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CHAPTER SIX
The Dream-Work
All other previous attempts to solve the problems of dreams have concerned themselves
directly with the manifest dream-content as it is retained in the memory. They have
sought to obtain an interpretation of the dream from this content, or, if they dispensed
with an interpretation, to base their conclusions concerning the dream on the evidence
provided by this content. We, however, are confronted by a different set of data; for us a
new psychic material interposes itself between the dream-content and the results of our
investigations: the latent dream-content, or dream-thoughts, which are obtained only by
our method. We develop the solution of the dream from this latent content, and not from
the manifest dream-content. We are thus confronted with a new problem, an entirely
novel task -- that of examining and tracing the relations between the latent dreamthoughts
and the manifest dream-content, and the processes by which the latter has grown
out of the former.
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content present themselves as two descriptions of the
same content in two different languages; or, to put it more clearly, the dream-content
appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression,
whose symbols and laws of composition we must learn by comparing the origin with the
translation. The dream-thoughts we can understand without further trouble the moment
we have ascertained them. The dream-content is, as it were, presented in hieroglyphics,
whose symbols must be translated, one by one, into the language of the dream-thoughts.
It would of course be incorrect to attempt to read these symbols in accordance with their
values as pictures, instead of in accordance with their meaning as symbols. For instance, I
have before me a picture-puzzle (rebus) -- a house, upon whose roof there is a boat; then
a single letter; then a running figure, whose head has been omitted, and so on. As a critic
I might be tempted to judge this composition and its elements to be nonsensical. A boat is
out of place on the roof of a house, and a headless man cannot run; the man, too, is larger
than the house, and if the whole thing is meant to represent a landscape the single letters
of the alphabet have no right in it, since they do not occur in nature. A correct judgment
of the picture-puzzle is possible only if I make no such objections to the whole and its
parts, and if, on the contrary, I take the trouble to replace each image by a syllable or
word which it may represent by virtue of some allusion or relation. The words thus put
together are no longer meaningless, but might constitute the most beautiful and pregnant
aphorism. Now a dream is such a picture-puzzle, and our predecessors in the art of
dream-interpretation have made the mistake of judging the rebus as an artistic
composition. As such, of course, it appears
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A. CONDENSATION
The first thing that becomes clear to the investigator when he compares the dreamcontent
with the dream-thoughts is that a tremendous work of condensation has been
accomplished. The dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and
copiousness of the dream-thoughts. The dream, when written down, fills half a page; the
analysis, which contains the dream-thoughts, requires six, eight, twelve times as much
space. The ratio varies with different dreams; but in my experience it is always of the
same order. As a rule, the extent of the compression which has been accomplished is
underestimated, owing to the fact that the dream-thoughts which have been brought to
light are believed to be the whole of the material, whereas a continuation of the work of
interpretation would reveal still further thoughts hidden in the dream. We have already
found it necessary to remark that one can never be really sure that one has interpreted a
dream completely; even if the solution seems satisfying and flawless, it is always possible
that yet another meaning has been manifested by the same dream. Thus the degree of
condensation is -- strictly speaking -- indeterminable. Exception may be taken -- and at
first sight the objection seems perfectly plausible -- to the assertion that the disproportion
between dream-content and dream-thoughts justifies the conclusion that a considerable
condensation of psychic material occurs in the formation of dreams. For we often have
the feeling that we have been dreaming a great deal all night, and have then forgotten
most of what we have dreamed. The dream which we remember on waking would thus
appear to be merely a remnant of the total dream-work, which would surely equal the
dream-thoughts in range if only we could remember it completely. To a certain extent
this is undoubtedly true; there is no getting away from the fact that a dream is most
accurately reproduced if we try to remember it immediately after waking, and that the
recollection of it becomes more and more defective as the day goes on. On the other
hand, it has to be recognised that the impression that we have dreamed a good deal more
than we are able to reproduce is very often based on an illusion, the origin of which we
shall explain later on. Moreover, the assumption of a condensation in the dream-work is
not affected by the possibility of forgetting a part of dreams, for it may be demonstrated
by the multitude of ideas pertaining to those individual parts of the dream which do
remain in the memory. If a large part of the dream has really escaped the memory, we are
probably deprived of access to a new series of dream-thoughts. We have no justification
for expecting that those portions of the dream which have been lost should likewise have
referred only to those thoughts which we know from the analysis of the portions which
have been preserved.1
In view of the very great number of ideas which analysis elicits for each individual
element of the dream-content, the principal doubt in the minds of many readers will be
whether it is permissible to count everything that subsequently occurs to the mind during
analysis as forming part of the dream-thoughts -- in other words, to assume that all these
thoughts have been active in the sleeping state, and have taken part in the formation of
the dream. Is it not more probable that new combinations of thoughts are developed in the
course of analysis, which did not participate in the formation of the dream? To this
objection I can give only a conditional reply. It is true, of course, that separate
combinations of thoughts make their first appearance during the analysis; but one can
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convince oneself every time this happens that such new combinations have been
established only between thoughts which have already been connected in other ways in
the dream-thoughts; the new combinations are, so to speak, corollaries, short-circuits,
which are made possible by the existence of other, more fundamental modes of
connection. In respect of the great majority of the groups of thoughts revealed by
analysis, we are obliged to admit that they have already been active in the formation of
the dream, for if we work through a succession of such thoughts, which at first sight seem
to have played no part in the formation of the dream, we suddenly come upon a thought
which occurs in the dream-content, and is indispensable to its interpretation, but which is
nevertheless inaccessible except through this chain of thoughts. The reader may here turn
to the dream of the botanical monograph, which is obviously the result of an astonishing
degree of condensation, even though I have not given the complete analysis.
But how, then, are we to imagine the psychic condition of the sleeper which precedes
dreaming? Do all the dream-thoughts exist side by side, or do they pursue one another, or
are there several simultaneous trains of thought, proceeding from different centres, which
subsequently meet? I do not think it is necessary at this point to form a plastic conception
of the psychic condition at the time of dream-formation. But let us not forget that we are
concerned with unconscious thinking, and that the process may easily be different from
that which we observe in ourselves in deliberate contemplation accompanied by
consciousness.
The fact, however, is irrefutable that dream-formation is based on a process of
condensation. How, then, is this condensation effected?
Now, if we consider that of the dream-thoughts ascertained only the most restricted
number are represented in the dream by means of one of their conceptual elements, we
might conclude that the condensation is accomplished by means of omission, inasmuch
as the dream is not a faithful translation or projection, point by point, of the dreamthoughts,
but a very incomplete and defective reproduction of them. This view, as we
shall soon perceive, is a very inadequate one. But for the present let us take it as a point
of departure, and ask ourselves: If only a few of the elements of the dream-thoughts make
their way into the dream-content, what are the conditions that determine their selection?
In order to solve this problem, let us turn our attention to those elements of the dreamcontent
which must have fulfilled the conditions for which we are looking. The most
suitable material for this investigation will be a dream to whose formation a particularly
intense condensation has contributed. I select the dream, cited on page 73 ff., of the
botanical monograph.
Dream 1
Dream-content: I have written a monograph upon a certain (indeterminate) species of
plant. The book lies before me. I am just turning over a folded coloured plate. A dried
specimen of the plant is bound up in this copy, as in a herbarium.
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The most prominent element of this dream is the botanical monograph. This is derived
from the impressions of the dream-day; I had actually seen a monograph on the genus
Cyclamen in a bookseller's window. The mention of this genus is lacking in the dreamcontent;
only the monograph and its relation to botany have remained. The `botanical
monograph' immediately reveals its relation to the work on cocaine which I once wrote;
from cocaine the train of thought proceeds on the one hand to a Festschrift, and on the
other to my friend, the oculist, Dr Königstein, who was partly responsible for the
introduction of cocaine as a local anaesthetic. Moreover, Dr Königstein is connected with
the recollection of an interrupted conversation I had had with him on the previous
evening, and with all sorts of ideas relating to the remuneration of medical and surgical
services among colleagues. This conversation, then, is the actual dream-stimulus; the
monograph on cyclamen is also a real incident, but one of an indifferent nature; as I now
see, the `botanical monograph' of the dream proves to be a common mean between the
two experiences of the day, taken over unchanged from an indifferent impression, and
bound up with the psychically significant experience by means of the most copious
associations.
Not only the combined idea of the botanical monograph, however, but also each of its
separate elements, `botanical' and `monograph', penetrates farther and farther, by
manifold associations, into the confused tangle of the dream-thoughts. To botanical
belong the recollections of the person of Professor Gärtner (German: Gärtner = gardener),
of his blooming wife, of my patient, whose name is Flora, and of a lady concerning
whom I told the story of the forgotten flowers. Gärtner, again, leads me to the laboratory
and the conversation with Königstein; and the allusion to the two female patients belongs
to the same conversation. From the lady with the flowers a train of thoughts branches off
to the favourite flowers of my wife, whose other branch leads to the title of the hastily
seen monograph. Further, botanical recalls an episode at the `Gymnasium', and a
university examination; and a fresh subject -- that of my hobbies -- which was broached
in the abovementioned conversation, is linked up, by means of what is humorously called
my favourite flower, the artichoke, with the train of thoughts proceeding from the
forgotten flowers; behind `artichoke' there lies, on the one hand, a recollection of Italy,
and on the other a reminiscence of a scene of my childhood, in which I first formed an
acquaintance -- which has since then grown so intimate -- with books. Botanical, then, is
a veritable nucleus, and, for the dream, the meeting-point of many trains of thought;
which, I can testify, had all really been brought into connection by the conversation
referred to. Here we find ourselves in a thought-factory, in which, as in The Weaver's
Masterpiece:
The little shuttles to and fro
Fly, and the threads unnoted flow;
One throw links up a thousand threads.
Monograph in the dream, again, touches two themes: the one-sided nature of my studies,
and the costliness of my hobbies.
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The impression derived from this first investigation is that the elements `botanical' and
`monograph' were taken up into the dream-content because they were able to offer the
most numerous points of contact with the greatest number of dream-thoughts, and thus
represented nodal points at which a great number of the dream-thoughts met together,
and because they were of manifold significance in respect of the meaning of the dream.
The fact upon which this explanation is based may be expressed in another form: Every
element of the dream-content proves to be over-determined -- that is, it appears several
times over in the dream-thoughts.
We shall learn more if we examine the other components of the dream in respect of their
occurrence in the dream-thoughts. The coloured plate refers (cf. the analysis on p. 76) to
a new subject, the criticism passed upon my work by colleagues, and also to a subject
already represented in the dream -- my hobbies -- and, further, to a memory of my
childhood, in which I pull to pieces a book with coloured plates; the dried specimen of
the plant relates to my experience with the herbarium at the `Gymnasium', and gives this
memory particular emphasis. Thus I perceive the nature of the relation between the
dream-content and dream-thoughts: Not only are the elements of the dream determined
several times over by the dream-thoughts, but the individual dream-thoughts are
represented in the dream by several elements. Starting from an element of the dream, the
path of the association leads to a number of dream-thoughts; and from a single dreamthought
to several elements of the dream. In the process of dream-formation, therefore, it
is not the case that a single dream-thought, or a group of dream-thoughts, supplies the
dream-content with an abbreviation of itself as its representative, and that the next dreamthought
supplies another abbreviation as its representative (much as representatives are
elected from among the population); but rather that the whole mass of the dream-thoughts
is subjected to a certain elaboration, in the course of which those elements that receive
the strongest and completest support stand out in relief; so that the process might perhaps
be likened to election by the scrutin du liste. Whatever dream I may subject to such a
dissection, I always find the same fundamental principle confirmed -- that the dreamelements
have been formed out of the whole mass of the dream-thoughts, and that every
one of them appears, in relation to the dream-thoughts, to have a multiple determination.
It is certainly not superfluous to demonstrate this relation of the dream-content to the
dream-thoughts by means of a further example, which is distinguished by a particularly
artful intertwining of reciprocal relations. The dream is that of a patient whom I am
treating for claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces). It will soon become evident why I
feel myself called upon to entitle this exceptionally clever piece of dream-activity:
Dream 2 -- `A Beautiful Dream'
The dreamer is driving with a great number of companions in X-- Street, where there is a
modest hostelry (which is not the case). A theatrical performance is being given in one of
the rooms of the inn. He is first spectator, then actor. Finally the company are told to
change their clothes, in order to return to the city. Some of the company are shown into
rooms on the ground floor, others to rooms on the first floor. Then a dispute arises. The
people upstairs are annoyed because those downstairs have not yet finished changing, so
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that they cannot come down. His brother is upstairs; he is downstairs; and he is angry
with his brother because they are so hurried. (This part obscure.) Besides, it was already
decided, upon their arrival, who was to go upstairs and who down. Then he goes alone
up the hill towards the city, and he walks so heavily, and with such difficulty, that he
cannot move from the spot. An elderly gentleman joins him and talks angrily of the King
of Italy. Finally, towards the top of the hill, he is able to walk much more easily.
The difficulty experienced in climbing the hill was so distinct that for some time after
waking he was in doubt whether the experience was a dream or the reality.
Judged by the manifest content, this dream can hardly be eulogised. Contrary to the rules,
I shall begin the interpretation with that portion to which the dreamer referred as being
the most distinct.
The difficulty dreamed of, and probably experienced during the dream -- difficulty in
climbing, accompanied by dyspnoea -- was one of the symptoms which the patient had
actually exhibited some years before, and which, in conjunction with other symptoms,
was at the time attributed to tuberculosis (probably hysterically simulated). From our
study of exhibition-dreams we are already acquainted with this sensation of being
inhibited in motion, peculiar to dreams, and here again we find it utilised as material
always available for the purposes of any other kind of representation. The part of the
dream-content which represents climbing as difficult at first, and easier at the top of the
hill, made me think, while it was being related, of the well-known masterly introduction
to Daudet's Sappho. Here a young man carries the woman he loves upstairs; she is at first
as light as a feather, but the higher he climbs the more she weighs; and this scene is
symbolic of the progress of their relation, in describing which Daudet seeks to admonish
young men not to lavish an earnest affection upon girls of humble origin and dubious
antecedents.2 Although I knew that my patient had recently had a love-affair with an
actress, and had broken it off, I hardly expected to find that the interpretation which had
occurred to me was correct. The situation in Sappho is actually the reverse of that in the
dream; for in the dream climbing was difficult at the first and easy later on; in the novel
the symbolism is pertinent only if what was at first easily carried finally proves to be a
heavy burden. To my astonishment, the patient remarked that the interpretation fitted in
very well with the plot of a play which he had seen the previous evening. The play was
called Rund um Wien (`Round about Vienna'), and treated of the career of a girl who was
at first respectable, but who subsequently lapsed into the demi-monde, and formed
relations with highly-placed lovers, thereby climbing, but finally she went downhill faster
and faster. This play reminded him of another, entitled Von Stufe zu Stufe (`From Step to
Step'), the poster advertising which had depicted a flight of stairs.
To continue the interpretation: The actress with whom he had had his most recent and
complicated affair had lived in X-- Street. There is no inn in this street. However, while
he was spending part of the summer in Vienna for the sake of this lady, he had lodged
(German: abgestiegen = stopped, literally stepped off) at a small hotel in the
neighbourhood. When he was leaving the hotel, he said to the cab-driver: `I am glad at all
events that I didn't get any vermin here!' (Incidentally, the dread of vermin is one of his
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phobias.) Whereupon the cab-driver answered: `How could anybody stop there! That isn't
a hotel at all, it's really nothing but a pub!'
The `pub' immediately reminded him of a quotation:
Of a wonderful host
I was lately a guest.
But the host in the poem by Uhland is an apple-tree. Now a second quotation continues
the train of thought:
FAUST: (dancing with the young witch).
A lovely dream once came to me;
I then beheld an apple-tree,
And there two fairest apples shone:
They lured me so, I climbed thereon.
THE FAIR ONE:
`Apples have been desired by you,
Since first in Paradise they grew;
And I am moved with joy to know
That such within my garden grow.3
There is not the slightest doubt what is meant by the apple-tree and the apples. A
beautiful bosom stood high among the charms by which the actress had bewitched our
dreamer.
Judging from the context of the analysis, we had every reason to assume that the dream
referred to an impression of the dreamer's childhood. If this is correct, it must have
referred to the wet-nurse of the dreamer, who is now a man of nearly thirty years of age.
The bosom of the nurse is in reality an inn for the child. The nurse, as well as Daudet's
Sappho, appears as an allusion to his recently abandoned mistress.
The (elder) brother of the patient also appears in the dream-content; he is upstairs, while
the dreamer himself is downstairs. This again is an inversion, for the brother, as I happen
to know, has lost his social position, while my patient has retained his. In relating the
dream-content, the dreamer avoided saying that his brother was upstairs and that he
himself was downstairs. This would have been too obvious an expression, for in Austria
we say that a man is on the ground floor when he has lost his fortune and social position,
just as we say that he has come down. Now the fact that at this point in the dream
something is represented as inverted must have a meaning; and the inversion must apply
to some other relation between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content. There is an
indication which suggests how this inversion is to be understood. It obviously applies to
the end of the dream, where the circumstances of climbing are the reverse of those
described in Sappho. Now it is evident what inversion is meant: In Sappho the man
carries the woman who stands in a sexual relation to him; in the dream-thoughts,
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conversely, there is a reference to a woman carrying a man; and, as this could occur only
in childhood, the reference is once more to the nurse who carries the heavy child. Thus
the final portion of the dream succeeds in representing Sappho and the nurse in the same
allusion.
Just as the name Sappho has not been selected by the poet without reference to a Lesbian
practice, so the portions of the dream in which people are busy upstairs and downstairs,
`above' and `beneath', point to fancies of a sexual content with which the dreamer is
occupied, and which, as suppressed cravings, are not unconnected with his neurosis.
Dream-interpretation itself does not show that these are fancies and not memories of
actual happenings; it only furnishes us with a set of thoughts and leaves it to us to
determine their actual value. In this case real and imagined happenings appear at first as
of equal value -- and not only here, but also in the creation of more important psychic
structures than dreams. A large company, as we already know, signifies a secret. The
brother is none other than a representative, drawn into the scenes of childhood by
`fancying backwards', of all of the subsequent rivals for women's favours. Through the
medium of an experience indifferent in itself, the episode of the gentleman who talks
angrily of the King of Italy refers to the intrusion of people of low rank into aristocratic
society. It is as though the warning which Daudet gives to young men were to be
supplemented by a similar warning applicable to a suckling child.4
In the two dreams here cited I have shown by italics where one of the elements of the
dream recurs in the dream-thoughts, in order to make the multiple relations of the former
more obvious.
Since, however, the analysis of these dreams has not been carried to completion, it will
probably be worth while to consider a dream with a full analysis, in order to demonstrate
the manifold determination of the dream-content. For this purpose I shall select the dream
of Irma's injection (see p. 19). From this example we shall readily see that the
condensation-work in the dream-formation has made use of more means than one.
The chief person in the dream-content is my patient Irma, who is seen with the features
which belong to her in waking life, and who therefore, in the first instance, represents
herself. But her attitude, as I examine her at the window, is taken from a recollection of
another person, of the lady for whom I should like to exchange my patient, as is shown
by the dream-thoughts. Inasmuch as Irma has a diphtheritic membrane, which recalls my
anxiety about my eldest daughter, she comes to represent this child of mine, behind
whom, connected with her by the identity of their names, is concealed the person of the
patient who died from the effects of poison. In the further course of the dream the
significance of Irma's personality changes (without the alteration of her image as it is
seen in the dream): she becomes one of the children whom we examine in the public
dispensaries for children's diseases, where my friends display the differences in their
mental capacities. The transition was obviously effected by the idea of my little daughter.
Owing to her unwillingness to open her mouth, the same Irma constitutes an allusion to
another lady who was once examined by me, and, also in the same connection, to my
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wife. Further, in the morbid changes which I discover in her throat I have summarised
allusions to quite a number of other persons.
All these people whom I encounter as I follow up the associations suggested by `Irma' do
not appear personally in the dream; they are concealed behind the dream-person `Irma',
who is thus developed into a collective image, which, as might be expected, has
contradictory features. Irma comes to represent these other persons, who are discarded in
the work of condensation, inasmuch as I allow anything to happen to her which reminds
me of these persons, trait by trait.
For the purposes of dream-condensation I may construct a composite person in yet
another fashion, by combining the actual features of two or more persons in a single
dream-image. It is in this fashion that the Dr M. of my dream was constructed; he bears
the name of Dr M., and he speaks and acts as Dr M. does, but his bodily characteristics
and his malady belong to another person, my eldest brother; a single feature, paleness, is
doubly determined, owing to the fact that it is common to both persons. Dr R., in my
dream about my uncle, is a similar composite person. But here the dream-image is
constructed in yet another fashion. I have not united features peculiar to the one person
with the features of the other, thereby abridging by certain features the memory-picture of
each; but I have adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family portraits;
namely, I have superimposed the two images, so that the common features stand out in
stronger relief, while those which do not coincide neutralise one another and become
indistinct. In the dream of my uncle the fair beard stands out in relief, as an emphasised
feature, from a physiognomy which belongs to two persons, and which is consequently
blurred; further, in its reference to growing grey the beard contains an allusion to my
father and to myself.
The construction of collective and composite persons is one of the principal methods of
dream-condensation. We shall presently have occasion to deal with this in another
connection.
The notion of dysentery in the dream of Irma's injection has likewise a multiple
determination; on the one hand, because of its paraphasic assonance with diphtheria, and
on the other because of its reference to the patient whom I sent to the East, and whose
hysteria had been wrongly diagnosed.
The mention of propyls in the dream proves again to be an interesting case of
condensation. Not propyls but amyls were included in the dream-thoughts. One might
think that here a simple displacement had occurred in the course of dream-formation.
This is in fact the case, but the displacement serves the purposes of the condensation, as
is shown from the following supplementary analysis: If I dwell for a moment upon the
word propylen (German) its assonance with the word propylaeum suggests itself to me.
But a propylaeum is to be found not only in Athens, but also in Munich. In the latter city,
a year before my dream, I had visited a friend who was seriously ill, and the reference to
him in trimethylamin, which follows closely upon propyls, is unmistakable.
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I pass over the striking circumstance that here, as elsewhere in the analysis of dreams,
associations of the most widely differing values are employed for making thoughtconnections
as though they were equivalent, and I yield to the temptation to regard the
procedure by which amyls in the dream-thoughts are replaced in the dream-content by
propyls as a sort of plastic process.
On the one hand, here is the group of ideas relating to my friend Otto, who does not
understand me, thinks I am in the wrong, and gives me the liqueur that smells of amyls;
on the other hand, there is the group of ideas -- connected with the first by contrast --
relating to my Berlin friend who does understand me, who would always think that I was
right, and to whom I am indebted for so much valuable information concerning the
chemistry of sexual processes.
What elements in the Otto group are to attract my particular attention are determined by
the recent circumstances which are responsible for the dream; amyls belong to the
element so distinguished, which are predestined to find their way into the dream-content.
The large group of ideas centring upon William is actually stimulated by the contrast
between William and Otto, and those elements in it are emphasised which are in tune
with those already stirred up in the `Otto' group. In the whole of this dream I am
continually recoiling from somebody who excites my displeasure towards another person
with whom I can at will confront the first; trait by trait I appeal to the friend as against the
enemy. Thus `amyls' in the Otto group awakes recollections in the other group, also
belonging to the region of chemistry; `trimethylamin', which receives support from
several quarters, finds its way into the dream-content. `Amyls', too, might have got into
the dream-content unchanged, but it yields to the influence of the `William' group,
inasmuch as out of the whole range of recollections covered by this name an element is
sought out which is able to furnish a double determination for `amyls'. `Propyls' is closely
associated with `amyls'; from the `William' group comes Munich with its propylaeum.
Both groups are united in `propyls--propylaeum'. As though by a compromise, this
intermediate element then makes its way into the dream-content. Here a common mean
which permits of a multiple determination has been created. It thus becomes palpable that
a multiple determination must facilitate penetration into the dream-content. For the
purpose of this mean-formation a displacement of the attention has been unhesitatingly
effected from what is really intended to something adjacent to it in the associations.
The study of the dream of Irma's injection has now enabled us to obtain some insight into
the process of condensation which occurs in the formation of dreams. We perceive, as
peculiarities of the condensing process, a selection of those elements which occur several
times over in the dream-content, the formation of new unities (composite persons, mixed
images), and the production of common means. The purpose which is served by
condensation, and the means by which it is brought about, will be investigated when we
come to study in all their bearings the psychic processes at work in the formation of
dreams. Let us for the present be content with establishing the fact of dream-condensation
as a relation between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content which deserves attention.
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The condensation-work of dreams becomes most palpable when it takes words and names
as its objects. Generally speaking, words are often treated in dreams as things, and
therefore undergo the same combinations as the ideas of things. The results of such
dreams are comical and bizarre word-formations.
1. A colleague sent an essay of his, in which he had, in my opinion, overestimated the
value of a recent physiological discovery, and had expressed himself, moreover, in
extravagant terms. On the following night I dreamed a sentence which obviously referred
to this essay: `That is a truly norekdal style.' The solution of this word-formation at first
gave me some difficulty; it was unquestionably formed as a parody of the superlatives
`colossal', `pyramidal'; but it was not easy to say where it came from. At last the monster
fell apart into the two names Nora and Ekdal, from two well-known plays by Ibsen. I had
previously read a newspaper article on Ibsen by the writer whose latest work I was now
criticising in my dream.
