I am riding on a grey horse, at first timidly and awkwardly, as though I were only leaning against something. I meet a colleague P., who is mounted on a horse and is wearing a heavy woollen suit; he calls my attention to something (probably to the fact that my riding position is bad). Now I become more and more expert on the horse, which is most intelligent; I sit comfortably, and I notice that I am already quite at home in the saddle. For a saddle I have a kind of padding, which completely fills the space between the neck and the rump of the horse. In this manner I ride with difficulty between two lumber-wagons. After having ridden up the street for some distance, I turn around and want to dismount, at first in front of a little open chapel, which is situated close to the street. Then I actually dismount in front of a chapel which stands near the first; the hotel is in the same street, I could let the horse go there by itself, but I prefer to lead it there. It seems as if I should be ashamed to arrive there on horseback. In front of the hotel is standing a hall-boy who shows me a card of mine which has been found, and who ridicules me on account of it. On the card is written, doubly underlined, “Eat nothing,” and then a second sentence (indistinct) something like “Do not work”; at the same time a hazy idea that I am in a strange city, in which I do no work.
It will not be apparent at once that this dream originated under the influence, or rather under the compulsion, of a stimulus of pain. The day before I had suffered from furuncles, which made every movement a torture, and at last a furuncle had grown to the size of an apple at the root of the scrotum, and had caused me the most intolerable pains that accompanied every step; a feverish lassitude, lack of appetite, and the hard work to which I had nevertheless kept myself during the day, had conspired with the pain to make me lose my temper. I was not altogether in a condition to discharge my duties as a physician, but in view of the nature and the location of the malady, one might have expected some performance other than riding, for which I was very especially unfitted. It is this very activity, of riding into which I am plunged by the dream; it is the most energetic denial of the suffering which is capable of being conceived. In the first place, I do not know how to ride, I do not usually dream of it, and I never sat on a horse but once—without a saddle—and then I did not feel comfortable. But in this dream I ride as though I had no furuncle on the perineum, and why? just because I don’t want any. According to the description my saddle is the poultice which has made it possible for me to go to sleep. Probably I did not feel anything of my pain—as I was thus taken care of—during the first few hours of sleeping. Then the painful sensations announced themselves and tried to wake me up, whereupon the dream came and said soothingly: “Keep on sleeping, you won’t wake up anyway! You have no furuncle at all, for you are riding on a horse, and with a furuncle where you have it riding is impossible!” And the dream was successful; the pain was stifled, and I went on sleeping.
But the dream was not satisfied with “suggesting away” the furuncle by means of tenaciously adhering to an idea incompatible with that of the malady, in doing which it behaved like the hallucinatory insanity of the mother who has lost her child, or like the merchant who has been deprived of his fortune by losses.[BP] In addition the details of the denied sensation and of the image which is used to displace it are employed by the dream as a means to connect the material ordinarily actually present in the mind with the dream situation, and to give this material representation. I am riding on a grey horse—the colour of the horse corresponds exactly to the pepper-and-salt costume in which I last met my colleague P. in the country. I have been warned that highly seasoned food is the cause of furunculosis, but in any case it is preferable as an etiological explanation to sugar which ordinarily suggests furunculosis. My friend P. has been pleased to “ride the high horse” with regard to me, ever since he superseded me in the treatment of a female patient, with whom I had performed great feats (in the dream I first sit on the horse side-saddle fashion, like a circus rider), but who really led me wherever she wished, like the horse in the anecdote about the Sunday equestrian. Thus the horse came to be a symbolic representation of a lady patient (in the dream it is most intelligent). “I feel quite at home up here,” refers to the position which I occupied in the patient’s household until I was replaced by my colleague P. “I thought you were securely seated in the saddle,” one of my few well-wishers among the great physicians of this city recently said to me with reference to the same household. And it was a feat to practise psychotherapy for ten hours a day with such pains, but I know that I cannot continue my particularly difficult work for any length of time without complete physical health, and the dream is full of gloomy allusions to the situation which must in that case result (the card such as neurasthenics have and present to doctors): No work and no food. With further interpretation I see that the dream activity has succeeded in finding the way from the wish-situation of riding to very early infantile scenes of quarrelling, which must have taken place between me and my nephew, who is now living in England, and who, moreover, is a year older than I. Besides it has taken up elements from my journeys to Italy; the street in the dream is composed of impressions of Verona and Siena. Still more exhaustive interpretation leads to sexual dream-thoughts, and I recall what significance dream allusions to that beautiful country had in the case of a female patient who had never been in Italy (Itlay—German gen Italien—Genitalien—genitals). At the same time there are references to the house in which I was physician before my friend P., and to the place where the furuncle is located.
Among the dreams mentioned in the previous chapter there are several which might serve as examples for the elaboration of so-called nerve stimuli. The dream about drinking in full draughts is one of this sort; the somatic excitement in it seems to be the only source of the dream, and the wish resulting from the sensation—thirst—the only motive for dreaming. Something similar is true of the other simple dreams, if the somatic excitement alone is capable of forming a wish. The dream of the sick woman who throws the cooling apparatus from her cheek at night is an instance of a peculiar way of reacting to painful excitements with a wish-fulfilment; it seems as though the patient had temporarily succeeded in making herself analgesic by ascribing her pains to a stranger.
