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G. ABSURD DREAMS -- INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN DREAMS
Hitherto, in our interpretation of dreams, we have come upon the element of absurdity in
the dream-content so frequently that we must no longer postpone the investigation of its
cause and its meaning. We remember, of course, that the absurdity of dreams has
furnished the opponents of dream-interpretation with their chief argument for regarding
the dream as merely the meaningless product of an attenuated and fragmentary activity of
the psyche.
I will begin with a few examples in which the absurdity of the dream-content is apparent
only, disappearing when the dream is more thoroughly examined. These are certain
dreams which -- accidentally, one begins by thinking -- are concerned with the dreamer's
dead father.
Dream 1. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years before the date
of the dream:
His father had been involved in a terrible accident. He was travelling by the night
express when the train was derailed, the seats were telescoped, and his head was crushed
from side to side. The dreamer sees him lying on his bed; from his left eyebrow a wound
runs vertically upwards. The dreamer is surprised that his father should have met with an
accident (since he is dead already, as the dreamer adds in relating his dream). His
father's eyes are so clear.
According to the prevailing standards of dream-criticism, this dream-content would be
explained as follows: At first, while the dreamer is picturing his father's accident, he has
forgotten that his father has already been many years in his grave; in the course of the
dream this memory awakens, so that he is surprised at his own dream even while he is
dreaming it. Analysis, however, tells us that it is quite superfluous to seek for such
explanations. The dreamer had commissioned a sculptor to make a bust of his father, and
he had inspected the bust two days before the dream. It is this which seems to him to
have come to grief (the German word means `gone wrong' or `met with an accident'). The
sculptor has never seen his father, and has had to work from photographs. On the very
day before the dream the son had sent an old family servant to the studio in order to see
whether he, too, would pass the same judgment upon the marble bust -- namely, that it
was too narrow between the temples. And now follows the memory-material which has
contributed to the formation of the dream: The dreamer's father had a habit, whenever he
was harassed by business cares or domestic difficulties, of pressing his temples between
his hands, as though his head was growing too large and he was trying to compress it.
When the dreamer was four years old, he was present when a pistol was accidentally
discharged, and his father's eyes were blackened (his eyes are so clear). When his father
was thoughtful or depressed, he had a deep furrow in his forehead just where the dream
shows his wound. The fact that in the dream this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to
the second occasion for the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little
daughter; the plate had fallen from his hand, and when he picked it up it revealed a crack
which ran like a vertical furrow across the child's forehead, extending as far as the
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eyebrow. He could not help feeling a superstitious foreboding, for on the day before his
mother's death the negative of her portrait had been cracked.
Thus, the absurdity of this dream is simply the result of a carelessness of verbal
expression, which does not distinguish between the bust or the photograph and the
original. We are all accustomed to making remarks like: `Don't you think it's exactly your
father?' The appearance of absurdity in this dream might, of course, have been easily
avoided. If it were permissible to form an opinion on the strength of a single case, one
might be tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity is admitted or even desired.
Dream 2. Here is another example of the same kind from my own dreams (I lost my
father in the year 1896): --
After his death my father has played a part in the political life of the Magyars, and has
united them into a political whole; and here I see, indistinctly, a little picture: a number of
men, as though in the Reichstag; a man is standing on one or two chairs; there are others
round about him. I remember that on his death-bed he looked so like Garibaldi, and I am
glad that this promise has really come true.
Certainly this is absurd enough. It was dreamed at the time when the Hungarians were in
a state of anarchy, owing to Parliamentary obstruction, and were passing through the
crisis from which Koloman Széll subsequently delivered them. The trivial circumstance
that the scenes beheld in dreams consist of such little pictures is not without significance
for the elucidation of this element. The customary visual dream-representations of our
thoughts present images that impress us as being life-size; my dream-picture, however, is
the reproduction of a wood-cut inserted in the text of an illustrated history of Austria,
representing Maria Theresa in the Reichstag of Pressburg -- the famous scene of
Moriamur pro rege nostro.1 Like Maria Theresa, my father, in my dream, is surrounded
by the multitude; but he is standing on one or two chairs (Stühlen), and is thus, like a
Stuhlrichter (presiding judge). (He has united them; here the intermediary is the phrase:
`We shall need no judge.') Those of us who stood about my father's death-bed did
actually notice that he looked very like Garibaldi. He had a post-mortem rise of
temperature; his cheeks shone redder and redder . . . involuntarily we continue: `And
behind him, in unsubstantial (radiance), lay that which subdues us all -- the common fate.'
This uplifting of our thoughts prepares us for the fact that we shall have to deal with this
`common fate'. The post-mortem rise in temperature corresponds to the words `after his
death' in the dream-content. The most agonising of his afflictions had been a complete
paralysis of the intestines (obstruction) during the last few weeks of his life. All sorts of
disrespectful thoughts associate themselves with this. One of my contemporaries, who
lost his father while still at the `gymnasium' -- upon which occasion I was profoundly
moved, and tendered him my friendship -- once told me, derisively, of the distress of a
relative whose father had died in the street, and had been brought home, when it
appeared, upon undressing the corpse, that at the moment of death, or post-mortem, an
evacuation of the bowels (Stuhlentleerung) had taken place. The daughter was deeply
distressed by this circumstance, because this ugly detail would inevitably spoil her
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memory of her father. We have now penetrated to the wish that is embodied in this
dream. To stand after one's death before one's children great and undefiled: who would
not wish that? What now has become of the absurdity of this dream? The appearance of
absurdity was due only to the fact that a perfectly permissible figure of speech, in which
we are accustomed to ignore any absurdity that may exist as between its components, has
been faithfully represented in the dream. Here again we can hardly deny that the
appearance of absurdity is desired and has been purposely produced.
The frequency with which dead persons appear in our dreams as living and active and
associating with us has evoked undue astonishment, and some curious explanations,
which afford conspicuous proof of our misunderstanding of dreams. And yet the
explanation of these dreams is close at hand. How often it happens that we say to
ourselves: `If my father were still alive, what would he say to this?' The dream can
express this if in no other way than by his presence in a definite situation. Thus, for
instance, a young man whose grandfather has left him a great inheritance dreams that the
old man is alive, and calls his grandson to account, reproaching him for his lavish
expenditure. What we regard as an objection to the dream on account of our better
knowledge that the man is already dead, is in reality the consoling thought that the dead
man does not need to learn the truth, or satisfaction over the fact that he can no longer
have a say in the matter.
Another form of absurdity found in dreams of deceased relatives does not express scorn
and derision; it serves to express the extremest repudiation, the representation of a
suppressed thought which one would like to believe the very last thing one would think
of. Dreams of this kind appear to be capable of solution only if we remember that a
dream makes no distinction between desire and reality. For example, a man who nursed
his father during his last illness, and who felt his death very keenly, dreamed some time
afterwards the following senseless dream: His father was again living, and conversing
with him as usual, but (and this was the remarkable thing) he had nevertheless died,
though he did not know it. This dream is intelligible if, after `he had nevertheless died',
we insert in consequence of the dreamer's wish, and if after `but he did not know it,' we
add that the dreamer had entertained this wish. While nursing him, the son had often
wished that his father was dead; that is, he had had the really compassionate thought that
it would be a good thing if death would at last put an end to his sufferings. While he was
mourning his father's death, even this compassionate wish became an unconscious
reproach, as though it had really contributed to shorten the sick man's life. By the
awakening of the earliest infantile feelings against his father, it became possible to
express this reproach as a dream; and it was precisely because of the extreme antithesis
between the dream-instigator and the day-thoughts that this dream had to assume so
absurd a form.2
As a general thing, the dreams of a deceased person of whom the dreamer has been fond
confront the interpreter with difficult problems, the solution of which is not always
satisfying. The reason for this may be sought in the especially pronounced ambivalence
of feeling which controls the relation of the dreamer to the dead person. In such dreams it
is quite usual for the deceased person to be treated at first as living; then it suddenly
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appears that he is dead; and in the continuation of the dream he is once more living. This
has a confusing effect. I at last divined that this alternation of death and life is intended to
represent the indifference of the dreamer. (`It is all one to me whether he is alive or
dead'). This indifference, of course, is not real, but wished; its purpose is to help the
dreamer to deny his very intense and often contradictory emotional attitudes, and so it
becomes the dream-representation of his ambivalence. For other dreams in which one
meets with deceased persons the following rule will often be a guide: If in the dream the
dreamer is not reminded that the dead person is dead, he sets himself on a par with the
dead; he dreams of his own death. The sudden realisation or astonishment in the dream
(`but he has long been dead!') is a protest against this identification, and rejects the
meaning that the dreamer is dead. But I will admit that I feel that dream-interpretation is
far from having elicited all the secrets of dreams having this content.
Dream 3. In the example which I shall now cite, I can detect the dream-work in the act of
purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no occasion whatever in the
dream-material. It is taken from the dream which I had as a result of meeting Count Thun
just before going away on a holiday. `I am driving in a cab, and I tell the driver to drive
to a railway station. ``Of course, I can't drive with you on the railway track itself,'' I say,
after the driver has reproached me, as though I had worn him out; at the same time, it
seems as though I had already made with him a journey that one usually makes by train.'
Of this confused and senseless story analysis gives the following explanation: During the
day I had hired a cab to take me to a remote street in Dornbach. The driver, however, did
not know the way, and simply kept on driving, in the manner of such worthy people, until
I became aware of the fact and showed him the way, indulging in a few derisive remarks.
From this driver a train of thought led to the aristocratic personage whom I was to meet
later on. For the present, I will only remark that one thing that strikes us middle-class
plebeians about the aristocracy is that they like to put themselves in the driver's seat.
Does not Count Thun guide the Austrian `car of State'? The next sentence in the dream,
however, refers to my brother, whom I thus also identify with the cab-driver. I had
refused to go to Italy with him this year (`Of course, I can't drive with you on the railway
track itself'), and this refusal was a sort of punishment for his accustomed complaint that
I usually wear him out on this tour (this finds its way into the dream unchanged) by
rushing him too quickly from place to place, and making him see too many beautiful
things in a single day. That evening my brother had accompanied me to the railway
station, but shortly before the carriage had reached the Western station of the
Metropolitan Railway he had jumped out in order to take the train to Purkersdorf. I
suggested to him that he might remain with me a little longer, as he did not travel to
Purkersdorf by the Metropolitan but by the Western Railway. This is why, in my dream, I
made in the cab a journey which one usually makes by train. In reality, however, it was
the other way about: what I told my brother was: `The distance which you travel on the
Metropolitan Railway you could travel in my company on the Western Railway.' The
whole confusion of the dream is therefore due to the fact that in my dream I replace
`Metropolitan Railway' by `cab', which, to be sure, does good service in bringing the
driver and my brother into conjunction. I then elicit from the dream some nonsense which
is hardly disentangled by elucidation, and which almost constitutes a contradiction of my
earlier speech (`Of course, I cannot drive with you on the railway track itself'). But as I
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have no excuse whatever for confronting the Metropolitan Railway with the cab, I must
intentionally have given the whole enigmatical story this peculiar form in my dream.
But with what intention? We shall now learn what the absurdity in the dream signifies,
and the motives which admitted it or created it. In this case the solution of the mystery is
as follows: In the dream I need an absurdity, and something incomprehensible, in
connection with `driving' (Fahren = riding, driving) because in the dream-thoughts I have
a certain opinion that demands representation. One evening, at the house of the witty and
hospitable lady who appears, in another scene of the same dream, as the `housekeeper', I
heard two riddles which I could not solve. As they were known to the other members of
the party. I presented a somewhat ludicrous figure in my unsuccessful attempts to find the
solutions. They were two puns turning on the words Nachkommen (to obey orders--
offspring) and Vorfahren (to drive--forefathers, ancestry). They ran, I believe, as follows:
`The coachman does it
At the master's behests;
Everyone has it;
In the grave it rests.'
(Vorfahren)
A confusing detail was that the first halves of the two riddles were identical:
`The coachman does it
At the master's behests;
Not everyone has it;
In the grave it rests.'
(Nachkommen)
When I saw Count Thun drive up (vorfahren) in state, and fell into the Figaro-like mood,
in which one finds that the sole merit of such aristocratic gentlemen is that they have
taken the trouble to be born (to become Nachkommen), these two riddles became
intermediary thoughts for the dream-work. As aristocrats may readily be replaced by
coachmen, and since it was once the custom to call a coachman `Herr Schwäger' (brotherin-
law), the work of condensation could involve my brother in the same representation.
But the dream-thought at work in the background is as follows: It is nonsense to be proud
of one's ancestors (Vorfahren). I would rather be an ancestor (Vorfahr) myself. On
account of this opinion, `it is nonsense', we have the nonsense in the dream. And now the
last riddle in this obscure passage of the dream is solved -- namely that I have driven
before (vorher gefahren, vorgefahren) with this driver.