2. One of my female patients dreams that a man with a fair beard and a peculiar
glittering eye is pointing to a signboard attached to a tree which reads: uclamparia --
wet.5
Analysis. -- The man was rather authoritative-looking, and his peculiar glittering eye at
once recalled the church of San Paolo, near Rome, where she had seen the mosaic
portraits of the Popes. One of the early Popes had a golden eye (this is really an optical
illusion, to which the guides usually call attention). Further associations showed that the
general physiognomy of the man corresponded with her own clergyman (pope), and the
shape of the fair beard recalled her doctor (myself), while the stature of the man in the
dream recalled her father. All these persons stand in the same relation to her; they are all
guiding and directing the course of her life. On further questioning, the golden eye
recalled gold -- money -- the rather expensive psychoanalytic treatment, which gives her
a great deal of concern. Gold, moreover, recalls the gold cure for alcoholism -- Herr D.,
whom she would have married, if it had not been for his clinging to the disgusting
alcohol habit -- she does not object to anyone's taking an occasional drink; she herself
sometimes drinks beer and liqueurs. This again brings her back to her visit to San Paolo
(fuori la mura) and its surroundings. She remembers that in the neighbouring monastery
of the Tre Fontane she drank a liqueur made of eucalyptus by the Trappist monks of the
monastery. She then relates how the monks transformed this malarial and swampy region
into a dry and wholesome neighbourhood by planting numbers of eucalyptus trees. The
word `uclamparia' then resolves itself into eucalyptus and malarie, and the word wet
refers to the former swampy nature of the locality. Wet also suggests dry. Dry is actually
the name of the man whom she would have married but for his over-indulgence in
alcohol. The peculiar name of Dry is of Germanic origin (drei = three) and hence, alludes
to the monastery of the Three (drei) Fountains. In talking of Mr Dry's habit she used the
strong expression: `He could drink a fountain.' Mr Dry jocosely refers to his habit by
saying: `You know I must drink because I am always dry' (referring to his name). The
eucalyptus refers also to her neurosis, which was at first diagnosed as malaria. She went
to Italy because her attacks of anxiety, which were accompanied by marked rigors and
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shivering, were thought to be of malarial origin. She bought some eucalyptus oil from the
monks, and she maintains that it has done her much good.
The condensation uclamparia--wet is therefore the point of junction for the dream as well
as for the neurosis.
3. In a rather long and confused dream of my own, the apparent nucleus of which is a seavoyage,
it occurs to me that the next port is Hearsing, and next after that Fliess. The latter
is the name of my friend in B., to which city I have often journeyed. But Hearsing is put
together from the names of the places in the neighbourhood of Vienna, which so
frequently end in `ing': Hietzing, Liesing, Moedling (the old Medelitz, meae deliciae, `my
joy'; that is, my own name, the German for `joy' being Freude), and the English hearsay,
which points to calumny, and establishes the relation to the indifferent dream-stimulus of
the day -- a poem in Fliegende Blätter about a slanderous dwarf, `Sagter Hatergesagt'
(Saidhe Hashesaid). By the combination of the final syllable ing with the name Fliess,
Vlissingen is obtained, which is a real port through which my brother passes when he
comes to visit us from England. But the English for Vlissingen is Flushing, which
signifies blushing, and recalls patients suffering from erythrothobia (fear of blushing),
whom I sometimes treat, and also a recent publication of Bechterew's, relating to this
neurosis, the reading of which angered me.6
4. Upon another occasion I had a dream which consisted of two separate parts. The first
was the vividly remembered word `Autodidasker': the second was a faithful reproduction
in the dream-content of a short and harmless fancy which had been developed a few days
earlier, and which was to the effect that I must tell Professor N., when I next saw him:
`The patient about whose condition I last consulted you is really suffering from a
neurosis, just as you suspected.' So not only must the newly-coined `Autodidasker' satisfy
the requirement that it should contain or represent a compressed meaning, but this
meaning must have a valid connection with my resolve -- repeated from waking life -- to
give Professor N. due credit for his diagnosis.
Now Autodidasker is easily separated into author (German, Autor), autodidact, and
Lasker, with whom is associated the name Lasalle. The first of these words leads to the
occasion of the dream -- which this time is significant. I had brought home to my wife
several volumes by a well-known author who is a friend of my brother's, and who, as I
have learned, comes from the same neighbourhood as myself (J. J. David). One evening
she told me how profoundly impressed she had been by the pathetic sadness of a story in
one of David's novels (a story of wasted talents), and our conversation turned upon the
signs of talent which we perceive in our own children. Under the influence of what she
had just read, my wife expressed some concern about our children, and I comforted her
with the remark that precisely such dangers as she feared can be averted by training.
During the night my thoughts proceeded farther, took up my wife's concern for the
children, and interwove with it all sorts of other things. Something which the novelist had
said to my brother on the subject of marriage showed my thoughts a bypath which might
lead to representation in the dream. This path led to Breslau; a lady who was a very good
friend of ours had married and gone to live there. I found in Breslau Lasker and Lasalle,
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two examples to justify the fear lest our boys should be ruined by women, examples
which enabled me to represent simultaneously two ways of influencing a man to his
undoing.7 The Cherchez la femme, by which these thoughts may be summarised, leads
me, if taken in another sense, to my brother, who is still unmarried and whose name is
Alexander. Now I see that Alex, as we abbreviate the name, sounds almost like an
inversion of Lasker, and that this fact must have contributed to send my thoughts on a
detour by way of Breslau.
But the playing with names and syllables in which I am here engaged has yet another
meaning. It represents the wish that my brother may enjoy a happy family life, and this in
the following manner: In the novel of artistic life, L'Oeuvre, which, by virtue of its
content, must have been in association with my dream-thoughts, the author, as is well
known, has incidentally given a description of his own person and his own domestic
happiness, and appears under the name of Sandoz. In the metamorphosis of his name he
probably went to work as follows: Zola, when inverted (as children are fond of inverting
names) gives Aloz. But this was still too undisguised; he therefore replaced the syllable
Al, which stands at the beginning of the name Alexander, by the third syllable of the same
name, sand, and thus arrived at Sandoz. My autodidasker originated in a similar fashion.
My fantasy -- that I am telling Professor N. that the patient whom we have both seen is
suffering from a neurosis -- found its way into the dream in the following manner:
Shortly before the close of my working year I had a patient in whose case my powers of
diagnosis failed me. A serious organic trouble -- possibly some alterative degeneration of
the spinal cord -- was to be assumed, but could not be conclusively demonstrated. It
would have been tempting to diagnose the trouble as a neurosis, and this would have put
an end to all my difficulties, but for the fact that the sexual anamnesis, failing which I am
unwilling to admit a neurosis, was so energetically denied by the patient. In my
embarrassment I called to my assistance the physician whom I respect most of all men (as
others do also), and to whose authority I surrender most completely. He listened to my
doubts, told me he thought them justified, and then said: `Keep on observing the man, it
is probably a neurosis.' Since I know that he does not share my opinions concerning the
etiology of the neuroses, I refrained from contradicting him, but I did not conceal my
scepticism. A few days later I informed the patient that I did not know what to do with
him, and advised him to go to someone else. Thereupon, to my great astonishment, he
began to beg my pardon for having lied to me; he had felt so ashamed; and now he
revealed to me just that piece of sexual etiology which I had expected, and which I found
necessary for assuming the existence of a neurosis. This was a relief to me, but at the
same time a humiliation; for I had to admit that my consultant, who was not disconcerted
by the absence of anamnesis, had judged the case more correctly. I made up my mind to
tell him, when next I saw him, that he had been right and I had been wrong.
This is just what I do in the dream. But what sort of a wish is fulfilled if I acknowledge
that I am mistaken? This is precisely my wish; I wish to be mistaken as regards my fears -
- that is to say, I wish that my wife, whose fears I have appropriated in my dreamthoughts,
may prove to be mistaken. The subject to which the fact of being right or wrong
is related in the dream is not far removed from that which is really of interest to the
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dream-thoughts. We have the same pair of alternatives, of either organic or functional
impairment caused by a woman, or actually by the sexual life -- either tabetic paralysis or
a neurosis -- with which latter the nature of Lasalle's undoing is indirectly connected.
In this well-constructed (and on careful analysis quite transparent) dream, Professor N.
appears not merely on account of this analogy, and my wish to be proved mistaken, or the
associated references to Breslau and to the family of our married friend who lives there,
but also on account of the following little dialogue which followed our consultation:
After he had acquitted himself of his professional duties by making the above-mentioned
suggestion. Dr N. proceeded to discuss personal matters. `How many children have you
now?' -- `Six.' -- A thoughtful and respectful gesture. -- `Girls, boys?' -- `Three of each.
They are my pride and my riches.' -- `Well, you must be careful; there is no difficulty
about the girls, but the boys are a difficulty later on as regards their upbringing.' I replied
that until now they had been very tractable: obviously this prognosis of my boys' future
pleased me as little as his diagnosis of my patient, whom he believed to be suffering only
from a neurosis. These two impressions, then, are connected by their contiguity, by their
being successively received; and when I incorporate the story of the neurosis into the
dream, I substitute it for the conversation on the subject of upbringing, which is even
more closely connected with the dream-thoughts, since it touches so closely upon the
anxiety subsequently expressed by my wife. Thus, even my fear that N. may prove to be
right in his remarks on the difficulties to be met with in bringing up boys is admitted into
the dream-content, inasmuch as it is concealed behind the representation of my wish that
I may be wrong to harbour such apprehensions. The same fantasy serves without
alteration to represent both the conflicting alternatives.
Examination-dreams present the same difficulties to interpretation that I have already
described as characteristic of most typical dreams. The associative material which the
dreamer supplies only rarely suffices for interpretation. A deeper understanding of such
dreams has to be accumulated from a considerable number of examples. Not long ago I
arrived at a conviction that reassurances like `But you already are a doctor', and so on,
not only convey a consolation but imply a reproach as well. This would have run: `You
are already so old, so far advanced in life, and yet you still commit such follies, are guilty
of such childish behaviour.' This mixture of self-criticism and consolation would
correspond with the examination-dreams. After this it is no longer surprising that the
reproaches in the last analysed examples concerning `follies' and `childish behaviour'
should relate to repetitions of reprehensible sexual acts.
The verbal transformations in dreams are very similar to those which are known to occur
in paranoia, and which are observed also in hysteria and obsessions. The linguistic tricks
of children, who at a certain age actually treat words as objects, and even invent new
languages and artificial syntaxes, are a common source of such occurrences both in
dreams and in the psychoneuroses.
The analysis of nonsensical word-formations in dreams is particularly well suited to
demonstrate the degree of condensation effected in the dream-work. From the small
number of the selected examples here considered it must not be concluded that such
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material is seldom observed or is at all exceptional. It is, on the contrary, very frequent,
but owing to the dependence of dream-interpretation on psychoanalytic treatment very
few examples are noted down and reported, and most of the analyses which are reported
are comprehensible only to the specialist in neuropathology.
When a spoken utterance, expressly distinguished as such from a thought, occurs in a
dream, it is an invariable rule that the dream-speech has originated from a remembered
speech in the dream-material. The wording of the speech has either been preserved in its
entirety or has been slightly altered in expression; frequently the dream-speech is pieced
together from different recollections of spoken remarks; the wording has remained the
same, but the sense has perhaps become ambiguous, or differs from the wording. Not
infrequently the dream-speech serves merely as an allusion to an incident in connection
with which the remembered speech was made.8
1 References to the condensation in dreams are to be found in the works of many writers
on the subject. Du Prel states in his Philospohie der Mystik that he is absolutely certain
that a condensation-process of the succession of ideas has occurred.
2 In estimating the significance of this passage we may recall the meaning of dreams of
climbing stairs, as explained in the chapter on Symbolism.
3 Translated by Bayard Taylor.
4 The fantastic nature of the situation relating to the dreamer's wet-nurse is shown by the
circumstance, objectively ascertained, that the nurse in this case was his mother. Further,
I may call attention to the regret of the young man in the anecdote related on p. 105 (that
he had not taken better advantage of his opportunities with his wet-nurse) as the probable
source of this dream.
5 Given by translator, as the author's example could not be translated.
6 The same analysis and synthesis of syllables -- a veritable chemistry of syllables --
serves us for many a jest in waking life. `What is the cheapest method of obtaining
silver? You go to a field where silver-berries are growing and pick them; then the berries
are eliminated and the silver remains in a free state.' [Translator's example.] The first
person who read and criticised this book made the objection -- with which other readers
will probably agree -- `that the dreamer often appears too witty.' That is true, so long as it
applies to the dreamer; it involves a condemnation only when its application is extended
to the interpreter of the dream. In waking reality I can make very little claim to the
predicate `witty'; if my dreams appear witty, this is not the fault of my individuality, but
of the peculiar psychological conditions under which the dream is fabricated, and is
intimately connected with the theory of wit and the comical. The dream becomes witty
because the shortest and most direct way to the expression of its thoughts is barred for it;
the dream is under constraint. My readers may convince themselves that the dreams of
my patients give the impression of being quite as witty (at least, in intention), as my own,
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and even more so. Nevertheless, this reproach impelled me to compare the technique of
wit with the dream-work.
7 Lasker died of progressive paralysis; that is, of the consequences of an infection caught
from a woman (syphilis); Lasalle, also a syphilitic, was killed in a duel which he fought
on account of the lady whom he had been courting.
8 In the case of a young man who was suffering from obsessions, but whose intellectual
functions were intact and highly developed, I recently found the only exception to this
rule The speeches which occurred in his dreams did not originate in speeches which he
had heard or had made himself, but corresponded to the undistorted verbal expression of
his obsessive thoughts, which came to his waking consciousness only in an altered form.
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B. THE WORK OF DISPLACEMENT
Another and probably no less significant relation must have already forced itself upon our
attention while we were collecting examples of dream-condensation. We may have
noticed that these elements which obtrude themselves in the dream-content as its essential
components do not by any means play this same part in the dream-thoughts. As a
corollary to this, the converse of this statement is also true. That which is obviously the
essential content of the dream-thoughts need not be represented at all in the dream. The
dream is, as it were, centred elsewhere; its content is arranged about elements which do
not constitute the central point of the dream-thoughts. Thus, for example, in the dream of
the botanical monograph the central point of the dream-content is evidently the element
`botanical'; in the dream-thoughts we are concerned with the complications and conflicts
resulting from services rendered between colleagues which place them under mutual
obligations; later on with the reproach that I am in the habit of sacrificing too much time
to my hobbies; and the element `botanical' finds no place in this nucleus of the dreamthoughts,
unless it is loosely connected with it by antithesis, for botany was never among
my favourite subjects. In the Sappho-dream of my patient, ascending and descending,
being upstairs and down, is made the central point; the dream, however, is concerned
with the danger of sexual relations with persons of `low' degree; so that only one of the
elements of the dream-thoughts seems to have found its way into the dream-content, and
this is unduly expanded. Again, in the dream of my uncle, the fair beard, which seems to
be its central point, appears to have no rational connection with the desire for greatness
which we have recognised as the nucleus of the dream-thoughts. Such dreams very
naturally give us an impression of a `displacement'. In complete contrast to these
examples, the dream of Irma's injection shows that individual elements may claim the
same place in dream-formation as that which they occupy in the dream-thoughts. The
recognition of this new and utterly inconstant relation between the dream-thoughts and
the dream-content will probably astonish us at first. If we find in a psychic process of
normal life that one idea has been selected from among a number of others, and has
acquired a particular emphasis in our consciousness, we are wont to regard this as proof
that a peculiar psychic value (a certain degree of interest) attaches to the victorious idea.
We now discover that this value of the individual element in the dream-thoughts is not
retained in dream-formation, or is not taken into account. For there is no doubt which of
the elements of the dream-thoughts are of the highest value; our judgment informs us
immediately. In dream-formation the essential elements, those that are emphasised by
intensive interest, may be treated as though they were subordinate, while they are
replaced in the dream by other elements, which were certainly subordinate in the dreamthoughts.
It seems at first as though the psychic intensity1 of individual ideas were of no
account in their selection for dream-formation, but only their greater or lesser multiplicity
of determination. One might be inclined to think that what gets into the dream is not what
is important in the dream-thoughts, but what is contained in them several times over; but
our understanding of dream-formation is not much advanced by this assumption; to begin
with, we cannot believe that the two motives of multiple determination and intrinsic value
can influence the selection of the dream otherwise than in the same direction. Those ideas
in the dream-thoughts which are most important are probably also those which recur most
frequently, since the individual dream-thoughts radiate from them as centres. And yet the
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dream may reject these intensively emphasised and extensively reinforced elements, and
may take up into its content other elements which are only extensively reinforced.
This difficulty may be solved if we follow up yet another impression received during the
investigation of the over-determination of the dream-content. Many readers of this
investigation may already have decided, in their own minds, that the discovery of the
multiple determination of the dream-elements is of no great importance, because it is
inevitable. Since in analysis we proceed from the dream-elements, and register all the
ideas which associate themselves with these elements, is it any wonder that these
elements should recur with peculiar frequency in the thought-material obtained in this
manner? While I cannot admit the validity of this objection, I am now going to say
something that sounds rather like it: Among the thoughts which analysis brings to light
are many which are far removed from the nucleus of the dream, and which stand out like
artificial interpolations made for a definite purpose. Their purpose may readily be
detected; they establish a connection, often a forced and far-fetched connection, between
the dream-content and the dream-thoughts, and in many cases, if these elements were
weeded out of the analysis, the components of the dream-content would not only not be
over-determined, but they would not be sufficiently determined. We are thus led to the
conclusion that multiple determination, decisive as regards the selection made by the
dream, is perhaps not always a primary factor in dream-formation, but is often a
secondary product of a psychic force which is as yet unknown to us. Nevertheless, it must
be of importance for the entrance of the individual elements into the dream, for we may
observe that in cases where multiple determination does not proceed easily from the
dream-material it is brought about with a certain effort.
It now becomes very probable that a psychic force expresses itself in the dream-work
which, on the one hand, strips the elements of the high psychic value of their intensity
and, on the other hand, by means of over-determination, creates new significant values
from elements of slight value, which new values then make their way into the dreamcontent.
Now if this is the method of procedure, there has occurred in the process of
dream-formation a transference and displacement of the psychic intensities of the
individual elements, from which results the textual difference between the dream-content
and the thought-content. The process which we here assume to be operative is actually
the most essential part of the dream-work; it may fitly be called dream-displacement.
Dream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may
chiefly ascribe the structure of the dream.
I think it will be easy to recognise the psychic force which expresses itself in dreamdisplacement.
The result of this displacement is that the dream-content no longer has any
likeness to the nucleus of the dream-thoughts, and the dream reproduces only a distorted
form of the dream-wish in the unconscious. But we are already acquainted with dreamdistortion;
we have traced it back to the censorship which one psychic instance in the
psychic life exercises over another. Dream-displacement is one of the chief means of
achieving this distortion. Is fecit, cui profuit. We must assume that dream-displacement is
brought about by the influence of this censorship, the endopsychic defence.2
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The manner in which the factors of displacement, condensation and over-determination
interact with one another in dream-formation -- which is the ruling factor and which the
subordinate one -- all this will be reserved as a subject for later investigation. In the
meantime, we may state, as a second condition which the elements that find their way
into the dream must satisfy, that they must be withdrawn from the resistance of the
censorship. But henceforth, in the interpretation of dreams, we shall reckon with dreamdisplacement
as an unquestionable fact.
1 The psychic intensity or value of an idea -- the emphasis due to interest -- is of course to
be distinguished from perceptual or conceptual intensity.
2 Since I regard the attribution of dream-distortion to the censorship as the central point of
my conception of the dream, I will here quote the closing passage of a story, Träumen
wie Wachen, from Phantasien eines Realisten, by Lynkeus (Vienna, second edition,
1900), in which I find this chief feature of my doctrine reproduced:
`Concerning a man who possesses the remarkable faculty of never dreaming nonsense . .
.'
`Your marvellous faculty of dreaming as if you were awake is based upon your virtues,
upon your goodness, your justice, and your love of truth; it is the moral clarity of your
nature which makes everything about you intelligible to me.'
`But if I really give thought to the matter,' was the reply, `I almost believe that all men
are made as I am, and that no one ever dreams nonsense! A dream which one remembers
so distinctly that one can relate it afterwards, and which, therefore, is no dream of
delirium, always has a meaning; why, it cannot be otherwise! For that which is in
contradiction to itself can never be combined into a whole. The fact that time and space
are often thoroughly shaken up, detracts not at all from the real content of the dream,
because both are without any significance whatever for its essential content. We often do
the same thing in waking life; think of fairytales, of so many bold and pregnant creations
of fantasy, of which only a foolish person would say: ``That is nonsense! For it isn't
possible.'' '
`If only it were always possible to interpret dreams correctly, as you have just done with
mine!' said the friend.
`That is certainly not an easy task, but with a little attention it must always be possible to
the dreamer. -- You ask why it is generally impossible? In your case there seems to be
something veiled in your dreams, something unchaste in a special and exalted fashion, a
certain secrecy in your nature, which it is difficult to fathom; and that is why your dreams
so often seem to be without meaning or even nonsensical. But in the profoundest sense,
this is by no means the case; indeed it cannot be, for a man is always the same person,
whether he wakes or dreams.'
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C. THE MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN DREAMS
Besides the two factors of condensation and displacement in dreams, which we have
found to be at work in the transformation of the latent dream-material into the manifest
dream-content, we shall, in the course of this investigation, come upon two further
conditions which exercise an unquestionable influence over the selection of the material
that eventually appears in the dream. But first, even at the risk of seeming to interrupt our
progress, I shall take a preliminary glance at the processes by which the interpretation of
dreams is accomplished. I do not deny that the best way of explaining them, and of
convincing the critic of their reliability, would be to take a single dream as an example, to
detail its interpretation, as I did (in Chapter Two) in the case of the dream of Irma's
injection, but then to assemble the dream-thoughts which I had discovered, and from
them to reconstruct the formation of the dream -- that is to say, to supplement dreamanalysis
by dream-synthesis. I have done this with several specimens for my own
instruction; but I cannot undertake to do it here, as I am prevented by a number of
considerations (relating to the psychic material necessary for such a demonstration) such
as any right-thinking person would approve. In the analysis of dreams these
considerations present less difficulty, for an analysis may be incomplete and still retain its
value, even if it leads only a little way into the structure of the dream. I do not see how a
synthesis, to be convincing, could be anything short of complete. I could give a complete
synthesis only of the dreams of such persons as are unknown to the reading public. Since,
however, neurotic patients are the only persons who furnish me with the means of
making such a synthesis, this part of the description of dreams must be postponed until I
can carry the psychological explanation of the neuroses far enough to demonstrate their
relation to our subject.1 This will be done elsewhere.
From my attempts to construct dreams synthetically from their dream-thoughts, I know
that the material which is yielded by interpretation varies in value. Part of it consists of
the essential dream-thoughts, which would completely replace the dream and would in
themselves be a sufficient substitute for it, were there no dream-censorship. To the other
part one is wont to ascribe slight importance, nor does one set any value on the assertion
that all these thoughts have participated in the formation of the dream; on the contrary,
they may include notions which are associated with experiences that have occurred
subsequently to the dream, between the dream and the interpretation. This part comprises
not only all the connecting-paths which have led from the manifest to the latent dreamcontent,
but also the intermediate and approximating associations by means of which one
has arrived at a knowledge of these connecting-paths during the work of interpretation.
At this point we are interested exclusively in the essential dream-thoughts. These
commonly reveal themselves as a complex of thoughts and memories of the most
intricate possible construction, with all the characteristics of the thought-processes known
to us in waking life. Not infrequently they are trains of thought which proceed from more
than one centre, but which are not without points of contact; and almost invariably we
find, along with a train of thought, its contradictory counterpart, connected with it by the
association of contrast.
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The individual parts of this complicated structure naturally stand in the most manifold
logical relations to one another. They constitute foreground and background, digressions,
illustrations, conditions, lines of argument and objections. When the whole mass of these
dream-thoughts is subjected to the pressure of the dream-work, during which the
fragments are turned about, broken up and compacted, somewhat like drifting ice, the
question arises, what becomes of the logical ties which had hitherto provided the
framework of the structure? What representation do `if, `because', `as though', `although',
`either -- or' and all the other conjunctions, without which we cannot understand a phrase
or a sentence, receive in our dreams?
To begin with, we must answer that the dream has at its disposal no means of
representing these logical relations between the dream-thoughts. In most cases it
disregards all these conjunctions, and undertakes the elaboration only of the material
content of the dream-thoughts. It is left to the interpretation of the dream to restore the
coherence which the dream-work has destroyed.
If dreams lack the ability to express these relations, the psychic material of which they
are wrought must be responsible for this defect. As a matter of fact, the representative
arts -- painting and sculpture -- are similarly restricted, as compared with poetry, which is
able to employ speech; and here again the reason for this limitation lies in the material by
the elaboration of which the two plastic arts endeavour to express something. Before the
art of painting arrived at an understanding of the laws of expression by which it is bound,
it attempted to make up for this deficiency. In old paintings little labels hung out of the
mouths of the persons represented, giving in writing the speech which the artist despaired
of expressing in the picture.
Here, perhaps an objection will be raised, challenging the assertion that our dreams
dispense with the representation of logical relations. There are dreams in which the most
complicated intellectual operations take place; arguments for and against are adduced,
jokes and comparisons are made, just as in our waking thoughts. But here again
appearances are deceptive; if the interpretation of such dreams is continued it will be
found that all these things are dream-material, not the representation of intellectual
activity in the dream. The content of the dream-thoughts is reproduced by the apparent
thinking in our dreams, but not the relations of the dream-thoughts to one another, in the
determination of which relations thinking consists. I shall give some examples of this.
But the fact which is most easily established is that all speeches which occur in dreams,
and which are expressly designated as such, are unchanged or only slightly modified
replicas of speeches which occur likewise among the memories in the dream-material.
Often the speech is only an allusion to an event contained in the dream-thoughts; the
meaning of the dream is quite different.
However, I shall not dispute the fact that even critical thought-activity, which does not
simply repeat material from the dream-thoughts, plays a part in dream-formation. I shall
have to explain the influence of this factor at the close of this discussion. It will then
become clear that this thought activity is evoked not by the dream-thoughts, but by the
dream itself, after it is, in a certain sense, already completed.