My dream about the three Parcæ is obviously a dream of hunger, but it has found means to refer the need for food back to the longing of the child for its mother’s breast, and to make the harmless desire a cloak for a more serious one, which is not permitted to express itself so openly. In the dream about Count Thun we have seen how an accidental bodily desire is brought into connection with the strongest, and likewise the most strongly suppressed emotions of the psychic life. And when the First Consul incorporates the sound of an exploding bomb into a dream of battle before it causes him to wake, as in the case reported by Garnier, the purpose for which psychic activity generally concerns itself with sensations occurring during sleep is revealed with extraordinary clearness. A young lawyer, who has been deeply preoccupied with his first great bankruptcy proceeding, and who goes to sleep during the afternoon following, acts just like the great Napoleon. He dreams about a certain G. Reich in Hussiatyn (German husten—to cough), whom he knows in connection with the bankruptcy proceeding, but Hussiatyn forces itself upon his attention still further, with the result that he is obliged to awaken, and hears his wife—who is suffering from bronchial catarrh—coughing violently.
Let us compare the dream of Napoleon I., who, incidentally, was an excellent sleeper, with that of the sleepy student, who was awakened by his landlady with the admonition that he must go to the hospital, who thereupon dreams himself into a bed in the hospital, and then sleeps on, with the following account of his motives: If I am already in the hospital, I shan’t have to get up in order to go there. The latter is obviously a dream of convenience; the sleeper frankly admits to himself the motive for his dreaming; but he thereby reveals one of the secrets of dreaming in general. In a certain sense all dreams are dreams of convenience; they serve the purpose of continuing sleep instead of awakening. The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it. We shall justify this conception with respect to the psychic factors of awakening elsewhere; it is possible, however, at this point to prove its applicability to the influence exerted by objective external excitements. Either the mind does not concern itself at all with the causes of sensations, if it is able to do this in spite of their intensity and of their significance, which is well understood by it; or it employs the dream to deny these stimuli; or thirdly, if it is forced to recognise the stimulus, it seeks to find that interpretation of the stimulus which shall represent the actual sensation as a component part of a situation which is desired and which is compatible with sleep. The actual sensation is woven into the dream in order to deprive it of its reality. Napoleon is permitted to go on sleeping; it is only a dream recollection of the thunder of the cannon at Arcole which is trying to disturb him.[BQ]
The wish to sleep, by which the conscious ego has been suspended and which along with the dream-censor contributes its share to the dream, must thus always be taken into account as a motive for the formation of dreams, and every successful dream is a fulfilment of this wish. The relation of this general, regularly present, and invariable sleep-wish to the other wishes, of which now the one, now the other is fulfilled, will be the subject of a further explanation. In the wish to sleep we have discovered a factor capable of supplying the deficiency in the theory of Strümpell and Wundt, and of explaining the perversity and capriciousness in the interpretation of the outer stimulus. The correct interpretation, of which the sleeping mind is quite capable, would imply an active interest and would require that sleep be terminated; hence, of those interpretations which are possible at all, only those are admitted which are agreeable to the absolute censorship of the somatic wish. It is something like this: It’s the nightingale and not the lark. For if it’s the lark, love’s night is at an end. From among the interpretations of the excitement which are at the moment possible, that one is selected which can secure the best connection with the wish-possibilities that are lying in wait in the mind. Thus everything is definitely determined, and nothing is left to caprice. The misinterpretation is not an illusion, but—if you will—an excuse. Here again, however, there is admitted an action which is a modification of the normal psychic procedure, as in the case where substitution by means of displacement is effected for the purposes of the dream-censor.
If the outer nerve stimuli and inner bodily stimuli are sufficiently intense to compel psychic attention, they represent—that is, in case they result in dreaming and not in awakening—a definite point in the formation of dreams, a nucleus in the dream material, for which an appropriate wish-fulfilment is sought, in a way similar (see above) to the search for connecting ideas between two dream stimuli. To this extent it is true for a number of dreams that the somatic determines what their content is to be. In this extreme case a wish which is not exactly actual is aroused for the purpose of dream formation. But the dream can do nothing but represent a wish in a situation as fulfilled; it is, as it were, confronted by the task of seeking what wish may be represented and fulfilled by means of the situation which is now actual. Even if this actual material is of a painful or disagreeable character, still it is not useless for the purposes of dream formation. The psychic life has control even over wishes the fulfilment of which brings forth pleasure—a statement which seems contradictory, but which becomes intelligible if one takes into account the presence of two psychic instances and the censor existing between them.
There are in the psychic life, as we have heard, repressed wishes which belong to the first system, and to whose fulfilment the second system is opposed. There are wishes of this kind—and we do not mean this in an historic sense, that there have been such wishes and that these have then been destroyed—but the theory of repression, which is essential to the study of psychoneurosis, asserts that such repressed wishes still exist, contemporaneously with an inhibition weighing them down. Language has hit upon the truth when it speaks of the “suppression” of such impulses. The psychic contrivance for bringing such wishes to realisation remains preserved and in a condition to be used. But if it happens that such a suppressed wish is fulfilled, the vanquished inhibition of the second system (which is capable of becoming conscious) is then expressed as a painful feeling. To close this discussion; if sensations of a disagreeable character which originate from somatic sources are presented during sleep, this constellation is taken advantage of by the dream activity to represent the fulfilment—with more or less retention of the censor—of an otherwise suppressed wish.