Thus, a dream is made absurd if there occurs in the dream-thoughts, as one of the
elements of the contents, the opinion: `That is nonsense'; and, in general, if criticism and
derision are the motives of one of the dreamer's unconscious trains of thought. Hence
absurdity is one of the means by which the dream-work represents contradiction; another
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means is the inversion of material relation between the dream-thoughts and the dreamcontent;
another is the employment of the feeling of motor inhibition. But the absurdity
of a dream is not to be translated by a simple `no'; it is intended to reproduce the
tendency of the dream-thoughts to express laughter or derision simultaneously with the
contradiction. Only with this intention does the dream-work produce anything ridiculous.
Here again it transforms a part of the latent content into a manifest form.3
As a matter of fact, we have already cited a convincing example of this significance of an
absurd dream. The dream (interpreted without analysis) of the Wagnerian performance
which lasted until 7.45 a.m., and in which the orchestra is conducted from a tower, etc.
(see p. 223) is obviously saying: It is a crazy world and an insane society. He who
deserves a thing doesn't get it, and he who doesn't care for it does get it. In this way the
dreamer compares her fate with that of her cousin. The fact that dreams of a dead father
were the first to furnish us with examples of absurdity in dreams is by no means
accidental. The conditions for the creation of absurd dreams are here grouped together in
a typical fashion. The authority proper to the father has at an early age evoked the
criticism of the child, and the strict demands which he has made have caused the child, in
self-defence, to pay particularly close attention to every weakness of his father's; but the
piety with which the father's personality is surrounded in our thoughts, especially after
his death, intensifies the censorship which prevents the expression of his criticism from
becoming conscious.
Dream 4. Here is another absurd dream of a deceased father:
I receive a communication from the town council of my native city concerning the cost of
accommodation in the hospital in the year 1851. This was necessitated by a seizure from
which I was suffering. I make fun of the matter for, in the first place, I was not yet born in
1851, and in the second place, my father, to whom the communication might refer, is
already dead. I go to him in the adjoining room, where he is lying in bed, and tell him
about it. To my surprise he remembers that in the year 1851 he was once drunk and had
to be locked up or confined. It was when he was working for the firm of T. `Then you, too,
used to drink?' I ask. `You married soon after?' I reckon that I was born in 1856, which
seems to me to be immediately afterwards.
In the light of the foregoing exposition, we shall translate the insistence with which this
dream exhibits its absurdities as a sure sign of a particularly embittered and passionate
polemic in the dream-thoughts. All the greater, then, is our astonishment when we
perceive that in this dream the polemic is waged openly, and that my father is denoted as
the person who is made a laughing-stock. Such frankness seems to contradict our
assumption of a censorship controlling the dream-work. The explanation is that here the
father is only an interposed figure, while the quarrel is really with another person, who
appears in the dream only in a single allusion. Whereas a dream usually treats of revolt
against other persons, behind whom the father is concealed, here it is the other way
about: the father serves as the man of straw to represent another, and hence the dream
dares to concern itself openly with a person who is usually hallowed, because there is
present the certain knowledge that he is not in reality intended. We learn of this condition
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of affairs by considering the occasion of the dream. It was dreamed after I had heard that
an older colleague, whose judgment was considered infallible, had expressed disapproval
and astonishment on hearing that one of my patients had already been undergoing
psychoanalytic treatment at my hands for five years. The introductory sentences of the
dream allude in a transparently disguised manner to the fact that this colleague had for a
time taken over the duties which my father could no longer perform (statement of
expenses, accommodation in the hospital); and when our friendly relations began to alter
for the worse I was thrown into the same emotional conflict as that which arises in the
case of a misunderstanding between father and son (by reason of the part played by the
father, and his earlier functions). The dream-thoughts now bitterly resent the reproach
that I am not making better progress, which extends itself from the treatment of this
patient to other things. Does my colleague know anyone who can get on any faster? Does
he not know that conditions of this sort are usually incurable and last for life? What are
four or five years in comparison to a whole lifetime, especially when life has been made
so much easier for the patient during the treatment?
The impression of absurdity in this dream is brought about largely by the fact that
sentences from different divisions of the dream-thoughts are strung together without any
reconciling transition. Thus, the sentence, I go to him in the adjoining room, etc., leaves
the subject from which the preceding sentences are taken, and faithfully reproduces the
circumstances under which I told my father that I was engaged to be married. Thus the
dream is trying to remind me of the noble disinterestedness which the old man showed at
that time, and to contrast this with the conduct of another newly-introduced person. I now
perceive that the dream is allowed to make fun of my father because in the dreamthoughts,
in the full recognition of his merits, he is held up as an example to others. It is
in the nature of every censorship that one is permitted to tell untruths about forbidden
things rather than the truth. The next sentence, to the effect that my father remembers that
he was once drunk, and was locked up in consequence, contains nothing that really relates
to my father any more. The person who is screened by him is here a no less important
personage than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I followed with such veneration,
and whose attitude towards me, after a short period of favouritism, changed into one of
undisguised hostility. The dream recalls to me his own statement that in his youth he had
at one time formed the habit of intoxicating himself with chloroform, with the result that
he had to enter a sanatorium; and also my second experience with him, shortly before his
death. I had an embittered literary controversy with him in reference to masculine
hysteria, the existence of which he denied, and when I visited him during his last illness,
and asked him how he felt, he described his condition at some length, and concluded with
the words: `You know, I have always been one of the prettiest cases of masculine
hysteria.' Thus, to my satisfaction, and to my astonishment, he admitted what he so long
and so stubbornly denied. But the fact that in this scene of my dream I can use my father
to screen Meynert is explained not by any discovered analogy between the two persons,
but by the fact that it is the brief yet perfectly adequate representation of a conditional
sentence in the dream-thoughts which, if fully expanded, would read as follows: `Of
course, if I belonged to the second generation, if I were the son of a professor or a privy
councillor, I should have progressed more rapidly.' In my dream I make my father a
professor and a privy councillor. The most obvious and most annoying absurdity of the
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dream lies in the treatment of the date 1851, which seems to me to be indistinguishable
from 1856, as though a difference of five years meant nothing whatever. But it is just this
one of the dream-thoughts that requires expression. Four or five years -- that is precisely
the length of time during which I enjoyed the support of the colleague mentioned at the
outset; but it is also the duration of time I kept my fiancee waiting before I married her;
and by a coincidence that is eagerly exploited by the dream-thoughts, it is also the time I
have kept my oldest patient waiting for a complete cure. `What are five years?' ask the
dream-thoughts. `That is no time at all to me, that isn't worth consideration. I have time
enough ahead of me, and just as what you wouldn't believe came true at last, so I shall
accomplish this also.' Moreover, the number 51, when considered apart from the number
of the century, is determined in yet another manner and in an opposite sense; for which
reason it occurs several times over in the dream. It is the age at which man seems
particularly exposed to danger; the age at which I have seen colleagues die suddenly,
among them one who had been appointed a few days earlier to a professorship for which
he had long been waiting.
Dream 5. Another absurd dream which plays with figures:
An acquaintance of mine, Herr M., has been attacked in an essay by no less a person
than Goethe and, as we all think, with unjustifiable vehemence. Herr M. is, of course,
crushed by this attack. He complains of it bitterly at a dinner-party; but his veneration
for Goethe has not suffered as a result of this personal experience. I try to elucidate the
temporal relations a little, as they seem improbable to me. Goethe died in 1832; since his
attack upon M. must, of course, have taken place earlier, M. was at the time quite a
young man. It seems plausible to me that he was 18 years old. But I do not know exactly
what the date of the present year is, and so the whole calculation lapses into obscurity.
The attack, by the way, is contained in Goethe's well-known essay on `Nature'.
We shall soon find the means of justifying the nonsense of this dream. Herr M., with
whom I became acquainted at a dinnerparty, had recently asked me to examine his
brother, who showed signs of general paralysis. The conjecture was right; the painful
thing about this visit was that the patient gave his brother away by alluding to his youthful
pranks, though our conversation gave him no occasion to do so. I had asked the patient to
tell me the year of his birth, and had repeatedly got him to make trifling calculations in
order to show the weakness of his memory -- which tests, by the way, he passed quite
well. Now I can see that I behave like a paralytic in the dream (I do not know exactly
what the date of the present year is). Other material of the dream is drawn from another
recent source. The editor of a medical periodical, a friend of mine, had accepted for his
paper a very unfavourable `crushing' review of the last book of my Berlin friend, Fl., the
critic being a very youthful reviewer, who was not very competent to pass judgment. I
thought I had a right to interfere, and called the editor to account; he greatly regretted his
acceptance of the review, but he would not promise any redress. I thereupon broke off my
relations with the periodical, and in my letter of resignation I expressed the hope that our
personal relations would not suffer as a result of the incident. The third source of this
dream is an account given by a female patient -- it was fresh in my memory at the time --
of the psychosis of her brother who had fallen into a frenzy crying `Nature, Nature.' The
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physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived from a reading of Goethe's
beautiful essay, and that it pointed to the patient's overwork in the study of natural
philosophy. I thought, rather, of the sexual meaning in which even our less cultured
people use the word `Nature', and the fact that the unfortunate man afterwards mutilated
his genitals seems to show that I was not far wrong. Eighteen years was the age of this
patient at the time of this access of frenzy.
If I add, further, that the book of my so severely criticised friend (`One asks oneself
whether the author or oneself is crazy' had been the opinion of another critic) treats of the
temporal conditions of life, and refers the duration of Goethe's life to the multiple of a
number significant from the biological point of view, it will readily be admitted that in
my dream I am putting myself in my friend's place. (I try to elucidate the temporal
relations a little.) But I behave like a paretic, and the dream revels in absurdity. This
means that the dream-thoughts say, ironically: `Naturally, he is the fool, the lunatic, and
you are the clever people who know better. Perhaps, however, it is the other way about?'
Now, `the other way about' is abundantly represented in my dream, inasmuch as Goethe
has attacked the young man, which is absurd, while it is perfectly possible even today for
a young fellow to attack the immortal Goethe and inasmuch as I reckon from the year of
Goethe's death, while I made the paretic reckon from the year of his birth.
But I have further promised to show that no dream is inspired by other than egoistical
motives. Accordingly, I must account for the fact that in this dream I make my friend's
cause my own, and put myself in his place. My critical conviction in waking life would
not justify my doing so. Now, the story of the eighteen-year-old patient, and the divergent
interpretations of his cry, `Nature', allude to the fact that I have put myself into
opposition to the majority of physicians by claiming a sexual etiology for the
psychoneuroses. I may say to myself: `You will meet with the same kind of criticism as
your friend; indeed you have already done so to some extent'; so that I may now replace
the `he' in the dream-thoughts by `we'. `Yes, you are right; we two are the fools.' That
mea res agitur is clearly shown by the mention of the short, incomparably beautiful essay
of Goethe's for it was a popular lecture on this essay which induced me to study the
natural sciences when I left the gymnasium, and was still undecided as to my future.
Dream 6. I have to show that yet another dream in which my ego does not appear is none
the less egoistic. On p. 163 I referred to a short dream in which Professor M. says: `My
son, the myopic . . .'; and I stated that this was only a preliminary dream, preceding
another in which I play a part. Here is the main dream, previously omitted, which
challenges us to explain its absurd and unintelligible word-formation.
On account of something or other that is happening in Rome it is necessary for the
children to flee, and this they do. The scene is then laid before a gate, a double gate in
the ancient style (the Porta Romana in Siena, as I realise while I am dreaming). I am
sitting on the edge of a well, and I am greatly depressed; I am almost weeping. A woman
-- a nurse, a nun -- brings out the two boys and hands them over to their father, who is
not myself. The elder is distinctly my eldest son, but I do not see the face of the other boy.
The woman asks the eldest boy for a parting kiss. She is remarkable for a red nose. The
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boy refuses her the kiss, but says to her, extending her his hand in parting, `Auf Geseres',
and to both of us (or to one of us) `Auf Ungeseres.' I have the idea that this indicates a
preference.
This dream is built upon a tangle of thoughts induced by a play I saw at the theatre, called
Das neue Ghetto (`The New Ghetto'). The Jewish question, anxiety as to the future of my
children, who cannot be given a fatherland, anxiety as to educating them so that they may
enjoy the privileges of citizens -- all these features may easily be recognised in the
accompanying dream-thoughts.
`By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.' Siena, like Rome, is famous for its
beautiful fountains. In the dream I have to find some sort of substitute for Rome (cf. p.
94) from among localities which are known to me. Near the Porta Romana of Siena we
saw a large, brightly-lit building, which we learned was the Manicomio, the insane
asylum. Shortly before the dream I had heard that a co-religionist had been forced to
resign a position, which he had secured with great effort, in a state asylum.
Our interest is aroused by the speech: `Auf Geseres', where one might expect, from the
situation continued throughout the dream, `Auf Wiedersehen' (Au revoir), and by its quite
meaningless antithesis: `Auf Ungeseres.' (`Un' is a prefix meaning `not'.)