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Provisionally, then, it is agreed that the logical relations between the dream-thoughts do
not obtain any particular representation in the dream. For instance, where there is a
contradiction in the dream, this is either a contradiction directed against the dream itself
or a contradiction contained in one of the dream-thoughts; a contradiction in the dream
corresponds with a contradiction between the dream-thoughts only in the most indirect
and intermediate fashion.
But just as the art of painting finally succeeded in depicting, in the persons represented, at
least the intentions behind their words -- tenderness, menace, admonition, and the like by
other means than by floating labels, so also the dream has found it possible to render an
account of certain of the logical relations between its dream-thoughts by an appropriate
modification of the peculiar method of dream-representation. It will be found by
experience that different dreams go to different lengths in this respect; while one dream
will entirely disregard the logical structure of its material, another attempts to indicate it
as completely as possible. In so doing the dream departs more or less widely from the
text which it has to elaborate; and its attitude is equally variable in respect to the temporal
articulation of the dream-thoughts, if such has been established in the unconscious (as,
for example, in the dream of Irma's injection).
But what are the means by which the dream-work is enabled to indicate those relations in
the dream-material which are difficult to represent? I shall attempt to enumerate these,
one by one.
In the first place, the dream renders an account of the connection which is undeniably
present between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining this material into a
unity as a situation or a proceeding. It reproduces logical connection in the form of
simultaneity; in this case it behaves rather like the painter who groups together all the
philosophers or poets in a picture of the School of Athens, or Parnassus. They never were
assembled in any hall or on any mountain-top, although to the reflective mind they do
constitute a community.
The dream carries out in detail this mode of representation. Whenever it shows two
elements close together, it vouches for a particularly intimate connection between their
corresponding representatives in the dream-thoughts. It is as in our method of writing: to
signifies that the two letters are to be pronounced as one syllable; while t with o
following a blank space indicates that t is the last letter of one word and o the first letter
of another. Consequently, dream-combinations are not made up of arbitrary, completely
incongruous elements of the dream-material, but of elements that are pretty intimately
related in the dream-thoughts also.
For representing causal relations our dreams employ two methods, which are essentially
reducible to one. The method of representation more frequently employed -- in cases, for
example, where the dream-thoughts are to the effect: `Because this was thus and thus, this
and that must happen' -- consists in making the subordinate clause a prefatory dream and
joining the principal clause on to it in the form of the main dream. If my interpretation is
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correct, the sequence may likewise be reversed. The principal clause always corresponds
to that part of the dream which is elaborated in the greatest detail.
An excellent example of such a representation of causality was once provided by a
female patient, whose dream I shall subsequently give in full. The dream consisted of a
short prologue, and of a very circumstantial and very definitely centred dreamcomposition.
I might entitle it `Flowery language'. The preliminary dream is as follows:
She goes to the two maids in the kitchen and scolds them for taking so long to prepare `a
little bite of food'. She also sees a very large number of heavy kitchen utensils in the
kitchen turned upside down in order to drain, even heaped up in stacks. The two maids go
to fetch water, and have, as it were, to climb into a river, which reaches up to the house
or into the courtyard.
Then follows the main dream, which begins as follows: She is climbing down from a
height over a curiously shaped trellis, and she is glad that her dress doesn't get caught
anywhere, etc. Now the preliminary dream refers to the house of the lady's parents. The
words which are spoken in the kitchen are words which she has probably often heard
spoken by her mother. The piles of clumsy pots and pans are taken from an unpretentious
hardware shop located in the same house. The second part of this dream contains an
allusion to the dreamer's father, who was always pestering the maids, and who during a
flood -- for the house stood close to the bank of the river -- contracted a fatal illness. The
thought which is concealed behind the preliminary dream is something like this: `Because
I was born in this house, in such sordid and unpleasant surroundings . . .' The main dream
takes up the same thought, and presents it in a form that has been altered by a wishfulfilment:
`I am of exalted origin.' Properly then: `Because I am of such humble origin,
the course of my life has been so and so.'
As far as I can see, the division of a dream into two unequal portions does not always
signify a causal relation between the thoughts of the two portions. It often seems as
though in the two dreams the same material were presented from different points of view;
this is certainly the case when a series of dreams, dreamed the same night, end in a
seminal emission, the somatic need enforcing a more and more definite expression. Or
the two dreams have proceeded from two separate centres in the dream material, and they
overlap one another in the content, so that the subject which in one dream constitutes the
centre co-operates in the other as an allusion, and vice versa. But in a certain number of
dreams the division into short preliminary dreams and long subsequent dreams actually
signifies a causal relation between the two portions. The other method of representing the
causal relation is employed with less comprehensive material, and consists in the
transformation of an image in the dream into another image, whether it be of a person or
a thing. Only where this transformation is actually seen occurring in the dream shall we
seriously insist on the causal relation; not where we simply note that one thing has taken
the place of another. I said that both methods of representing the causal relation are really
reducible to the same method; in both cases causation is represented by succession,
sometimes by the succession of dreams, sometimes by the immediate transformation of
one image into another. In the great majority of cases, of course, the causal relation is not
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represented at all, but is effaced amidst the succession of elements that is unavoidable
even in the dream-process.
Dreams are quite incapable of expressing the alternative `either -- or'; it is their custom to
take both members of this alternative into the same context, as though they had an equal
right to be there. A classic example of this is contained in the dream of Irma's injection.
Its latent thoughts obviously mean: I am not responsible for the persistence of Irma's
pains; the responsibility rests either with her resistance to accepting the solution or with
the fact that she is living under unfavourable sexual conditions, which I am unable to
change, or her pains are not hysterical at all, but organic. The dream, however, carries out
all these possibilities, which are almost mutually exclusive, and is quite ready to add a
fourth solution derived from the dream-wish. After interpreting the dream, I then inserted
the either -- or in its context in the dream-thoughts.
But when in narrating a dream the narrator is inclined to employ the alternative either --
or: `It was either a garden or a living-room,' etc., there is not really an alternative in the
dream-thoughts, but an `and' -- a simple addition. When we use either -- or we are as a
rule describing a quality of vagueness in some element of the dream, but a vagueness
which may still be cleared up. The rule to be applied in this case is as follows: The
individual members of the alternative are to be treated as equal and connected by an
`and'. For instance, after waiting long and vainly for the address of friend who is
travelling in Italy, I dream that I receive a telegram which gives me the address. On the
telegraph form I see printed in blue letters: the first word is blurred -- perhaps via
or villa; the second is distinctly Sezerno,
or even (Casa).
The second word, which reminds me of Italian names, and of our discussions on
etymology, also expresses my annoyance in respect of the fact that my friend has kept his
address a secret from me; but each of the possible first three words may be recognised on
analysis as an independent and equally justifiable starting-point in the concatenation of
ideas.
During the night before the funeral of my father I dreamed of a printed placard, a card or
poster rather like the notices in the waiting-rooms of railway stations which announce
that smoking is prohibited. The sign reads either:
You are requested to shut the eyes
or
You are requested to shut one eye
an alternative which I am in the habit of representing in the following form:
the
You are requested to shut eye(s).
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one
Each of the two versions has its special meaning, and leads along particular paths in the
dream-interpretation. I had made the simplest possible funeral arrangements, for I knew
what the deceased thought about such matters. Other members of the family, however,
did not approve of such puritanical simplicity; they thought we should feel ashamed in
the presence of the other mourners. Hence one of the wordings of the dream asks for the
`shutting of one eye', that is to say, it asks that people should show consideration. The
significance of the vagueness, which is here represented by an either -- or, is plainly to be
seen. The dream-work has not succeeded in concocting a coherent and yet ambiguous
wording for the dream-thoughts. Thus the two principal trains of thought are separated
from each other, even in the dream-content.
In some few cases the division of a dream into two equal parts expresses the alternative
which the dream finds it so difficult to present.
The attitude of dreams to the category of antithesis and contradiction is very striking.
This category is simply ignored; the word `No' does not seem to exist for a dream.
Dreams are particularly fond of reducing antitheses to uniformity, or representing them as
one and the same thing. Dreams likewise take the liberty of representing any element
whatever by its desired opposite, so that it is at first impossible to tell, in respect of any
element which is capable of having an opposite, whether it is contained in the dreamthoughts
in the negative or the positive sense.2 In one of the recently cited dreams, whose
introductory portion we have already interpreted (`because my origin is so and so'), the
dreamer climbs down over a trellis, and holds a blossoming bough in her hands. Since
this picture suggests to her the angel in paintings of the Annunciation (her own name is
Mary) bearing a lily-stem in his hand, and the white-robed girls walking in procession on
Corpus Christi Day, when the streets are decorated with green boughs, the blossoming
bough in the dream is quite clearly an allusion to sexual innocence. But the bough is
thickly studded with red blossoms, each of which resembles a camellia. At the end of her
walk (so the dream continues) the blossoms are already beginning to fall; then follow
unmistakable allusions to menstruation. But this very bough, which is carried like a lilystem
and as though by an innocent girl, is also an allusion to Camille, who, as we know,
usually wore a white camellia, but a red one during menstruation. The same blossoming
bough (`the flower of maidenhood' in Goethe's songs of the miller's daughter) represents
at once sexual innocence and its opposite. Moreover, the same dream, which expresses
the dreamer's joy at having succeeded in passing through life unsullied, hints in several
places (as in the falling of the blossom) at the opposite train of thought, namely, that she
had been guilty of various sins against sexual purity (that is, in her childhood). In the
analysis of the dream we may clearly distinguish the two trains of thought, of which the
comforting one seems to be superficial, and the reproachful one more profound. The two
are diametrically opposed to each other, and their similar yet contrasting elements have
been represented by identical dream-elements.
The mechanism of dream-formation is favourable in the highest degree to only one of the
logical relations. This relation is that of similarity, agreement, contiguity, `just as'; a
relation which may be represented in our dreams, as no other can be, by the most varied
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expedients. The `screening' which occurs in the dream-material, or the cases of `just as',
are the chief points of support for dream-formation, and a not inconsiderable part of the
dream-work consists in creating new `screenings' of this kind in cases where those that
already exist are prevented by the resistance of the censorship from making their way into
the dream. The effort towards condensation evinced by the dream-work facilitates the
representation of a relation of similarity.
Similarity, agreement, community, are quite generally expressed in dreams by contraction
into a unity, which is either already found in the dream-material or is newly created. The
first case may be referred to as identification, the second as composition. Identification is
used where the dream is concerned with persons, composition where things constitute the
material to be unified; but compositions are also made of persons. Localities are often
treated as persons.
Identification consists in giving representation in the dream-content to only one of two or
more persons who are related by some common feature, while the second person or other
persons appear to be suppressed as far as the dream is concerned. In the dream this one
`screening' person enters into all the relations and situations which derive from the
persons whom she screens. In cases of composition, however, when persons are
combined, there are already present in the dream-image features which are characteristic
of, but not common to, the persons in question, so that a new unity, a composite person,
appears as the result of the union of these features. The combination itself may be
effected in various ways. Either the dream-person bears the name of one of the persons to
whom he refers -- and in this case we simply know, in a manner that is quite analogous to
knowledge in waking life, that this or that person is intended -- while the visual features
belong to another person; or the dream-image itself is compounded of visual features
which in reality are derived from the two. Also, in place of the visual features, the part
played by the second person may be represented by the attitudes and gestures which are
usually ascribed to him by the words he speaks, or by the situations in which he is placed.
In this latter method of characterisation the sharp distinction between the identification
and the combination of persons begins to disappear. But it may also happen that the
formation of such a composite person is unsuccessful. The situations or actions of the
dream are then attributed to one person, and the other -- as a rule the more important -- is
introduced as an inactive spectator. Perhaps the dreamer will say: `My mother was there
too' (Stekel). Such an element of the dream-content is then comparable to a determinative
in hieroglyphic script which is not meant to be expressed, but is intended only to explain
another sign.
The common feature which justifies the union of two person -- that is to say, which
enables it to be made -- may either be represented in the dream or it may be absent. As a
rule identification or composition of persons actually serves to avoid the necessity of
representing this common feature. Instead of repeating: `A is ill-disposed towards me,
and so is B', I make, in my dream, a composite person of A and B; or I conceive A as
doing something which is alien to his character, but which is characteristic of B. The
dream-person obtained in this way appears in the dream in some new connection, and the
fact that he signifies both A and B justifies my inserting that which is common to both
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persons -- their hostility towards me -- at the proper place in the dream-interpretation. In
this manner I often achieve a quite extraordinary degree of condensation of the dreamcontent;
I am able to dispense with the direct representation of the very complicated
relations belonging to one person, if I can find a second person who has an equal claim to
some of these relations. It will be readily understood how far this representation by
means of identification may circumvent the censoring resistance which sets up such harsh
conditions for the dream-work. The thing that offends the censorship may reside in those
very ideas which are connected in the dream-material with the one person; I now find a
second person, who likewise stands in some relation to the objectionable material, but
only to a part of it. Contact at that one point which offends the censorship now justifies
my formation of a composite person, who is characterised by the indifferent features of
each. This person, the result of combination or identification, being free of the
censorship, is now suitable for incorporation in the dream-content. Thus, by the
application of dream-condensation, I have satisfied the demands of the dream-censorship.
When a common feature of two persons is represented in a dream, this is usually a hint to
look for another concealed common feature, the representation of which is made
impossible by the censorship. Here a displacement of the common feature has occurred,
which in some degree facilitates representation. From the circumstance that the
composite person is shown to me in the dream with an indifferent common feature, I
must infer that another common feature which is by no means indifferent exists in the
dream-thoughts.
Accordingly, the identification or combination of persons serves various purposes in our
dreams; in the first place, that of representing a feature common to two persons;
secondly, that of representing a displaced common feature; and, thirdly, that of
expressing a community of features which is merely wished for. As the wish for a
community of features in two persons often coincides with the interchanging of these
persons, this relation also is expressed in dreams by identification. In the dream of Irma's
injection I wish to exchange one patient for another -- that is to say, I wish this other
person to be my patient, as the former person has been; the dream deals with this wish by
showing me a person who is called Irma, but who is examined in a position such as I
have had occasion to see only the other person occupy. In the dream about my uncle this
substitution is made the centre of the dream; I identify myself with the minister by
judging and treating my colleagues as shabbily as he does.
It has been my experience -- and to this I have found no exception -- that every dream
treats of oneself. Dreams are absolutely egoistic.3 In cases where not my ego but only a
strange person occurs in the dream-content, I may safely assume that by means of
identification my ego is concealed behind that person. I am permitted to supplement my
ego. On other occasions, when my ego appears in the dream the situation in which it is
placed tells me that another person is concealing himself, by means of identification,
behind the ego. In this case I must be prepared to find that in the interpretation I should
transfer something which is connected with this person -- the hidden common feature --
to myself. There are also dreams in which my ego appears together with other persons
who, when the identification is resolved, once more show themselves to be my ego.
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Through these identifications I shall then have to connect with my ego certain ideas to
which the censorship has objected. I may also give my ego multiple representation in my
dream, either directly or by means of identification with other people. By means of
several such identifications an extraordinary amount of thought material may be
condensed.4 That one's ego should appear in the same dream several times or in different
forms is fundamentally no more surprising than that it should appear, in conscious
thinking, many times and in different places or in different relations: as, for example, in
the sentence: `When I think what a healthy child I was.'
Still easier than in the case of persons is the resolution of identifications in the case of
localities designated by their own names, as here the disturbing influence of the allpowerful
ego is lacking. In one of my dreams of Rome (p.96) the name of the place in
which I find myself is Rome; I am surprised, however, by a large number of German
placards at a street corner. This last is a wish-fulfilment, which immediately suggests
Prague; the wish itself probably originated at a period of my youth when I was imbued
with a German nationalistic spirit which today is quite subdued. At the time of my dream
I was looking forward to meeting a friend in Prague; the identification of Rome with
Prague is therefore explained by a desired common feature; I would rather meet my
friend in Rome than in Prague; for the purpose of this meeting I should like to exchange
Prague for Rome.
The possibility of creating composite formations is one of the chief causes of the fantastic
character so common in dreams, in that it introduces into the dream-content elements
which could never have been objects of perception. The psychic process which occurs in
the creation of composite formations is obviously the same as that which we employ in
conceiving or figuring a dragon or a centaur in our waking senses. The only difference is
that in the fantastic creations of waking life the impression intended is itself the decisive
factor, while the composite formation in the dream is determined by a factor -- the
common feature in the dream-thoughts -- which is independent of its form. Composite
formations in dreams may be achieved in a great many different ways. In the most artless
of these methods only the properties of the one thing are represented, and this
representation is accompanied by a knowledge that they refer to another object also. A
more careful technique combines features of the one object with those of the other in a
new image, while it makes skilful use of any really existing resemblances between the
two objects. The new creation may prove to be wholly absurd, or even successful as a
fantasy, according as the material and the wit employed in constructing it may permit. If
the objects to be condensed into a unity are too incongruous, the dream-work is content
with creating a composite formation with a comparatively distinct nucleus, to which are
attached more indefinite modifications. The unification into one image has here been to
some extent unsuccessful; the two representations overlap one another, and give rise to
something like a contest between the visual images. Similar representations might be
obtained in a drawing if one were to attempt to give form to a unified abstraction of
disparate perceptual images.
Dreams naturally abound in such composite formations; I have given several examples of
these in the dreams already analysed, and will now cite more such examples. In the
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dream on p. 199, which describes the career of my patient `in flowery language', the
dream-ego carries a spray of blossom in her hand which, as we have seen, signifies at
once sexual innocence and sexual transgression. Moreover, from the manner in which the
blossoms are set on, they recall cherry-blossom; the blossoms themselves, considered
singly, are camellias, and finally the whole spray gives the dreamer the impression of an
exotic plant. The common feature in the elements of this composite formation is revealed
by the dream-thoughts. The blossoming spray is made up of allusions to presents by
which she was induced or was to have been induced to behave in a manner agreeable to
the giver. So it was with cherries in her childhood, and with a camellia-tree in her later
years; the exotic character is an allusion to a much-travelled naturalist, who sought to win
her favour by means of a drawing of a flower. Another female patient contrives a
composite meaning out of bathing machines at a seaside resort, country privies, and the
attics of our city dwelling-houses. A reference to human nakedness and exposure is
common to the first two elements; and we may infer from their connection with the third
element that (in her childhood) the garret was likewise the scene of bodily exposure. A
dreamer of the male sex makes a composite locality out of two places in which
`treatment' is given -- my office and the assembly rooms in which he first became
acquainted with his wife. Another, a female patient, after her elder brother has promised
to regale her with caviare, dreams that his legs are covered all over with black beads of
caviare. The two elements, `taint' in a moral sense and the recollection of a cutaneous
eruption in childhood which made her legs look as though studded over with red instead
of black spots, have here been combined with the beads of caviare to form a new idea --
the idea of `what she gets from her brother.' In this dream parts of the human body are
treated as objects, as is usually the case in dreams. In one of the dreams recorded by
Ferenczi there occurs a composite formation made up of the person of a physician and a
horse, and this composite being wears a nightshirt. The common feature in these three
components was revealed in the analysis, after the nightshirt had been recognised as an
allusion to the father of the dreamer in a scene of childhood. In each of the three cases
there was some object of her sexual curiosity. As a child she had often been taken by her
nurse to the army stud, where she had the amplest opportunity to satisfy her curiosity, at
that time still uninhibited.
I have already stated that the dream has no means of expressing the relation of
contradiction, contrast, negation. I shall now contradict this assertion for the first time. A
certain number of cases of what may be summed up under the word `contrast' obtain
representation, as we have seen, simply by means of identification -- that is, when an
exchange, a substitution, can be bound up with the contrast. Of this we have cited
repeated examples. Certain other of the contrasts in the dream-thoughts, which perhaps
come under the category of `inverted, turned into the opposite', are represented in dreams
in the following remarkable manner, which may almost be described as witty. The
`inversion' does not itself make its way into the dream-content, but manifests its presence
in the material by the fact that a part of the already formed dream-content which is, for
other reasons, closely connected in context is -- as it were subsequently -- inverted. It is
easier to illustrate this process than to describe it. In the beautiful `Up and Down' dream
(p. 176) the dream-representation of ascending is an inversion of its prototype in the
dream-thoughts: that is, of the introductory scene of Daudet's Sappho; in the dream
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climbing is difficult at first and easy later on, whereas in the novel it is easy at first, and
later becomes more and more difficult. Again, `above' and `below', with reference to the
dreamer's brother, are reversed in the dream. This points to a relation of inversion or
contrast between two parts of the material in the dream-thoughts, which indeed we found
in them, for in the childish fantasy of the dreamer he is carried by his nurse, while in the
novel, on the contrary, the hero carries his beloved. My dream of Goethe's attack on Herr
M. (to be cited later) likewise contains an inversion of this sort, which must be set right
before the dream can be interpreted. In this dream Goethe attacks a young man, Herr M.;
the reality, as contained in the dream-thoughts, is that an eminent man, a friend of mine,
has been attacked by an unknown young author. In the dream I reckon time from the date
of Goethe's death; in reality the reckoning was made from the year in which the paralytic
was born. The thought which influences the dream-material reveals itself as my
opposition to the treatment of Goethe as though he were a lunatic. `It is the other way
about,' says the dream; `if you don't understand the book it is you who are feeble-minded,
not the author.' All these dreams of inversion, moreover, seem to me to imply an allusion
to the contemptuous phrase, `to turn one's back upon a person' (German: einem die
Kehrseite zeigen, lit. to show a person one's backside): cf. the inversion in respect of the
dreamer's brother in the Sappho dream. It is further worth noting how frequently
inversion is employed in precisely those dreams which are inspired by repressed
homosexual impulses.
Moreover, inversion, or transformation into the opposite, is one of the most favoured and
most versatile methods of representation which the dream-work has at its disposal. It
serves, in the first place, to enable the wish-fulfilment to prevail against a definite
element of the dream-thoughts. `If only it were the other way about!' is often the best
expression for the reaction of the ego against a disagreeable recollection. But inversion
becomes extraordinarily useful in the service of the censorship, for it effects, in the
material to be represented, a degree of distortion which at first simply paralyses our
understanding of the dream. It is therefore always permissible, if a dream stubbornly
refuses to surrender its meaning, to venture on the experimental inversion of definite
portions of its manifest content. Then, not infrequently, everything becomes clear.
Besides the inversion of content, the temporal inversion must not be overlooked. A
frequent device of dream-distortion consists in presenting the final issue of the event or
the conclusion of the train of thought at the beginning of the dream, and appending at the
end of the dream, and appending at the end of the dream the premises of the conclusion,
or the causes of the event. Anyone who forgets this technical device of dream-distortion
stands helpless before the problem of dream-interpretation.5
In many cases, indeed, we discover the meaning of the dream only when we have
subjected the dream-content to a multiple inversion, in accordance with the different
relations. For example, in the dream of a young patient who is suffering from obsessional
neurosis, the memory of the childish death-wish directed against a dreaded father
concealed itself behind the following words: His father scolds him because he comes
home so late, but the context of the psychoanalytic treatment and the impressions of the
dreamer show that the sentence must be read as follows: He is angry with his father, and
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further, that his father always came home too early (i.e. too soon). He would have
preferred that his father should not come home at all, which is identical with the wish
(see p. 143 ff.) that his father would die. As a little boy, during the prolonged absence of
his father, the dreamer was guilty of a sexual aggression against another child, and was
punished by the threat: `Just you wait until your father comes home!'
If we should seek to trace the relations between the dream-content and the dreamthoughts
a little farther, we shall do this best by making the dream itself our point of
departure, and asking ourselves: What do certain formal characteristics of the dreampresentation
signify in relation to the dream-thoughts? First and foremost among the
formal characteristics which are bound to impress us in dreams are the differences in the
sensory intensity of the single dream-images, and in the distinctness of various parts of
the dream, or of whole dreams as compared with one another. The differences in the
intensity of individual dream images cover the whole gamut, from a sharpness of
definition which one is inclined -- although without warrant -- to rate more highly than
that of reality, to a provoking indistinctness which we declare to be characteristic of
dreams, because it really is not wholly comparable to any of the degrees of indistinctness
which we occasionally perceive in real objects. Moreover, we usually describe the
impression which we receive of an indistinct object in a dream as `fleeting', while we
think of the more distinct dream-images as having been perceptible also for a longer
period of time. We must now ask ourselves by what conditions in the dream-material
these differences in the distinctness of the individual portions of the dream-content are
brought about.
Before proceeding farther, it is necessary to deal with certain expectations which seem to
be almost inevitable. Since actual sensations experienced during sleep may constitute part
of the dream-material, it will probably be assumed that these sensations, or the dreamelements
resulting from them, are emphasised by a special intensity, or conversely, that
anything which is particularly vivid in the dream can probably be traced to such real
sensations during sleep. My experience, however, has never confirmed this. It is not true
that those elements of a dream which are derivatives of real impressions perceived in
sleep (nerve stimuli) are distinguished by their special vividness from others which are
based on memories. The factor of reality is inoperative in determining the intensity of
dream-images.
Further, it might be expected that the sensory intensity (vividness) of single dreamimages
is in proportion to the psychic intensity of the elements corresponding to them in
the dream-thoughts. In the latter, intensity is identical with psychic value; the most
intense elements are in fact the most significant, and these constitute the central point of
the dream-thoughts. We know, however, that it is precisely these elements which are
usually not admitted to the dream-content, owing to the vigilance of the censorship. Still,
it might be possible for their most immediate derivatives, which represent them in the
dream, to reach a higher degree of intensity without, however, for that reason constituting
the central point of the dream-representation. This assumption also vanishes as soon as
we compare the dream and the dream-material. The intensity of the elements in the one
has nothing to do with the intensity of the elements in the other; as a matter of fact, a
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complete `transvaluation of all psychic values' takes place between the dream-material
and the dream. The very element of the dream which is transient and hazy, and screened
by more vigorous images, is often discovered to be the one and only direct derivative of
the topic that completely dominates the dream-thoughts.