This condition of affairs makes possible a number of anxiety dreams, while another series of the dream formations which are unfavourable to the wish theory exhibits a different mechanism. For anxiety in dreams may be of a psychoneurotic nature, or it may originate in psychosexual excitements, in which case the anxiety corresponds to a repressed libido. Then this anxiety as well as the whole anxiety dream has the significance of a neurotic symptom, and we are at the dividing-line where the wish-fulfilling tendency of dreams disappears. But in other anxiety-dreams the feeling of anxiety comes from somatic sources (for instance in the case of persons suffering from pulmonary or heart trouble, where there is occasional difficulty in getting breath), and then it is used to aid those energetically suppressed wishes in attaining fulfilment in the form of a dream, the dreaming of which from psychic motives would have resulted in the same release of fear. It is not difficult to unite these two apparently discrepant cases. Of two psychic formations, an emotional inclination and an ideal content, which are intimately connected, the one, which is presented as actual, supports the other in the dream; now anxiety of somatic origin supports the suppressed presentation content, now the ideal content, which is freed from suppression, and which proceeds with the impetus given by sexual emotion, assists the discharge of anxiety. Of the one case it may be said that an emotion of somatic origin is psychically interpreted; in the other case everything is of psychic origin but the content which has been suppressed is easily replaced by a somatic interpretation which is suited to anxiety. The difficulties which lie in the way of understanding all this have little to do with the dream; they are due to the fact that in discussing these points we are touching upon the problems of the development of anxiety and of repression.
Undoubtedly the aggregate of bodily feelings is to be included among the commanding dream stimuli which originate internally. Not that it is able to furnish the dream content, but it forces the dream thoughts to make a choice from the material destined to serve the purpose of representation in the dream content; it does this by putting within easy reach that part of the material which is suited to its own character, while withholding the other. Moreover this general feeling, which is left over from the day, is probably connected with the psychic remnants which are significant for the dream.
If somatic sources of excitement occurring during sleep—that is, the sensations of sleep—are not of unusual intensity, they play a part in the formation of dreams similar, in my judgment, to that of the impressions of the day which have remained recent but indifferent. I mean that they are drawn into the dream formation, if they are qualified for being united with the presentation content of the psychic dream-source, but in no other case. They are treated as a cheap ever-ready material, which is utilised as often as it is needed, instead of prescribing, as a precious material does, the manner in which it is to be utilised. The case is similar to that where a patron of art brings to an artist a rare stone, a fragment of onyx, in order that a work of art may be made of it. The size of the stone, its colour, and its marking help to decide what bust or what scene shall be represented in it, while in the case where there is a uniform and abundant supply of marble or sandstone the artist follows only the idea which takes shape in his mind. Only in this manner, it seems to me, is the fact explicable that the dream content resulting from bodily excitements that have not been accentuated to a usual degree, does not appear in all dreams and during every night.
Perhaps an example, which takes us back to the interpretation of dreams, will best illustrate my meaning. One day I was trying to understand the meaning of the sensations of being impeded, of not being able to move from the spot, of not being able to get finished, &c., which are dreamt about so often, and which are so closely allied to anxiety. That night I had the following dream: I am very incompletely dressed, and I go from a dwelling on the ground floor up a flight of stairs to an upper story. In doing this I jump over three steps at a time, and I am glad to find I can mount the steps so quickly. Suddenly I see that a servant girl is coming down the stairs, that is, towards me. I am ashamed and try to hurry away, and now there appears that sensation of being impeded; I am glued to the steps and cannot move from the spot.
Analysis: The situation of the dream is taken from everyday reality. In a house in Vienna I have two apartments, which are connected only by a flight of stairs outside. My consultation-rooms and my study are on an elevated portion of the ground floor, and one story higher are my living-rooms. When I have finished my work downstairs late at night, I go up the steps into my bedroom. On the evening before the dream I had actually gone this short distance in a somewhat disorderly attire—that is to say, I had taken off my collar, cravat, and cuffs; but in the dream this has changed into a somewhat more advanced degree of undress, which as usual is indefinite. Jumping over the steps is my usual method of mounting stairs; moreover it is the fulfilment of a wish that has been recognised in the dream, for I have reassured myself about the condition of my heart action by the ease of this accomplishment. Moreover the manner in which I climb the stairs is an effective contrast to the sensation of being impeded which occurs in the second half of the dream. It shows me—something which needed no proof—that the dream has no difficulty in representing motor actions as carried out fully and completely; think of flying in dreams!
But the stairs which I go up are not those of my house; at first I do not recognise them; only the person coming toward me reveals to me the location which they are intended to signify. This woman is the maid of the old lady whom I visit twice daily to give hypodermic injections; the stairs, too, are quite similar to those which I must mount there twice daily.
How do this flight of stairs and this woman get into my dream? Being ashamed because one is not fully dressed, is undoubtedly of a sexual character; the servant of whom I dream is older than I, sulky, and not in the least attractive. These questions call up exactly the following occurrences: When I make my morning visit at this house I am usually seized with a desire to clear my throat; the product of the expectoration falls upon the steps. For there is no spittoon on either of these floors, and I take the view that the stairs should not be kept clean at my expense, but by the provision of a spittoon. The housekeeper, likewise an elderly and sulky person, with instincts for cleanliness, takes another view of the matter. She lies in wait for me to see whether I take the liberty referred to, and when she has made sure of it, I hear her growl distinctly. For days thereafter she refuses to show me her customary regard when we meet. On the day before the dream the position of the housekeeper had been strengthened by the servant girl. I had just finished my usual hurried visit to the patient when the servant confronted me in the ante-room and observed: “You might as well have wiped your shoes to-day, doctor, before you came into the room. The red carpet is all dirty again from your feet.” This is the whole claim which the flight of stairs and the servant-girl can make for appearing in my dream.