According to information received from Hebrew scholars, Geseres is a genuine Hebrew
word, derived from the verb goiser, and may best be rendered by `ordained sufferings,
fated disaster'. From its employment in the Jewish jargon one would take it to mean
`wailing and lamentation'. Ungeseres is a coinage of my own, and is the first to attract my
attention, but for the present it baffles me. The little observation at the end of the dream --
that Ungeseres indicates an advantage over Geseres -- opens the way to the associations,
and therewith to understanding. This relation holds good in the case of caviare; the
unsalted kind4 is more highly prized than the salted. `Caviare to the general' -- `noble
passions'. Herein lies concealed a jesting allusion to a member of my household, of
whom I hope -- for she is younger than I -- that she will watch over the future of my
children; this, too, agrees with the fact that another member of my household, our worthy
nurse, is clearly indicated by the nurse (or nun) of the dream. But a connecting-link is
wanting between the pair, salted-unsalted and Geseres-Ungeseres. This is to be found in
gesauert and ungesauert (leavened and unleavened). In their flight or exodus from Egypt
the children of Israel had not time to allow their dough to become leavened, and in
commemoration of this event they eat unleavened bread at Passover to this day. Here,
too, I can find room for the sudden association which occurred to me in this part of the
analysis. I remembered how we, my friend from Berlin and myself, had strolled about the
streets of Breslau, a city which was strange to us, during the last days of Easter. A little
girl asked me the way to a certain street; I had to tell her that I did not know it; I then
remarked to my friend, `I hope that later on in life the child will show more perspicacity
in selecting the persons whom she allows to direct her.' Shortly afterwards a sign caught
my eye: `Dr Herod, consulting hours . . .' I said to myself: `I hope this colleague does not
happen to be a children's specialist.' Meanwhile, my friend had been developing his views
on the biological significance of bilateral symmetry, and had begun a sentence with the
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words: `If we had only one eye in the middle of the forehead, like Cyclops . . .' This leads
us to the speech of the professor in the preliminary dream: `My son, the myopic.' And
now I have been led to the chief source for Geseres. Many years ago, when this son of
Professor M.'s, who is today an independent thinker, was still sitting on his school-bench,
he contracted an affection of the eye which, according to the doctor, gave some cause for
anxiety. He expressed the opinion that so long as it was confined to one eye it was of no
great significance, but that if it should extend to the other eye it would be serious. The
affection subsided in the one eye without leaving any ill effects; shortly afterwards,
however, the same symptoms did actually appear in the other eye. The boy's terrified
mother immediately summoned the physician to her distant home in the country. But the
doctor was now of a different opinion (took the other side). `What sort of ``Geseres'' is
this you are making?' he asked the mother, impatiently. `If one side got well, the other
will, too.' And so it turned out.
And now as to the connection between this and myself and my family. The school-bench
upon which Professor M.'s son learned his first lessons has become the property of my
eldest son; it was given to him by the boy's mother, and it is into his mouth that I put the
words of farewell in the dream. One of the wishes that may be connected with this
transference may now be readily guessed. This school-bench is intended by its
construction to guard the child from becoming shortsighted and one-sided. Hence myopia
(and behind it the Cyclops), and the discussion about bilateralism. The fear of onesidedness
has a twofold significance; it might mean not only physical one-sidednes, but
intellectual one-sidedness also. Does it not seem as though the scene in the dream, with
all its craziness, were contradicting precisely this anxiety? When on the one hand the boy
has spoken his words of farewell, on the other hand he calls out the very opposite, as
though to establish an equilibrium. He is acting, as it were, in obedience to bilateral
symmetry!
Thus, a dream frequently has the profoundest meaning in the places where it seems most
absurd. In all ages those who have had something to say and have been unable to say it
without danger to themselves have gladly donned the cap and bells. He for whom the
forbidden saying was intended was more likely to tolerate it if he was able to laugh at it,
and to flatter himself with the comment that what he disliked was obviously absurd.
Dreams behave in real life as does the prince in the play who is obliged to pretend to be a
madman, and hence we may say of dreams what Hamlet said of himself, substituting an
unintelligible jest for the actual truth: `I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is
southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw' (Act II, sc. ii).5
Thus, my solution of the problem of absurdity in dreams is that the dream-thoughts are
never absurd -- at least, not those of the dreams of sane persons -- and that the dreamwork
produces absurd dreams, and dreams with individually absurd elements, when the
dream-thoughts contain criticism, ridicule, and derision, which have to be given
expression. My next concern is to show that the dream-work is exhausted by the cooperation
of the three factors enumerated -- and of a fourth which has still to be
mentioned -- that it does no more than translate the dream-thoughts, observing the four
conditions prescribed, and that the question whether the mind goes to work in dreams
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with all its intellectual faculties, or with only part of them, is wrongly stated, and does not
meet the actual state of affairs. But since there are plenty of dreams in which judgments
are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognised in which astonishment at some
individual element of the dream appears, and explanations are attempted, and arguments
adduced, I must meet the objections deriving from these occurrences by the citation of
selected examples.
My answer is as follows: Everything in dreams which occurs as the apparent functioning
of the critical faculty is to be regarded, not as the intellectual performance of the dreamwork,
but as belonging to the substance of the dream-thoughts, and it has found its way
from these, as a completed structure, into the manifest dream-content. I may go even
farther than this! I may even say that the judgments which are passed upon the dream as
it is remembered after waking, and the feelings which are aroused by the reproduction of
the dream, belong largely to the latent dream-content, and must be fitted into place in the
interpretation of the dream.
1. One striking example of this has already been given. A female patient does not wish to
relate her dream because it was too vague. She saw a person in the dream, and does not
know whether it was her husband or her father. Then follows a second dream-fragment,
in which there occurs a `manure-pail', with which the following reminiscence is
associated. As a young housewife she once declared jestingly, in the presence of a young
male relative who frequented the house, that her next business would be to procure a new
manure-pail. Next morning one was sent to her, but it was filled with lilies of the valley.
This part of the dream served to represent the phrase, `Not grown on my own manure'.6 If
we complete the analysis, we find in the dream-thoughts the after-effect of a story heard
in youth; namely, that a girl had given birth to a child, and that it was not clear who was
the father. The dream-representation here overlaps into the waking thought, and allows
one of the elements of the dream-thoughts to be represented by a judgment, formed in the
waking state, of the whole dream.
2. A similar case: One of my patients has a dream which strikes him as being an
interesting one, for he says to himself, immediately after waking: `I must tell that to the
doctor.' The dream is analysed, and shows the most distinct allusion to an affair in which
he had become involved during the treatment, and of which he had decided to tell me
nothing.7
3. Here is a third example from my own experience:
I go to the hospital with P., through a neighbourhood in which there are houses and
gardens. Thereupon I have an idea that I have already seen this locality several times in
my dreams. I do not know my way very well; P. shows me a way which leads round a
corner to a restaurant (indoor); here I ask for Frau Doni, and I hear that she is living at
the back of the house, in a small room, with three children. I go there, and on the way I
meet an undefined person with my two little girls. After I have been with them for a while,
I take them with me. A sort of reproach against my wife for having left them there.
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On waking I am conscious of a great satisfaction, whose motive seems to be the fact that
I shall now learn from the analysis what is meant by `I have already dreamed of this.'8
But the analysis of the dream tells me nothing about this; it shows me only that the
satisfaction belongs to the latent dream-content, and not to a judgment of the dream. It is
satisfaction concerning the fact that I have had children by my marriage. P.'s path
through life and my own ran parallel for a time; now he has outstripped me both socially
and financially, but his marriage has remained childless. Of this the two occasions of the
dream give proof on complete analysis. On the previous day I had read in the newspaper
the obituary notice of a certain Frau Dona A--y (which I turn into Doni), who had died in
childbirth; I was told by my wife that the dead woman had been nursed by the same
midwife whom she herself had employed at the birth of our two youngest boys. The name
Dona had caught my attention, for I had recently met with it for the first time in an
English novel. The other occasion for the dream may be found in the date on which it was
dreamed; this was the night before the birthday of my eldest boy, who, it seems, is
poetically gifted.
4. The same satisfaction remained with me after waking from the absurd dream that my
father, after his death, had played a political role among the Magyars. It is motivated by
the persistence of the feeling which accompanied the last sentence of the dream: `I
remember that on his deathbed he looked so like Garibaldi, and I am glad that it has
really come true . . .' (Followed by a forgotten continuation.) I can now supply from the
analysis what should fill this gap. It is the mention of my second boy, to whom I have
given the baptismal name of an eminent historical personage who attracted me greatly
during my boyhood, especially during my stay in England. I had to wait for a year before
I could fulfil my intention of using this name if the next child should be a son, and with
great satisfaction I greeted him by this name as soon as he was born. It is easy to see how
the father's suppressed desire for greatness is, in his thoughts, transferred to his children;
one is inclined to believe that this is one of the ways by which the suppression of this
desire (which becomes necessary in the course of life) is effected. The little fellow won
his right to inclusion in the text of this dream by virtue of the fact that the same accident -
- that of soiling his clothes (quite pardonable in either a child or in a dying person) -- had
occurred to him. Compare with this the allusion Stuhlrichter (presiding judge) and the
wish of the dream: to stand before one's children great and undefiled.
5. If I should now have to look for examples of judgments or expressions of opinion
which remain in the dream itself, and are not continued in, or transferred to, our waking
thoughts, my task would be greatly facilitated were I to take my examples from dreams
which have already been cited for other purposes. The dream of Goethe's attack on Herr
M. appears to contain quite a number of acts of judgment. I try to elucidate the temporal
relations a little, as they seem improbable to me. Does not this look like a critical impulse
directed against the nonsensical idea that Goethe should have made a literary attack upon
a young man of my acquaintance? `It seems plausible to me that he was 18 years old.'
That sounds quite like the result of a calculation, though a silly one; and the `I do not
know exactly what is the date of the present year' would be an example of uncertainty or
doubt in dreams.
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But I know from analysis that these acts of judgment, which seem to have been
performed in the dream for the first time, admit of a different construction, in the light of
which they become indispensable for interpreting the dream, while at the same time all
absurdity is avoided. With the sentence `I try to elucidate the temporal relations a little,' I
put myself in the place of my friend, who is actually trying to elucidate the temporal
relations of life. The sentence then loses its significance as a judgment which objects to
the nonsense of the previous sentences. The interposition, `Which seems improbable to
me,' belongs to the following: `It seems plausible to me.' With almost these identical
words I replied to the lady who told me of her brother's illness: `It seems improbable to
me' that the cry of `Nature, Nature', was in any way connected with Goethe; it seems
much more plausible to me that it has the sexual significance which is known to you. In
this case, it is true, a judgment was expressed, but in reality, not in a dream, and on an
occasion which is remembered and utilised by the dream-thoughts. The dream-content
appropriates this judgment like any other fragment of the dream-thoughts.
The number 18 with which the judgment in the dream is meaninglessly connected still
retains a trace of the context from which the real judgment was taken. Lastly, the `I do
not know exactly what is the date of the present year' is intended for no other purpose
than that of my identification with the paralytic, in examining whom this particular fact
was established.
In the solution of these apparent acts of judgment in dreams, it will be well to keep in
mind the above-mentioned rule of interpretation, which tells us that we must disregard
the coherence which is established in the dream between its constituent parts as an
unessential phenomenon, and that every dream-element must be taken separately and
traced back to its source. The dream is a compound, which for the purposes of
investigation must be broken up into its elements. On the other hand, we become alive to
the fact that there is a psychic force which expresses itself in our dreams and establishes
this apparent coherence; that is, the material obtained by the dream-work undergoes a
secondary elaboration. Here we have the manifestations of that psychic force which we
shall presently take into consideration as the fourth of the factors which co-operate in
dream-formation.
6. Let us now look for other examples of acts of judgment in the dreams which have
already been cited. In the absurd dream about the communication from the town council,
I ask the question, `You married soon after?' I reckon that I was born in 1856, which
seems to me to be directly afterwards. This certainly takes the form of an inference. My
father married shortly after his attack, in the year 1851. I am the eldest son, born in 1856,
so this is correct. We know that this inference has in fact been falsified by the
wishfulfilment, and that the sentence which dominates the dream-thoughts is as follows:
Four or five years -- that is no time at all -- that need not be counted. But every part of
this chain of reasoning may be seen to be otherwise determined from the dream-thoughts,
as regards both its content and its form. It is the patient of whose patience my colleague
complains who intends to marry immediately the treatment is ended. The manner in
which I converse with my father in this dream reminds me of an examination or crossexamination,
and thus of a university professor who was in the habit of compiling a
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complete docket of personal data when entering his pupils' names: You were born when?
-- 1856. -- Patre? -- Then the applicant gave the Latin form of the baptismal name of the
father and we students assumed that the Hofrat drew inferences from the father's name
which the baptismal name of the candidate would not always have justified. Hence, the
drawing of inferences in the dream would be merely the repetition of the drawing of
inferences which appears as a scrap of material in the dream-thoughts. From this we learn
something new. If an inference occurs in the dream-content, it assuredly comes from the
dream-thoughts; but it may be contained in these as a fragment of remembered material,
or it may serve as the logical connective of a series of dream-thoughts. In any case, an
inference in the dream represents an inference taken from the dream-thoughts.9
It will be well to continue the analysis of this dream at this point. With the inquisition of
the professor is associated the recollection of an index (in my time published in Latin) of
the university students; and further, the recollection of my own course of study. The five
years allowed for the study of medicine were, as usual, too little for me. I worked
unconcernedly for some years longer; my acquaintances regarded me as a loafer, and
doubted whether I should `get through'. Then, suddenly, I decided to take my
examinations, and I `got through' in spite of the postponement. A fresh confirmation of
the dream-thoughts with which I defiantly meet my critics: `Even though you won't
believe it, because I am taking my time, I shall reach the conclusion (German, Schluss =
end. conclusion, inference). It has often happened like that.'