The intensity of the dream-elements proves to be determined in a different manner: that
is, by two factors which are mutually independent. It will readily be understood that those
elements by means of which the wish-fulfilment expresses itself are those which are
intensely represented. But analysis tells us that from the most vivid elements of the dream
the greatest number of trains of thought proceed, and that those which are most vivid are
at the same time those which are best determined. No change of meaning is involved if
we express this latter empirical proposition in the following formula: The greatest
intensity is shown by those elements of the dream for whose formation the most
extensive condensation-work was required. We may, therefore, expect that it will be
possible to express this condition, as well as the other condition of the wish-fulfilment in
a single formula.
I must utter a warning that the problem which I have just been considering -- the causes
of the greater or lesser intensity or distinctness of single elements in dreams -- is not to be
confounded with the other problem -- that of variations in the distinctness of whole
dreams or sections of dreams. In the former case the opposite of distinctness is haziness;
in the latter, confusion. It is, of course, undeniable that in both scales the two kinds of
intensities rise and fall in unison. A portion of the dream which seems clear to us usually
contains vivid elements; an obscure dream, on the contrary, is composed of less vivid
elements. But the problem offered by the scale of definition, which ranges from the
apparently clear to the indistinct or confused, is far more complicated than the problem of
the fluctuations in vividness of the dream-elements. For reasons which will be given
later, the former cannot at this stage be further discussed. In isolated cases one observes,
not without surprise, that the impression of distinctness or indistinctness produced by a
dream has nothing to do with the dream-structure, but proceeds from the dream-material,
as one of its ingredients. Thus, for example, I remember a dream which on waking
seemed so particularly well-constructed, flawless and clear that I made up my mind,
while I was still in a somnolent state, to admit a new category of dreams -- those which
had not been subject to the mechanism of condensation and distortion, and which might
thus be described as `fantasies during sleep.' A closer examination, however, proved that
this unusual dream suffered from the same structural flaws and breaches as exist in all
other dreams; so I abandoned the idea of a category of `dream-fantasies'.6 The content of
the dream, reduced to its lowest terms, was that I was expounding to a friend a difficult
and long-sought theory of bisexuality, and the wish-fulfilling power of the dream was
responsible for the fact that this theory (which, by the way, was not communicated in the
dream) appeared to be so lucid and flawless. Thus, what I believed to be a judgment as
regards the finished dream was a part, and indeed the most essential part, of the dreamcontent.
Here the dream-work reached out, as it were, into my first waking thoughts, and
presented to me, in the form of a judgment of the dream, that part of the dream-material
which it had failed to represent with precision in the dream. I was once confronted with
the exact counterpart of this case by a female patient who at first absolutely declined to
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relate a dream which was necessary for the analysis `because it was so hazy and
confused', and who finally declared, after repeatedly protesting the inaccuracy of her
description, that it seemed to her that several persons -- herself, her husband, and her
father -- had occurred in the dream, and that she had not known whether her husband was
her father, or who really was her father, or something of that sort. Comparison of this
dream with the ideas which occurred to the dreamer in the course of the sitting showed
beyond a doubt that it dealt with the rather commonplace story of a maidservant who has
to confess that she is expecting a child, and hears doubts expressed as to `who the father
really is'.7 The obscurity manifested by this dream, therefore, was once more a portion of
the dream-exciting material. A fragment of this material was represented in the form of
the dream. The form of the dream or of dreaming is employed with astonishing frequency
to represent the concealed content.
Glosses on the dream, and seemingly harmless comments on it, often serve in the most
subtle manner to conceal -- although, of course, they really betray -- a part of what is
dreamed. As, for example, when the dreamer says: Here the dream was wiped out, and
the analysis gives an infantile reminiscence of listening to someone cleaning himself after
defecation. Or another example, which deserves to be recorded in detail: A young man
has a very distinct dream, reminding him of fantasies of his boyhood which have
remained conscious. He found himself in a hotel at a seasonal resort; it was night; he
mistook the number of his room, and entered a room in which an elderly lady and her two
daughters were undressing to go to bed. He continues: `Then there are some gaps in the
dream; something is missing; and at the end there was a man in the room, who wanted to
throw me out, and with whom I had to struggle.' He tries in vain to recall the content and
intention of the boyish fantasy to which the dream obviously alluded. But we finally
become aware that the required content had already been given in his remarks concerning
the indistinct part of the dream. The `gaps' are the genital apertures of the women who are
going to bed: `Here something is missing' describes the principal characteristic of the
female genitals. In his young days he burned with curiosity to see the female genitals, and
was still inclined to adhere to the infantile sexual theory which attributes a male organ to
women.
A very similar form was assumed in an analogous reminiscence of another dreamer. He
dreamed: I go with Fräulein K. into the restaurant of the Volksgarten . . . then comes a
dark place, an interruption . . . then I find myself in the salon of a brothel, where I see two
or three women, one in a chemise and drawers.
Analysis. -- Fräulein K. is the daughter of his former employer; as he himself admits, she
was a sister-substitute. He rarely had the opportunity of talking to her, but they once had
a conversation in which `one recognised one's sexuality, so to speak, as though one were
to say: I am a man and you are a woman.' He had been only once to the above-mentioned
restaurant, when he was accompanied by the sister of his brother-in-law, a girl to whom
he was quite indifferent. On another occasion he accompanied three ladies to the door of
the restaurant. The ladies were his sister, his sister-in-law, and the girl already mentioned.
He was perfectly indifferent to all three of them, but they all belonged to the `sister
category'. He had visited a brothel but rarely, perhaps two or three times in his life.
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The interpretation is based on the `dark place', the `interruption' in the dream, and
informs us that on occasion, but in fact only rarely, obsessed by his boyish curiosity, he
had inspected the genitals of his sister, a few years his junior. A few days later the
misdemeanour indicated in the dream recurred to his conscious memory.
All dreams of the same night belong, in respect of their content, to the same whole; their
division into several parts, their grouping and number, are all full of meaning and may be
regarded as pieces of information about the latent dream-thoughts. In the interpretation of
dreams consisting of several main sections, or of dreams belonging to the same night, we
must not overlook the possibility that these different and successive dreams mean the
same thing, expressing the same impulses in different material. That one of these
homologous dreams which comes first in time is usually the most distorted and most
bashful, while the next dream is bolder and more distinct.
Even Pharaoh's dream of the ears and the kine, which Joseph interpreted, was of this
kind. It is given by Josephus in greater detail than in the Bible. After relating the first
dream, the King said: `After I had seen this vision I awaked out of my sleep, and, being
in disorder, and considering with myself what this appearance should be, I fell asleep
again, and saw another dream much more wonderful than the foregoing, which still did
more affright and disturb me.' After listening to the relation of the dream, Joseph said:
`This dream, O King, although seen under two forms, signifies one and the same event of
things.'8
Jung, in his Beitrag sur Psychologie des Gerüchtes, relates how a veiled erotic dream of a
schoolgirl was understood by her friends without interpretation, and continued by them
with variations, and he remarks, with reference to one of these narrated dreams, `that the
concluding idea of a long series of dream-images had precisely the same content as the
first image of the series had endeavoured to represent. The censorship thrust the complex
out of the way as long as possible by a constant renewal of symbolic screenings,
displacements, transformations into something harmless, etc.' Scherner was well
acquainted with this peculiarity of dream-representation, and describes it in his Leben des
Traumes in terms of a special law in the Appendix to his doctrine of organic stimulation:
`But finally, in all symbolic dream-formations emanating from definite nerve stimuli, the
fantasy observes the general law that at the beginning of the dream it depicts the
stimulating object only by the remotest and freest allusions, but towards the end, when
the graphic impulse becomes exhausted, the stimulus itself is nakedly represented by its
appropriate organ or its function; whereupon the dream, itself describing its organic
motive, achieves its end . . .'
A pretty confirmation of this law of Scherner's has been furnished by Otto Rank in his
essay Ein Traum, der sich selbst deutet. This dream, related to him by a girl, consisted of
two dreams of the same night, separated by an interval of time, the second of which
ended with an orgasm. It was possible to interpret this orgastic dream in detail in spite of
the few ideas contributed by the dreamer, and the wealth of relations between the two
dream-contents made it possible to recognise that the first dream expressed in modest
language the same thing as the second, so that the latter -- the orgastic dream -- facilitated
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a full explanation of the former. From this example, Rank very justifiably argues the
significance of orgastic dreams for the theory of dreams in general.
But in my experience it is only in rare cases that one is in a position to translate the
lucidity or confusion of a dream, respectively, into a certainty or doubt in the dreammaterial.
Later on I shall have to disclose a hitherto unmentioned factor in dreamformation,
upon whose operation this qualitative scale in dreams is essentially dependent.
In many dreams in which a certain situation and environment are preserved for some
time, there occur interruptions which may be described in the following words: `But then
it seemed as though it were, at the same time, another place, and there such and such a
thing happened.' In these cases what interrupts the main action of the dream, which after
a while may be continued again, reveals itself in the dream-material as a subordinate
clause, an interpolated thought. Conditionality in the dream-thoughts is represented by
simultaneity in the dream-content (wenn or wann = if or when, while).
We may now ask, What is the meaning of the sensation of inhibited movement which so
often occurs in dreams, and is so closely allied to anxiety? One wants to move, and is
unable to stir from the spot; or wants to accomplish something, and encounters obstacle
after obstacle. The train is about to start, and one cannot reach it; one's hand is raised to
avenge an insult, and its strength fails, etc. We have already met with this sensation in
exhibition-dreams, but have as yet made no serious attempt to interpret it. It is
convenient, but inadequate, to answer that there is motor paralysis in sleep, which
manifests itself by means of the sensation alluded to. We may ask: `Why is it, then, that
we do not dream continually of such inhibited movements?' And we may permissibly
suspect that this sensation, which may at any time occur during sleep, serves some sort of
purpose for representation, and is evoked only when the need of this representation is
present in the dream-material.
Inability to do a thing does not always appear in the dream as a sensation; it may appear
simply as part of the dream-content. I think one case of this kind is especially fitted to
enlighten us as to the meaning of this peculiarity. I shall give an abridged version of a
dream in which I seem to be accused of dishonesty. The scene is a mixture made up of a
private sanatorium and several other places. A manservant appears, to summon me to an
inquiry. I know in the dream that something has been missed, and that the inquiry is
taking place because I am suspected of having appropriated the lost article. Analysis
shows that inquiry is to be taken in two senses; it includes the meaning of medical
examination. Being conscious of my innocence, and my position as consultant in this
sanatorium, I calmly follow the manservant. We are received at the door by another
manservant who says, pointing at me, `Have you brought him? Why, he is a respectable
man.' Thereupon, and unattended, I enter a great hall where there are many machines,
which reminds me of an inferno with its hellish instruments of punishment. I see a
colleague strapped to an appliance; he has every reason to be interested in my
appearance, but he takes no notice of me. I understand that I may now go. Then I cannot
find my hat, and cannot go after all.
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The wish that the dream fulfils is obviously the wish that my honesty shall be
acknowledged, and that I may be permitted to go; there must therefore be all sorts of
material in the dream-thoughts which comprise a contradiction of this wish. The fact that
I may go is the sign of my absolution; if, then, the dream provides at its close an event
which prevents me from going, we may readily conclude that the suppressed material of
the contradiction is asserting itself in this feature. The fact that I cannot find my hat
therefore means: `You are not after all an honest man.' The inability to do something in
the dream is the expression of a contradiction, a `No'; so that our earlier assertion, to the
effect that the dream is not capable of expressing a negation, must be revised
accordingly.9
In other dreams in which the inability to do something occurs, not merely as a situation,
but also as a sensation, the same contradiction is more emphatically expressed by the
sensation of inhibited movement, or a will to which a counter-will is opposed. Thus the
sensation of inhibited movement represents a conflict of will. We shall see later on that
this very motor paralysis during sleep is one of the fundamental conditions of the psychic
process which functions during dreaming. Now an impulse which is conveyed to the
motor system is none other than the will, and the fact that we are certain that this impulse
will be inhibited in sleep makes the whole process extraordinarily well-adapted to the
representation of a will towards something and of a `No' which opposes itself thereto.
From my explanation of anxiety, it is easy to understand why the sensation of the
inhibited will is so closely allied to anxiety, and why it is so often connected with it in
dreams. Anxiety is a libidinal impulse which emanates from the unconscious and is
inhibited by the preconscious.10 Therefore, when a sensation of inhibition in the dream is
accompanied by anxiety, the dream must be concerned with a volition which was at one
time capable of arousing libido; there must be a sexual impulse.
As for the judgment which is often expressed during a dream: `Of course, it is only a
dream', and the psychic force to which it may be ascribed, I shall discuss these questions
later on. For the present I will merely say that they are intended to depreciate the
importance of what is being dreamed. The interesting problem allied to this, as to what is
meant if a certain content in the dream is characterised in the dream itself as having been
`dreamed' -- the riddle of a `dream within a dream' -- has been solved in a similar sense
by W. Stekel, by the analysis of some convincing examples. Here again the part of the
dream `dreamed' is to be depreciated in value and robbed of its reality; that which the
dreamer continues to dream after waking from the `dream within a dream' is what the
dream-wish desires to put in place of the obliterated reality. It may therefore be assumed
that the part `dreamed' contains the representation of the reality, the real memory, while,
on the other hand, the continued dream contains the representation of what the dreamer
merely wishes. The inclusion of a certain content in `a dream within a dream' is therefore
equivalent to the wish that what has been characterised as a dream had never occurred. In
other words: when a particular incident is represented by the dream-work in a `dream', it
signifies the strongest confirmation of the reality of this incident, the most emphatic
affirmation of it. The dream-work utilises the dream itself as a form of repudiation, and
thereby confirms the theory that a dream is a wish-fulfilment.
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1 I have since given the complete analysis and synthesis of two dreams in the Bruchstück
einer Hysterieanalyse, 1905 (Ges. Schriften, Bd. viii). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case
of Hysteria, translated by Strachey, Collected Papers, vol. iii, Hogarth Press, London. O.
Rank's analysis, Ein Traum der sich selbst deutet, deserves mention as the most complete
interpretation of a comparatively long dream.
2 From a work of K. Abel's Der Gegensinn der Urworte, 1884 (see my review of it in the
Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch, ii, 1910 (Ges. Schriften, Bd. x), I learned the surprising fact,
which is confirmed by other philologists, that the oldest languages behaved just as
dreams do in this regard. They had originally only one word for both extremes in a series
of qualities or activities (strong-weak, old-young, far-near, bind-separate), and formed
separate designations for the two opposites only secondarily, by slight modifications of
the common primitive word. Abel demonstrates a very large number of those
relationships in ancient Egyptian, and points to distinct remnants of the same
development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic languages.
3 cf. here the observations made on pp. 161ff.
4 If I do not know behind which of the persons appearing in the dream I am to look for my
ego, I observe the following rule: That person in the dream who is subject to an emotion
which I am aware of while asleep is the one that conceals my ego.
5 The hysterical attack often employs the same device of temporal inversion in order to
conceal its meaning from the observer. The attack of a hysterical girl, for example,
consists in enacting a little romance, which she has imagined in the unconscious in
connection with an encounter in a tram. A man, attracted by the beauty of her foot,
addresses her while she is reading, whereupon she goes with him and a passionate lovescene
ensues. Her attack begins with the representation of this scene by writhing
movements of the body (accompanied by movements of the lips and folding of the arms
to signify kisses and embraces), whereupon she hurries into the next room, sits down on a
chair, lifts her skirt in order to show her foot, acts as though she were about to read a
book, and speaks to me (answers me). Cf. the observation of Artemidorus: `In
interpreting dreamstories one must consider them the first time from the beginning to the
end, and the second time from the end to the beginning.'
6 I do not know today whether I was justified in doing so.
7 Accompanying hysterical symptoms, amenorrhoea and profound depression were the
chief troubles of this patient.
8 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book ii, chap. v, trans. by Wm. Whiston, David
McKay, Philadelphia.
9 A reference to an experience of childhood emerges, in the complete analysis, through
the following connecting links: `The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go.' And then
follows the waggish question: `How old is the Moor when he has done his duty?' -- `A
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year, then he can go (walk).' (It is said that I came into the world with so much black
curly hair that my mother declared that I was a little Moor.) The fact that I cannot find
my hat is an experience of the day which has been exploited in various senses. Our
servant, who is a genius at stowing things away, had hidden the hat. A rejection of
melancholy thoughts of death is concealed behind the conclusion of the dream: `I have
not nearly done my duty yet; I cannot go yet.' Birth and death together -- as in the dream
of Goethe and the paralytic, which was a little earlier in date.
10 This theory is not in accordance with more recent views.
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D. REGARD FOR REPRESENTABILITY
We have hitherto been concerned with investigating the manner in which our dreams
represent the relations between the dream-thoughts, but we have often extended our
inquiry to the further question as to what alterations the dream-material itself undergoes
for the purposes of dream-formation. We now know that the dream-material, after being
stripped of a great many of its relations, is subjected to compression, while at the same
time displacements of the intensity of its elements enforce a psychic transvaluation of this
material. The displacements which we have considered were shown to be substitutions of
one particular idea for another, in some way related to the original by its associations, and
the displacements were made to facilitate the condensation, inasmuch as in this manner,
instead of two elements, a common mean between them found its way into the dream. So
far no mention has been made of any other kind of displacement. But we learn from the
analyses that displacement of another kind does occur, and that it manifests itself in an
exchange of the verbal expression for the thought in question. In both cases we are
dealing with a displacement along a chain of associations, but the same process takes
place in different psychic spheres, and the result of this displacement in the one case is
that one element is replaced by another, while in the other case an element exchanges its
verbal shape for another.
This second kind of displacement occurring in dream-formation is not only of great
theoretical interest, but is also peculiarly well-fitted to explain the appearance of fantastic
absurdity in which dreams disguise themselves. Displacement usually occurs in such a
way that a colourless and abstract expression of the dream-thought is exchanged for one
that is pictorial and concrete. The advantage, and along with it the purpose, of this
substitution is obvious. Whatever is pictorial is capable of representation in dreams and
can be fitted into a situation in which abstract expression would confront the dreamrepresentation
with difficulties not unlike those which would arise if a political leading
article had to be represented in an illustrated journal. Not only the possibility of
representation, but also the interests of condensation and of the censorship, may be
furthered by this exchange. Once the abstractly expressed and unserviceable dreamthought
is translated into pictorial language, those contacts and identities between this
new expression and the rest of the dream-material which are required by the dream-work,
and which it contrives whenever they are not available, are more readily provided, since
in every language concrete terms, owing to their evolution, are richer in associations than
are abstract terms. It may be imagined that a good part of the intermediate work in
dream-formation, which seeks to reduce the separate dream-thoughts to the tersest and
most unified expression in the dream, is effected in this manner, by fitting paraphrases of
the various thoughts. The one thought whose mode of expression has perhaps been
determined by other factors will therewith exert a distributive and selective influence on
the expressions available for the others, and it may even do this from the very start, just
as it would in the creative activity of a poet. When a poem is to be written in rhymed
couplets, the second rhyming line is bound by two conditions: it must express the
meaning allotted to it, and its expression must permit of a rhyme with the first line. The
best poems are, of course, those in which one does not detect the effort to find a rhyme,
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and in which both thoughts have as a matter of course, by mutual induction, selected the
verbal expression which, with a little subsequent adjustment, will permit of the rhyme.
In some cases the change of expression serves the purposes of dream-condensation more
directly, in that it provides an arrangement of words which, being ambiguous, permits of
the expression of more than one of the dream-thoughts. The whole range of verbal wit is
thus made to serve the purpose of the dream-work. The part played by words in dreamformation
ought not to surprise us. A word, as the point of junction of a number of ideas,
possesses, as it were, a predestined ambiguity, and the neuroses (obsessions, phobias)
take advantage of the opportunities for condensation and disguise afforded by words
quite as eagerly as do dreams.1 That dream-distortion also profits by this displacement of
expression may be readily demonstrated. It is indeed confusing if one ambiguous word is
substituted for two with single meanings, and the replacement of sober, everyday
language by a plastic mode of expression baffles our understanding, especially since a
dream never tells us whether the elements presented by it are to be interpreted literally or
metaphorically, whether they refer to the dream-material directly, or only by means of
interpolated expressions. Generally speaking, in the interpretation of any element of a
dream it is doubtful whether it
(a) is to be accepted in the negative or the positive sense (contrast
relation);
(b) is to be interpreted historically (as a memory);
(c) is symbolic; or whether
(d) its valuation is to be based upon its wording.
In spite of this versatility, we may say that the representation effected by the dream-work,
which was never even intended to be understood, does not impose upon the translator any
greater difficulties than those that the ancient writers of hieroglyphics imposed upon their
readers.
I have already given several examples of dream-representations which are held together
only by ambiguity of expression (`her mouth opens without difficulty', in the dream of
Irma's injection; `I cannot go yet after all', in the last dream related, etc.). I shall now cite
a dream in the analysis of which plastic representation of the abstract thoughts plays a
greater part. The difference between such dream-interpretation and the interpretation by
means of symbols may nevertheless be clearly defined; in the symbolic interpretation of
dreams the key to the symbolism is selected arbitrarily by the interpreter, while in our
own cases of verbal disguise these keys are universally known and are taken from
established modes of speech. Provided one hits on the right idea on the right occasion,
one may solve dreams of this kind, either completely or in part, independently of any
statements made by the dreamer.
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A lady, a friend of mine, dreams: She is at the opera. It is a Wagnerian performance,
which has lasted until 7.45 in the morning. In the stalls and pit there are tables, at which
people are eating and drinking. Her cousin and his young wife, who have just returned
from their honeymoon, are sitting at one of these tables; beside them is a member of the
aristocracy. The young wife is said to have brought him back with her from the
honeymoon quite openly, just as she might have brought back a hat. In the middle of the
stalls there is a high tower, on the top of which there is a platform surrounded by an iron
railing. There, high overhead, stands the conductor, with the features of Hans Richter,
continually running round behind the railing, perspiring terribly; and from this position
he is conducting the orchestra, which is arranged round the base of the tower. She
herself is sitting in a box with a friend of her own sex (known to me). Her younger sister
tries to hand her up, from the stalls, a large lump of coal, alleging that she had not
known that it would be so long, and that she must by this time be miserably cold. (As
though the boxes ought to have been heated during the long performance.)
Although in other respects the dream gives a good picture of the situation, it is, of course,
nonsensical enough: the tower in the middle of the stalls, from which the conductor leads
the orchestra, and above all the coal which her sister hands up to her. I purposely asked
for no analysis of this dream. With some knowledge of the personal relations of the
dreamer, I was able to interpret parts of it independently of her. I knew that she had felt
intense sympathy for a musician whose career had been prematurely brought to an end by
insanity. I therefore decided to take the tower in the stalls verbally. It then emerged that
the man whom she wished to see in the place of Hans Richter towered above all the other
members of the orchestra. This tower must be described as a composite formation by
means of apposition; by its substructure it represents the greatness of the man, but by the
railing at the top, behind which he runs round like a prisoner or an animal in a cage (an
allusion to the name of the unfortunate man2), it represents his later fate. `Lunatic-tower'
is perhaps the expression in which the two thoughts might have met.
Now that we have discovered the dream's method of representation, we may try, with the
same key, to unlock the meaning of the second apparent absurdity, that of the coal which
her sister hands up to the dreamer. `Coal' should mean `secret love'.
No fire, no coal so hotly glows
As the secret love of which no one knows.
She and her friend remain seated3 while her younger sister, who still has a prospect of
marrying, hands her up the coal `because she did not know that it would be so long.'
What would be so long is not told in the dream. If it were an anecdote, we should say `the
performance'; but in the dream we may consider the sentence as it is, declare it to be
ambiguous, and add `before she married'. The interpretation `secret love' is then
confirmed by the mention of the cousin who is sitting with his wife in the stalls, and by
the open love-affair attributed to the latter. The contrasts between secret and open love,
between the dreamer's fire and the coldness of the young wife, dominate the dream.
Moreover, here once again there is a person `in a high position' as a middle term between
the aristocrat and the musician who is justified in raising high hopes.
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In the above analysis we have at last brought to light a third factor, whose part in the
transformation of the dream-thoughts into the dream-content is by no means trivial:
namely, consideration of the suitability of the dream-thoughts for representation in the
particular psychic material of which the dream makes use -- that is, for the most part in
visual images. Among the various subordinate ideas associated with the essential dreamthoughts,
those will be preferred which permit of visual representation, and the dreamwork
does not hesitate to recast the intractable thoughts into another verbal form, even
though this is a more unusual form, provided it makes representation possible, and thus
puts an end to the psychological distress caused by strangulated thinking. This pouring of
the thought-content into another mould may at the same time serve the work of
condensation, and may establish relations with another thought which otherwise would
not have been established. It is even possible that this second thought may itself have
previously changed its original expression for the purpose of meeting the first one halfway.
Herbert Silberer4 has described a good method of directly observing the transformation of
thoughts into images which occurs in dream-formation, and has thus made it possible to
study in isolation this one factor of the dream-work. If while in a state of fatigue and
somnolence he imposed upon himself a mental effort, it frequently happened that the
thought escaped him, and in its place there appeared a picture in which he could
recognise the substitute for the thought. Not quite appropriately, Silberer described this
substitution as `auto-symbolic'. I shall cite here a few examples from Silberer's work, and
on account of certain peculiarities of the phenomena observed I shall refer to the subject
later on.
Example 1. -- I remember that I have to correct a halting passage in an
essay.
Symbol. -- I see myself planing a piece of wood.
Example 5. -- I endeavour to call to mind the aim of certain metaphysical
studies which I am proposing to undertake.
This aim, I reflect, consists in working one's way through, while seeking
for the basis of existence, to ever higher forms of consciousness or levels
of being.
Symbol. -- I run a long knife under a cake as though to take a slice out of
it.