An intimate connection exists between my flying over the stairs and my spitting on the stairs. Pharyngitis and diseases of the heart are both said to be punishments for the vice of smoking, on account of which vice, of course, I do not enjoy a reputation for great neatness with my housekeeper in the one house any more than in the other, both of which the dream fuses into a single image.
I must postpone the further interpretation of this dream until I can give an account of the origin of the typical dream of incomplete dress. I only note as a preliminary result from the dream which has just been cited that the dream sensation of inhibited action is always aroused at a point where a certain connection requires it. A peculiar condition of my motility during sleep cannot be the cause of this dream content, for a moment before I saw myself hurrying over the steps with ease, as though in confirmation of this fact.
(d) Typical Dreams
In general we are not in a position to interpret the dream of another person if he is unwilling to furnish us with the unconscious thoughts which lie behind the dream content, and for this reason the practical applicability of our method of dream interpretation is seriously curtailed.[BR] But there are a certain number of dreams—in contrast with the usual freedom displayed by the individual in fashioning his dream world with characteristic peculiarity, and thereby making it unintelligible—which almost every one has dreamed in the same manner, and of which we are accustomed to assume that they have the same significance in the case of every dreamer. A peculiar interest belongs to these typical dreams for the reason that they probably all come from the same sources with every person, that they are thus particularly suited to give us information upon the sources of dreams.
Typical dreams are worthy of the most exhaustive investigation. I shall, however, only give a somewhat detailed consideration to examples of this species, and for this purpose I shall first select the so-called embarrassment dream of nakedness, and the dream of the death of dear relatives.
The dream of being naked or scantily clad in the presence of strangers occurs with the further addition that one is not at all ashamed of it, &c. But the dream of nakedness is worthy of our interest only when shame and embarrassment are felt in it, when one wishes to flee or to hide, and when one feels the strange inhibition that it is impossible to move from the spot and that one is incapable of altering the disagreeable situation. It is only in this connection that the dream is typical; the nucleus of its content may otherwise be brought into all kinds of relations or may be replaced by individual amplifications. It is essentially a question of a disagreeable sensation of the nature of shame, the wish to be able to hide one’s nakedness, chiefly by means of locomotion, without being able to accomplish this. I believe that the great majority of my readers will at some time have found themselves in this situation in a dream.
Usually the nature and manner of the experience is indistinct. It is usually reported, “I was in my shirt,” but this is rarely a clear image; in most cases the lack of clothing is so indeterminate that it is designated in the report of the dream by a set of alternatives: “I was in my chemise or in my petticoat.” As a rule the deficiency in the toilet is not serious enough to justify the feeling of shame attached to it. For a person who has served in the army, nakedness is often replaced by a mode of adjustment that is contrary to regulations. “I am on the street without my sabre and I see officers coming,” or “I am without my necktie,” or “I am wearing checkered civilian’s trousers,” &c.
The persons before whom one is ashamed are almost always strangers with faces that have been left undetermined. It never occurs in the typical dream that one is reproved or even noticed on account of the dress which causes the embarrassment to one’s self. Quite on the contrary, the people have an air of indifference, or, as I had opportunity to observe in a particularly clear dream, they look stiffly solemn. This is worth thinking about.
The shamed embarrassment of the dreamer and the indifference of the spectators form a contradiction which often occurs in the dream. It would better accord with the feelings of the dreamer if the strangers looked at him in astonishment and laughed at him, or if they grew indignant. I think, however, that the latter unpleasant feature has been obviated by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, while the embarrassment, being retained on some account or other, has been left standing, and thus the two parts fail to agree. We have interesting evidence to show that the dream, whose appearance has been partially disfigured by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, has not been properly understood. For it has become the basis of a fairy tale familiar to us all in Andersen’s version,[BS] and it has recently received poetic treatment by L. Fulda in the Talisman. In Andersen’s fairy tale we are told of two impostors who weave a costly garment for the Emperor, which, however, shall be visible only to the good and true. The Emperor goes forth clad in this invisible garment, and, the fabric serving as a sort of touchstone, all the people are frightened into acting as though they did not notice the nakedness of the Emperor.
But such is the situation in our dream. It does not require great boldness to assume that the unintelligible dream content has suggested the invention of a state of undress in which the situation that is being remembered becomes significant. This situation has then been deprived of its original meaning, and placed at the service of other purposes. But we shall see that such misunderstanding of the dream content often occurs on account of the conscious activity of the second psychic system, and is to be recognised as a factor in the ultimate formation of the dream; furthermore, that in the development of the obsessions and phobias similar misunderstandings, likewise within the same psychic personality, play a leading part. The source from which in our dream the material for this transformation is taken can also be explained. The impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact that the latent dream content is occupied with forbidden wishes which have become the victims of repression. The connection in which such dreams appear during my analysis of neurotics leaves no room for doubting that the dream is based upon a recollection from earliest childhood. Only in our childhood was there a time when we were seen by our relatives as well as by strange nurses, servant girls, and visitors, in scanty clothing, and at that time we were not ashamed of our nakedness.[BT]
It may be observed in the case of children who are a little older that being undressed has a kind of intoxicating effect upon them, instead of making them ashamed. They laugh, jump about, and strike their bodies; the mother, or whoever is present, forbids them to do this, and says: “Fie, that is shameful—you mustn’t do that.” Children often show exhibitional cravings; it is hardly possible to go through a village in our part of the country without meeting a two or three-year-old tot who lifts up his or her shirt before the traveller, perhaps in his honour. One of my patients has reserved in his conscious memory a scene from the eighth year of his life in which he had just undressed previous to going to bed, and was about to dance into the room of his little sister in his undershirt when the servant prevented his doing it. In the childhood history of neurotics, denudation in the presence of children of the opposite sex plays a great part; in paranoia the desire to be observed while dressing and undressing may be directly traced to these experiences; among those remaining perverted there is a class which has accentuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the exhibitionists.