In its introductory portion this dream contains several sentences which, we can hardly
deny, are of the nature of an argument. And this argument is not at all absurd; it might
just as well occur in my waking thoughts. In my dream I make fun of the communication
from the town council, for in the first place I was not yet born in 1851, and in the second
place my father, to whom it might refer, is already dead. Not only is each of these
statements perfectly correct in itself, but they are the very arguments that I should employ
if I received such a communication. We know from the foregoing analysis (p. 289) that
this dream has sprung from the soil of deeply embittered and scornful dream-thoughts;
and if we may also assume that the motive of the censorship is a very powerful one, we
shall understand that the dream-thought has every occasion to create a flawless refutation
of an unreasonable demand, in accordance with the pattern contained in the dreamthoughts.
But the analysis shows that in this case the dream-work has not been required to
make a free imitation, but that material taken from the dream-thoughts had to be
employed for the purpose. It is as though in an algebraic equation there should occur,
besides the figures, plus and minus signs, and symbols of powers and of roots, and as
though someone, in copying this equation, without understanding it, should copy both the
symbols and the figures, and mix them all up together. The two arguments may be traced
to the following material: It is painful to me to think that many of the hypotheses upon
which I base my psychological solution of the psychoneuroses will arouse scepticism and
ridicule when they first became known. For instance, I shall have to assert that
impressions of the second year of life, and even the first, leave an enduring trace upon the
emotional life of subsequent neuropaths, and that these impressions -- although greatly
distorted and exaggerated by the memory -- may furnish the earliest and profoundest
basis of a hysterical symptom. Patients to whom I explain this at a suitable moment are
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wont to parody my explanation by offering to search for reminiscenes of the period when
they were not yet born. My disclosure of the unsuspected part played by the father in the
earliest sexual impulses of female patients may well have a similar reception. (Cf. the
discussion on pp. 150 ff.) Nevertheless, it is my well-founded conviction that both
doctrines are true. In confirmation of this I recall certain examples in which the death of
the father occurred when the child was very young, and subsequent incidents, otherwise
inexplicable, proved that the child had unconsciously preserved recollections of the
person who had so early gone out of its life. I know that both my assertions are based
upon inferences whose validity will be attacked. It is the doing of the wish-fulfilment that
precisely the material of those inferences, which I fear will be contested, should be
utilised by the dream-work for establishing incontestable conclusions.
7. In one dream, which I have hitherto only touched upon, astonishment at the subject
emerging is distinctly expressed at the outset.
`The elder Brücke must have set me some task or other; strangely enough, it relates to the
preparation of the lower part of my own body, the pelvis and legs, which I see before me
as though in the dissecting-room, but without feeling the absence of part of my body, and
without a trace of horror. Louise N. is standing beside me, and helps me in the work. The
pelvis is eviscerated; now the upper, now the lower aspect is visible, and the two aspects
are commingled. Large fleshy red tubercles are visible (which, even in the dream, make
me think of haemorrhoids). Also something lying over them had to be carefully picked off,
it looked like crumpled tinfoil.10 Then I was once more in possession of my legs, and I
made a journey through the city, but I took a cab (as I was tired). To my astonishment,
the cab drove into the front door of a house, which opened and allowed it to pass into a
corridor, which was broken off at the end, and eventually led on into the open.11 Finally I
wandered through changing landscapes, with an Alpine guide, who carried my things. He
carried me for some distance, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was
swampy; we went along the edge; people were sitting on the ground, like Red Indians or
gypsies; among them a girl. Until then I had made my way along on the slippery ground,
in constant astonishment that I was so well able to do so after making the preparation. At
last we came to a small wooden house with an open window at one end. Here the guide
set me down, and laid two planks, which stood in readiness, on the window-sill so as to
bridge the chasm which had to be crossed from the window. Now I grew really alarmed
about my legs. Instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying upon
wooden benches which were fixed on the walls of the hut, and something like two
sleeping children next to them; as though not the planks but the children were intended to
make the crossing possible. I awoke with terrified thoughts.
Anyone who has been duly impressed by the extensive nature of dream-condensation will
readily image what a number of pages the exhaustive analysis of this dream would fill.
Fortunately for the context, I shall make this dream only the one example of astonishment
in dreams, which makes its appearance in the parenthetical remark, `strangely enough'.
Let us consider the occasion of the dream. It is a visit of this lady, Louise N., who helps
me with my work in the dream. She says: `Lend me something to read.' I offer her She,
by Rider Haggard. `A strange book, but full of hidden meaning,' I try to explain; `the
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eternal feminine, the immortality of our emotions --' Here she interrupts me: `I know that
book already. Haven't you something of your own?' `No, my own immortal works are
still unwritten.' `Well, when are you going to publish your so-called ``latest revelations'',
which, you promised us, even we should be able to read?' she asks, rather sarcastically. I
now perceive that she is a mouthpiece for someone else, and I am silent. I think of the
effort it cost me to make public even my work on dreams, in which I had to surrender so
much of my own intimate nature. (`The best that you know you can't tell the boys.') The
preparation of my own body which I am ordered to make in my dream is thus the selfanalysis
involved in the communication of my dreams. The elder Brücke very properly
finds a place here; in the first years of my scientific work it so happened that I neglected
the publication of a certain discovery until his insistence forced me to publish it. But the
further trains of thought, proceeding from my conversation with Louise N., go too deep
to become conscious; they are side-tracked by way of the material which has been
incidentally awakened in me by the mention of Rider Haggard's She. The comment
`strangely enough' applies to this book, and to another by the same author, The Heart of
the World' and numerous elements of the dream are taken from these two fantastic
romances. The swampy ground over which the dreamer is carried, the chasm which has
to be crossed by means of planks, come from She; the Red Indians, the girl, and the
wooden house, from The Heart of the World. In both novels a woman is the leader, and
both treat of perilous wandering; She has to do with an adventurous journey to an
undiscovered country, a place almost untrodden by the foot of man. According to a note
which I find in my record of the dream, the fatigue in my legs was a real sensation from
those days. Probably a weary mood corresponded with this fatigue, and the doubting
question: `How much farther will my legs carry me?' In She the end of the adventure is
that the heroine meets her death in the mysterious central fire, instead of winning
immortality for herself and for others. Some related anxiety has mistakably arisen in the
dream-thoughts. The `wooden house' is assuredly also a coffin -- that is, the grave. But in
representing this most unwished-for of all thoughts by means of a wish-fulfilment, the
dream-work has achieved its masterpiece. I was once in a grave, but it was an empty
Etruscan grave near Orvieto -- a narrow chamber with two stone benches on the walls,
upon which were lying the skeletons of two adults. The interior of the wooden house in
the dream looks exactly like this grave, except that stone has been replaced by wood. The
dream seems to say: `If you must already sojourn in your grave, let it be this Etruscan
grave', and by means of this interpolation it transforms the most mournful expectation
into one that is really to be desired. Unfortunately, as we shall learn, the dream is able to
change into its opposite only the idea accompanying an affect, but not always the affect
itself. Hence, I awake with `thoughts of terror', even after the idea that perhaps my
children will achieve what has been denied to their father has forced its way to
representation: a fresh allusion to the strange romance in which the identity of a character
is preserved through a series of generations covering two thousand years.
8. In the context of another dream there is a similar expression of astonishment at what is
experienced in the dream. This, however, is connected with such a striking, far-fetched,
and almost intellectual attempt at explanation that if only on this account I should have to
subject the whole dream to analysis, even if it did not possess two other interesting
features. On the night of the eighteenth of July 1 was travelling on the Southern Railway,
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and in my sleep I heard someone call out: `Hollthum, 10 minutes.' I immediately think of
Holothuria -- of a natural history museum -- that here is a place where valiant men have
vainly resisted the domination of their overlord. -- Yes, the counter-reformation in
Austria! -- As though it were a place in Styria or the Tyrol. Now I see indistinctly a small
museum, in which the relics or the acquisitions of these men are preserved. I should like
to leave the train, but I hesitate to do so. There are women with fruit on the platform;
they squat on the ground, and in that position invitingly hold up their baskets. -- I
hesitated, in doubt as to whether we have time, but here we are still stationary. -- I am
suddenly in another compartment, in which the leather and the seats are so narrow that
one's spine directly touches the back.12 I am surprised at this, but I may have changed
carriages while asleep. Several people, among them an English brother and sister; a row
of books plainly on a shelf on the wall. -- I see `The Wealth of Nations', and `Matter and
Motion' (by Maxwell), thick books bound in brown linen. The man asks his sister about a
book of Schiller's, whether she has forgotten it. These books seem to belong now to me,
now to them. At this point I wish to join in the conversation in order to confirm or
support what is being said . . . I wake sweating all over, because all the windows are shut.
The train stops at Marburg.
While writing down the dream, a part of it occurs to me which my memory wished to
pass over. I tell the brother and sister (in English), referring to a certain book: `It is from
. . .' but I correct myself: `It is by . . .' The man remarks to his sister: `He said it
correctly.'
The dream begins with the name of a station, which seems to have almost waked me. For
this name, which was Marburg, I substitute Hollthurn. The fact that I heard Marburg the
first, or perhaps the second time it was called out, is proved by the mention of Schiller in
the dream; he was born in Marburg, though not the Styrian Marburg.13 Now on this
occasion, although I was travelling first class, I was doing so under very disagreeable
circumstances. The train was overcrowded; in my compartment I had come upon a lady
and gentleman who seemed very fine people, and had not the good breeding, or did not
think it worth while, to conceal their displeasure at my intrusion. My polite greeting was
not returned, and although they were sitting side by side (with their backs to the engine),
the woman before my eyes hastened to pre-empt the seat opposite her, and next to the
window, with her umbrella; the door was immediately closed, and pointed remarks about
the opening of windows were exchanged. Probably I was quickly recognised as a person
hungry for fresh air. It was a hot night, and the atmosphere of the compartment, closed on
both sides, was almost suffocating. My experience as a traveller leads me to believe that
such inconsiderate and overbearing conduct marks people who have paid for their tickets
only partly, or not at all. When the conductor came round, and I presented my dearly
bought ticket, the lady exclaimed haughtily and almost threateningly: `My husband has a
pass.' She was an imposing-looking person, with a discontented expression, in age not far
removed from the autumn of feminine beauty; the man had no chance to say anything; he
sat there motionless. I tried to sleep. In my dream I take a terrible revenge on my
disagreeable travelling companions; no one would suspect what insults and humiliations
are concealed behind the disjointed fragments of the first half of the dream. After this
need has been satisfied, the second wish, to exchange my compartment for another,
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makes itself felt. The dream changes its scene so often, and without making the slightest
objection to such changes, that it would not have seemed at all remarkable had I at once,
from my memories, replaced my travelling companions by more agreeable persons. But
here was a case where something or other opposes the change of scene, and finds it
necessary to explain it. How did I suddenly get into another compartment? I could not
positively remember having changed carriages. So there was only one explanation: I must
have left the carriage while asleep -- an unusual occurrence, examples of which,
however, are known to neuropathologists. We know of persons who undertake railway
journeys in a crepuscular state, without betraying their abnormal condition by any sign
whatever, until at some stage of their journey they come to themselves, and are surprised
by the gap in their memory. Thus, while I am still dreaming, I declare my own case to be
such a case of automatisme ambulatoire.
Analysis permits of another solution. The attempt at explanation, which so surprises me if
I am to attribute it to the dream-work, is not original, but is copied from the neurosis of
one of my patients. I have already spoken in another chapter of a highly cultured and
kindly man who began, shortly after the death of his parents, to accuse himself of
murderous tendencies, and who was distressed by the precautionary measures which he
had to take to secure himself against these tendencies. His was a case of severe
obsessional idea with full insight. To begin with, it was painful to him to walk through
the streets, as he was obsessed by the necessity of accounting for all the persons he met;
he had to know whither they had disappeared; if one of them suddenly eluded his
pursuing glance, he was left with a feeling of distress and the idea that he might possibly
have made away with the man. Behind this obsessive idea was concealed, among other
things, a Cain-fantasy, for `all men are brothers'. Owing to the impossibility of
accomplishing this task, he gave up going for walks, and spent his life imprisoned within
his four walls. But reports of murders which had been committed in the world outside
were constantly reaching his room by way of the newspapers, and his conscience
tormented him with the doubt that he might be the murderer for whom the police were
looking. The certainty that he had not left the house for weeks protected him for a time
against these accusations, until one day there dawned upon him the possibility that he
might have left his house while in an unconscious state, and might thus have committed
murder without knowing anything about it. From that time onwards he locked his front
door, and gave the key to his old housekeeper, strictly forbidding her to give it into his
hands, even if he demanded it.