Interpretation. -- My movement with the knife signifies `working one's
way through'. . . . The explanation of the basis of the symbolism is as
follows: At table it devolves upon me now and again to cut and distribute
a cake, a business which I perform with a long, flexible knife, and which
necessitates a certain amount of care. In particular, the neat extraction of
the cut slices of cake presents a certain amount of difficulty; the knife
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must be carefully pushed under the slices in question (the slow `working
one's way through' in order to get to the bottom). But there is yet more
symbolism in the picture. The cake of the symbol was really a `doboscake'
-- that is, a cake in which the knife has to cut through several layers
(the levels of consciousness and thought).
Example 9. -- I lost the thread in a train of thought. I make an effort to
find it again, but I have to recognise that the point of departure has
completely escaped me.
Symbol. -- Part of a form of type, the last lines of which have fallen out.'
In view of the part played by witticisms, puns, quotations, songs, and proverbs in the
intellectual life of educated persons, it would be entirely in accordance with our
expectations to find disguises of this sort used with extreme frequency in the
representation of the dream-thoughts. Only in the case of a few types of material has a
generally valid dream-symbolism established itself on the basis of generally known
allusions and verbal equivalents. A good part of this symbolism, however, is common to
the psychoneuroses, legends, and popular usages as well as to dreams.
In fact, if we look more closely into the matter, we must recognise that in employing this
kind of substitution the dream-work is doing nothing at all original. For the achievement
of its purpose, which in this case is representation without interference from the
censorship, it simply follows the paths which it finds already marked out in unconscious
thinking, and gives the preference to those transformations of the repressed material
which are permitted to become conscious also in the form of witticisms and allusions,
and with which all the fantasies of neurotics are replete. Here we suddenly begin to
understand the dream-interpretations of Scherner, whose essential correctness I have
vindicated elsewhere. The preoccupation of the imagination with one's own body is by no
means peculiar to or characteristic of the dream alone. My analyses have shown me that it
is constantly found in the unconscious thinking of neurotics, and may be traced back to
sexual curiosity, whose object, in the adolescent youth or maiden, is the genitals of the
opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But, as Scherner and Volkelt very truly insist, the
house does not constitute the only group of ideas which is employed for the
symbolisation of the body, either in dreams or in the unconscious fantasies of neurosis.
To be sure, I know patients who have steadily adhered to an architectural symbolism for
the body and the genitals (sexual interest, of course, extends far beyond the region of the
external genital organs) -- patients for whom posts and pillars signify legs (as in the Song
of Songs), to whom every door suggests a bodily aperture (`hole'), and every water-pipe
the urinary system, and so on. But the groups of ideas appertaining to plant-life, or to the
kitchen, are just as often chosen to conceal sexual images;5 in respect of the former
everyday language, the sediment of imaginative comparisons dating from the remotest
times, has abundantly paved the way (the `vineyard' of the Lord, the `seed' of Abraham,
the `garden' of the maiden in the Song of Songs). The ugliest as well as the most intimate
details of sexual life may be thought or dreamed of in apparently innocent allusions to
culinary operations, and the symptoms of hysteria will become absolutely unintelligible if
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we forget that sexual symbolism may conceal itself behind the most commonplace and
inconspicuous matters as its safest hiding-place. That some neurotic children cannot look
at blood and raw meat, that they vomit at the sight of eggs and macaroni, and that the
dread of snakes, which is natural to mankind, is monstrously exaggerated in neurotics --
all this has a definite sexual meaning. Wherever the neurosis employs a disguise of this
sort, it treads the paths once trodden by the whole of humanity in the early stages of
civilisation -- paths to whose thinly veiled existence our idiomatic expressions, proverbs,
superstitions, and customs testify to this day.
I here insert the promised `flower-dream' of a female patient, in which I shall print in
Roman type everything which is to be sexually interpreted. This beautiful dream lost all
its charm for the dreamer once it had been interpreted.
(a) Preliminary dream: She goes to the two maids in the kitchen and scolds them for
taking so long to prepare `a little bite of food'. She also sees a very large number of
heavy kitchen utensils in the kitchen, heaped into piles and turned upside down in order
to drain. Later addition: The two maids go to fetch water, and have, as it were, to climb
into a river which reaches up to the house or into the courtyard.6
(b) Main dream:7 She is descending from a height8 over curiously constructed railings, or
a fence which is composed of large square trelliswork hurdles with small square
apertures.9 It is really not adapted for climbing; she is constantly afraid that she cannot
find a place for her foot, and she is glad that her dress doesn't get caught anywhere, and
that she is able to climb down it so respectably.10 As she climbs she is carrying a big
branch in her hand,11 really like a tree, which is thickly studded with red flowers; a
spreading branch, with many twigs.12 With this is connected the idea of cherry-blossoms
(Blüten = flowers), but they look like fully opened camellias, which of course do not grow
on trees. As she is descending, she first has one, then suddenly two, and then again only
one.13 When she has reached the ground the lower flowers have already begun to fall.
Now that she has reached the bottom she sees an `odd man' who is combing -- as she
would like to put it -- just such a tree, that is, with a piece of wood he is scraping thick
bunches of hair from it, which hang from it like moss. Other men have chopped off such
branches in a garden, and have flung them into the road, where they are lying about, so
that a number of people take some of them. But she asks whether this is right, whether
she may take one, too.14 In the garden there stands a young man (he is a foreigner, and
known to her) toward whom she goes in order to ask him how it is possible to transplant
such branches in her own garden.15 He embraces her, whereupon she struggles and asks
him what he is thinking of, whether it is permissible to embrace her in such a manner. He
says there is nothing wrong in it, that it is permitted.16 He then declares himself willing to
go with her into the other garden, in order to show her how to put them in, and he says
something to her which she does not quite understand: `Besides this I need three metres
(later she says: square metres) or three fathoms of ground.' It seems as though he were
asking her for something in return for his willingness, as though he had the intention of
indemnifying (reimbursing) himself in her garden, as though he wanted to evade some
law or other, to derive some advantage from it without causing her an injury. She does
not know whether or not he really shows her anything.
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The above dream, which has been given prominence on account of its symbolic elements,
may be described as a `biographical' dream. Such dreams occur frequently in
psychoanalysis, but perhaps only rarely outside it.17
I have, of course, an abundance of such material, but to reproduce it here would lead us
too far into the consideration of neurotic conditions. Everything points to the same
conclusion, namely, that we need not assume that any special symbolising activity of the
psyche is operative in dream-formation; that, on the contrary, the dream makes use of
such symbolisations as are to be found ready-made in unconscious thinking, since these,
by reason of their ease of representation, and for the most part by reason of their being
exempt from the censorship, satisfy more effectively the requirements of dreamformation.
1 cf. Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious.
2 Hugo Wolf.
3 [The German sitzen geblieben is often applied to women who have not succeeded in
getting married. -- TRANS.]
4 Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch, i, 1909.
5 A mass of corroborative material may be found in the three supplementary volumes of
Edward Fuchs's Illustrierte Sittengeschichte; privately printed by A. Lange, Munich.
6 For the interpretation of this preliminary dream, which is to be regarded as `causal', see
p. 199.
7 Her career.
8 Exalted origin, the wish-contrast to the preliminary dream.
9 A composite formation, which unites two localities, the so-called garret (German: Boden
= floor, garret) of her father's house, in which she used to play with her brother, the
object of her later fantasies, and the farm of a malicious uncle, who used to tease her.
10 Wish-contrast to an actual memory of her uncle's farm, to the effect that she used to
expose herself while she was asleep.
11 Just as the angel bears a lily-stem in the Annunciation.
12 For the explanation of this composite formation, see pp. 202-03; innocence,
menstruation, La Dame aux Camélias.
13 Referring to the plurality of the persons who serve her fantasies.
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14 Whether it is permissible to masturbate. [`Sich einen herunterreissen' means `to pull off'
and colloquially `to masturbate'. -- TRANS.]
15 The branch (Ast) has long been used to represent the male organ, and, moreover,
contains a very distinct allusion to the family name of the dreamer
16 Refers to matrimonial precautions, as does that which immediately follows.
17 An analogous `biographical' dream is recorded on p. 242, among the examples of dream
symbolism.
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E. REPRESENTATION IN DREAMS BY SYMBOLS: SOME FURTHER
TYPICAL DREAMS
The analysis of the last biographical dream shows that I recognised the symbolism in
dreams from the very outset. But it was only little by little that I arrived at a full
appreciation of its extent and significance, as the result of increasing experience, and
under the influence of the works of W. Stekel, concerning which I may here fittingly say
something.
This author, who has perhaps injured psychoanalysis as much as he has benefited it,
produced a large number of novel symbolic translations, to which no credence was given
at first, but most of which were later confirmed and had to be accepted. Stekel's services
are in no way belittled by the remark that the sceptical reserve with which these symbols
were received was not unjustified. For the examples upon which he based his
interpretations were often unconvincing, and, moreover, he employed a method which
must be rejected as scientifically unreliable. Stekel found his symbolic meanings by way
of intuition, by virtue of his individual faculty of immediately understanding the symbols.
But such an art cannot be generally assumed; its efficiency is immune from criticism, and
its results have therefore no claim to credibility. It is as though one were to base one's
diagnosis of infectious diseases on the olfactory impressions received beside the sick-bed,
although of course there have been clinicians to whom the sense of smell -- atrophied in
most people -- has been of greater service than to others, and who really have been able
to diagnose a case of abdominal typhus by their sense of smell.
The progressive experience of psychoanalysis has enabled us to discover patients who
have displayed in a surprising degree this immediate understanding of dream-symbolism.
Many of these patients suffered from dementia praecox, so that for a time there was an
inclination to suspect that all dreamers with such an understanding of symbols were
suffering from that disorder. But this did not prove to be the case; it is simply a question
of a personal gift or idiosyncrasy without perceptible pathological significance.
When one has familiarised oneself with the extensive employment of symbolism for the
representation of sexual material in dreams, one naturally asks oneself whether many of
these symbols have not a permanently established meaning, like the signs in shorthand;
and one even thinks of attempting to compile a new dream-book on the lines of the cipher
method. In this connection it should be noted that symbolism does not appertain
especially to dreams, but rather to the unconscious imagination, and particularly to that of
the people, and it is to be found in a more developed condition in folklore, myths,
legends, idiomatic phrases, proverbs, and the current witticisms of a people than in
dreams. We should have, therefore, to go far beyond the province of dream-interpretation
in order fully to investigate the meaning of symbolism, and to discuss the numerous
problems -- for the most part still unsolved -- which are associated with the concept of the
symbol.1 We shall here confine ourselves to say that representation by a symbol comes
under the heading of the indirect representations, but that we are warned by all sorts of
signs against indiscriminately classing symbolic representation with the other modes of
indirect representation before we have clearly conceived its distinguishing characteristics.
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In a number of cases the common quality shared by the symbol and the thing which it
represents is obvious, in others it is concealed; in these latter cases the choice of the
symbol appears to be enigmatic. And these are the very cases that must be able to
elucidate the ultimate meaning of the symbolic relation; they point to the fact that it is of
a genetic nature. What is today symbolically connected was probably united, in primitive
times, by conceptual and linguistic identity.2 The symbolic relationship seems to be a
residue and reminder of a former identity. It may also be noted that in many cases the
symbolic identity extends beyond the linguistic identity, as had already been asserted by
Schubert (1814).3
Dreams employ this symbolism to give a disguised representation to their latent thoughts.
Among the symbols thus employed there are, of course, many which constantly, or all but
constantly, mean the same thing. But we must bear in mind the curious plasticity of
psychic material. Often enough a symbol in the dream-content may have to be interpreted
not symbolically but in accordance with its proper meaning; at other times the dreamer,
having to deal with special memory-material, may take the law into his own hands and
employ anything whatever as a sexual symbol, though it is not generally so employed.
Wherever he has the choice of several symbols for the representation of a dream-content,
he will decide in favour of that symbol which is in addition objectively related to his
other thought-material; that is to say, he will employ an individual motivation besides the
typically valid one.
Although since Scherner's time the more recent investigations of dream-problems have
definitely established the existence of dream-symbolism -- even Havelock Ellis
acknowledges that our dreams are indubitably full of symbols -- it must yet be admitted
that the existence of symbols in dreams has not only facilitated dream-interpretation, but
has also made it more difficult. The technique of interpretation in accordance with the
dreamer's free associations more often than otherwise leaves us in the lurch as far as the
symbolic elements of the dream-content are concerned. A return to the arbitrariness of
dream-interpretation as it was practised in antiquity, and is seemingly revived by Stekel's
wild interpretations, is contrary to scientific method. Consequently, those elements in the
dream-content which are to be symbolically regarded compel us to employ a combined
technique, which on the one hand is based on the dreamer's associations, while on the
other hand the missing portions have to be supplied by the interpreter's understanding of
the symbols. Critical circumspection in the solution of the symbols must coincide with
careful study of the symbols in especially transparent examples of dreams in order to
silence the reproach of arbitrariness in dream-interpretation. The uncertainties which still
adhere to our function as dream-interpreters are due partly to our imperfect knowledge
(which, however, can be progressively increased) and partly to certain peculiarities of the
dream-symbols themselves. These often possess many and varied meanings, so that, as in
Chinese script, only the context can furnish the correct meaning. This multiple
significance of the symbol is allied to the dream's faculty of admitting overinterpretations,
of representing, in the same content, various wish-impulses and thoughtformations,
often of a widely divergent character.
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After these limitations and reservations I will proceed. The Emperor and the Empress
(King and Queen)4 in most cases really represent the dreamer's parents; the dreamer
himself or herself is the prince or princess. But the high authority conceded to the
Emperor is also conceded to great men, so that in some dreams, for example, Goethe
appears as a father-symbol (Hitschmann). -- All elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks,
umbrellas (on account of the opening, which might be likened to an erection), all sharp
and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes, represent the male member. A
frequent, but not very intelligible symbol for the same is a nail-file (a reference to
rubbing and scraping?). -- Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the
female organ; also cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels. -- A room in a dream generally
represents a woman; the description of its various entrances and exits is scarcely
calculated to make us doubt this interpretation.5 The interest as to whether the room is
`open' or `locked' will be readily understood in this connection. (Cf. Dora's dream in
Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria.) There is no need to be explicit as to the sort of key
that will unlock the room; the symbolism of `lock and key' has been gracefully if broadly
employed by Uhland in his song of the Graf Eberstein. -- The dream of walking through
a suite of rooms signifies a brothel or a harem. But, as H. Sachs has shown by an
admirable example, it is also employed to represent marriage (contrast). An interesting
relation to the sexual investigations of childhood emerges when the dreamer dreams of
two rooms which were previously one, or finds that a familiar room in a house of which
he dreams has been divided into two, or the reverse. In childhood the female genitals and
anus (the `behind'6) are conceived of as a single opening according to the infantile cloaca
theory, and only later is it discovered that this region of the body contains two separate
cavities and openings. Steep inclines, ladders, and stairs, and going up or down them, are
symbolic representations of the sexual act.7 Smooth walls over which one climbs, facades
of houses, across which one lets oneself down -- often with a sense of great anxiety --
correspond to erect human bodies, and probably repeat in our dreams childish memories
of climbing up parents or nurses. `Smooth' walls are men; in anxiety dreams one often
holds firmly to `projections' on houses. Tables, whether bare or covered, and boards, are
women, perhaps by virtue of contrast, since they have no protruding contours. `Wood',
generally speaking, seems, in accordance with its linguistic relations, to represent
feminine matter (Materie). The name of the island Madeira means `wood' in Portuguese.
Since `bed and board' (mensa et thorus) constitute marriage, in dreams the latter is often
substituted for the former, and as far as practicable the sexual representation-complex is
transposed to the eating-complex. -- Of articles of dress, a woman's hat may very often be
interpreted with certainty as the male genitals. In the dreams of men one often finds the
necktie as a symbol for the penis; this is not only because neckties hang down in front of
the body, and are characteristic of men, but also because one can select them at pleasure,
a freedom which nature prohibits as regards the original of the symbol. Persons who
make use of this symbol in dreams are very extravagant in the matter of ties, and possess
whole collections of them.8 All complicated machines and appliances are very probably
the genitals -- as a rule the male genitals -- in the description of which the symbolism of
dreams is as indefatigable as human wit. It is quite unmistakable that all weapons and
tools are used as symbols for the male organ: e.g. ploughshare, hammer, gun, revolver,
dagger, sword, etc. Again, many of the landscapes seen in dreams, especially those that
contain bridges or wooded mountains, may be readily recognised as descriptions of the
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genitals. Marcinowski collected a series of examples in which the dreamer explained his
dream by means of drawings, in order to represent the landscapes and places appearing in
it. These drawings clearly showed the distinction between the manifest and the latent
meaning of the dream. Whereas, naively regarded, they seemed to represent plans, maps,
and so forth, closer investigation showed that they were representations of the human
body, of the genitals, etc., and only after conceiving them thus could the dream be
understood.9 Finally, where one finds incomprehensible neologisms one may suspect
combinations of components having a sexual significance. -- Children, too, often signify
the genitals, since men and women are in the habit of fondly referring to their genital
organs as `little man', `little woman', `little thing'. The `little brother' was correctly
recognised by Stekel as the penis. To play with or to beat a little child is often the dream's
representation of masturbation. The dream-work represents castration by baldness, haircutting,
the loss of teeth, and beheading. As an insurance against castration, the dream
uses one of the common symbols of a penis in double or multiple form; and the
appearance in a dream of a lizard -- an animal whose tail, if pulled off, is regenerated by a
new growth -- has the same meaning. Most of those animals which are utilised as genital
symbols in mythology and folklore play this part also in dreams: the fish, the snail, the
cat, the mouse (on account of the hairiness of the genitals), but above all the snake, which
is the most important symbol of the male member. Small animals and vermin are
substitutes for little children, e.g. undesired sisters or brothers. To be infected with
vermin is often the equivalent for pregnancy. -- As a very recent symbol of the male
organ I may mention the airship, whose employment is justified by its relation to flying,
and also, occasionally, by its form. -- Stekel has given a number of other symbols, not yet
sufficiently verified, which he has illustrated by examples. The works of this author, and
especially his book Die Sprache des Traumes, contain the richest collection of
interpretations of symbols, some of which were ingeniously guessed and were proved to
be correct upon investigation, as, for example, in the section on the symbolism of death.
The author's lack of critical reflection, and his tendency to generalise at all costs, make
his interpretations doubtful or inapplicable, so that in making use of his works caution is
urgently advised. I shall therefore restrict myself to mentioning a few examples.
Right and left, according to Stekel, are to be understood in dreams in an ethical sense.
`The right-hand path always signifies the way to righteousness, the left-hand path the
path to crime. Thus the left may signify homosexuality, incest, and perversion, while the
right signifies marriage, relations with a prostitute, etc. The meaning is always
determined by the individual moral standpoint of the dreamer' (loc. cit., p. 466). Relatives
in dreams generally stand for the genitals (pp. 373 ff.). Here I can confirm this meaning
only for the son, the daughter, and the younger sister -- that is, wherever `little thing'
could be employed. On the other hand, verified examples allow us to recognise sisters as
symbols of the breasts, and brothers as symbols of the larger hemispheres. To be unable
to overtake a carriage is interpreted by Stekel as regret at being unable to catch up with a
difference in age (p. 479). The luggage of a traveller is the burden of sin by which one is
oppressed (ibid.). But a traveller's luggage often proves to be an unmistakable symbol of
one's own genitals. To numbers, which frequently occur in dreams, Stekel has assigned a
fixed symbolic meaning, but these interpretations seem neither sufficiently verified nor of
universal validity, although in individual cases they can usually be recognised as
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plausible. We have, at all events, abundant confirmation that the figure three is a symbol
of the male genitals. One of Stekel's generalisations refers to the double meaning of the
genital symbols. `Where is there a symbol,' he asks, `which (if in any way permitted by
the imagination) may not be used simultaneously in the masculine and the feminine
sense?' To be sure, the clause in parenthesis retracts much of the absolute character of this
assertion, for this double meaning is not always permitted by the imagination. Still, I
think it is not superfluous to state that in my experience this general statement of Stekel's
requires elaboration. Besides those symbols which are just as frequently employed for the
male as for the female genitals, there are others which preponderantly, or almost
exclusively, designate one of the sexes, and there are yet others which, so far as we know,
have only the male or only the female signification. To use long, stiff objects and
weapons as symbols of the female genitals, or hollow objects (chests, boxes, etc.) as
symbols of the male genitals, is certainly not permitted by the imagination.
It is true that the tendency of dreams, and of the unconscious fantasy, to employ the
sexual symbols bisexually, reveals an archaic trait, for in childhood the difference in the
genitals is unknown, and the same genitals are attributed to both sexes. One may also be
misled as regards the significance of a bisexual symbol if one forgets the fact that in some
dreams a general reversal of sexes takes place, so that the male organ is represented by
the female, and vice versa. Such dreams express, for example, the wish of a woman to be
a man.
The genitals may even be represented in dreams by other parts of the body: the male
member by the hand or the foot, the female genital orifice by the mouth, the ear, or even
the eye. The secretions of the human body -- mucus, tears, urine, semen, etc. -- may be
used in dreams interchangeably. This statement of Stekel's, correct in the main, has
suffered a justifiable critical restriction as the result of certain comments of R. Reitler's
(Internat. Zeitschr. für Psych., i, 1913). The gist of the matter is the replacement of an
important secretion, such as the semen, by an indifferent one.
These very incomplete indications may suffice to stimulate others to make a more
painstaking collection.10 I have attempted a much more detailed account of dreamsymbolism
in my Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (trans. by Joan Riviere; Allen
and Unwin, London).
I shall now append a few instances of the use of such symbols, which will show how
impossible it is to arrive at the interpretation of a dream if one excludes dreamsymbolism,
but also how in many cases it is imperatively forced upon one. At the same
time, I must expressly warn the investigator against overestimating the importance of
symbols in the interpretation of dreams, restricting the work of dream-translation to the
translation of symbols, and neglecting the technique of utilising the associations of the
dreamer. The two techniques of dream-interpretation must supplement one another;
practically, however, as well as theoretically, precedence is retained by the latter process,
which assigns the final significance to the utterances of the dreamer, while the symboltranslations
which we undertake play an auxiliary part.
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1. The hat as the symbol of a man (of the male genitals):11 (A fragment from the dream of
a young woman who suffered from agoraphobia as the result of her fear of temptation.)
`I am walking in the street in summer; I am wearing a straw hat of peculiar shape, the
middle piece of which is bent upwards, while the side pieces hang downwards (here the
description hesitates), and in such a fashion that one hangs lower than the other. I am
cheerful and in a confident mood, and as I pass a number of young officers I think to
myself: You can't do anything to me.'
As she could produce no associations to the hat, I said to her: `The hat is really a male
genital organ, with its raised middle piece and the two downward-hanging side pieces.' It
is perhaps peculiar that her hat should be supposed to be a man, but after all one says:
Unter die Haube kommen (to get under the cap) when we mean: to get married. I
intentionally refrained from interpreting the details concerning the unequal dependence of
the two side pieces, although the determination of just such details must point the way to
the interpretation. I went on to say that if, therefore, she had a husband with such
splendid genitals she would not have to fear the officers; that is, she would have nothing
to wish from them, for it was essentially her temptation-fantasies which prevented her
from going about unprotected and unaccompanied. This last explanation of her anxiety I
had already been able to give her repeatedly on the basis of other material.
It is quite remarkable how the dreamer behaved after this interpretation. She withdrew
her description of the hat, and would not admit that she had said that the two side pieces
were hanging down. I was, however, too sure of what I had heard to allow myself to be
misled, and so I insisted that she did say it. She was quiet for a while, and then found the
courage to ask why it was that one of her husband's testicles was lower than the other,
and whether it was the same with all men. With this the peculiar detail of the hat was
explained, and the whole interpretation was accepted by her.
The hat symbol was familiar to me long before the patient related this dream. From other
but less transparent cases I believed that I might assume the hat could also stand for the
female genitals.12
2. The `little one' as the genital organ. Being run over as a symbol of sexual intercourse.
(Another dream of the same agoraphobic patient.)
`Her mother sends away her little daughter so that she has to go alone. She then drives
with her mother to the railway station, and sees her little one walking right along the
track, so that she is bound to be run over. She hears the bones crack. (At this she
experiences a feeling of discomfort but no real horror.) She then looks out through the
carriage window, to see whether the parts cannot be seen behind. Then she reproaches
her mother for allowing the little one to go out alone.'
Analysis. -- It is not an easy matter to give here a complete interpretation of the dream. It
forms part of a cycle of dreams, and can be fully understood only in connection with the
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rest. For it is not easy to obtain the material necessary to demonstrate the symbolism in a
sufficiently isolated condition. The patient at first finds that the railway journey is to be
interpreted historically as an allusion to a departure from a sanatorium for nervous
diseases, with whose director she was of course in love. Her mother fetched her away,
and before her departure the physician came to the railway station and gave her a bunch
of flowers; she felt uncomfortable because her mother witnessed this attention. Here the
mother, therefore, appears as the disturber of her tender feelings, a role actually played by
this strict woman during her daughter's girlhood. -- The next association referred to the
sentence: `She then looks to see whether the parts cannot be seen behind.' In the dreamfacade
one would naturally be compelled to think of the pieces of the little daughter who
had been run over and crushed. The association, however, turns in quite a different
direction. She recalls that she once saw her father in the bathroom, naked, from behind;
she then begins to talk about sex differences, and remarks that in the man the genitals can
be seen from behind, but in the woman they cannot. In this connection she now herself
offers the interpretation that `the little one' is the genital organ, and her little one (she has
a four-year-old daughter) her own organ. She reproaches her mother for wanting her to
live as though she had no genitals, and recognises this reproach in the introductory
sentence of the dream: the mother sends her little one away, so that she has to go alone.
In her fantasy, going alone through the streets means having no man, no sexual relations
(coire = to go together), and this she does not like. According to all her statements, she
really suffered as a girl through her mother's jealousy, because her father showed a
preference for her.