This age of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to our later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but a composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual. It is for this reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked and are not ashamed until the moment arrives when the sense of shame and of fear are aroused; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin. Into this Paradise the dream can take us back every night; we have already ventured the conjecture that the impressions from earliest childhood (from the prehistoric period until about the end of the fourth year) in themselves, and independently of everything else, crave reproduction, perhaps without further reference to their content, and that the repetition of them is the fulfilment of a wish. Dreams of nakedness, then, are exhibition dreams.[BU]
One’s own person, which is seen not as that of a child, but as belonging to the present, and the idea of scanty clothing, which became buried beneath so many later négligée recollections or because of the censor, turns out to be obscure—these two things constitute the nucleus of the exhibition dream. Next come the persons before whom one is ashamed. I know of no example where the actual spectators at those infantile exhibitions reappear in the dream. For the dream is hardly ever a simple recollection. Strangely enough, those persons who are the objects of our sexual interest during childhood are omitted from all the reproductions of the dream, of hysteria, and of the compulsion neurosis; paranoia alone puts the spectators back into their places, and is fanatically convinced of their presence, although they remain invisible. What the dream substitutes for these, the “many strange people,” who take no notice of the spectacle which is presented, is exactly the wish-opposite of that single, intimate person for whom the exposure was intended. “Many strange people,” moreover, are often found in the dream in any other favourable connection; as a wish-opposite they always signify “a secret.”[BV] It may be seen how the restoration of the old condition of affairs, as it occurs in paranoia, is subject to this antithesis. One is no longer alone. One is certainly being watched, but the spectators are “many strange, curiously indeterminate people.”
Furthermore, repression has a place in the exhibition dream. For the disagreeable sensation of the dream is the reaction of the second psychic instance to the fact that the exhibition scene which has been rejected by it has in spite of this succeeded in securing representation. The only way to avoid this sensation would be not to revive the scene.
Later on we shall again deal with the sensation of being inhibited. It serves the dream excellently in representing the conflict of the will, the negation. According to our unconscious purpose exhibition is to be continued; according to the demands of the censor, it is to be stopped.
The relation of our typical dreams to fairy tales and to other poetic material is neither a sporadic nor an accidental one. Occasionally the keen insight of a poet has analytically recognised the transforming process—of which the poet is usually the tool—and has followed it backwards, that is to say, traced it to the dream. A friend has called my attention to the following passage in G. Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich: “I do not wish, dear Lee, that you should ever come to realise from experience the peculiar piquant truth contained in the situation of Odysseus, when he appears before Nausikaa and her playmates, naked and covered with mud! Would you like to know what it means? Let us consider the incident closely. If you are ever separated from your home, and from everything that is dear to you, and wander about in a strange country, when you have seen and experienced much, when you have cares and sorrows, and are, perhaps, even miserable and forlorn, you will some night inevitably dream that you are approaching your home; you will see it shining and beaming in the most beautiful colours; charming, delicate and lovely figures will come to meet you; and you will suddenly discover that you are going about in rags, naked and covered with dust. A nameless feeling of shame and fear seizes you, you try to cover yourself and to hide, and you awaken bathed in sweat. As long as men exist, this will be the dream of the care-laden, fortune-battered man, and thus Homer has taken his situation from the profoundest depths of the eternal character of humanity.”
This profound and eternal character of humanity, upon the touching of which in his listeners the poet usually calculates, is made up of the stirrings of the spirit which are rooted in childhood, in the period which later becomes prehistoric. Suppressed and forbidden wishes of childhood break forth under cover of those wishes of the homeless man which are unobjectionable and capable of becoming conscious, and for that reason the dream which is made objective in the legend of Nausikaa regularly assumes the form of a dream of anxiety.
My own dream, mentioned on p. 201, of hurrying up the stairs, which is soon afterward changed into that of being glued to the steps, is likewise an exhibition dream, because it shows the essential components of such a dream. It must thus permit of being referred to childish experiences, and the possession of these ought to tell us how far the behaviour of the servant girl towards me—her reproach that I had soiled the carpet—helped her to secure the position which she occupies in the dream. I am now able to furnish the desired explanation. One learns in psychoanalysis to interpret temporal proximity by objective connection; two thoughts, apparently without connection, which immediately follow one another, belong to a unity which can be inferred; just as an a and a t, which I write down together, should be pronounced as one syllable, at. The same is true of the relation of dreams to one another. The dream just cited, of the stairs, has been taken from a series of dreams, whose other members I am familiar with on account of having interpreted them. The dream which is included in this series must belong to the same connection. Now the other dreams of the series are based upon the recollection of a nurse to whom I was entrusted from some time in the period when I was suckling to the age of two and a half years, and of whom a hazy recollection has remained in my consciousness. According to information which I have recently obtained from my mother, she was old and ugly, but very intelligent and thorough; according to inferences which I may draw from my dreams, she did not always give me the kindest treatment, and said hard words to me when I showed insufficient aptitude for education in cleanliness. Thus by attempting to continue this educational work the servant girl develops a claim to be treated by me, in the dream, as an incarnation of the prehistoric old woman. It is to be assumed that the child bestowed his love upon this governess in spite of her bad treatment of him.[BW]
Another series of dreams which might be called typical are those which have the content that a dear relative, parent, brother, or sister, child or the like, has died. Two classes of these dreams must immediately be distinguished—those in which the dreamer remains unaffected by sorrow while dreaming, and those in which he feels profound grief on account of the death, in which he even expresses this grief during sleep by fervid tears.
