properly
learnt it, only knowing it from Church Latin, which is, however,
quite familiar to me. If I read a French book to-day, then I
immediately begin thinking in French, whereas this never happens to
me with English, although I have more command of English. My
parents are peasant people (who for generations have never spoken
any languages except German and Polish.

   ‘
Visions
. -
Sometimes reality vanishes for some moments and I see something
quite different. In my house, for example, I often see an old
married couple and a child; and the house is then differently
furnished. In the sanatorium a friend once came into my room at
about four in the morning; I was awake, had the lamp burning, and
was sitting at my table reading, as I suffer much from
sleeplessness. This apparition of her always means a trying time
for me - as it did on this occasion.

   ‘In 1914 my brother was on
active service; I was not with my parents in B-- but in Ch--.
It was ten a. m. on August 22 when I heard my brother’s voice
calling, "Mother! Mother!" It came again ten minutes
later, but I saw nothing. On August 24 I came home, found my mother
greatly depressed, and in answer to my questions she said that she
had had a message from the boy on August 22. She had been in the
garden in the morning, when she had heard him call, "Mother!
Mother!" I comforted her and said nothing about myself. Three
weeks after there came a card from my brother, written on August 22
between nine and ten in the morning; shortly after that he
died.

   ‘On September 27, 1921,
while in the sanatorium, I received a message of some kind. There
were violent knockings two or three times repeated on the bed of
the patient who shared my room. We were both awake; I asked if she
had knocked; she had not even heard anything. Eight weeks later I
heard that one of my friends had died in the night of September
26-7.

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   ‘Now something which is
regarded as a hallucination - a matter of opinion! I have a friend
who married a widower with five children; I got to know the husband
only through my friend. Nearly every time that I have been to see
her, I have seen a lady going in and out of the house. It was
natural to suppose that this was the husband’s first wife. I
asked at some convenient opportunity for a portrait of her, but
could not identify the apparition with the photograph. Seven years
later I saw a picture with the features of the lady, belonging to
one of the children. It was the first wife after all. In the
picture she looked in much better health: she had just been through
a feeding-up treatment and that alters the appearance of a
consumptive patient. These are only a few examples out of many.

   ‘
The dream. - I saw a
tongue of land surrounded by water. The waves were being driven
forward and then back by the breakers. On this piece of land stood
a palm-tree, bent somewhat towards the water. A woman had her arm
wound round the stem of the palm and was bending low towards the
water, where a man was trying to reach the shore. At last she lay
down on the ground, held tightly to the palm-tree with her left
hand and stretched out her right hand as far as she could towards
the man in the water, but without reaching him
. At that point I
would fall out of bed and wake. I was about fifteen or sixteen
years old when I realized that this woman was myself, and from that
time I not only experienced all the woman’s apprehensions on
behalf of the man but sometimes stood there as a third person
looking on at the scene without taking part in it. I dreamed this
dream too in separate scenes. As an interest in men awoke in me (at
eighteen to twenty years old), I tried to see the man’s face;
but this was never possible. The foam hid everything but his neck
and the back of his head. I have twice been engaged to be married,
but judging by his head and build he was neither of the two men I
was engaged to. - Once, when I was lying in the sanatorium under
the influence of paraldehyde, I saw the man’s face, which I
now always see in this dream. It was that of the doctor under whose
care I was. I liked him as a doctor, but I was not drawn to him in
any other way.

   ‘
Memories. Six to nine
months old
. - I was in a perambulator. On my right were two
horses; one, a brown, was looking at me very intently and
expressively. This was my most vivid experience; I had the feeling
that it was a human being.

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   ‘
One year old
. -
Father and I in the town-park, where a park-keeper was putting a
little bird into my hand. Its eyes looked back into mine. I felt
"That is a creature like yourself".

   ‘
Animals being
slaughtered
. - When I heard the pigs squealing I always called
for help and cried out "You are killing a person" (four
years old). I always refused to eat meat. Pork always makes me
vomit. It was not till the war that I came to eat meat, and only
unwillingly; now I am learning to do without it again.

   ‘
Five years old
. -
My mother was confined and I heard her cry out. I had the feeling,
"There is a human being or an animal in the greatest
distress", just as I had over the pig-killing.

   ‘I was quite indifferent as
a child to sexual matters; at ten years old I had as yet no
conception of offences against chastity. Menstruation came on at
the age of twelve. The woman first awakened in me at
six-and-twenty, after I had given life to a child; up to that time
(six months) I constantly had violent vomiting after intercourse.
This also came on whenever I was at all oppressed in mood.