The deeper interpretation of this dream depends upon another dream of the same night, in
which the dreamer identifies herself with her brother. She was a `tomboy', and was
always being told that she should have been born a boy. This identification with the
brother shows with especial clearness that `the little one' signifies the genital organ. The
mother threatened him (her) with castration, which could only be understood as a
punishment for playing with the genital parts, and the identification, therefore, shows that
she herself had masturbated as a child, though she had retained only a memory of her
brother's having done so. An early knowledge of the male genitals, which she lost later,
must, according to the assertions of this second dream, have been acquired at this time.
Moreover, the second dream points to the infantile sexual theory that girls originate from
boys as a result of castration. After I had told her of this childish belief, she at once
confirmed it by an anecdote in which the boy asks the girl: `Was it cut off?' to which the
girl replies: `No, it's always been like that.' Consequently the sending away of `the little
one', of the genital organ, in the first dream refers also to the threatened castration.
Finally, she blames her mother for not having borne her as a boy.
That `being run over' symbolises sexual intercourse would not be evident from this dream
if we had not learned it from many other sources.
3. Representation of the genitals by buildings, stairs, and shafts.
(Dream of a young man inhibited by a father complex.)
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`He is taking a walk with his father in a place which is certainly the Prater, for one can
see the Rotunda, in front of which there is a small vestibule to which there is attached a
captive balloon; the balloon, however, seems rather limp. His father asks him what this is
all for; he is surprised at it, but he explains it to his father. They come into a courtyard in
which lies a large sheet of tin. His father wants to pull off a big piece of this, but first
looks round to see if anyone is watching. He tells his father that all he needs to do is to
speak to the overseer, and then he can take as much as he wants to without any more ado.
From this courtyard a flight of stairs leads down into a shaft, the walls of which are
softly upholstered, rather like a leather armchair. At the end of this shaft there is a long
platform, and then a new shaft begins . . . '
Analysis. -- This dreamer belonged to a type of patient which is not at all promising from
a therapeutic point of view; up to a certain point in the analysis such patients offer no
resistance whatever, but from that point onwards they prove to be almost inaccessible.
This dream he analysed almost independently. `The Rotunda,' he said, `is my genitals, the
captive balloon in front is my penis, about whose flaccidity I have been worried.' We
must, however, interpret it in greater detail: the Rotunda is the buttocks, constantly
associated by the child with the genitals; the smaller structure in front is the scrotum. In
the dream his father asks him what this is all for -- that is, he asks him about the purpose
and arrangement of the genitals. It is quite evident that this state of affairs should be
reversed, and that he ought to be the questioner. As such questioning on the part of the
father never occurred in reality, we must conceive the dream-thought as a wish, or
perhaps take it conditionally, as follows. `If I had asked my father for sexual
enlightenment . . . ' The continuation of this thought we shall presently find in another
place.
The courtyard in which the sheet of tin is spread out is not to be conceived symbolically
in the first instance, but originates from his father's place of business. For reasons of
discretion I have inserted the tin for another material in which the father deals without,
however, changing anything in the verbal expression of the dream. The dreamer had
entered his father's business, and had taken a terrible dislike to the somewhat
questionable practices upon which its profit mainly depended. Hence the continuation of
the above dream-thought (`if I had asked him') would be: `He would have deceived me
just as he does his customers.' For the `pulling off', which serves to represent commercial
dishonesty, the dreamer himself gives a second explanation, namely, masturbation. This
is not only quite familiar to us (see above, p. 229), but agrees very well with the fact that
the secrecy of masturbation is expressed by its opposite (one can do it quite openly).
Thus, it agrees entirely with our expectations that the auto-erotic activity should be
attributed to the father, just as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream. The
shaft he at once interprets as the vagina, by referring to the soft upholstering of the walls.
That the action of coition in the vagina is described as a going down instead of in the
usual way as a going up agrees with what I have found in other instances.13
The details -- that at the end of the first shaft there is a long platform, and then a new
shaft -- he himself explains biographically. He had for some time had sexual intercourse
with women, but had given it up on account of inhibitions, and now hopes to be able to
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begin it again with the aid of the treatment. The dream, however, becomes indistinct
towards the end, and to the experienced interpreter it becomes evident that in the second
scene of the dream the influence of another subject has already begun to assert itself;
which is indicated by his father's business, his dishonest practices, and the vagina
represented by the first shaft, so that one may assume a reference to his mother.
4. The male organ symbolised by persons and the female by a landscape.
(Dream of a woman of the lower class, whose husband is a policeman, reported by B.
Dattner.)
`. . . Then someone broke into the house and she anxiously called for a policeman. But he
went peacefully with two tramps into a church,14 to which a great many steps led up;15
behind the church there was a mountain16 on top of which there was a dense forest.17 The
policeman was provided with a helmet, a gorget, and a cloak.18 The two vagrants, who
went along with the policeman quite peaceably, had sack-like aprons tied round their
loins.19 A road led from the church to the mountains. This road was overgrown on each
side with grass and brushwood, which became thicker and thicker as it reached the top of
the mountain, where it spread out into quite a forest.'
5. Castration dreams of children.
(a) `A boy aged three years and five months, for whom his father's return from military
service is clearly inconvenient, wakes one morning in a disturbed and excited state, and
constantly repeats the question: Why did Daddy carry his head on a plate? Last night
Daddy carried his head on a plate.'
(b) `A student who is now suffering from a severe obsessional neurosis remembers that in
his sixth year he repeatedly had the following dream: He goes to the barber to have his
hair cut. Then a large woman with severe features comes up to him and cuts off his head.
He recognises the woman as his mother.'
6. A modified staircase dream.
To one of my patients, a sexual abstainer, who was very ill, whose fantasy was fixated
upon his mother, and who repeatedly dreamed of climbing stairs while accompanied by
his mother, I once remarked that moderate masturbation would probably have been less
harmful to him than his enforced abstinence. The influence of this remark provoked the
following dream:
His piano teacher reproaches him for neglecting his piano-playing, and for not
practising the Etudes of Moscheles and Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum. With reference
to this he remarked that the Gradus, too, is a stairway, and that the piano itself is a
stairway, as it has a scale.
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It may be said that there is no class of ideas which cannot be enlisted in the representation
of sexual facts and wishes.
7. The sensation of reality and the representation of repetition.
A man, now thirty-five, relates a clearly remembered dream which he claims to have had
when he was four years of age: The notary with whom his father's will was deposited --
he had lost his father at the age of three -- brought two large Emperor-pears, of which he
was given one to eat. The other lay on the windowsill of the living-room. He woke with
the conviction of the reality of what he had dreamt, and obstinately asked his mother to
give him the second pear; it was, he said, still lying on the windowsill. His mother
laughed at this.
Analysis. -- The notary was a jovial old gentleman who, as he seems to remember, really
sometimes brought pears with him. The window-sill was as he saw it in the dream.
Nothing else occurs to him in this connection, except, perhaps, that his mother has
recently told him a dream. She has two birds sitting on her head; she wonders when they
will fly away, but they do not fly away, and one of them flies to her mouth and sucks at
it.
The dreamer's inability to furnish associations justifies the attempt to interpret it by the
substitution of symbols. The two pears -- pommes ou poires -- are the breasts of the
mother who nursed him; the window-sill is the projection of the bosom, analogous to the
balconies in the dream of houses. His sensation of reality after waking is justified, for his
mother had actually suckled him for much longer than the customary term, and her breast
was still available. The dream is to be translated: `Mother, give (show) me the breast
again at which I once used to drink.' The `once' is represented by the eating of the one
pear, the `again' by the desire for the other. The temporal repetition of an act is habitually
represented in dreams by the numerical multiplication of an object.
It is naturally a very striking phenomenon that symbolism should already play a part in
the dream of a child of four, but this is the rule rather than the exception. One may say
that the dreamer has command of symbolism from the very first.
The early age at which people make use of symbolic representation, even apart from the
dream-life, may be shown by the following uninfluenced memory of a lady who is now
twentyseven: She is in her fourth year. The nursemaid is driving her, with her brother,
eleven months younger, and a cousin, who is between the two in age, to the lavatory, so
that they can do their little business there before going for their walk. As the oldest, she
sits on the seat and the other two on chambers. She asks her (female) cousin: Have you a
purse, too? Walter has a little sausage, I have a purse. The cousin answers: Yes, I have a
purse, too. The nursemaid listens, laughing, and relates the conversation to the mother,
whose reaction is a sharp reprimand.
Here a dream may be inserted whose excellent symbolism permitted of interpretation
with little assistance from the dreamer:
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8. The question of symbolism in the dreams of normal persons.20
An objection frequently raised by the opponents of psychoanalysis -- and recently also by
Havelock Ellis21 -- is that, although dream-symbolism may perhaps be a product of the
neurotic psyche, it has no validity whatever in the case of normal persons. But while
psychoanalysis recognises no essential distinctions, but only quantitative differences,
between the psychic life of the normal person and that of the neurotic, the analysis of
those dreams in which, in sound and sick persons alike, the repressed complexes display
the same activity, reveals the absolute identity of the mechanisms as well as of the
symbolism. Indeed, the natural dreams of healthy persons often contain a much simpler,
more transparent, and more characteristic symbolism than those of neurotics, which,
owing to the greater strictness of the censorship and the more extensive dream-distortion
resulting therefrom, are frequently troubled and obscured, and are therefore more difficult
to translate. The following dream serves to illustrate this fact. This dream comes from a
non-neurotic girl of a rather prudish and reserved type. In the course of conversation I
found that she was engaged to be married, but that there were hindrances in the way of
the marriage which threatened to postpone it. She related spontaneously the following
dream:
I arrange the centre of a table with flowers for a birthday. On being questioned she states
that in the dream she seemed to be at home (she has no home at the time) and
experienced a feeling of happiness.
The `popular' symbolism enables me to translate the dream for myself. It is the
expression of her wish to be married: the table, with the flowers in the centre, is symbolic
of herself and her genitals. She represents her future wishes as fulfilled, inasmuch as she
is already occupied with thoughts of the birth of a child; so the wedding has taken place
long ago.
I call her attention to the fact that `the centre of a table' is an unusual expression, which
she admits; but here, of course, I cannot question her more directly. I carefully refrain
from suggesting to her the meaning of the symbols, and ask her only for the thoughts
which occur to her mind in connection with the individual parts of the dream. In the
course of the analysis her reserve gave way to a distinct interest in the interpretation, and
a frankness which was made possible by the serious tone of the conversation. -- To my
question as to what kind of flowers they had been, her first answer is `expensive flowers;
one has to pay for them'; then she adds that they were lilies-of-the-valley, violets, and
pinks or carnations. I took the word lily in this dream in its popular sense, as a symbol of
chastity; she confirmed this, as purity occurred to her in association with lily. Valley is a
common feminine dream-symbol. The chance juxtaposition of the two symbols in the
name of the flower is made into a piece of dream-symbolism, and serves to emphasise the
preciousness of her virginity -- expensive flowers; one has to pay for them -- and
expresses the expectation that her husband will know how to appreciate its value. The
comment, expensive flowers, etc., has, as will be shown, a different meaning in every one
of the three different flower-symbols.
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I thought of what seemed to me a venturesome explanation of the hidden meaning of the
apparently quite asexual word violets by an unconscious relation to the French viol. But
to my surprise the dreamer's association was the English word violate. The accidental
phonetic similarity of the two words violet and violate is utilised by the dream to express
in `the language of flowers' the idea of the violence of defloration (another word which
makes use of flowersymbolism), and perhaps also to give expression to a masochistic
tendency on the part of the girl. -- An excellent example of the word bridges across which
run the paths to the unconscious. `One has to pay for them' here means life, with which
she has to pay for becoming a wife and a mother.
In association with pinks, which she then calls carnations, I think of carnal. But her
association is colour, to which she adds that carnations are the flowers which her fiancé
gives her frequently and in large quantities. At the end of the conversation she suddenly
admits, spontaneously, that she has not told me the truth; the word that occurred to her
was not colour, but incarnation, the very word I expected. Moreover, even the word
`colour' is not a remote association; it was determined by the meaning of carnation (i.e.
flesh-colour) -- that is, by the complex. This lack of honesty shows that the resistance
here is at its greatest because the symbolism is here most transparent, and the struggle
between libido and repression is most intense in connection with this phallic theme. The
remark that these flowers were often given her by her fiancé is, together with the double
meaning of carnation, a still further indication of their phallic significance in the dream.
The occasion of the present of flowers during the day is employed to express the thought
of a sexual present and a return present. She gives her virginity and expects in return for
it a rich love-life. But the words: `expensive flowers; one has to pay for them' may have a
real, financial meaning. -- The flower-symbolism in the dream thus comprises the
virginal female, the male symbol, and the reference to violent defloration. It is to be noted
that sexual flower-symbolism, which, of course, is very widespread, symbolises the
human sexual organs by flowers, the sexual organs of plants; indeed, presents of flowers
between lovers may perhaps have this unconscious significance.
The birthday for which she is making preparations in the dream probably signifies the
birth of a child. She identifies herself with the bridegroom, and represents him preparing
her for a birth (having coitus with her). It is as though the latent thoughts were to say: `If
I were he, I would not wait, but I would deflower the bride without asking her; I would
use violence.' Indeed, the word violate points to this. Thus even the sadistic libidinal
components find expression.
In a deeper stratum of the dream the sentence I arrange, etc., probably has an auto-erotic,
that is, an infantile significance.
She also has a knowledge -- possible only in the dream -- of her physical need; she sees
herself flat like a table, so that she emphasises all the more her virginity, the costliness of
the centre (another time she calls it a centre-piece of flowers). Even the horizontal
element of the table may contribute something to the symbol. -- The concentration of the
dream is worthy of remark; nothing is superfluous, every word is a symbol.
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Later on she brings me a supplement to this dream: `I decorate the flowers with green
crinkled paper.' She adds that it was fancy paper of the sort which is used to disguise
ordinary flowerpots. She says also: `To hide untidy things, whatever was to be seen
which was not pretty to the eye; there is a gap, a little space in the flowers. The paper
looks like velvet or moss.' With decorate she associates decorum, as I expected. The
green colour is very prominent, and with this she associates hope, yet another reference to
pregnancy. -- In this part of the dream the identification with the man is not the dominant
feature, but thoughts of shame and frankness express themselves. She makes herself
beautiful for him; she admits physical defects, of which she is ashamed and which she
wishes to correct. The associations velvet and moss distinctly point to crines pubis.
The dream is an expression of thoughts hardly known to the waking state of the girl;
thoughts which deal with the love of the senses and its organs; she is `prepared for a
birthday', i.e. she has coitus; the fear of defloration and perhaps the pleasurably toned
pain find expression; she admits her physical defects and overcompensates them by
means of an over-estimation of the value of her virginity. Her shame excuses the
emerging sensuality by the fact that the aim of it all is the child. Even material
considerations, which are foreign to the lover, find expression here. The affect of the
simple dream -- the feeling of bliss -- shows that here strong emotional complexes have
found satisfaction.
I close with the --
9. Dream of a chemist.
(A young man who has been trying to give up his habit of masturbation by substituting
intercourse with a woman.)
Preliminary statement: On the day before the dream he had been instructing a student as
to Grignard's reaction, in which magnesium is dissolved in absolutely pure ether under
the catalytic influence of iodine. Two days earlier there had been an explosion in the
course of the same reaction, in which someone had burned his hand.
Dream I. He is going to make phenylmagnesiumbromide; he sees the apparatus with
particular distinctness, but he has substituted himself for the magnesium. He is now in a
curious, wavering attitude. He keeps on repeating to himself: `This is the right thing, it is
working, my feet are beginning to dissolve, and my knees are getting soft.' Then he
reaches down and feels for his feet, and meanwhile (he does not know how) he takes his
legs out of the carboy, and then again he says to himself: `That can't be . . . Yes, it has
been done correctly.' Then he partially wakes, and repeats the dream to himself, because
he wants to tell it to me. He is positively afraid of the analysis of the dream. He is much
excited during this state of semi-sleep, and repeats continually: `Phenyl, phenyl.'
Dream II. He is in . . . with his whole family. He is supposed to be at the Schottentor at
half-past eleven in order to keep an appointment with the lady in question, but he does
not wake until half-past eleven. He says to himself: `It is too late now; when you get there
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it will be half-past twelve.' The next moment he sees the whole family gathered about the
table -- his mother and the parlour-maid with the soup-tureen with peculiar distinctness.
Then he says to himself: `Well, if we are sitting down to eat already, I certainly can't get
away.'
Analysis. He feels sure that even the first dream contains a reference to the lady whom he
is to meet at the place of rendezvous (the dream was dreamed during the night before the
expected meeting). The student whom he was instructing is a particularly unpleasant
fellow; the chemist had said to him: `That isn't right, because the magnesium was still
unaffected,' and the student had answered, as though he were quite unconcerned: `Nor it
is.' He himself must be this student; he is as indifferent to his analysis as the student is to
his synthesis; the he in the dream, however, who performs the operation, is myself. How
unpleasant he must seem to me with his indifference to the result!
Again, he is the material with which the analysis (synthesis) is made. For the question is
the success of the treatment. The legs in the dream recall an impression of the previous
evening. He met a lady at a dancing class of whom he wished to make a conquest; he
pressed her to him so closely that she once cried out. As he ceased to press her legs he
felt her firm, responding pressure against his lower thighs as far as just above the knees,
the spot mentioned in the dream. In this situation, then, the woman is the magnesium in
the retort, which is at last working. He is feminine towards me, as he is virile towards the
woman. If he succeeds with the woman, the treatment will also succeed. Feeling himself
and becoming aware of his knees refers to masturbation, and corresponds to his fatigue of
the previous day . . . The rendezvous had actually been made for half-past eleven. His
wish to oversleep himself and to keep to his sexual object at home (that is, masturbation)
corresponds to his resistance.
He says, in respect to the repetition of the name phenyl, that all these radicals ending in yl
have always been pleasing to him; they are very convenient to use: benzyl, acetyl, etc.
That, however, explained nothing. But when I proposed the root Schlemihl22 he laughed
heartily, and told me that during the summer he had read a book by Prévost which
contained a chapter: Les exclus de l'amour, and in this there was some mention of
Schlemilies; and in reading of these outcasts he said to himself: `That is my case.' He
would have played the Schlemihl if he had missed the appointment.
It seems that the sexual symbolism of dreams has already been directly confirmed by
experiment. In 1912 Dr K. Schrötter, at the instance of H. Swoboda, produced dreams in
deeply hypnotised persons by suggestions which determined a large part of the dreamcontent.
If the suggestion proposed that the subject should dream of normal or abnormal
sexual relations, the dream carried out these orders by replacing sexual material by the
symbols with which psychoanalytic dream-interpretation has made us familiar. Thus,
following the suggestion that the dreamer should dream of homosexual relations with a
lady friend, this friend appeared in the dream carrying a shabby travelling-bag, upon
which there was a label with the printed words: `For ladies only'. The dreamer was
believed never to have heard of dream-symbolisation or of dream-interpretation.
Unfortunately, the value of this important investigation was diminished by the fact that
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Dr Schrötter shortly afterwards committed suicide. Of his dream-experiments he gave us
only a preliminary report in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse.
Similar results were reported in 1923 by G. Roffenstein. Especially interesting were the
experiments performed by Betlheim and Hartmann, because they eliminated hypnosis.
These authors told stories of a crude sexual content to confused patients suffering from
Korsakoff's psychosis, and observed the distortions which appeared when the material
related was reproduced.23 It was shown that the reproduced material contained symbols
made familiar by the interpretation of dreams (climbing stairs, stabbing and shooting as
symbols of coitus, knives and cigarettes as symbols of the penis). Special value was
attached to the appearance of the symbol of climbing stairs, for, as the authors justly
observed, `a symbolisation of this sort could not be effected by a conscious wish to
distort.'
Only when we have formed a due estimate of the importance of symbolism in dreams can
we continue the study of the typical dreams which was interrupted in an earlier chapter
(p. 161). I feel justified in dividing these dreams roughly into two classes: first, those
which always really have the same meaning, and second, those which despite the same or
a similar content must nevertheless be given the most varied interpretations. Of the
typical dreams belonging to the first class I have already dealt fairly fully with the
examination-dream.
On account of their similar affective character, the dreams of missing a train deserve to
be ranked with the examination-dreams; moreover, their interpretation justifies this
approximation. They are consolation-dreams, directed against another anxiety perceived
in dreams -- the fear of death. `To depart' is one of the most frequent and one of the most
readily established of the death-symbols. The dream therefore says consolingly:
`Reassure yourself, you are not going to die (to depart)', just as the examination-dream
calms us by saying: `Don't be afraid; this time, too, nothing will happen to you.' The
difficulty in understanding both kinds of dreams is due to the fact that the anxiety is
attached precisely to the expression of consolation.
The meaning of the `dreams due to dental stimulus' which I have often enough had to
analyse in my patients escaped me for a long time because, much to my astonishment,
they habitually offered too great a resistance to interpretation. But finally an
overwhelming mass of evidence convinced me that in the case of men nothing other than
the masturbatory desires of puberty furnish the motive power of these dreams. I shall
analyse two such dreams, one of which is also a `flying dream'. The two dreams were
dreamed by the same person -- a young man of pronounced homosexuality which,
however, has been inhibited in life.
He is witnessing a performance of Fidelio from the stalls of the opera-house; he is sitting
next to L., whose personality is congenial to him, and whose friendship he would like to
have. Suddenly he flies diagonally right across the stalls; he then puts his hand in his
mouth and draws out two of his teeth.
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He himself describes the flight by saying that it was as though he were thrown into the
air. As the opera performed was Fidelio, he recalls the words:
He who a charming wife acquires . . .
But the acquisition of even the most charming wife is not among the wishes of the
dreamer. Two other lines would be more appropriate:
He who succeeds in the lucky (big) throw
The friend of a friend to be . . .
The dream thus contains the `lucky (big) throw', which is not, however, a wish-fulfilment
only. For it conceals also the painful reflection that in his striving after friendship he has
often had the misfortune to be `thrown out', and the fear lest this fate may be repeated in
the case of the young man by whose side he has enjoyed the performance of Fidelio. This
is now followed by a confession, shameful to a man of his refinement, to the effect that
once, after such a rejection on the part of a friend, his profound sexual longing caused
him to masturbate twice in succession.
The other dream is as follows: Two university professors of his acquaintance are treating
him in my place. One of them does something to his penis; he is afraid of an operation.
The other thrusts an iron bar against his mouth, so that he loses one or two teeth. He is
bound with four silk handkerchiefs.
The sexual significance of this dream can hardly be doubted. The silk handkerchiefs
allude to an identification with a homosexual of his acquaintance. The dreamer, who has
never achieved coition (nor has he ever actually sought sexual intercourse) with men,
conceives the sexual act on the lines of masturbation with which he was familiar during
puberty.
I believe that the frequent modifications of the typical dream due to dental stimulus --
that, for example, in which another person draws the tooth from the dreamer's mouth --
will be made intelligible by the same explanation.24 It may, however, be difficult to
understand how `dental stimulus' can have come to have this significance. But here I may
draw attention to the frequent `displacement from below to above' which is at the service
of sexual repression, and by means of which all kinds of sensations and intentions
occurring in hysteria, which ought to be localised in the genitals, may at all events be
realised in other, unobjectionable parts of the body. We have a case of such displacement
when the genitals are replaced by the face in the symbolism of unconscious thought. This
is corroborated by the fact that verbal usage relates the buttocks to the cheeks,25 and the
labia minora to the lips which enclose the orifice of the mouth. The nose is compared to
the penis in numerous allusions, and in each case the presence of hair completes the
resemblance. Only one feature -- the teeth -- is beyond all possibility of being compared
in this way; but it is just this coincidence of agreement and disagreement which makes
the teeth suitable for purposes of representation under the pressure of sexual repression.
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I will not assert that the interpretation of dreams due to dental stimulus as dreams of
masturbation (the correctness of which I cannot doubt) has been freed of all obscurity.26 I
carry the explanation as far as I am able, and must leave the rest unsolved. But I must
refer to yet another relation indicated by a colloquial expression. In Austria there is in use
an indelicate designation for the act of masturbation, namely: `To pull one out', or `to pull
one off'.27 I am unable to say whence these colloquialisms originate, or on what
symbolisms they are based; but the teeth would very well fit in with the first of the two.
Dreams of pulling teeth, and of teeth falling out, are interpreted in popular belief to mean
the death of a connection. Psychoanalysis can admit of such a meaning only at the most
as a joking allusion to the sense already indicated.
To the second group of typical dreams belong those in which one is flying or hovering,
falling, swimming, etc. What do these dreams signify? Here we cannot generalise. They
mean, as we shall learn, something different in each case; only, the sensory material
which they contain always comes from the same source.
We must conclude from the information obtained in psychoanalysis that these dreams
also repeat impressions of our childhood -- that is, that they refer to the games involving
movement which have such an extraordinary attraction for children. Where is the uncle
who has never made a child fly by running with it across the room, with outstretched
arms, or has never played at falling with it by rocking it on his knee and then suddenly
straightening his leg, or by lifting it above his head and suddenly pretending to withdraw
his supporting hand? At such moments children shout with joy and insatiably demand a
repetition of the performance, especially if a little fright and dizziness are involved in it.
In after years they repeat their sensations in dreams, but in dreams they omit the hands
that held them, so that now they are free to float or fall. We know that all small children
have a fondness for such games as rocking and seesawing; and when they see gymnastic
performances at the circus their recollection of such games is refreshed. In some boys the
hysterical attack consists simply in the reproduction of such performances, which they
accomplish with great dexterity. Not infrequently sexual sensations are excited by these
games of movement, innocent though they are in themselves. To express the matter in a
few words: it is these romping games of childhood which are being repeated in dreams of
flying, falling, vertigo, and the like, but the pleasurable sensations are now transformed
into anxiety. But, as every mother knows, the romping of children often enough ends in
quarrelling and tears.