We may ignore the dreams of the first group; they have no claim to be reckoned as typical. If they are analysed, it is found that they signify something else than what they contain, that they are intended to cover up some other wish. Thus it is with the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her sister lying on a bier before her (p 129). This does not signify that she wishes the death of her little nephew; it only conceals, as we have learned, a wish to see a beloved person once more after long separation—the same person whom she had seen again after a similar long intermission at the funeral of another nephew. This wish, which is the real content of the dream, gives no cause for sorrow, and for that reason no sorrow is felt in the dream. It may be seen in this case that the emotion which is contained in the dream does not belong to the manifest content of the dream, but to the latent one, and that the emotional content has remained free from the disfigurement which has befallen the presentation content.
It is a different story with the dreams in which the death of a beloved relative is imagined and where sorrowful emotion is felt. These signify, as their content says, the wish that the person in question may die, and as I may here expect that the feelings of all readers and of all persons who have dreamt anything similar will object to my interpretation, I must strive to present my proof on the broadest possible basis.
We have already had one example to show that the wishes represented in the dream as fulfilled are not always actual wishes. They may also be dead, discarded, covered, and repressed wishes, which we must nevertheless credit with a sort of continuous existence on account of their reappearance in the dream. They are not dead like persons who have died in our sense, but they resemble the shades in the Odyssey which awaken a certain kind of life as soon as they have drunk blood. In the dream of the dead child in the box (p. 130) we were concerned with a wish that had been actual fifteen years before, and which had been frankly admitted from that time. It is, perhaps, not unimportant from the point of view of dream theory if I add that a recollection from earliest childhood is at the basis even of this dream. While the dreamer was a little child—it cannot be definitely determined at what time—she had heard that during pregnancy of which she was the fruit her mother had fallen into a profound depression of spirits and had passionately wished for the death of her child before birth. Having grown up herself and become pregnant, she now follows the example of her mother.
If some one dreams with expressions of grief that his father or mother, his brother or sister, has died, I shall not use the dream as a proof that he wishes them dead now. The theory of the dreams does not require so much; it is satisfied with concluding that the dreamer has wished them dead—at some one time in childhood. I fear, however, that this limitation will not contribute much to quiet the objectors; they might just as energetically contest the possibility that they have ever had such thoughts as they are sure that they do not cherish such wishes at present. I must, therefore, reconstruct a part of the submerged infantile psychology on the basis of the testimony which the present still furnishes.[BX]
Let us at first consider the relation of children to their brothers and sisters. I do not know why we presuppose that it must be a loving one, since examples of brotherly and sisterly enmity among adults force themselves upon every one’s experience, and since we so often know that this estrangement originated even during childhood or has always existed. But many grown-up people, who to-day are tenderly attached to their brothers and sisters and stand by them, have lived with them during childhood in almost uninterrupted hostility. The older child has ill-treated the younger, slandered it, and deprived it of its toys; the younger has been consumed by helpless fury against the elder, has envied it and feared it, or its first impulse toward liberty and first feelings of injustice have been directed against the oppressor. The parents say that the children do not agree, and cannot find the reason for it. It is not difficult to see that the character even of a well-behaved child is not what we wish to find in a grown-up person. The child is absolutely egotistical; it feels its wants acutely and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially with its competitors, other children, and in the first instance with its brothers and sisters. For doing this we do not call the child wicked—we call it naughty; it is not responsible for its evil deeds either in our judgment or in the eyes of the penal law. And this is justifiably so; for we may expect that within this very period of life which we call childhood, altruistic impulses and morality will come to life in the little egotist, and that, in the words of Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay and restrain the primary one. It is true that morality does not develop simultaneously in all departments, and furthermore, the duration of the unmoral period of childhood is of different length in different individuals. In cases where the development of this morality fails to appear, we are pleased to talk about “degeneration”; they are obviously cases of arrested development. Where the primary character has already been covered up by later development, it may be at least partially uncovered again by an attack of hysteria. The correspondence between the so-called hysterical character and that of a naughty child is strikingly evident. A compulsion neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a super-morality, imposed upon the primary character that is again asserting itself, as an increased check.
Many persons, then, who love their brothers and sisters, and who would feel bereaved by their decease, have evil wishes towards them from earlier times in their unconscious wishes, which are capable of being realised in the dream. It is particularly interesting to observe little children up to three years old in their attitude towards their brothers and sisters. So far the child has been the only one; he is now informed that the stork has brought a new child. The younger surveys the arrival, and then expresses his opinion decidedly: “The stork had better take it back again.”[BY]
I subscribe in all seriousness to the opinion that the child knows enough to calculate the disadvantage it has to expect on account of the new-comer. I know in the case of a lady of my acquaintance who agrees very well with a sister four years younger than herself, that she responded to the news of her younger sister’s arrival with the following words: “But I shan’t give her my red cap, anyway.” If the child comes to this realisation only at a later time, its enmity will be aroused at that point. I know of a case where a girl, not yet three years old, tried to strangle a suckling in the cradle, because its continued presence, she suspected, boded her no good. Children are capable of envy at this time of life in all its intensity and distinctness. Again, perhaps, the little brother or sister has really soon disappeared; the child has again drawn the entire affection of the household to itself, and then a new child is sent by the stork; is it then unnatural for the favourite to wish that the new competitor may have the same fate as the earlier one, in order that he may be treated as well as he was before during the interval? Of course this attitude of the child towards the younger infant is under normal circumstances a simple function of the difference of age. After a certain time the maternal instincts of the girl will be excited towards the helpless new-born child.