This, then, is the origin of the attempted explanation that I may have changed carriages
while in an unconscious state; it has been taken into the dream ready-made, from the
material of the dream-thoughts, and is evidently intended to identify me with the person
of my patient. My memory of this patient was awakened by natural association. My last
night journey had been made a few weeks earlier in his company. He was cured, and we
were going into the country together to his relatives, who had sent for me; as we had a
compartment to ourselves, we left all the windows open throughout the night, and for as
long as I remained awake we had a most interesting conversation. I knew that hostile
impulses towards his father in childhood, in a sexual connection, had been at the root of
his illness. By identifying myself with him I wanted to make an analogous confession to
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myself. The second scene of the dream really resolves itself into a wanton fantasy to the
effect that my two elderly travelling companions had acted so uncivilly towards me
because my arrival on the scene had prevented them from exchanging kisses and
embraces during the night, as they had intended. This fantasy, however, goes back to an
early incident of my childhood when, probably impelled by sexual curiosity, I had
intruded into my parents' bedroom, and was driven thence by my father's emphatic
command.
I think it would be superfluous to multiply such examples. They would all confirm what
we have learned from those already cited: namely, that an act of judgment in a dream is
merely the repetition of an original act of judgment in the dream-thoughts. In most cases
it is an unsuitable repetition, fitted into an inappropriate context; occasionally, however,
as in our last example, it is so artfully applied that it may almost give one the impression
of independent intellectual activity in the dream. At this point we might turn our attention
to that psychic activity which, though it does not appear to co-operate constantly in the
formation of dreams, yet endeavours to fuse the dream-elements of different origin into a
flawless and significant whole. We consider it necessary, however, first of all to consider
the expressions of affect which appear in dreams, and to compare these with the affects
which analysis discovers in the dream-thoughts.
1 I have forgotten in what author I found a reference to a dream which was overrun with
unusually small figures, the source of which proved to be one of the engravings of
Jacques Callot, which the dreamer had examined during the day. These engravings
contain an enormous number of very small figures; a whole series of them deals with the
horrors of the Thirty Years War.
2 cf. Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des seelischen Geschehens, in Jahrbuch f.
Ps.A., iii, 1, 1911 (Ges. Schriften, Bd. v).
3 Here the dream-work parodies the thought which it qualifies as ridiculous, in that it
creates something ridiculous in relation to it. Heine does the same thing when he wishes
to deride the bad rhymes of the King of Bavaria. He does it by using even worse rhymes:
Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet
Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo
Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht,
Halt ein, ich werde sonst toll, oh!
4 [Note the resemblance of Geseres and Ungeseres to the German words for salted and
unsalted -- gesalzen and ungesalzen; also to the words gesauert and ungesauert, leavened
and unleavened. -- TRANS.]
5 This dream furnishes a good example in support of the universally valid doctrine that
dreams of the same night, even though they are separated in the memory, spring from the
same thought-material. The dream-situation in which I am rescuing my children from the
city of Rome, moreover, is distorted by a reference back to an episode of my childhood.
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The meaning is that I envy certain relatives who years ago had occasion to transplant
their children to the soil of another country.
6 [This German expression is equivalent to our saying: `I am not responsible for that',
`That's not my funeral', or `That's not due to my own efforts'. -- TRANS.]
7 The injunction or resolve already contained in the dream: `I must tell that to the doctor',
when it occurs in dreams during psychoanalytic treatment, is constantly accompanied by
a great resistance to confessing the dream, and is not infrequently followed by the
forgetting of the dream.
8 A subject which has been extensively discussed in recent volumes of the Revue
Philosophique (paramnesia in dreams).
9 These results correct at several points my earlier statements concerning the
representation of logical relations (pp. 194 ff.). These described the general procedure of
the dream-work, but overlooked its most delicate and most careful operations.
10 Stanniol, allusion to Stannius; the nervous system of fishes; cf. p. 271.
11 The place in the corridor of my apartment-house where the perambulators of the other
tenants stand; it is also otherwise hyper-determined several times over.
12 This description is not intelligible even to myself, but I follow the principle of
reproducing the dream in those words which occur to me while I am writing it down. The
wording itself is a part of the dream-representation.
13 Schiller was not born in one of the Marburgs, but in Marbach, as every German
schoolboy knows, and as I myself knew. This again is one of those errors which creep in
as substitutes for an intentional falsification in another place and which I have
endeavoured to explain in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
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H. THE AFFECTS IN DREAMS
A shrewd remark of Stricker's called our attention to the fact that the expressions of
affects in dreams cannot be disposed of in the contemptuous fashion in which we are
wont to shake off the dream-content after we have waked. `If I am afraid of robbers in my
dreams, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real'; and the same
thing is true if I rejoice in my dream. According to the testimony of our feelings, an affect
experienced in a dream is in no way inferior to one of like intensity experienced in
waking life, and the dream presses its claim to be accepted as part of our real psychic
experiences, by virtue of its affective rather than its ideational content. In the waking
state we do not put the one before the other, since we do not know how to evaluate an
affect psychically except in connection with an ideational content. If an affect and an idea
are ill-matched as regards their nature or their intensity, our waking judgment becomes
confused.
The fact that in dreams the ideational content does not always produce the affective result
which in our waking thoughts we should expect as its necessary consequence has always
been a cause of astonishment. Strümpell declared that ideas in dreams are stripped of
their psychic values. But there is no lack of instances in which the reverse is true; when
an intensive manifestation of affect appears in a content which seems to offer no occasion
for it. In my dream I may be in a horrible, dangerous, or disgusting situation, and yet I
may feel no fear or aversion; on the other hand, I am sometimes terrified by harmless
things, and sometimes delighted by childish things.
This enigma disappears more suddenly and more completely than perhaps any other
dream-problem if we pass from the manifest to the latent content. We shall then no longer
have to explain it, for it will no longer exist. Analysis tells us that the ideational contents
have undergone displacements and substitutions, while the affects have remained
unchanged. No wonder, then, that the ideational content which has been altered by
dream-distortion no longer fits the affect which has remained intact; and no cause for
wonder when analysis has put the correct content into its original place.1
In a psychic complex which has been subjected to the influence of the resisting
censorship, the affects are the unyielding constituent, which alone can guide us to the
correct completion. This state of affairs is revealed in the psychoneuroses even more
distinctly than in dreams. Here the affect is always in the right, at least as regards its
quality; its intensity may, of course, be increased by displacement of the neurotic
attention. When the hysterical patient wonders that he should be so afraid of a trifle, or
when the sufferer from obsessions is astonished that he should reproach himself so
bitterly for a mere nothing, they are both in error, inasmuch as they regard the conceptual
content -- the trifle, the mere nothing -- as the essential thing, and they defend themselves
in vain, because they make this conceptual content the starting-point of their thoughtwork.
Psychoanalysis, however, puts them on the right path, inasmuch as it recognises
that, on the contrary, it is the affect that is justified, and looks for the concept which
pertains to it, and which has been repressed by a substitution. All that we need assume is
that the liberation of affect and the conceptual content do not constitute the indissoluble
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organic unity as which we are wont to regard them, but that the two parts may be welded
together, so that analysis will separate them. Dream-interpretation shows that this is
actually the case.
I will first of all give an example in which analysis explains the apparent absence of
affect in a conceptual content which ought to compel a liberation of affect.
Dream 1. The dreamer sees three lions in a desert, one of which is laughing, but she is
not afraid of them. Then, however, she must have fled from them, for she is trying to
climb a tree. But she finds that her cousin, the French teacher, is already up in the tree,
etc.
The analysis yields the following material: The indifferent occasion of dream was a
sentence in the dreamer's English exercise: `The lion's greatest adornment is his mane.'
Her father used to wear a beard which encircled his face like a mane. The name of her
English teacher is Miss Lyons. An acquaintance of hers had sent her the ballads of Loewe
(Loewe = lion). These, then, are the three lions; why should she be afraid of them? She
has read a story in which a negro who has incited his fellows to revolt is hunted with
bloodhounds, and climbs a tree to save himself. Then follow fragmentary recollections in
the merriest mood, such as the following directions for catching lions (from Die
Fliegende Blätter): `Take a desert and put it through a sieve; the lions will be left behind.'
Also a very amusing, but not very proper anecdote about an official who is asked why he
does not take greater pains to win the favour of his chief, and who replies that he has
been trying to creep into favour, but that his immediate superior was already up there.
The whole matter becomes intelligible as soon as one learns that on the dream-day the
lady had received a visit from her husband's superior. He was very polite to her, and
kissed her hand, and she was not at all afraid of him, although he is a `big bug' (Grosses
Tier = big animal) and plays the part of a `social lion' in the capital of her country. This
lion is, therefore, like the lion in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who is unmasked as Snug
the joiner; and of such stuff are all the dream-lions of which one is not afraid.
Dream 2. As my second example, I will cite the dream of the girl who saw her sister's
little son lying as a corpse in his coffin, but who, it may be added, was conscious of no
pain or sorrow. Why she was unmoved we know from the analysis. The dream only
disguised her wish to see once more the man she loved; the affect had to be attuned to the
wish, and not to its disguisement. There was thus no occasion for sorrow.
In a number of dreams the affect does at least remain connected with the conceptual
content which has replaced the content really belonging to it. In others, the dissolution of
the complex is carried farther. The affect is entirely separated from the idea belonging to
it, and finds itself accommodated elsewhere in the dream, where it fits into the new
arrangement of the dream-elements. We have seen that the same thing happens to acts of
judgment in dreams. If an important inference occurs in the dream-thoughts, there is one
in the dream also; but the inference in the dream may be displaced to entirely different
material. Not infrequently this displacement is effected in accordance with the principal
of antithesis.
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I will illustrate the latter possibility by the following dream, which I have subjected to the
most exhaustive analysis.
Dream 3. A castle by the sea; afterwards it lies not directly on the coast, but on a narrow
canal leading to the sea. A certain Herr P. is the governor of the castle. I stand with him
in a large salon with three windows, in front of which rise the projections of a wall, like
battlements of a fortress. I belong to the garrison, perhaps as a volunteer naval officer.
We fear the arrival of enemy warships, for we are in a state of war. Herr P. intends to
leave the castle; he gives me instructions as to what must be done if what we fear should
come to pass. His sick wife and his children are in the threatened castle. As soon as the
bombardment begins, the large hall is to be cleared. He breathes heavily, and tries to get
away; I detain him, and ask him how I am to send him news in case of need. He says
something further, and immediately afterwards he sinks to the floor dead. I have
probably taxed him unnecessarily with my questions. After his death, which makes no
further impression upon me, I consider whether the widow is to remain in the castle,
whether I should give notice of the death to the higher command, whether I should take
over the control of the castle as the next in command. I now stand at the window, and
scrutinise the ships as they pass by; they are cargo steamers, and they rush by over the
dark water; several with more than one funnel, others with bulging decks (these are very
like the railway stations in the preliminary dream, which has not been related). Then my
brother is standing beside me, and we both look out of the window on to the canal. At the
sight of one ship we are alarmed, and call out: `Here comes the warship!' It turns out,
however, that they are only the ships which I have already seen, returning. Now comes a
small ship, comically truncated, so that it ends amidships; on the deck one sees curious
things like cups or little boxes. We call out as with one voice: `That is the breakfast ship.'
The rapid motion of the ships, the deep blue of the water, the brown smoke of the funnels
-- all these together produce an intense and gloomy impression.
The localities in this dream are compiled from several journeys to the Adriatic
(Miramare, Duino, Venice, Aquileia). A short but enjoyable Easter trip to Aquileia with
my brother, a few weeks before the dream, was still fresh in my memory; also the naval
war between America and Spain, and associated with this my anxiety as to the fate of my
relatives in America, play a part in the dream. Manifestations of affect appear at two
places in this dream. In one place an affect that would be expected is lacking: it is
expressly emphasised that the death of the governor makes no impression upon me; at
another point, when I see the warships, I am frightened, and experience all the sensations
of fright in my sleep. The distribution of affects in this well-constructed dream has been
effected in such a way that any obvious contradiction is avoided. For there is no reason
why I should be frightened at the governor's death, and it is fitting that, as the commander
of the castle, I should be alarmed by the sight of the warship. Now analysis shows that
Herr P. is nothing but a substitute for my own ego (in the dream I am his substitute). I am
the governor who suddenly dies. The dream-thoughts deal with the future of my family
after my premature death. No other disagreeable thought is to be found among the dream
thoughts. The alarm which goes with the sight of the warship must be transferred from it
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thoughts from which the warship comes is laden with most cheerful reminiscences. In
Venice, a year before the dream, one magically beautiful day, we stood at the windows of
our room on the Riva Schiavoni and looked out over the blue lagoon, on which there was
more traffic to be seen than usual. Some English ships were expected; they were to be
given a festive reception; and suddenly my wife cried, happy as a child: `Here comes the
English warship!' In the dream I am frightened by the very same words; once more we
see that speeches in dreams have their origin in speeches in real life. I shall presently
show that even the element `English' in this speech has not been lost for the dream-work.