I have therefore good reason for rejecting the explanation that it is the condition of our
cutaneous sensations during sleep, the sensation of the movements of the lungs, etc., that
evoke dreams of flying and falling. As I see it, these sensations have themselves been
reproduced from the memory to which the dream refers -- that they are therefore dreamcontent,
and not dream-sources.28
This material, consisting of sensations of motion, similar in character, and originating
from the same sources, is now used for the representation of the most manifold dreamthoughts.
Dreams of flying or hovering, for the most part pleasurably toned, will call for
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the most widely differing interpretations -- interpretations of a quite special nature in the
case of some dreamers, and interpretations of a typical nature in that of others. One of my
patients was in the habit of dreaming very frequently that she was hovering a little way
above the street without touching the ground. She was very short of stature, and she
shunned every sort of contamination involved by intercourse with human beings. Her
dream of suspension -- which raised her feet above the ground and allowed her head to
tower into the air -- fulfilled both of her wishes. In the case of other dreamers of the same
sex, the dream of flying had the significance of the longing: `If only I were a little bird!'
Similarly, others become angels at night, because no one has ever called them angels by
day. The intimate connection between flying and the idea of a bird makes it
comprehensible that the dream of flying, in the case of male dreamers, should usually
have a coarsely sensual significance;29 and we should not be surprised to hear that this or
that dreamer is always very proud of his ability to fly.
Dr Paul Federn (Vienna) has propounded the fascinating theory that a great many flying
dreams are erection dreams, since the remarkable phenomenon of erection, which
constantly occupies the human fantasy, cannot fail to be impressive as an apparent
suspension of the laws of gravity (cf. the winged phalli of the ancients).
It is a noteworthy fact that a prudent experimenter like Mourly Vold, who is really averse
to any kind of interpretation, nevertheless defends the erotic interpretation of the dreams
of flying and hovering.30 He describes the erotic element as `the most important motive
factor of the hovering dream', and refers to the strong sense of bodily vibration which
accompanies this type of dream, and the frequent connection of such dreams with
erections and emissions.
Dreams of falling are more frequently characterised by anxiety. Their interpretation,
when they occur in women, offers no difficulty, because they nearly always accept the
symbolic meaning of falling, which is a circumlocution for giving way to an erotic
temptation. We have not yet exhausted the infantile sources of the dream of falling;
nearly all children have fallen occasionally, and then been picked up and fondled; if they
fell out of bed at night, they were picked up by the nurse and taken into her bed.
People who dream often, and with great enjoyment, of swimming, cleaving the waves,
etc., have usually been bedwetters, and they now repeat in the dream a pleasure which
they have long since learned to forgo. We shall soon learn, from one example or another,
to what representations dreams of swimming easily lend themselves.
The interpretation of dreams of fire justifies a prohibition of the nursery, which forbids
children to `play with fire' so that they may not wet the bed at night. These dreams also
are based on reminiscences of the enuresis nocturna of childhood. In my Fragment of an
Analysis of Hysteria31 I have given the complete analysis and synthesis of such a dream
of fire in connection with the infantile history of the dreamer, and have shown for the
representation of what maturer impulses this infantile material has been utilised.
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It would be possible to cite quite a number of other `typical' dreams, if by such one
understands dreams in which there is a frequent recurrence, in the dreams of different
persons, of the same manifest dream-content. For example: dreams of passing through
narrow alleys, or a whole suite of rooms; dreams of burglars, in respect of whom nervous
people take measures of precaution before going to bed; dreams of being chased by wild
animals (bulls, horses); or of being threatened with knives, daggers, and lances. The last
two themes are characteristic of the manifest dream-content of persons suffering from
anxiety, etc. A special investigation of this class of material would be well worth while.
In lieu of this I shall offer two observations, which do not, however, apply exclusively to
typical dreams.
The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams, the readier one becomes to
acknowledge that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give
expression to erotic wishes. Only those who really analyse dreams, that is, those who
penetrate from their manifest content to the latent dream-thoughts, can form an opinion
on this subject; but never those who are satisfied with registering merely the manifest
content (as, for example, Näcke in his writings on sexual dreams). Let us recognise at
once that there is nothing astonishing in this fact, which is entirely consistent with the
principles of dream-interpretation. No other instinct has had to undergo so much
suppression, from the time of childhood onwards, as the sexual instinct in all its
numerous components:32 from no other instinct are so many and such intense unconscious
wishes left over, which now, in the sleeping state, generate dreams. In dreaminterpretation
this importance of the sexual complexes must never be forgotten, though
one must not, of course, exaggerate it to the exclusion of all other factors.
Of many dreams it may be ascertained, by careful interpretation, that they may even be
understood bisexually, inasmuch as they yield an indisputable over-interpretation, in
which they realise homosexual impulses -- that is, impulses which are contrary to the
normal sexual activity of the dreamer. But that all dreams are to be interpreted bisexually,
as Stekel33 maintains, and Adler,34 seems to me to be a generalisation as insusceptible of
proof as it is improbable, and one which, therefore, I should be loth to defend; for I
should, above all, be at a loss to know how to dispose of the obvious fact that there are
many dreams which satisfy other than erotic needs (taking the word in the widest sense),
as, for example, dreams of hunger, thirst, comfort, etc. And other similar assertions, to
the effect that `behind every dream one finds a reference to death' (Stekel), or that every
dream shows `an advance from the feminine to the masculine line' (Adler), seem to me to
go far beyond the admissible in the interpretation of dreams. The assertion that all
dreams call for a sexual interpretation, against which there is such an untiring polemic in
the literature of the subject, is quite foreign to my Interpretation of Dreams. It will not be
found in any of the eight editions of this book, and is in palpable contradiction to the rest
of its contents.
We have stated elsewhere that dreams which are conspicuously innocent commonly
embody crude erotic wishes, and this we might confirm by numerous further examples.
But many dreams which appear indifferent, in which we should never suspect a tendency
in any particular direction, may be traced, according to the analysis, to unmistakably
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sexual wish-impulses, often of an unsuspected nature. For example, who, before it had
been interpreted, would have suspected a sexual wish in the following dream? The
dreamer relates: Between two stately palaces there stands, a little way back, a small
house, whose doors are closed. My wife leads me along the little bit of road leading to
the house and pushes the door open, and then I slip quickly and easily into the interior of
a courtyard that slopes steeply upwards.
Anyone who has had experience in the translating of dreams will, of course, at once be
reminded that penetration into narrow spaces and the opening of locked doors are among
the commonest of sexual symbols, and will readily see in this dream a representation of
attempted coition from behind (between the two stately buttocks of the female body). The
narrow, steep passage is, of course, the vagina; the assistance attributed to the wife of the
dreamer requires the interpretation that in reality it is only consideration for the wife
which is responsible for abstention from such an attempt. Moreover, inquiry shows that
on the previous day a young girl had entered the household of the dreamer; she had
pleased him, and had given him the impression that she would not be altogether averse to
an approach of this sort. The little house between the two palaces is taken from the
reminiscence of the Hradschin in Prague, and once more points to the girl, who is a native
of that city.
If, in conversation with my patients, I emphasise the frequency of the Oedipus dream --
the dream of having sexual intercourse with one's mother -- I elicit the answer: `I cannot
remember such a dream.' Immediately afterwards, however, there arises the recollection
of another, an unrecognisable, indifferent dream, which the patient has dreamed
repeatedly, and which on analysis proves to be a dream with this very content -- that is,
yet another Oedipus dream. I can assure the reader that disguised dreams of sexual
intercourse with the dreamer's mother are far more frequent than undisguised dreams to
the same effect.35
There are dreams of landscapes and localities in which emphasis is always laid upon the
assurance: `I have been here before.' But this `déja vu' has a special significance in
dreams. In this case the locality is always the genitals of the mother; of no other place can
it be asserted with such certainty that one `has been here before.' I was once puzzled by
the account of a dream given by a patient afflicted with obsessional neurosis. He dreamed
that he called at a house where he had been twice before. But this very patient had long
ago told me of an episode of his sixth year. At that time he shared his mother's bed, and
had abused the occasion by inserting his finger into his mother's genitals while she was
asleep.
A large number of dreams, which are frequently full of anxiety, and often have for
content the traversing of narrow spaces, or staying long in the water, are based upon
fantasies concerning the intra-uterine life, the sojourn in the mother's womb, and the act
of birth. I here insert the dream of a young man who, in his fantasy, has even profited by
the intra-uterine opportunity of spying upon an act of coition between his parents.
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`He is in a deep shaft, in which there is a window, as in the Semmering tunnel. Through
this he sees at first an empty landscape, and then he composes a picture in it, which is
there all at once and fills up the empty space. The picture represents a field which is
being deeply tilled by an implement, and the wholesome air, the associated idea of hard
work, and the bluish-black clods of earth make a pleasant impression on him. He then
goes on and sees a work on education lying open . . . and is surprised that so much
attention is devoted in it to the sexual feelings (of children), which makes him think of
me.'
Here is a pretty water-dream of a female patient, which was turned to special account in
the course of treatment.
At her usual holiday resort on the -- Lake, she flings herself into the dark water at a place
where the pale moon is reflected in the water.
Dreams of this sort are parturition dreams; their interpretation is effected by reversing the
fact recorded in the manifest dream-content; thus, instead of `flinging oneself into the
water', read `coming out of the water' -- that is, `being born'.36 The place from which one
is born may be recognised if one thinks of the humorous sense of the French `la lune'.
The pale moon thus becomes the white `bottom', which the child soon guesses to be the
place from which it came. Now what can be the meaning of the patient's wishing to be
born at a holiday resort? I asked the dreamer this, and she replied without hesitation:
`Hasn't the treatment made me as though I were born again?' Thus the dream becomes an
invitation to continue the treatment at this summer resort -- that is, to visit her there;
perhaps it also contains a very bashful allusion to the wish to become a mother herself.37
Another dream of parturition, with its interpretation, I take from a paper by E. Jones. `She
stood at the seashore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the
water. This he did till the water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up
and down near the surface. The scene then changed to the crowded hall of an hotel. Her
husband left her, and she ``entered into conversation with'' a stranger.
`The second half of the dream was discovered in the analysis to represent flight from her
husband, and the entering into intimate relations with a third person, behind whom was
plainly indicated Mr X.'s brother, mentioned in a former dream. The first part of the
dream was a fairly evident birth-fantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a
child from the uterine waters is commonly represented, by way of distortion, as the entry
of the child into water; among many other instances, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses,
and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head
in the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening which she had
experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a
reverie in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him into the
nursery, washing and dressing him, and installing him in her household.
`The second half of the dream, therefore, represents thoughts concerning the elopement,
which belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the
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dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth fantasy. Besides
this inversion in the order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the
first half the child entered the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dreamthoughts
the quickening occurred first, and then the child left the water (a double
inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream-thoughts she left her
husband.'
Another parturition dream is related by Abraham -- the dream of a young woman
expecting her first confinement: From one point of the floor of the room a subterranean
channel leads directly into the water (path of parturition--amniotic fluid). She lifts up a
trap in the door, and there immediately appears a creature dressed in brownish für,
which almost resembles a seal. This creature changes into the dreamer's younger
brother, to whom her relation has always been maternal in character.
Rank has shown from a number of dreams that parturition-dreams employ the same
symbols as micturition-dreams. The erotic stimulus expresses itself in these dreams as an
urethral stimulus. The stratification of meaning in these dreams corresponds with a
change in the significance of the symbol since childhood.
We may here turn back to the interrupted theme (see p. 37) of the part played by organic,
sleep-disturbing stimuli in dream-formation. Dreams which have come into existence
under these influences not only reveal quite frankly the wish-fulfilling tendency, and the
character of convenience-dreams, but they very often display a quite transparent
symbolism as well, since waking not infrequently follows a stimulus whose satisfaction
in symbolic disguise has already been vainly attempted in the dream. This is true of
emission dreams as well as those evoked by the need to urinate or defecate. The peculiar
character of emission dreams permits us directly to unmask certain sexual symbols
already recognised as typical, but nevertheless violently disputed, and it also convinces us
that many an apparently innocent dream-situation is merely the symbolic prelude to a
crudely sexual scene. This, however, finds direct representation, as a rule, only in the
comparatively infrequent emission dreams, while it often enough turns into an anxietydream,
which likewise leads to waking.
The symbolism of dreams due to urethral stimulus is especially obvious, and has always
been divined. Hippocrates had already advanced the theory that a disturbance of the
bladder was indicated if one dreamt of fountains and springs (Havelock Ellis). Scherner,
who has studied the manifold symbolism of the urethral stimulus, agrees that `the
powerful urethral stimulus always turns into the stimulation of the sexual sphere and its
symbolic imagery . . . The dream due to urethral stimulus is often at the same time the
representative of the sexual dream.'
O. Rank, whose conclusions (in his paper on Die Symbolschichtung im Wecktraum) I
have here followed, argues very plausibly that a large number of `dreams due to urethral
stimulus' are really caused by sexual stimuli, which at first seek to gratify themselves by
way of regression to the infantile form of urethral erotism. Those cases are especially
instructive in which the urethral stimulus thus produced leads to waking and the
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emptying of the bladder, whereupon, in spite of this relief, the dream is continued, and
expresses its need in undisguisedly erotic images.38
In a quite analogous manner dreams due to intestinal stimulus disclose the pertinent
symbolism, and thus confirm the relation, which is also amply verified by ethnopsychology,
of gold and feces.39 `Thus, for example, a woman, at a time when she is
under the care of a physician on account of an intestinal disorder, dreams of a digger for
hidden treasure who is burying a treasure in the vicinity of a little wooden shed which
looks like a rural privy. A second part of the dream has as its content how she wipes the
posterior of her child, a little girl, who has soiled herself.'
Dreams of `rescue' are connected with parturition dreams. To rescue, especially to rescue
from the water, is, when dreamed by a woman, equivalent to giving birth; this sense is,
however, modified when the dreamer is a man.40
Robbers, burglars, and ghosts, of which we are afraid before going to bed, and which
sometimes even disturb our sleep, originate in one and the same childish reminiscence.
They are the nightly visitors who have waked the child in order to set it on the chamber,
so that it may not wet the bed, or have lifted the coverlet in order to see clearly how the
child is holding its hands while sleeping. I have been able to induce an exact recollection
of the nocturnal visitor in the analysis of some of these anxiety-dreams. The robbers were
always the father; the ghosts more probably corresponded to female persons in white
nightgowns.
1 Cf. the works of Bleuler and his Zurich disciples, Maeder, Abraham, and others, and of
the non-medical authors (Kleinpaul and others) to whom they refer. But the most
pertinent things that have been said on the subject will be found in the work of O. Rank
and H. Sachs, Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für die Geisteswissenschaft, 1913, chap.
i; also E. Jones, Die Theorie der Symbolik Intern. Zeitschr. für Psychoanalyse, v. 1919.
2 This conception would seem to find an extraordinary confirmation in a theory advanced
by Hans Sperber (Über den Einfluss sexueller momente auf Entstehung und Entwicklung
der Sprache, in Imago, i, 1912). Sperber believes that primitive words denoted sexual
things exclusively, and subsequently lost their sexual significance and were applied to
other things and activities, which were compared with the sexual.
3 For example, a ship sailing on the sea may appear in the urinary dreams of Hungarian
dreamers, despite the fact that the term of `to ship', for `to urinate', is foreign to this
language (Ferenczi). In the dreams of the French and the other romance peoples `room'
serves as a symbolic representation for woman', although these peoples have nothing
analogous to the German Frauenzimmer. Many symbols are as old as language itself,
while others are continually being coined (e.g. the aeroplane, the Zeppelin).
4 [In the USA the father is represented in dreams as `the President', and even more often
as `the Governor' -- a title which is frequently applied to the parent in everyday life. --
trans.]
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5 `A patient living in a boarding-house dreams that he meets one of the servants, and asks
her what her number is; to his surprise she answers: 14. He has in fact entered into
relations with the girl in question, and has often had her in his bedroom. She feared, as
may be imagined, that the landlady suspected her, and had proposed, on the day before
the dream, that they should meet in one of the unoccupied rooms. In reality this room had
the number 14, while in the dream the woman bore this number. A clearer proof of the
identification of woman and room could hardly be imagined.' (Ernest Jones, Intern.
Zeitschr. f. Psychoanalyse, ii, 1914) (cf. Artemidorus, The Symbolism of Dreams
[German version by F. S. Krauss, Vienna, 1881, p. 110]: `Thus, for example, the
bedroom signifies the wife, supposing one to be in the house.')
6 cf. `the cloaca theory' in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.
7 I may here repeat what I have said in another place (Die Zukünftigen Chancen der
psychoanalytischen Therapie, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, No. 1 and 2, 1910, and
Ges. Schriften, Bd. vi): `Some time ago I learned that a psychologist who is unfamiliar
with our work remarked to one of my friends that we were surely overestimating the
secret sexual significance of dreams. He stated that his most frequent dream was that of
climbing a flight of stairs, and that there was surely nothing sexual behind this. Our
attention having been called to this objection, we directed our investigations to the
occurrence in dreams of flights of stairs, ladders, and steps, and we soon ascertained that
stairs (or anything analogous to them) represent a definite symbol of coitus. The basis for
this comparison is not difficult to find; with rhythmical intervals and increasing
breathlessness one reaches a height, and may then come down again in a few rapid
jumps. Thus the rhythm of coitus is reproduced in climbing stairs. Let us not forget to
consider the colloquial usage. This tells us that `mounting' is, without further addition,
used as a substitutive designation for the sexual act. In French, the step of a staircase is
called la marche; un vieux marcheur corresponds exactly to the German, ein alter
Steiger.'
8 cf. in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, ii, 675, the drawing of a nineteen-year-old
manic patient: a man with a snake as a neck-tie, which is turning towards a girl. Also the
story Der Schamhaftige (Anthropophyteia, vi, 334): A woman entered a bathroom, and
there came face to face with a man who hardly had time to put on his shirt. He was
greatly embarrassed, but at once covered his throat with the front of his shirt, and said:
`Please excuse me, I have no necktie.'
9 cf. Pfister's works on cryptography and picture-puzzles.
10 In spite of all the differences between Scherner's conception of dream-symbolism and
the one developed here, I must still insist that Scherner should be recognised as the true
discoverer of symbolism in dreams, and that the experience of psychoanalysis has
brought his book (published in 1861) into posthumous repute.
11 From Nachträge zur Traumdeutung in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, Nos. 5 and 6,
1911.
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12 cf. Kirchgraber for a similar example (Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, iii, 1912, p. 95).
Stekel reported a dream in which the hat with an obliquely-standing feather in the middle
symbolised the (impotent) man.
13 cf. comment in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, 1; and see above, p. 229, note 34.
14 or chapel = vagina.
15 symbol of coitus.
16 mons Veneris.
17 crines pubis.
18 Demons in cloaks and hoods are, according to the explanation of a specialist, of a
phallic character.
19 The two halves of the scrotum.
20 Alfred Robitsek in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, ii, 1911, p. 340.
21 The World of Dreams, London, 1911, p. 168.
22 [This Hebrew word is well known in German-speaking countries, even among Gentiles,
and signifies an unlucky, awkward person. -- trans.]
23 Über Fehlreaktionen bei der Korsakoffschen Psychose, Arch. f. Psychiatrie, Bd. lxxii.
1924.
24 The extraction of a tooth by another is usually to be interpreted as castration (cf. haircutting;
Stekel). One must distinguish between dreams due to dental stimulus and dreams
referring to the dentist, such as have been recorded, for example, by Coriat (Zentralblatt
für Psychoanalyse, iii, 440).
25 [In German Backen = cheeks and Hinterbacken (lit. `hindcheeks') = buttocks. -- trans.]
26 According to C. G. Jung, dreams due to dental stimulus in the case of women have the
significance of parturition dreams. E. Jones has given valuable confirmation of this. The
common element of this interpretation with that represented above may be found in the
fact that in both cases (castration--birth) there is a question of removing a part from the
whole body.
27 cf. the `biographical' dream on pp. 228-9.
28 This passage, dealing with dreams of motion, is repeated on account of the context. cf.
p. 165.
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29 [A reference to the German slang word vogeln (to copulate) from Vogel (a bird). --
trans.]
30 Über den Traum, Ges. Schriften, Bd. iii.
31 Collected Papers, vol. iii, trans. by Alix and James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London.
32 cf. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.
33 W. Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, 1911.
34 Alf. Adler, Der Psychische Hermaphroditismus im Leben und in der Neurose, in
Fortschritte der Medizin, 1910, No. 16, and later papers in the Zentralblatt für
Psychoanalyse, i, 1910-11.
35 I have published a typical example of such a disguised Oedipus dream in No. 1 of the
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (see below); another, with a detailed analysis, was
published in No. 4 of the same journal by Otto Rank. For other disguised Oedipus dreams
in which the eye appears as a symbol, see Rank (Int. Zeitschr. für Ps.A., i, 1913). Papers
upon eye dreams and eye symbolism by Eder, Ferenczi, and Reitler will be found in the
same issue. The blinding in the Oedipus legend and elsewhere is a substitute for
castration. The ancients, by the way, were not unfamiliar with the symbolic interpretation
of the undisguised Oedipus dream (see O. Rank, Jahrb. ii, p. 534: `Thus, a dream of
Julius Caesar's of sexual relations with his mother has been handed down to us, which the
oneiroscopists interpreted as a favourable omen signifying his taking possession of the
earth (Mother Earth). Equally well known is the oracle delivered to the Tarquinii, to the
effect that that one of them would become the ruler of Rome who should be the first to
kiss his mother (osculum matri tulerit), which Brutus conceived as referring to Mother
Earth (terram osculo contigit, scilicet quod ea communis mater omnium mortalium esset,
Livy, I, lxi).' Cf. here the dream of Hippias in Herodotus, VI, 107: `But Hippias led the
barbarians to Marathon after he had had the following dream-vision the previous night. It
had seemed to Hippias that he was sleeping with his own mother. He concluded from this
dream that he would return home to Athens, and would regain power, and that he would
die in his fatherland in his old age.' These myths and interpretations point to a correct
psychological insight. I have found that those persons who consider themselves preferred
or favoured by their mothers manifest in life that confidence in themselves, and that
unshakable optimism, which often seem heroic, and not infrequently compel actual
success.
Typical example of a disguised Oedipus dream:
A man dreams: He has a secret affair with a woman whom another man wishes to marry.
He is concerned lest the other should discover this relation and abandon the marriage;
he therefore behaves very affectionately to the man; he nestles up to him and kisses him. -
- The facts of the dreamer's life touch the dream-content only at one point. He has a secret
affair with a married woman, and an equivocal expression of her husband, with whom he
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is on friendly terms, aroused in him the suspicion that he might have noticed something
of this relationship. There is, however, in reality, yet another factor, the mention of which
was avoided in the dream, and which alone gives the key to it. The life of the husband is
threatened by an organic malady. His wife is prepared for the possibility of his sudden
death, and our dreamer consciously harbours the intention of marrying the young widow
after her husband's decease. It is through this objective situation that the dreamer finds
himself transferred into the constellation of the Oedipus dream; his wish is to be enabled
to kill the man, so that he may win the woman for his wife; his dream gives expression to
the wish in a hypocritical distortion. Instead of representing her as already married to the
other man, it represents the other man only as wishing to marry her, which indeed
corresponds with his own secret intention, and the hostile wishes directed against the man
are concealed under demonstrations of affection, which are reminiscences of his childish
relations to his father.
36 For the mythological meaning of water-birth, see Rank: Der Mythus von der Geburt des
Helden, 1909.
37 It was not for a long time that I learned to appreciate the significance of the fantasies
and unconscious thoughts relating to life in the womb. They contain the explanation of
the curious dread, felt by so many people, of being buried alive, as well as the
profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death, which represents only
the projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth,
moreover, is the first experience attended by anxiety, and is thus, the source and model of
the affect of anxiety.
38 `The same symbolic representations which in the infantile sense constitute the basis of
the vesical dream appear in the ``recent'' sense in purely sexual significance: water =
urine = semen = amniotic fluid; ship = ``to pump ship'' (urinate = seed-capsule; getting
wet = enuresis = coitus = pregnancy; swimming = full bladder = dwelling-place of the
unborn; rain = urination = symbol of fertilization; travelling (journeying-alighting) =
getting out of bed = having sexual intercourse (honeymoon journey); urinating = sexual
ejaculation' (Rankin, I, c.).
39 Freud, Charakter und Analerotik; Rank, Die Symbolschictung, etc.; Dattner, Intern.
Zeitschr. f. Psych. i, 1913; Reik, Intern. Zeitschr., iii, 1915.
40 For such a dream see Pfister, Ein Fall von psychoanalytischer Seelensorge und
Seelenheilung, in Evangelische Freiheit, 1909. Concerning the symbol of `rescuing', see
my paper, Die Zukünftigen Chancender psychoanalytischen Therapie, in Zentralblatt für
Psychoanalyse, i, 1910. Also Beitrage zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens, i. Über einen
besonderen Typus der objektwahl beim Manne, in Jahrbuch für Ps.A., Bd. ii, 1910 (Ges.
Schriften, Bd. v). Also Rank, Beilege zur Rettungsphantasie in the Zentralblatt für
Psychoanalyse, i, 1910, p. 331; Reik, Zur Rettungssymbolic; ibid., p. 299.
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F. EXAMPLES -- ARITHMETIC AND SPEECH IN DREAMS
Before I proceed to assign to its proper place the fourth of the factors which control the
formation of dreams, I shall cite a few examples from my collection of dreams, partly for
the purpose of illustrating the cooperation of the three factors with which we are already
acquainted, and partly for the purpose of adducing evidence for certain unsupported
assertions which have been made, or of bringing out what necessarily follows from them.
It has, of course, been difficult in the foregoing account of the dream-work to
demonstrate my conclusions by means of examples. Examples in support of isolated
statements are convincing only when considered in the context of an interpretation of a
dream as a whole; when they are wrested from their context, they lose their value; on the
other hand, a dream-interpretation, even when it is by no means profound, soon becomes
so extensive that it obscures the thread of the discussion which it is intended to illustrate.