   ‘I have extraordinarily
keen powers of observation, and quite exceptionally sharp hearing,
also a very keen sense of smell. With my eyes bandaged I can pick
out by smell people I know from among a number of others.

   ‘I do not regard my
abnormal powers of sight and hearing as pathological, but ascribe
them to finer perceptions and greater quickness of thought; but I
have only spoken of it to my pastor and to Dr.-- (very unwillingly
to the latter, as I was afraid he would tell me that what I
regarded as
plus
-qualities were
minus
-qualities, and
also because from being misunderstood in childhood I am very
reserved and shy).’

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   The dream which the writer of the
letter asks us to interpret is not hard to understand. It is a
dream of rescuing from water, a typical birth-dream. The language
of symbolism, as you are aware, knows no grammar; it is an extreme
case of a language of infinitives, and even the active and passive
are represented by one and the same image. If in a dream a woman
pulls (or tries to pull) a man out of the water, that may mean that
she wants to be his mother (takes him for her son as
Pharaoh’s daughter did with Moses). Or it may mean that she
wants him to make her into a mother: she wants to have a son by
him, who, as a likeness of him, can be his equivalent. The
tree-trunk to which the woman was clinging is easily recognized as
a phallic symbol, even though it is not standing straight up, but
inclined towards the surface of the water - in the dream the word
is ‘bent’. The onrush and recoil of the breakers
brought to the mind of another dreamer who was relating a similar
dream a comparison with the intermittent pains of labour; and when,
knowing that she had not yet borne a child, I asked her how she
knew of this characteristic of labour, she said that she imagined
labour as a kind of colic - a quite unimpeachable description
physiologically. She gave the association ‘
The Waves of
the Sea and of Love
’. How our present dreamer at so early
as age can have arrived at the finer details of symbolism - tongue
of land, palm-tree - I am naturally unable to say. We must not,
moreover, overlook the fact that, when people assert that they have
for years been pursued by the same dream, it often turns out that
the manifest content is not quite the same. Only the kernel of the
dream has recurred each time; the details of the content are
changed or additions are made to them.

   At the end of this dream, which
is clearly charged with anxiety, the dreamer falls out of bed. This
is a fresh representation of childbirth. Analytic investigation of
the fear of heights, of the dread of an impulse to throw oneself
out of the window, has doubtless led you all to the same
conclusion.

   Who then is the man, by whom the
dreamer wishes to have a child, or of whose likeness she would like
to be the mother?  She often tried to see his face, but the
dream never allowed her to; the man had to remain
incognito
.
We know from countless analyses what this concealment means, and
the conclusion we should base on analogy is verified by another
statement of the dreamer’s. Under the influence of
paraldehyde she once recognized the face of the man in the dream as
that of the hospital physician who was treating her, and who meant
nothing more to her conscious emotional life. The original thus
never divulged its identity, but this impression of it in
‘transference’ establishes the conclusion that earlier
it must always have been her father. Ferenczi is perfectly right in
pointing out that these ‘dreams of the unsuspecting’
are valuable sources of information, as confirming the conjectures
of analysis. Our dreamer was the eldest of twelve children; how
often must she have suffered the pangs of jealousy and
disappointment when it was not she but her mother who obtained from
her father the child she longed for!

Dreams And Telepathy

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   Our dreamer quite correctly
supposed that her first memories of childhood would be of value in
the interpretation of her early and recurrent dream. In the first
scene, before she was one year old, as she was sitting in her
perambulator she saw two horses beside her, one looking at her.
This she described as her most vivid experience; she had the
feeling that it was a human being. This was a feeling which we can
understand only if we assume that the two horses represented, in
this case as so often, a married couple, father and mother. It was,
as it were, a flash of infantile totemism. If we could, we should
ask the writer whether the
brown
horse who looked at her so
humanly could not be recognized by its colouring as her father. The
second recollection was associatively connected with the first
through the same ‘understanding’ gaze. Taking the
little bird in her hand, however, reminds the analyst, who has
prejudices of his own, of a feature in the dream in which the
woman’s hand was in contact with another phallic symbol.

   The next two memories belong
together; they make still slighter demands on the interpreter. The
mother crying out during her confinement reminded the daughter
directly of the pigs squealing when they were being killed and put
her into the same frenzy of pity. But we may also conjecture that
this was a violent reaction against an angry death-wish directed at
the mother.