Here, then, between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content, I turn joy into fright, and
I need only point to the fact that by means of this transformation I give expression to part
of the latent dream-content. The example shows, however, that the dream-work is at
liberty to detach the occasion of an affect from its connections in the dream-thoughts, and
to insert it at any other place it chooses in the dream-content.
I will take the opportunity which is here incidentally offered of subjecting to a closer
analysis the `breakfast ship', whose appearance in the dream so absurdly concludes a
situation that has been rationally adhered to. If I look more closely at this dream-object, I
am impressed after the event by the fact that it was black, and that by reason of its
truncation at its widest beam it achieved, at the truncated end, a considerable resemblance
to an object which had aroused our interest in the museums of the Etruscan cities. This
object was a rectangular cup of black clay, with two handles, upon which stood things
like coffee-cups or tea-cups, very similar to our modern service for the breakfast table.
Upon inquiry we learned that this was the toilet set of an Etruscan lady, with little boxes
for rouge and powder; and we told one another jestingly that it would not be a bad idea to
take a thing like that home to the lady of the house. The dream-object, therefore, signifies
a `black toilet' (toilette = dress), or mourning, and refers directly to a death. The other end
of the dream-object reminds us of the `boat' (German, Nachen, from the Greek root,
vexus, as a philological friend informs me), upon which corpses were laid in prehistoric
times, and were left to be buried by the sea. This is associated with the return of the ships
in the dream.
`Silently on his rescued boat the old man drifts into harbour.'
It is the return voyage after the shipwreck (German: Schiff-bruck = ship-breaking); the
breakfast ship looks as though it were broken off amidships. But whence comes the name
`breakfast' ship? This is where `English' comes in, which we have left over from the
warships. Breakfast, a breaking of the fast. Breaking again belongs to shipwreck (Schiffbruch),
and fasting is associated with the black (mourning).
But the only thing about this breakfast ship which has been newly created by the dream is
its name. The thing existed in reality, and recalls to me one of the merriest moments of
my last journey. As we distrusted the fare in Aquileia, we took some food with us from
Goerz, and bought a bottle of the excellent Istrian wine in Aquileia; and while the little
mail-steamer slowly travelled through the canale delle Mee and into the lonely expanse
of lagoon in the direction of Grado, we had breakfast on deck in the highest spirits -- we
were the only passengers -- and it tasted to us as few breakfasts have ever tasted. This,
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then, was the `breakfast ship', and it is behind this very recollection of the gayest joie de
vivre that the dream hides the saddest thoughts of an unknown and mysterious future.
The detachment of affects from the groups of ideas which have occasioned their
liberation is the most striking thing that happens to them in dream-formation, but it is
neither the only nor even the most essential change which they undergo on the way from
the dream-thoughts to the manifest dream. If the affects in the dream-thoughts are
compared with those in the dream, one thing at once becomes clear. Wherever there is an
affect in the dream, it is to be found also in the dream-thoughts; the converse, however, is
not true. In general, a dream is less rich in affects than the psychic material from which it
is elaborated. When I have reconstructed the dream-thoughts, I see that the most intense
psychic impulses are constantly striving in them for self-assertion, usually in conflict
with others which are sharply opposed to them. Now, if I turn back to the dream, I often
find it colourless and devoid of any very intensive affective tone. Not only the content,
but also the affective tone of my thoughts is often reduced by the dream-work to the level
of the indifferent. I might say that a suppression of the affects has been accomplished by
the dream-work. Take, for example, the dream of the botanical monograph. It
corresponds to a passionate plea for my freedom to act as I am acting, to arrange my life
as seems right to me, and to me alone. The dream which results from this sounds
indifferent; I have written a monograph; it is lying before me; it is provided with coloured
plates, and dried plants are to be found in each copy. It is like the peace of a deserted
battlefield; no trace is left of the tumult of battle.
But things may turn out quite differently; vivid expressions of affect may enter into the
dream itself; but we will first of all consider the unquestioned fact that so many dreams
appear indifferent, whereas it is never possible to go deeply into the dream-thoughts
without deep emotion.
The complete theoretical explanation of this suppression of affects during the dreamwork
cannot be given here; it would require a most careful investigation of the theory of
the affects and of the mechanism of repression. Here I can put forward only two
suggestions. I am forced -- for other reasons -- to conceive the liberation of affects as a
centrifugal process directed towards the interior of the body, analogous to the processes
of motor and secretory innervation. Just as in the sleeping state the emission of motor
impulses towards the outer world seems to be suspended, so the centrifugal awakening of
affects by unconscious thinking during sleep may be rendered more difficult. The
affective impulses which occur during the course of the dream-thoughts may thus in
themselves be feeble, so that those that find their way into the dream are no stronger.
According to this line of thought, the `suppression of the affects' would not be a
consequence of the dream-work at all, but a consequence of the state of sleep. This may
be so, but it cannot possibly be all the truth. We must remember that all the more
complex dreams have revealed themselves as the result of a compromise between
conflicting psychic forces. On the one hand, the wish-forming thoughts have to oppose
the contradiction of a censorship; on the other hand, as we have often seen, even in
unconscious thinking, every train of thought is harnessed to its contradictory counterpart.
Since all these trains of thought are capable of arousing affects, we shall, broadly
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speaking, hardly go astray if we conceive the suppression of affects as the result of the
inhibition which the contrasts impose upon one another, and the censorship upon the
urges which it has suppressed. The inhibition of affects would accordingly be the second
consequence of the dream-censorship, just as dream-distortion was the first consequence.
I will here insert an example of a dream in which the indifferent emotional tone of the
dream-content may be explained by the antagonism of the dream-thoughts. I must relate
the following short dream, which every reader will read with disgust.
Dream 4. Rising ground, and on it something like an open-air latrine; a very long bench,
at the end of which is a wide aperture. The whole of the back edge is thickly covered with
little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A thicket behind the bench.
I urinate upon the bench, a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of
excrement come off easily and fall into the opening. Nevertheless, it seems as though
something remained at the end.
Why did I experience no disgust in this dream?
Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and gratifying thoughts have cooperated
in the formation of this dream. Upon analysing it, I immediately think of the
Augean stables which were cleansed by Hercules. I am this Hercules. The rising ground
and the thicket belong to Aussee, where my children are now staying I have discovered
the infantile etiology of the neuroses, and have thus guarded my own children from
falling ill. The bench (omitting the aperture, of course) is the faithful copy of a piece of
furniture of which an affectionate female patient has made me a present. This reminds me
how my patients honour me. Even the museum of human excrement is susceptible of a
gratifying interpretation. However much it disgusts me, it is a souvenir of the beautiful
land of Italy, where in the small cities, as everyone knows, the privies are not equipped in
any other way. The stream of urine that washes everything clean is an unmistakable
allusion to greatness. It is in this manner that Gulliver extinguishes the great fire in
Lilliput; to be sure, he thereby incurs the displeasure of the tiniest of queens. In this way,
too, Gargantua. the superman of Master Rabelais, takes vengeance upon the Parisians,
straddling Notre-Dame and training his stream of urine upon the city. Only yesterday I
was turning over the leaves of Garnier's illustrations to Rabelais before I went to bed.
And, strangely enough, here is another proof that I am the superman! The platform of
Notre-Dame was my favourite nook in Paris; every free afternoon I used to go up into the
towers of the cathedral and there clamber about between the monsters and gargoyles. The
circumstance that all the excrement vanishes so rapidly before the stream of urine
corresponds to the motto: Afflavit et dissipati sunt, which I shall some day make the title
of a chapter on the therapeutics of hysteria.
And now as to the affective occasion of the dream. It had been a hot summer afternoon;
in the evening, I had given my lecture on the connection between hysteria and the
perversions, and everything which I had to say displeased me thoroughly, and seemed
utterly valueless. I was tired; I took not the least pleasure in my difficult work, and
longed to get away from this rummaging in human filth; first to see my children, and then
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to revisit the beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the lecture-hall to a café to get
some little refreshment in the open air, for my appetite had forsaken me. But a member of
my audience went with me; he begged for permission to sit with me while I drank my
coffee and gulped down my roll, and began to say flattering things to me. He told me
how much he had learned from me, that he now saw everything through different eyes,
that I had cleansed the Augean stables of error and prejudice, which encumbered the
theory of the neuroses -- in short, that I was a very great man. My mood was ill-suited to
his hymn of praise; I struggled with my disgust, and went home earlier in order to get rid
of him; and before I went to sleep I turned over the leaves of Rabelais, and read a short
story by C. F. Meyer entitled Die Leiden eines Knaben (The Sorrows of a Boy).
The dream had originated from this material, and Meyer's novel had supplied the
recollections of scenes of childhood.2
The day's mood of annoyance and disgust is continued in the dream, inasmuch as it is
permitted to furnish nearly all the material for the dream-content. But during the night the
opposite mood of vigorous, even immoderate self-assertion awakened and dissipated the
earlier mood. The dream had to assume such a form as would accommodate both the
expressions of self-depreciation and exaggerated self-glorification in the same material.
This compromise-formation resulted in an ambiguous dream-content, but, owing to the
mutual inhibition of the opposites, in an indifferent emotional tone.
According to the theory of wish-fulfilment, this dream would not have been possible had
not the opposed, and indeed suppressed, yet pleasure-emphasised megalomaniac train of
thought been added to the thoughts of disgust. For nothing painful is intended to be
represented in dreams; the painful elements of our daily thoughts are able to force their
way into our dreams only if at the same time they are able to disguise a wish-fulfilment.
The dream-work is able to dispose of the affects of the dream-thoughts in yet another
way than by admitting them or reducing them to zero. It can transform them into their
opposites. We are acquainted with the rule that for the purposes of interpretation every
element of the dream may represent its opposite, as well as itself. One can never tell
beforehand which is to be posited; only the context can decide this point. A suspicion of
this state of affairs has evidently found its way into the popular consciousness; the dreambooks,
in their interpretations, often proceed according to the principle of contraries. This
transformation into the contrary is made possible by the intimate associative ties which in
our thoughts connect the idea of a thing with that of its opposite. Like every other
displacement, this serves the purposes of the censorship, but it is often the work of wishfulfilment,
for wish-fulfilment consists in nothing more than the substitution of an
unwelcome thing by its opposite. Just as concrete images may be transformed into their
contraries in our dreams, so also may the affects of the dream-thoughts, and it is probable
that this inversion of affects is usually brought about by the dream-censorship. The
suppression and inversion of affects is useful even in social life, as is shown by the
familiar analogy of the dream-censorship and, above all, hypocrisy. If I am conversing
with a person to whom I must show consideration while I should like to address him as
an enemy, it is almost more important that I should conceal the expression of my affect
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from him than that I should modify the verbal expression of my thoughts. If I address him
in courteous terms, but accompany them by looks or gestures of hatred and disdain, the
effect which I produce upon him is not very different from what it would have been had I
cast my unmitigated contempt into his face. Above all, then, the censorship bids me
suppress my affects, and if I am a master of the art of dissimulation I can hypocritically
display the opposite affect -- smiling where I should like to be angry, and pretending
affection where I should like to destroy.
We have already had an excellent example of such an inversion of affect in the service of
the dream-censorship. In the dream `of my uncle's beard' I feel great affection for my
friend R. while (and because) the dream-thoughts berate him as a simpleton. From this
example of the inversion of affects we derived our first proof of the existence of the
censorship. Even here it is not necessary to assume that the dream-work creates a
counter-affect of this kind that is altogether new; it usually finds it lying ready in the
material of the dream-thoughts, and merely intensifies it with the psychic force of the
defence-motives until it is able to predominate in the dream-formation. In the dream of
my uncle, the affectionate counter-affect probably has its origin in an infantile source (as
the continuation of the dream would suggest), for owing to the peculiar nature of my
earliest childhood experiences the relation of uncle and nephew has become the source of
all my friendships and hatred (cf. analysis on p. 279).
An excellent example of such a reversal of affect is found in a dream recorded by
Ferenczi.3
An elderly gentleman was awakened at night by his wife, who was frightened because he
laughed so loudly and uncontrollably in his sleep. The man afterwards related that he had
had the following dream: I lay in my bed, a gentleman known to me came in, I wanted to
turn on the light, but I could not; I attempted to do so repeatedly, but in vain. Thereupon
my wife got out of bed, in order to help me, but she, too, was unable to manage it; being
ashamed of her néligé in the presence of the gentleman, she finally gave it up and went
back to her bed; all this was so comical that I had to laugh terribly. My wife said: `What
are you laughing at, what are you laughing at?' but I continued to laugh until I woke.
The following day the man was extremely depressed, and suffered from headache: `From
too much laughter, which shook me up,' he thought.