This technical consideration must be my excuse if I now proceed to mix together all sorts
of things which have nothing in common except their reference to the text of the
foregoing chapter.
We shall first consider a few examples of very peculiar or unusual methods of
representation in dreams. A lady dreamed as follows: A servant-girl is standing on a
ladder as though to clean the windows, and has with her a chimpanzee and a gorilla cat
(later corrected, angora cat). She throws the animals on to the dreamer; the chimpanzee
nestles up to her, and this is very disgusting. This dream has accomplished its purpose by
a very simple means, namely, by taking a mere figure of speech literally, and
representing it in accordance with the literal meaning of its words. `Monkey', like the
names of animals in general, is an opprobrious epithet, and the situation of the dream
means merely `to hurl invectives'. This same collection will soon furnish us with further
examples of the employment of this simple artifice in the dream-work.
Another dream proceeds in a very similar manner: A woman with a child which has a
conspicuously deformed cranium; the dreamer has heard that the child acquired this
deformity owing to its position in its mother's womb. The doctor says that the cranium
might be given a better shape by means of compression, but that this would injure the
brain. She thinks that because it is a boy it won't suffer so much from deformity. This
dream contains a plastic representation of the abstract concept `childish impressions',
with which the dreamer has become familiar in the course of the treatment.
In the following example the dream-work follows rather a different course. The dream
contains a recollection of an excursion to the Hilmteich, near Graz: There is a terrible
storm outside; a miserable hotel -- the water is dripping from the walls, and the beds are
damp. (The latter part of the content was less directly expressed than I give it.) The dream
signifies `superfluous'. The abstract idea occurring in the dream-thoughts is first made
equivocal by a certain abuse of language; it has perhaps been replaced by `overflowing',
or by `fluid' and `super-fluid (-fluous)', and has then been brought to representation by an
accumulation of like impressions. Water within, water without, water in the beds in the
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representation the spelling is much less considered than the sound of words ought not to
surprise us when we remember that rhyme exercises a similar privilege.
The fact that language has at its disposal a great number of words which were originally
used in a pictorial and concrete sense, but are at present used in a colourless and abstract
fashion, has, in certain other cases, made it very easy for the dream to represent its
thoughts. The dream has only to restore to these words their full significance, or to follow
their change of meaning a little way back. For example, a man dreams that his friend,
who is struggling to get out of a very tight place, calls upon him for help. The analysis
shows that the tight place is a hole, and that the dreamer symbolically uses these very
words to his friend: `Be careful, or you'll get yourself into a hole.'1 Another dreamer
climbs a mountain from which he obtains an extraordinarily extensive view. He identifies
himself with his brother, who is editing a `review' dealing with the Far East.
In a dream in Der Grüne Heinrich a spirited horse is plunging about in a field of the
finest oats, every grain of which is really `a sweet almond, a raisin and a new penny
wrapped in red silk and tied with a bit of pig's bristle.' The poet (or the dreamer)
immediately furnishes the meaning of this dream, for the horse felt himself pleasantly
tickled, so that he exclaimed: `The oats are pricking me' (`I feel my oats').
In the old Norse sagas (according to Henzen) prolific use is made in dreams of
colloquialisms and witty expressions; one scarcely finds a dream without a double
meaning or a play upon words.
It would be a special undertaking to collect such methods of representation and to arrange
them in accordance with the principles upon which they are based. Some of the
representations are almost witty. They give one the impression that one would have never
guessed their meaning if the dreamer himself had not succeeded in explaining it.
1. A man dreams that he is asked for a name, which, however, he cannot recall. He
himself explains that this means: `I shouldn't dream of it.'
2. A female patient relates a dream in which all the persons concerned were singularly
large. `That means,' she adds, `that it must deal with an episode of my early childhood,
for at that time all grown-up people naturally seemed to me immensely large.' She herself
did not appear in the dream.
The transposition into childhood is expressed differently in other dreams -- by the
translation of time into space. One sees persons and scenes as though at a great distance,
at the end of a long road, or as though one were looking at them through the wrong end of
a pair of opera-glasses.
3. A man who in waking life shows an inclination to employ abstract and indefinite
expressions, but who otherwise has his wits about him, dreams, in a certain connection,
that he reaches a railway station just as a train is coming in. But then the platform moves
towards the train, which stands still; an absurd inversion of the real state of affairs. This
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detail, again, is nothing more than an indication to the effect that something else in the
dream must be inverted. The analysis of the same dream leads to recollections of picturebooks
in which men were represented standing on their heads and walking on their hands.
4. The same dreamer, on another occasion, relates a short dream which almost recalls the
technique of a rebus. His uncle gives him a kiss in an automobile. He immediately adds
the interpretation, which would never have occurred to me: it means auto-erotism. In the
waking state this might have been said in jest.
5. At a New Year's Eve dinner the host, the patriarch of the family, ushered in the New
Year with a speech. One of his sons-in-law, a lawyer, was not inclined to take the old
man seriously, especially when in the course of his speech he expressed himself as
follows: `When I open the ledger for the Old Year and glance at its pages I see everything
on the asset side and nothing, thank the Lord, on the side of liability; all you children
have been a great asset, none of you a liability.' On hearing this the young lawyer thought
of X, his wife's brother, who was a cheat and a liar, and whom he had recently extricated
from the entanglements of the law. That night, in a dream, he saw the New Year's
celebration once more, and heard the speech, or rather saw it. Instead of speaking, the old
man actually opened the ledger, and on the side marked `assets' he saw his name amongst
others, but on the other side, marked `liability', there was the name of his brother-in-law,
X. However, the word `Liability' was changed into `Lie-Ability', which he regarded as
X.'s main characteristic.2
6 A dreamer treats another person for a broken bone. The analysis shows that the
fracture represents a broken marriage vow, etc.
7. In the dream-content the time of day often represents a certain period of the dreamer's
childhood. Thus, for example, 5.15 a.m. means to one dreamer the age of five years and
three months; when he was that age, a younger brother was born.
8. Another representation of age in a dream: A woman is walking with two little girls;
there is a difference of fifteen months in their ages. The dreamer cannot think of any
family of her acquaintance in which this is the case. She herself interprets it to mean that
the two children represent her own person, and that the dream reminds her that the two
traumatic events of her childhood were separated by this period of time (3½ and 4¾
years).
9. It is not astonishing that persons who are undergoing psychoanalytic treatment
frequently dream of it, and are compelled to give expression in their dreams to all the
thoughts and expectations aroused by it. The image chosen for the treatment is as a rule
that of a journey, usually in a motorcar, this being a modern and complicated vehicle; in
the reference to the speed of the car the patient's ironical humour is given free play. If the
`unconscious', as an element of waking thought, is to be represented in the dream, it is
replaced, appropriately enough, by subterranean localities, which at other times, when
there is no reference to analytic treatment, have represented the female body or the
womb. Below in the dream very often refers to the genitals, and its opposite, above, to the
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face, mouth or breast. By wild beasts the dream-work usually symbolises passionate
impulses; those of the dreamer, and also those of other persons of whom the dreamer is
afraid; or thus, by means of a very slight displacement, the persons who experience these
passions. From this it is not very far to the totemistic representation of the dreaded father
by means of vicious animals, dogs, wild horses, etc. One might say that wild beasts serve
to represent the libido, feared by the ego, and combated by repression. Even the neurosis
itself, the sick person, is often separated from the dreamer and exhibited in the dream as
an independent person.
One may go so far as to say that the dream-work makes use of all the means accessible to
it for the visual representation of the dream-thoughts, whether these appear admissible or
inadmissible to waking criticism, and thus exposes itself to the doubt as well as the
derision of all those who have only hearsay knowledge of dream-interpretation, but have
never themselves practised it. Stekel's book, Die Sprache des Traumes, is especially rich
in such examples, but I avoid citing illustrations from this work as the author's lack of
critical judgment and his arbitrary technique would make even the unprejudiced observer
feel doubtful.
10. From an essay by V. Tausk (Kleider und Farben im Dienste der Traumdarstellung, in
Interna. Zeitschr. für Ps.A. ii, 1914):
(a) A. dreams that he sees his former governess wearing a dress of black lustre, which fits
closely over her buttocks. -- That means he declares this woman to be lustful.
(b) C. in a dream sees a girl on the road to X, bathed in a white light and wearing a white
blouse.
The dreamer began an affair with a Miss White on this road.
11. In an analysis which I carried out in the French language I had to interpret a dream in
which I appeared as an elephant. I naturally had to ask why I was thus represented. `Vous
me trompez', answered the dreamer (Trompe = trunk).
The dream-work often succeeds in representing very refractory material, such as proper
names, by means of the forced exploitation of very remote relation. In one of my dreams
old Brücke has set me a task. I make a preparation, and pick something out of it which
looks like crumpled tinfoil. (I shall return to this dream later). The corresponding
association, which is not easy to find, is stanniol, and now I know that I have in mind the
name of the author Stannius, which appeared on the title-page of a treatise on the nervous
system of fishes, which in my youth I regarded with reverence. The first scientific
problem which my teacher set me did actually relate to the nervous system of a fish -- the
Ammocoetes. Obviously, this name could not be utilised in the picture-puzzle.
Here I must not fail to include a dream with a curious content, which is worth noting also
as the dream of a child, and which is readily explained by analysis. A lady tells me. `I can
remember that when I was a child I repeatedly dreamed that God wore a conical paper
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hat on His head. They often used to make me wear such a hat at table, so that I shouldn't
be able to look at the plates of the other children and see how much they had received of
any particular dish. Since I had heard that God was omniscient, the dream signified that I
knew everything in spite of the hat which I was made to wear.'
What the dream-work consists in, and its unceremonious handling of its material, the
dream-thoughts, may be shown in an instructive manner by the numbers and calculations
which occur in dreams. Superstition, by the way, regards numbers as having a special
significance in dreams. I shall therefore give a few examples of this kind from my
collection.
1. From the dream of a lady, shortly before the end of her treatment:
She wants to pay for something or other; her daughter takes 3 florins 65 kreuzer from her
purse; but the mother says: `What are you doing? It costs only 21 kreuzer.' This fragment
of the dream was intelligible without further explanation owing to my knowledge of the
dreamer's circumstances. The lady was a foreigner, who had placed her daughter at
school in Vienna, and was able to continue my treatment as long as her daughter
remained in the city. In three weeks the daughter's scholastic year would end, and the
treatment would then stop. On the day before the dream the principal of the school had
asked her whether she could not decide to leave the child at school for another year. She
had then obviously reflected that in this case she would be able to continue the treatment
for another year. Now, this is what the dream refers to, for a year is equal to 365 days; the
three weeks remaining before the end of the scholastic year, and of the treatment, are
equivalent to 21 days (though not to so many hours of treatment). The numerals, which in
the dream-thoughts refer to periods of time, are given money values in the dream, and
simultaneously a deeper meaning finds expression -- for `time is money'. 365 kreuzer, of
course, are 3 florins 65 kreuzer. The smallness of the sums which appear in the dream is a
self-evident wish-fulfilment; the wish has reduced both the cost of the treatment and the
year's school fees.
2. In another dream the numerals are involved in even more complex relations. A young
lady, who has been married for some years, learns that an acquaintance of hers, of about
the same age, Elise L., has just become engaged. Thereupon she dreams: She is sitting in
the theatre with her husband, and one side of the stalls is quite empty. Her husband tells
her that Elise L. and her fiance had also wished to come to the theatre, but that they only
could have obtained poor seats; three for 1 florin 50 kreuzer, and of course they could
not take those. She thinks they didn't lose much, either.
What is the origin of the 1 florin 50 kreuzer? A really indifferent incident of the previous
day. The dreamer's sister-in-law had received 150 florins as a present from her husband,
and hastened to get rid of them by buying some jewelery. Let us note that 150 florins is
100 times 1 florin 50 kreuzer. But whence the 3 in connection with the seats in the
theatre? There is only one association for this, namely, that the fiance is three months
younger than herself. When we have ascertained the significance of the fact that one side
of the stalls is empty we have the solution of the dream. This feature is an undisguised
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allusion to a little incident which had given her husband a good excuse for teasing her.
She had decided to go to the theatre that week; she had been careful to obtain tickets a
few days beforehand, and had had to pay the advance booking-fee. When they got to the
theatre they found that one side of the house was almost empty; so that she certainly need
not have been in such a hurry.
I shall now substitute the dream-thoughts for the dream: `It surely was nonsense to marry
so early; there was no need for my being in such a hurry. From Elise L.'s example I see
that I should have got a husband just the same -- and one a hundred times better -- if I had
only waited (antithesis to the haste of her sister-in-laws), I could have bought three such
men for the money (the dowry)!' -- Our attention is drawn to the fact that the numerals in
this dream have changed their meanings and their relations to a much greater extent than
in the one previously considered. The transforming and distorting activity of the dream
has in this case been greater -- a fact which we interpret as meaning that these dreamthoughts
had to overcome an unusual degree of endo-psychic resistance before they
attained to representation. And we must not overlook the fact that the dream contains an
absurd element, namely, that two persons are expected to take three seats. It will throw
some light on the question of the interpretation of absurdity in dreams if I remark that this
absurd detail of the dream-content is intended to represent the most strongly emphasised
of the dream-thoughts: `It was nonsense to marry so early.' The figure 3, which occurs in
a quite subordinate relation between the two persons compared (three months' difference
in their ages), has thus been adroitly utilised to produce the idea of nonsense required by
the dream. The reduction of the actual 150 florins to 1 florin 50 kreuzer corresponds to
the dreamer's disparagement of her husband in her suppressed thoughts.
3. Another example displays the arithmetical powers of dreams, which have brought them
into such disrepute. A man dreams: He is sitting in the B.s' house (the B.s are a family
with which he was formerly acquainted), and he says: `It was nonsense that you didn't
give me Amy for my wife.' Thereupon, he asks the girl: `How old are you?' Answer: `I
was born in 1882.' `Ah, then you are 28 years old.'
Since the dream was dreamed in the year 1898, this is obviously bad arithmetic, and the
inability of the dreamer to calculate may, if it cannot be otherwise explained, be likened
to that of a general paralytic. My patient was one of those men who cannot help thinking
about every woman they see. The patient who for some months came next after him in
my consulting-room was a young lady; he met this lady after he had constantly asked
about her, and he was very anxious to make a good impression on her. This was the lady
whose age he estimated at 28. So much for explaining the result of his apparent
calculation. But 1882 was the year in which he had married. He had been unable to
refrain from entering into conversation with the two other women whom he met at my
house -- the two by no means youthful maids who alternately opened the door to him --
and as he did not find them very responsive, he had told himself that they probably
regarded him as elderly and `serious'.
Bearing in mind these examples, and others of a similar nature (to follow), we may say:
The dream-work does not calculate at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it only strings
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together, in the form of a sum, numerals which occur in the dream-thoughts, and which
may serve as allusions to material which is insusceptible of representation. It thus deals
with figures, as material for expressing its intentions, just as it deals with all other
concepts, and with names and speeches which are only verbal images.
For the dream-work cannot compose a new speech. No matter how many speeches and
answers, which may in themselves be sensible or absurd, may occur in dreams, analysis
always shows us that the dream has merely taken from the dream-thoughts fragments of
speeches which have really been delivered or heard, and has dealt with them in the most
arbitrary fashion. It has not only torn them from their context and mutilated them,
accepting one fragment and rejecting another, but it has often fitted them together in a
novel manner, so that the speech which seems coherent in dream is dissolved by analysis
into three or four components. In this new application of the words the dream has often
ignored the meaning which they had in the dream-thoughts, and has drawn an entirely
new meaning from them.3 Upon closer inspection he more distinct and compact
ingredients of the dream-speech may be distinguished from others, which serve as
connectives, and have probably been supplied, just as we supply omitted letters and
syllables in reading. The dream-speech thus has the structure of breccia, in which the
larger pieces of various material are held together by a solidified cohesive medium.
Strictly speaking, of course, this description is correct only for those dream-speeches
which have something of the sensory character of a speech, and are described as
`speeches'. The others, which have not, as it were, been perceived as heard or spoken
(which have no accompanying acoustic or motor emphasis in the dream) are simply
thoughts, such as occur in our waking life, and find their way unchanged into many of
our dreams. Our reading, too, seems to provide an abundant and not easily traceable
source for the indifferent speech-material of dreams. But anything that is at all
conspicuous as a speech in a dream can be referred to actual speeches which have been
made or heard by the dreamer.
We have already found examples of the derivation of such dream-speeches in the
analyses of dreams which have been cited for other purposes. Thus, in the `innocent
market-dream' (pp. 86-7) where the speech: That is no longer to be had serves to identify
me with the butcher, while a fragment of the other speech: I don't know that, I don't take
that, precisely fulfils the task of rendering the dream innocent. On the previous day the
dreamer, replying to some unreasonable demand on the part of her cook, had waved her
aside with the words: I don't know that, behave yourself properly, and she afterwards
took into the dream the first, indifferent sounding part of the speech in order to allude to
the latter part, which fitted well into the fantasy underlying the dream, but which might
also have betrayed it.
Here is one of many examples which all lead to the same conclusion:
A large courtyard in which dead bodies are being burned. The dreamer says, `I'm going,
I can't stand the sight of it.' (Not a distinct speech.) Then he meets two butcher boys and
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asks, `Well, did it taste good?' And one of them answers, `No, it wasn't good.' As though
it had been human flesh.
The innocent occasion of this dream is as follows: After taking supper with his wife, the
dreamer pays a visit to his worthy but by no means appetising neighbour. The hospitable
old lady is just sitting down to her own supper, and presses him (among men a
composite, sexually significant word is used jocosely in the place of this word) to taste it.
He declines, saying that he has no appetite. She replies: `Go on with you, you can manage
it all right', or something of the kind. The dreamer is thus forced to taste and praise what
is offered him. `But that's good!' When he is alone again with his wife, he complains of
his neighbour's importunity, and of the quality of the food which he has tasted. `I can't
stand the sight of it', a phrase that in the dream, too, does not emerge as an actual speech,
is a thought relating to the physical charms of the lady who invites him, which may be
translated by the statement that he has no desire to look at her.
The analysis of another dream -- which I will cite at this stage for the sake of a very
distinct speech, which constitutes its nucleus, but which will be explained only when we
come to evaluate the affects in dreams -- is more instructive. I dream very vividly: I have
gone to Brücke's laboratory at night, and on hearing a gentle knocking at the door, I
open it to (the deceased) Professor Fleischl, who enters in the company of several
strangers, and after saying a few words sits down at his table. Then follows a second
dream: My friend Fl. has come to Vienna, unobtrusively, in July; I meet him in the street,
in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and I go with them somewhere, and they sit
down facing each other as though at a small table, while I sit facing them at the narrow
end of the table. Fl. speaks of his sister, and says: `In three-quarters of an hour she was
dead,' and then something like `That is the threshold.' As P. does not understand him, Fl.
turns to me, and asks me how much I have told P. of his affairs. At this, overcome by
strange emotions, I try to tell Fl. that P. (cannot possibly know anything, of course,
because he) is not alive. But noticing the mistake myself, I say: `Non vixit.' Then I look
searchingly at P., and under my gaze he becomes pale and blurred, and his eyes turn a
sickly blue and at last he dissolves. I rejoice greatly at this; I now understand that Ernst
Fleischl, too, is only an apparition, a revenant, and I find that it is quite possible that
such a person should exist only so long as one wishes him to, and that he can be made to
disappear by the wish of another person.
This very pretty dream unites so many of the enigmatical characteristics of the dreamcontent
-- the criticism made in the dream itself, inasmuch as I myself notice my mistake
in saying Non vixit instead of Non vivit, the unconstrained intercourse with deceased
persons, whom the dream itself declares to be dead, the absurdity of my conclusion, and
the intense satisfaction which it gives me -- that `I would give my life' to expound the
complete solution of the problem. But in reality I am incapable of doing what I do in the
dream, i.e. of sacrificing such intimate friends to my ambition. And if I attempted to
disguise the facts, the true meaning of the dream, with which I am perfectly familiar,
would be spoiled. I must therefore be content to select a few of the elements of the dream
for interpretation, some here, and some at a later stage.
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202
The scene in which I annihilate P. with a glance forms the centre of the dream. His eyes
become strange and weirdly blue, and then he dissolves. This scene is an unmistakable
imitation of a scene that was actually experienced. I was a demonstrator at the
Physiological Institute; I was on duty in the morning, and Brücke learned that on several
occasions I had been unpunctual in my attendance at the students' laboratory. One
morning, therefore, he arrived at the hour of opening, and waited for me. What he said to
me was brief and to the point; but it was not what he said that mattered. What
overwhelmed me was the terrible gaze of his blue eyes, before which I melted away -- as
P. does in the dream, for P. has exchanged roles with me, much to my relief. Anyone who
remembers the eyes of the great master, which were wonderfully beautiful even in his old
age, and has ever seen him angered, will readily imagine the emotions of the young
transgressor on that occasion.
But for a long while I was unable to account for the Non vixit with which I pass sentence
in the dream. Finally, I remembered that the reason why these two words were so distinct
in the dream was not because they were heard or spoken, but because they were seen.
Then I knew at once where they came from. On the pedestal of the statue of the Emperor
Joseph in the Vienna Hofburg are inscribed the following beautiful words:
Saluti patriae vixit
non diu sed totus.4
From this inscription I had taken what fitted one inimical train of thought in my dreamthoughts,
and which was intended to mean: `That fellow has nothing to say in the matter,
he is not really alive.' And I now recalled that the dream was dreamed a few days after
the unveiling of the memorial to Fleischl, in the cloisters of the University, upon which
occasion I had once more seen the memorial to Brücke, and must have thought with
regret (in the unconscious) how my gifted friend P., with all his devotion to science, had
by his premature death forfeited his just claim to a memorial in these halls. So I set up
this memorial to him in the dream; Josef is my friend P.'s baptismal name.5
According to the rules of dream-interpretation, I should still not be justified in replacing
non vivit, which I need, by non vixit, which is placed at my disposal by the recollection of
the Kaiser Josef memorial. Some other element of the dream-thoughts must have
contributed to make this possible. Something now calls my attention to the fact that in the
dream scene two trains of thought relating to my friend P. meet, one hostile, the other
affectionate -- the former on the surface, the latter covered up -- and both are given
representation in the same words: non vixit. As my friend P. has deserved well of science,
I erect a memorial to him; as he has been guilty of a malicious wish (expressed at the end
of the dream), I annihilate him. I have here constructed a sentence with a special cadence,
and in doing so I must have been influenced by some existing model. But where can I
find a similar antithesis, a similar parallel between two opposite reactions to the same
person, both of which can claim to be wholly justified, and which nevertheless do not
attempt to affect one another? Only in one passage which, however, makes a profound
impression upon the reader -- Brutus's speech of justification in Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar. `As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he
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203
was valiant, I honour him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him.' Have we not here the
same verbal structure, and the same antithesis of thought, as in the dream-thoughts? So I
am playing Brutus in my dream. If only I could find in my dream-thoughts another
collateral connection to confirm this! I think it might be the following: `My friend Fl.
comes to Vienna in July.' This detail is not the case in reality. To my knowledge, my
friend has never been in Vienna in July. But the month of July is named after Julius
Caesar, and might therefore very well furnish the required allusion to the intermediate
thought -- that I am playing the part of Brutus.6
Strangely enough, I once did actually play the part of Brutus. When I was a boy of
fourteen, I presented the scene between Brutus and Caesar in Schiller's poem to an
audience of children: with the assistance of my nephew, who was a year older than I, and
who had come to us from England -- and was thus a revenant -- for in him I recognise the
playmate of my early childhood. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable;
we had loved each other and fought each other and, as I have already hinted, this childish
relation has determined all my later feelings in my intercourse with persons of my own
age. My nephew John has since then had many incarnations, which have revivified first
one and then another aspect of a character that is ineradicably fixed in my unconscious
memory. At times he must have treated me very badly, and I must have opposed my
tyrant courageously, for in later years I was often told of a short speech in which I
defended myself when my father -- his grandfather -- called me to account: `Why did you
hit John?' `I hit him because he hit me.' It must be this childish scene which causes non
vivit to become non vixit, for in the language of later childhood striking is known as
wichsen (German: wichsen = to polish, to wax, i.e. to thrash); and the dream-work does
not disdain to take advantage of such associations. My hostility towards my friend P.,
which has so little foundation in reality -- he was greatly my superior, and might
therefore have been a new edition of my old playmate -- may certainly be traced to my
complicated relations with John during our childhood. I shall, as I have said, return to this
dream later on.
1 [Given by translator, as the author's example could not be translated.]
2 Reported by Brill in his Fundamental Conceptions of Psychoanalysis.
3 Analyses of other numerical dreams have been given by Jung, Marcinowski and others.
Such dreams often involve very complicated arithmetical operations, which are none the
less solved by the dreamer with astonishing confidence. Cf. also Ernest Jones, über
unbewusste Zahlenbehandlung, Zentralb. für Psychoanalyse, 4, ii, 1912, p. 241).
Neurosis behaves in the same fashion. I know a patient who -- involuntarily and
unwillingly -- hears (hallucinates) songs or fragments of songs without being able to
understand their significance for her psychic life. She is certainly not a paranoiac.
Analysis shows that by exercising a certain licence she gave the text of these songs a
false application. `Oh, thou blissful one! Oh, thou happy one!' This is the first line of a
Christmas carol, but by not continuing it to the word `Christmastide', she turns it into a
bridal song, etc. The same mechanism of distortion may operate, without hallucination,
merely in association.
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204
4 The inscription in fact reads: Saluti publicae vixit non diu sed totus. The motive of the
mistake: patriae for publicae, has probably been correctly divined by Wittels.
5 As an example of over-determination: My excuse for coming late was that after working
late into the night, in the morning I had to make the long journey from Kaiser-Josef-
Strasse to Währinger Strasse.
6 And also, Caesar = Kaiser.

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