Feelings of enmity towards brothers and sisters must occur far more frequently during the age of childhood than is noted by the dull observation of adults.
In case of my own children, who followed one another rapidly, I missed the opportunity to make such observations; I am now retrieving it through my little nephew, whose complete domination was disturbed after fifteen months by the arrival of a female competitor. I hear, it is true, that the young man acts very chivalrously towards his little sister, that he kisses her hand and pets her; but in spite of this I have convinced myself that even before the completion of his second year he is using his new facility in language to criticise this person who seems superfluous to him. Whenever the conversation turns upon her, he chimes in and cries angrily: “Too (l)ittle, too (l)ittle.” During the last few months, since the child has outgrown this unfavourable criticism, owing to its splendid development, he has found another way of justifying his insistence that she does not deserve so much attention. On all suitable occasions he reminds us, “She hasn’t any teeth.”[BZ] We have all preserved the recollection of the eldest daughter of another sister of mine—how the child which was at that time six years old sought assurance from one aunt after another for an hour and a half with the question: “Lucy can’t understand that yet, can she?” Lucy was the competitor, two and a half years younger.
I have never failed in any of my female patients to find this dream of the death of brothers and sisters denoting exaggerated hostility. I have met with only one exception, which could easily be reinterpreted into a confirmation of the rule. Once in the course of a sitting while I was explaining this condition of affairs to a lady, as it seemed to have a bearing upon the symptoms under consideration, she answered, to my astonishment, that she had never had such dreams. However, she thought of another dream which supposedly had nothing to do with the matter—a dream which she had first dreamed at the age of four, when she was the youngest child, and had since dreamed repeatedly. “A great number of children, all of them the dreamer’s brothers and sisters, and male and female cousins, were romping about in a meadow. Suddenly they all got wings, flew up, and were gone.” She had no idea of the significance of the dream; but it will not be difficult for us to recognise it as a dream of the death of all the brothers and sisters, in its original form, and little influenced by the censor. I venture to insert the following interpretation: At the death of one out of a large number of children—in this case the children of two brothers were brought up in common as brothers and sisters—is it not probable that our dreamer, at that time not yet four years old, asked a wise, grown-up person: “What becomes of children when they are dead?” The answer probably was: “They get wings and become angels.” According to this explanation all the brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings like angels and—this is the important thing—they fly away. Our little angel-maker remains alone, think of it, the only one after such a multitude! The feature that the children are romping about on a meadow points with little ambiguity to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the same association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche as having the wings of a butterfly.
Perhaps some one will now object that, although the inimical impulses of children towards their brothers and sisters may well enough be admitted, how does the childish disposition arrive at such a height of wickedness as to wish death to a competitor or stronger playmate, as though all transgressions could be atoned for only by the death-punishment? Whoever talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of “being dead” has little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, which the grown-up person, as all the myths concerning the Great Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in his conception. Fear of death is strange to the child; therefore it plays with the horrible word and threatens another child: “If you do that again you will die, as Francis died,” whereat the poor mother shudders, for perhaps she cannot forget that the great majority of mortals do not succeed in living beyond the years of childhood. It is still possible, even for a child eight years old, on returning from a museum of natural history, to say to its mother: “Mamma, I love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can always, always see you!” So little does the childish conception of being dead resemble our own.[CA]
Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as “being gone,” not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by travelling, estrangement, or death. If, during the prehistoric years of a child, a nurse has been sent away and its mother has died a short while after, the two experiences, as is revealed by analysis, overlap in his memory. The fact that the child does not miss very intensely those who are absent has been realised by many a mother to her sorrow, after she has returned home after a summer journey of several weeks, and has been told upon inquiry: “The children have not asked for their mother a single time.” But if she really goes to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” the children seem at first to have forgotten her, and begin only subsequently to remember the dead mother.
If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die, and the psychic reaction to the dream of wishing death proves that, in spite of all the differences in content, the wish in the case of the child is somehow or other the same as it is with adults.
If now the death-wish of the child towards its brothers and sisters has been explained by the childish egotism, which causes the child to regard its brothers and sisters as competitors, how may we account for the same wish towards parents, who bestow love on the child and satisfy its wants, and whose preservation it ought to desire from these very egotistical motives?
In the solution of this difficulty we are aided by the experience that dreams of the death of parents predominantly refer to that member of the parental couple which shares the sex of the dreamer, so that the man mostly dreams of the death of his father, the woman of the death of her mother. I cannot claim that this happens regularly, but the predominating occurrence of this dream in the manner indicated is so evident that it must be explained through some factor that is universally operative. To express the matter boldly, it is as though a sexual preference becomes active at an early period, as though the boy regards his father as a rival in love, and as though the girl takes the same attitude toward her mother—a rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but profit.
Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader consider the actual relations between parents and children. What the requirements of culture and piety demand of this relation must be distinguished from what daily observation shows us to be the fact. More than one cause for hostile feeling is concealed within the relations between parents and children; the conditions necessary for the actuation of wishes which cannot exist in the presence of the censor are most abundantly provided. Let us dwell at first upon the relation between father and son. I believe that the sanctity which we have ascribed to the injunction of the decalogue dulls our perception of reality. Perhaps we hardly dare to notice that the greater part of humanity neglects to obey the fifth commandment. In the lowest as well as in the highest strata of human society, piety towards parents is in the habit of receding before other interests. The obscure reports which have come to us in mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human society give us an unpleasant idea of the power of the father and the ruthlessness with which it was used. Kronos devours his children, as the wild boar devours the brood of the sow; Zeus emasculates his father[CB] and takes his place as a ruler. The more despotically the father ruled in the ancient family, the more must the son have taken the position of an enemy, and the greater must have been his impatience, as designated successor, to obtain the mastery himself after his father’s death. Even in our own middle-class family the father is accustomed to aid the development of the germ of hatred which naturally belongs to the paternal relation by refusing the son the disposal of his own destiny, or the means necessary for this. A physician often has occasion to notice that the son’s grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction at the liberty which he has at last obtained. Every father frantically holds on to whatever of the sadly antiquated potestas patris still remains in the society of to-day, and every poet who, like Ibsen, puts the ancient strife between father and son in the foreground of his fiction is sure of his effect. The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter grows up and finds a guardian in her mother, while she desires sexual freedom, and when, on the other hand, the mother has been warned by the budding beauty of her daughter that the time has come for her to renounce sexual claims.
All these conditions are notorious and open to everyone’s inspection. But they do not serve to explain dreams of the death of parents found in the case of persons to whom piety towards their parents has long since come to be inviolable. We are furthermore prepared by the preceding discussion to find that the death-wish towards parents is to be explained by reference to earliest childhood.
This conjecture is reaffirmed with a certainty that makes doubt impossible in its application to psychoneurotics through the analyses that have been undertaken with them. It is here found that the sexual wishes of the child—in so far as they deserve this designation in their embryonic state—awaken at a very early period, and that the first inclinations of the girl are directed towards the father, and the first childish cravings of the boy towards the mother. The father thus becomes an annoying competitor for the boy, as the mother does for the girl, and we have already shown in the case of brothers and sisters how little it takes for this feeling to lead the child to the death-wish. Sexual selection, as a rule, early becomes evident in the parents; it is a natural tendency for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who discourages it. To find love in a grown-up person is for the child not only the satisfaction of a particular craving, but also means that the child’s will is to be yielded to in other respects. Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and at the same time re-enforces the feeling which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that corresponds to theirs.
Most of the signs of these infantile inclinations are usually overlooked; some of them may be observed even after the first years of childhood. An eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. “Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,” &c. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, with whom this bit of child psychology is unusually transparent, says outright: “Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.” Nor does this wish by any means exclude from child life the possibility that the child may love his mother affectionately. If the little boy is allowed to sleep at his mother’s side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if after his father’s return he must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his dear, beautiful mamma; and the father’s death is obviously a means for the attainment of this wish; for the child’s experience has taught him that “dead” folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return.
Although observations upon little children lend themselves, without being forced, to the proposed interpretation, they do not carry the full conviction which psychoanalyses of adult neurotics obtrude upon the physician. The dreams in question are here cited with introductions of such a nature that their interpretation as wish-dreams becomes unavoidable. One day I find a lady sad and weeping. She says: “I do not want to see my relatives any more; they must shudder at me.” Thereupon, almost without any transition, she tells that she remembers a dream, whose significance, of course, she does not know. She dreamed it four years before, and it is as follows: A fox or a lynx is taking a walk on the roof; then something falls down, or she falls down, and after that her mother is carried out of the house dead—whereat the dreamer cries bitterly. No sooner had I informed her that this dream must signify a wish from her childhood to see her mother dead, and that it is because of this dream that she thinks that her relatives must shudder at her, than she furnished some material for explaining the dream. “Lynx-eye” is an opprobrious epithet which a street boy once bestowed on her when she was a very small child; when she was three years old a brick had fallen on her mother’s head so that she bled severely.
I once had opportunity to make a thorough study of a young girl who underwent several psychic states. In the state of frenzied excitement with which the illness started, the patient showed a very strong aversion to her mother; she struck and scolded her as soon as she approached the bed, while at the same time she remained loving and obedient to a much older sister. Then there followed a clear but somewhat apathetic state with very much disturbed sleep. It was in this phase that I began to treat her and to analyse her dreams. An enormous number of these dealt in a more or less abstruse manner with the death of the mother; now she was present at the funeral of an old woman, now she saw her sisters sitting at the table dressed in mourning; the meaning of the dreams could not be doubted. During the further progress of the convalescence hysterical phobias appeared; the most torturing of these was the idea that something happened to her mother. She was always having to hurry home from wherever she happened to be in order to convince herself that her mother was still alive. Now this case, in view of my other experiences, was very instructive; it showed in polyglot translations, as it were, the different ways in which the psychic apparatus reacts to the same exciting idea. In the state of excitement which I conceive as the overpowering of the second psychic instance, the unconscious enmity towards the mother became potent as a motor impulse; then, after calmness set in, following the suppression of the tumult, and after the domination of the censor had been restored, this feeling of enmity had access only to the province of dreams in order to realise the wish that the mother might die; and after the normal condition had been still further strengthened, it created the excessive concern for the mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and manifestation of defence. In the light of these considerations it is no longer inexplicable why hysterical girls are so often extravagantly attached to their mothers.