Analytically considered, the dream looks less comical. In the latent dream-thoughts the
`gentleman known' to him who came into the room is the image of death as the `great
unknown', which was awakened in his mind on the previous day. The old gentleman, who
suffers from arteriosclerosis, had good reason to think of death on the day before the
dream. The uncontrollable laughter takes the place of weeping and sobbing at the idea
that he has to die. It is the light of life that he is no longer able to turn on. This mournful
thought may have associated itself with a failure to effect sexual intercourse, which he
had attempted shortly before this, and in which the assistance of his wife en négligé was
of no avail; he realised that he was already on the decline. The dream-work knew how to
transform the sad idea of impotence and death into a comic scene, and the sobbing into
laughter.
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There is one class of dreams which has a special claim to be called `hypocritical', and
which severely tests the theory of wishfulfilment. My attention was called to them when
Frau Dr M. Hilferding proposed for discussion by the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna a
dream recorded by Rosegger, which is here reprinted:
In Waldheimat, vol. xi, Rosegger writes as follows in his story, Fremd gemacht (p. 303):
I usually enjoy healthful sleep, yet I have gone without repose on many a night; in
addition to my modest existence as a student and literary man, I have for long years
dragged out the shadow of a veritable tailor's life -- like a ghost from which I could not
become divorced.
It is not true that I have occupied myself very often or very intensely with thoughts of my
past during the day. A stormer of heaven and earth who has escaped from the hide of the
Philistine has other things to think about. And as a gay young fellow, I hardly gave a
thought to my nocturnal dreams; only later, when I had formed the habit of thinking
about everything, or when the Philistine within me began to assert itself a little, did it
strike me that -- when I dreamed at all -- I was always a journeyman tailor, and that in
that capacity I had already worked in my master's shop for a long time without any pay.
As I sat there beside him, and sewed and pressed, I was perfectly well aware that I no
longer belonged there, and that as a burgess of the town I had other things to attend to;
but I was always on a holiday, or away in the country, and so I sat beside my master and
helped him. I often felt far from comfortable about it, and regretted the waste of time
which I might have employed for better and more useful purposes. If anything was not
quite correct in measure and cut I had to put up with a scolding from my master. Of
wages there was never a question. Often, as I sat with bent back in the dark workshop, I
decided to give notice and make myself scarce. Once I actually did so, but the master
took no notice of me, and next time I was sitting beside him again and sewing.
How happy I was when I woke up after such weary hours! And I then resolved that, if
this intrusive dream should ever occur again, I would energetically throw it off, and
would cry aloud: `It is only a delusion, I am lying in bed, and I want to sleep' . . . And the
next night I would be sitting in the tailor's shop again.
So it went on for years, with dismal regularity. Once, when the master and I were
working at Alpelhofer's, at the house of the peasant with whom I began my
apprenticeship, it happened that my master was particularly dissatisfied with my work. `I
should like to know where in the world your thoughts are?' he cried, and looked at me
sullenly. I thought the most sensible thing to do would be to get up and explain to the
master that I was working with him only as a favour, and then take my leave. But I did
not do this. I even submitted when the master engaged an apprentice, and ordered me to
make room for him on the bench. I moved into the corner, and kept on sewing. On the
same day another journeyman was engaged; a bigoted fellow; he was the Bohemian who
had worked for us nineteen years earlier, and then had fallen into the lake on his way
home from the public-house. When he tried to sit down there was no room for him. I
looked at the master inquiringly, and he said to me: `You have no talent for tailoring; you
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may go; you're a stranger henceforth.' My fright on that occasion was so overpowering
that I woke.
The grey of morning glimmered through the clear windows of my familiar home. Objects
d'art surrounded me; in the tasteful bookcase stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic
Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe -- all radiant and immortal.
From the adjoining room resounded the clear little voices of the children, who were
waking up prattling to their mother. I felt as though I had rediscovered that idyllically
sweet, peaceful, poetical and spiritualised life in which I have so often and so deeply
been conscious of contemplative human happiness. And yet I was vexed that I had not
given my master notice first, but had been dismissed by him.
And how remarkable this seems to me: since that night, when my master `made a
stranger' of me, I have enjoyed restful sleep; I no longer dream of my tailoring days,
which now lie in the remote past; which in their unpretentious simplicity were really so
cheerful, but which, none the less, have cast a long shadow over the later years of my life.
In this series of dreams of a poet who, in his younger years, had been a journeyman tailor,
it is hard to recognise the domination of the wish-fulfilment. All the delightful things
occurred in his waking life, while the dream seemed to drag along with it the ghost-like
shadow of an unhappy existence which had long been forgotten. Dreams of my own of a
similar character enable me to give some explanation of such dreams. As a young doctor,
I worked for a long time in the Chemical Institute without being able to accomplish
anything in that exacting science, so that in the waking state I never think about this
unfruitful and actually somewhat humiliating period of my student days. On the other
hand, I have a recurring dream to the effect that I am working in the laboratory, making
analyses, and experiments, and so forth: these dreams, like the examination-dreams, are
disagreeable, and they are never very distinct. During the analysis of one of these dreams
my attention was directed to the word `analysis' which gave me the key to an
understanding of them. since then I have become an `analyst'. I make analyses which are
greatly praised -- psychoanalyses, of course. Now I understand: when I feel proud of
these analyses in my waking life, and feel inclined to boast of my achievements, my
dreams hold up to me at night those other, unsuccessful analyses, of which I have no
reason to be proud; they are the punitive dreams of the upstart, like those of the
journeyman tailor who became a celebrated poet. But how is it possible for a dream to
place itself at the service of self-criticism in its conflict with parvenu pride, and to take as
its content a rational warning instead of a prohibited wish-fulfilment? I have already
hinted that the answer to this question presents many difficulties. We may conclude that
the foundation of the dream consisted at first of an arrogant fantasy of ambition; but that
in its stead only its suppression and abasement has reached the dream-content. One must
remember that there are masochistic tendencies in mental life to which such an inversion
might be attributed. I see no objection to regarding such dreams as punishment-dreams,
as distinguished from wish-fulfilling dreams. I should not see in this any limitation of the
theory of dreams hitherto as presented, but merely a verbal concession to the point of
view to which the convergence of contraries seems strange. But a more thorough
investigation of individual dreams of this class allows us to recognise yet another
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element. In an indistinct, subordinate portion of one of my laboratory dreams, I was just
at the age which placed me in the most gloomy and most unsuccessful year of my
professional' career; I still had no position, and no idea how I was going to support
myself, when I suddenly found that I had the choice of several women whom I might
marry! I was, therefore, young again and, what is more, she was young again -- the
woman who has shared with me all these difficult years. In this way, one of the wishes
which constantly gnaws at the heart of the ageing man was revealed as the unconscious
dream-instigator. The conflict raging in other psychic strata between vanity and selfcriticism
had certainly determined the dream-content, but the more deeply-rooted wish
for youth had alone made it possible as a dream. One often says to oneself even in the
waking state: `To be sure, things are going well with you today, and once you found life
very hard; but, after all, life was sweet in those days, when you were still so young.'4
Another group of dreams, which I have often myself experienced, and which I have
recognised to be hypocritical, have as their content a reconciliation with persons with
whom one has long ceased to have friendly relations. The analysis constantly discovers
an occasion which might well induce me to cast aside the last remnants of consideration
for these former friends, and to treat them as strangers or enemies. But the dream chooses
to depict the contrary relation.
In considering dreams recorded by a novelist or poet, we may often enough assume that
he has excluded from the record those details which he felt to be disturbing and regarded
as unessential. His dreams thus set us a problem which could be readily solved if we had
an exact reproduction of the dream-content.
O. Rank has called my attention to the fact that in Grimm's fairy-tale of the valiant little
tailor, or Seven at one Stroke, there is related a very similar dream of an upstart. The
tailor, who has become a hero, and has married the king's daughter, dreams one night
while lying beside the princess, his wife, about his trade; having become suspicious, on
the following night she places armed guards where they can listen to what is said by the
dreamer, and arrest him. But the little tailor is warned, and is able to correct his dream.
The complicated processes of removal, diminution, and inversion by which the affects of
the dream-thoughts finally become the affects of the dream may be very well surveyed in
suitable syntheses of completely analysed dreams. I shall here discuss a few examples of
affective manifestations in dreams which will, I think, prove this conclusively in some of
the cases cited.
Dream 5. In the dream about the odd task which the elder Brücke sets me -- that of
preparing my own pelvis -- I am aware in the dream itself of not feeling appropriate
horror. Now this is a wish-fulfilment in more senses than one. The preparation signifies
the self-analyses which I perform, as it were, by publishing my book on dreams, which I
actually found so painful that I postponed the printing of the completed manuscript for
more than a year. The wish now arises that I may disregard this feeling of aversion, and
for that reason I feel no horror (Grauen, which also means `to grow grey') in the dream. I
should much like to escape `Grauen' in the other sense too, for I am already growing
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quite grey, and the grey in my hair warns me to delay no longer For we know that at the
end of the dream this thought secures representation: `I shall have to leave my children to
reach the goal of their difficult journey without my help.'
In the two dreams that transfer the expression of satisfaction to the moments immediately
after waking, this satisfaction is in the one case motivated by the expectation that I am
now going to learn what is meant by `I have already dreamed of this', and refers in reality
to the birth of my first child, and in the other case it is motivated by the conviction that
`that which has been announced by a premonitory sign' is now going to happen, and the
satisfaction is that which I felt on the arrival of my second son. Here the same affects that
dominated in the dream-thoughts have remained in the dream, but the process is probably
not quite so simple as this in any dream. If the two analyses are examined a little more
closely it will be seen that this satisfaction, which does not succumb to the censorship,
receives reinforcement from a source which must fear the censorship and whose affect
would certainly have aroused opposition if it had not screened itself by a similar and
readily admitted affect of satisfaction from the permitted source, and had, so to speak,
sneaked in behind it. I am unfortunately unable to show this in the case of the actual
dream, but an example from another situation will make my meaning intelligible. I will
put the following case: Let there be a person near me whom I hate so strongly that I have
a lively impulse to rejoice should anything happen to him. But the moral side of my
nature does not give way to this impulse; I do not dare to express this sinister wish, and
when something does happen to him which he does not deserve I suppress my
satisfaction, and force myself to thoughts and expressions of regret. Everyone will at
some time have found himself in such a position. But now let it happen that the hated
person, through some transgression of his own, draws upon himself a well-deserved
calamity; I shall now be allowed to give free rein to my satisfaction at his being visited
by a just punishment, and I shall be expressing an opinion which coincides with that of
other impartial persons. But I observe that my satisfaction proves to be more intense than
that of others, for it has received reinforcement from another source -- from my hatred,
which was hitherto prevented by the inner censorship from furnishing the affect, but
which, under the altered circumstances, is no longer prevented from doing so. This case
generally occurs in social life when antipathetic persons or the adherents of an unpopular
minority have been guilty of some offence. Their punishment is then usually
commensurate not with the guilt, but with their guilt plus the ill-will against them that has
hitherto not been put into effect. Those who punish them doubtless commit an injustice,
but they are prevented from becoming aware of it by the satisfaction arising from the
release within themselves of a suppression of long standing. In such cases the quality of
the affect is justified, but not its degree; and the selfcriticism that has been appeased in
respect of the first point is only too ready to neglect to scrutinise the second point. Once
you have opened the doors more people enter than it was your original intention to admit.
A striking feature of the neurotic character, namely, that in it causes capable of evoking
affect produce results which are qualitatively justified but quantitatively excessive, is to
be explained on these lines, in so far as it admits of a psychological explanation at all.
But the excess of affect proceeds from unconscious and hitherto suppressed affective
sources which are able to establish an associative connection with the actual occasion,
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and for whose liberation of affect the unprotested and permitted source of affects opens
up the desired path. Our attention is thus called to the fact that the relation of mutual
inhibition must not be regarded as the only relation obtaining between the suppressed and
the suppressing psychic institution. The cases in which the two institution bring about a
pathological result by co-operation and mutual reinforcement deserve just as much
attention. These hints regarding the psychic mechanism will contribute to our
understanding of the expressions of affects in dreams. A gratification which makes its
appearance in a dream, and which, of course, may readily be found in its proper place in
the dream-thoughts, may not always be fully explained by means of this reference. As a
rule, it is necessary to search for a second source in the dream-thoughts, upon which the
pressure of the censorship rests, and which, under this pressure, would have yielded not
gratification but the contrary affect, had it not been enabled by the presence of the first
dream-source to free its gratification-affect from repression, and reinforce the
gratification springing from the other source. Hence affects which appear in dreams
appear to be formed by the confluence of several tributaries, and are over-determined in
respect of the material of the dream-thoughts. Sources of affect which are able to furnish
the same affect combine in the dream-work in order to produce it.5
Some insight into these involved relations is gained from the analysis of the admirable
dream in which `non vixit' constitutes the central point (cf. p. 277). In this dream
expressions of affect of different qualities are concentrated at two points in the manifest
content. Hostile and painful impulses (in the dream itself we have the phrase `overcome
by strange emotions') overlap one another at the point where I destroy my antagonistic
friend with a couple of words. At the end of the dream I am greatly pleased, and am quite
ready to believe in a possibility which I recognise as absurd when I am awake, namely,
that there are revenants who can be swept away by a mere wish.
I have not yet mentioned the occasion of this dream. It is an important one, and leads us
far down into the meaning of the dream. From my friend in Berlin (whom I have
designed as Fl.) I had received the news that he was about to undergo an operation, and
that relatives of his living in Vienna would inform me as to his condition. The first few
messages after the operation were not very reassuring, and caused me great anxiety. I
should have liked to go to him myself, but at that time I was afflicted with a painful
complaint which made every movement a torment. I now learn from the dream-thoughts
that I feared for this dear friend's life. I knew that his only sister, with whom I had never
been acquainted, had died young, after a very brief illness. (In the dream Fl. tells me
about his sister, and says: `In three-quarters of an hour she was dead.') I must have
imagined that his own constitution was not much stronger, and that I should soon be
travelling, in spite of my health, in response to far worse news -- and that I should arrive
too late, for which I should eternally reproach myself.6 This reproach, that I should arrive
too late, has become the central point of the dream, but it has been represented in a scene
in which the revered teacher of my student years -- Brücke -- reproaches me for the same
thing with a terrible look from his blue eyes. What brought about this alteration of the
scene will soon become apparent: the dream cannot reproduce the scene itself as I
experienced it. To be sure, it leaves the blue eyes to the other man, but it gives me the
part of the annihilator, an inversion which is obviously the work of the wish-fulfilment.
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My concern for the life of my friend, my self-reproach for not having gone to him, my
shame (he had come to me in Vienna unobtrusively), my desire to consider myself
excused on account of my illness -- all this builds up an emotional tempest which is
distinctly felt in my sleep, and which rages in that region of the dream-thoughts.
But there was another thing in the occasion of the dream which had quite the opposite
effect. With the unfavourable news during the first days of the operation I received also
an injunction to speak to no one about the whole affair, which hurt my feelings, for it
betrayed an unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I know, of course, that this request did
not proceed from my friend, but that it was due to clumsiness or excessive timidity on the
part of the messenger; yet the concealed reproach affected me very disagreeably, because
it was not altogether unjustified. As we know, only reproaches which `have something in
them' have the power to hurt. Years ago, when I was younger than I am now, I knew two
men who were friends, and who honoured me with their friendship; and I quite
superfluously told one of them what the other had said of him. This incident, of course,
had nothing to do with the affairs of my friend Fl., but I have never forgotten the
reproaches to which I had to listen on that occasion. One of the two friends between
whom I made trouble was Professor Fleischl; the other one I will call by his baptismal
name, Josef, a name which was borne also by my friend and antagonist P., who appears
in this dream.
In the dream the element unobtrusively points to the reproach that I cannot keep anything
to myself, and so does the question of Fl. as to how much of his affairs I have told P. But
it is the intervention of that old memory which transposes the reproach for arriving too
late from the present to the time when I was working in Brücke's laboratory; and by
replacing the second person in the annihilation scene of the dream by a Josef, I enable
this scene to represent not only the first reproach -- that I have arrived too late -- but also
that other reproach, more strongly affected by the repression, to the effect that I do not
keep secrets. The work of condensation and displacement in this dream, as well as the
motives for it, are now obvious.
My present trivial annoyance at the injunction not to divulge secrets draws reinforcement
from springs that flow far beneath the surface, and so swells to a stream of hostile
impulses towards persons who are in reality dear to me. The source which furnishes the
reinforcement is to be found in my childhood. I have already said that my warm
friendships as well as my enmities with persons of my own age go back to my childish
relations to my nephew, who was a year older than I. In these he had the upper hand, and
I early learned how to defend myself; we lived together, were inseparable, and loved one
another, but at times, as the statements of older persons testify, we used to squabble and
accuse one another. In a certain sense, all my friends are incarnations of this first figure;
they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned when a young man, and then we
were like Caesar and Brutus. An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been
indispensable to my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not
infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy have
coincided in the same person; but not simultaneously, of course, nor in constant
alternation, as was the case in my early childhood.
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How, when such associations exist, a recent occasion of emotion may cast back to the
infantile occasion and substitute this as a cause of affect, I shall not consider now. Such
an investigation would properly belong to the psychology of unconscious thought, or a
psychological explanation of the neuroses. Let us assume, for the purposes of dreaminterpretation,
that a childish recollection presents itself, or is created by the fantasy with,
more or less, the following content: We two children quarrel on account of some object --
just what we shall leave undecided, although the memory, or illusion of memory, has a
very definite object in view -- and each claims that he got there first, and therefore has
the first right to it. We come to blows; Might comes before Right; and, according to the
indications of the dream, I must have known that I was in the wrong (noticing the error
myself); but this time I am the stronger, and take possession of the battlefield; the
defeated combatant hurries to my father, his grandfather, and accuses me, and I defend
myself with the words, which I have heard from my father: `I hit him because he hit me.'
Thus, this recollection, or more probably fantasy, which forces itself upon my attention in
the course of the analysis -- without further evidence I myself do not know how --
becomes a central item of the dream-thoughts, which collects the affective impulses
prevailing in the dream-thoughts, as the bowl of a fountain collects the water that flows
into it. From this point the dream-thoughts flow along the following channels: `It serves
you right that you have had to make way for me; why did you try to push me off? I don't
need you; I'll soon find someone else to play with,' etc. Then the channels are opened
through which these thoughts flow back again into the dream-representation. For such an
`ote-toi que je m'y mette' I once had to reproach my deceased friend Josef. He was next to
me in the line of promotion in Brücke's laboratory, but advancement there was very slow.
Neither of the two assistants budged from his place, and youth became impatient. My
friend, who knew that his days were numbered, and was bound by no intimate relation to
his superior, sometimes gave free expression to his impatience. As this superior was a
man seriously ill, the wish to see him removed by promotion was susceptible of an
obnoxious secondary interpretation. Several years earlier, to be sure, I myself had
cherished, even more intensely, the same wish -- to obtain a post which had fallen vacant;
wherever there are gradations of rank and promotion the way is opened for the
suppression of covetous wishes. Shakespeare's Prince Hal cannot rid himself of the
temptation to see how the crown fits, even at the bedside of his sick father. But, as may
readily be understood, the dream inflicts this inconsiderate wish not upon me, but upon
my friend.7
`As he was ambitious, I slew him.' As he could not expect that the other man would make
way for him, the man himself has been put out of the way. I harbour these thoughts
immediately after attending the unveiling of the memorial to the other man at the
University. Part of the satisfaction which I feel in the dream may therefore be interpreted:
A just punishment; it serves you right.
At the funeral of this friend a young man made the following remark, which seemed
rather out of place: `The preacher talked as though the world could no longer exist
without this one human being.' Here was a stirring of revolt in the heart of a sincere man,
whose grief had been disturbed by exaggeration. But with this speech are connected the
dream-thoughts: `No one is really irreplaceable; how many men have I already escorted
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to the grave! But I am still alive; I have survived them all; I claim the field.' Such a
thought, at the moment when I fear that if I make a journey to see him I shall find my
friend no longer among the living, permits only of the further development that I am glad
once more to have survived someone; that it is not I who have died but he; that I am
master of the field, as once I was in the imagined scene of my childhood. This
satisfaction, infantile in origin, at the fact that I am master of the field, covers the greater
part of the affect which appears in the dream. I am glad that I am the survivor; I express
this sentiment with the naive egoism of the husband who says to his wife: `If one of us
dies, I shall move to Paris.' My expectation takes it as a matter of course that I am not the
one to die.
It cannot be denied that great self-control is needed to interpret one's dreams and to report
them. One has to reveal oneself as the sole villain among all the noble souls with whom
one shares the breath of life. Thus, I find it quite comprehensible that revenants should
exist only as long as one wants them, and that they can be obliterated by a wish. It was
for this reason that my friend Josef was punished. But the revenants are the successive
incarnations of the friend of my childhood; I am also gratified at having replaced this
person for myself over and over again, and a substitute will doubtless soon be found even
for the friend whom I am now on the point of losing. No one is irreplaceable.
But what has the dream-censorship been doing in the meantime? Why does it not raise
the most emphatic objection to a train of thoughts characterised by such brutal
selfishness, and transform the satisfaction inherent therein into extreme discomfort? I
think it is because other unobjectionable trains of thought referring to the same persons
result also in satisfaction, and with their affect cover that proceeding from the forbidden
infantile sources. In another stratum of thought I said to myself, at the ceremony of
unveiling the memorial: `I have lost so many dear friends, some through death, some
through the dissolution of friendship; is it not good that substitutes have presented
themselves, that I have gained a friend who means more to me than the others could, and
whom I shall now always retain, at an age when it is not easy to form new friendships?'
The gratification of having found this substitute for my lost friend can be taken over into
the dream without interference, but behind it there sneaks in the hostile feeling of
malicious gratification from the infantile source. Childish affection undoubtedly helps to
reinforce the rational affection of today; but childish hatred also has found its way into
the representation.
But besides this, there is in the dream a distinct reference to another train of thoughts
which may result in gratification. Some time before this, after long waiting, a little
daughter was born to my friend. I knew how he had grieved for the sister whom he had
lost at an early age, and I wrote to him that I felt that he would transfer to this child the
love he had felt for her, that this little girl would at last make him forget his irreparable
loss.
Thus this train also connects up with the intermediary thoughts of the latent dreamcontent,
from which paths radiate in the most contrary directions: `No one is
irreplaceable. See, here are only revenants; all those whom one has lost return.' And now
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242
the bonds of association between the contradictory components of the dream-thoughts are
more tightly drawn by the accidental circumstance that my friend's little daughter bears
the same name as the girl playmate of my own youth, who was just my own age, and the
sister of my oldest friend and antagonist. I heard the name `Pauline' with satisfaction, and
in order to allude to this coincidence I replaced one Josef in the dream by another Josef,
and found it impossible to suppress the identical initials in the name Fleischl and Fl.
From this point a train of thought runs to the naming of my own children. I insisted that
the names should not be chosen according to the fashion of the day, but should be
determined by regard for the memory of those dear to us. The children's names make
them `revenants'. And, finally, is not the procreation of children for all men the only way
of access to immortality?
I shall add only a few observations as to the affects of dreams considered from another
point of view. In the psyche of the sleeper an affective tendency -- what we call a mood --
may be contained as its dominating element, and may induce a corresponding mood in
the dream. This mood may be the result of the experiences and thoughts of the day, or it
may be of somatic origin; in either case it will be accompanied by the corresponding
trains of thought. That this ideational content of the dream-thoughts should at one time
determine the affective tendency primarily, while at another time it is awakened in a
secondary manner by the somatically determined emotional disposition, is indifferent for
the purposes of dream-formation. This is always subject to the restriction that it can
represent only a wish-fulfilment, and that it may lend its psychic energy to the wish
alone. The mood actually present will receive the same treatment as the sensation which
actually emerges during sleep (cf. p. 133), which is either neglected or reinterpreted in
the sense of a wish-fulfilment. Painful moods during sleep become the motive force of
the dream, inasmuch as they awake energetic wishes which the dream has to fulfil. The
material in which they inhere is elaborated until it is serviceable for the expression of the
wish-fulfilment. The more intense and the more dominating the element of the painful
mood in the dream-thoughts, the more surely will the most strongly suppressed wishimpulses
take advantage of the opportunity to secure representation; for thanks to the
actual existence of discomfort, which otherwise they would have to create spontaneously,
they find that the more difficult part of the work necessary to ensure representation has
already been accomplished; and with these observations we touch once more upon the
problem of anxiety-dreams, which will prove to be the boundary-case of dream-activity.
1 If I am not greatly mistaken, the first dream which I was able to elicit from my grandson
(aged 20 months) points to the fact that the dream-work had succeeded in transforming its
material into a wish-fulfilment, while the affect which belonged to it remained unchanged
even in the sleeping state The night before its father was to return to the front the child
cried out, sobbing violently: `Papa, Papa -- Baby.' That may mean: Let Papa and Baby
still be together; while the weeping takes cognisance of the imminent departure. The
child was at the time very well able to express the concept of separation. `Fort' (= away,
replaced by a peculiarly accented, long-drawn out ooooh) had been his first word, and for
many months before this first dream he had played at `away' with all his toys; which went
back to his early self-conquest in allowing his mother to go away.
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2 cf. the dream about Count Thun, last scene.
3 Internat. Zeitschr. f. Psychoanalyse, iv, 1916.
4 Ever since psychoanalysis has dissected the personality into an ego and a super-ego
(Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. by James Strachey, Intern.
Psychoanalytic Press, London) it has been easy to recognise in these punishment-dreams
wish-fulfilments of the super-ego.
5 I have since explained the extraordinary effect of pleasure produced by tendency wit on
analogous lines.
6 It is this fancy from the unconscious dream-thoughts which pre-emptorily demands non
vivit instead of non vixit. `You have come too late, he is no longer alive.' The fact that the
manifest situation of the dream aims at the non vivit has been mentioned on p. 277.
7 It will have been obvious that the name Josef plays a great part in my dreams (see the
dream about my uncle). It is particularly easy for me to hide my ego in my dreams behind
persons of this name, since Joseph was the name of the dream-interpreter in the Bible.

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