Part 18

1. An intelligent and refined young lady, who, however, in conduct, belongs to the class we call reserved, to the “still waters,” relates the following dream:—

Her husband asks: “Should not the piano be tuned?” She answers: “It won’t pay; the hammers would have to be newly buffed too.” This repeats an actual event of the previous day. Her husband had asked such a question, and she had answered something similar. But what is the significance of her dreaming it? She tells of the piano, indeed, that it is a disgusting old box which has a bad tone; it is one of the things which her husband had before they were married, &c., but the key to the true solution lies in the phrase: It won’t pay. This originated in a visit made the day before to a lady friend. Here she was asked to take off her coat, but she declined, saying, “It won’t pay. I must go in a moment.” At this point, I recall that during yesterday’s analysis she suddenly took hold of her coat, a button of which had opened. It is, therefore, as if she had said, “Please don’t look in this direction; it won’t pay.” Thus “box” develops into “chest,” or breast-box (“bust”), and the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time in her bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape. It also leads to earlier periods, if we take into consideration “disgusting” and “bad tone,” and remember how often in allusions and in dreams the two small hemispheres of the feminine body take the place—as a substitute and as an antithesis—of the large ones.

II. I may interrupt this dream to insert a brief harmless dream of a young man. He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat again, which was terrible. The occasion for this dream is apparently the cold weather, which has recently set in again. On more careful examination we note that the two short portions of the dream do not fit together well, for what is there “terrible” about wearing a heavy or thick coat in the cold? Unfortunately for the harmlessness of this dream, the first idea educed in analysis is the recollection that on the previous day a lady had secretly admitted to him that her last child owed its existence to the bursting of a condom. He now reconstructs his thoughts in accordance with this suggestion: A thin condom is dangerous, a thick one is bad. The condom is an “overcoat” (Überzieher), for it is put over something; Ueberzieher is also the name given in German to a thin overcoat. An experience like the one related by the lady would indeed be “terrible” for an unmarried man.—We may now return to our other harmless dreamer.

III. She puts a candle into a candlestick; but the candle is broken, so that it does not stand straight. The girls at school say she is clumsy; the young lady replies that it is not her fault.

Here, too, there is an actual occasion for the dream; the day before she had actually put a candle into a candlestick; but this one was not broken. A transparent symbolism has been employed here. The candle is an object which excites the feminine genitals; its being broken, so that it does not stand straight, signifies impotence on the man’s part (“it is not her fault”). But does this young woman, carefully brought up, and a stranger to all obscenity, know of this application of the candle? She happens to be able to tell how she came by this information. While riding in a boat on the Rhine, another boat passes containing students who are singing or rather yelling, with great delight: “When the Queen of Sweden with closed shutters and the candles of Apollo....”

She does not hear or understand the last word. Her husband is asked to give her the required explanation. These verses are then replaced in the dream content by the harmless recollection of a command which she once executed clumsily at a girls’ boarding school, this occurring by means of the common features closed shutters. The connection between the theme of onanism and that of impotence is clear enough. “Apollo” in the latent dream content connects this dream with an earlier one in which the virgin Pallas figured. All this is obviously not harmless.

IV. Lest it may seem too easy a matter to draw conclusions from dreams concerning the dreamer’s real circumstances, I add another dream coming from the same person which likewise appears harmless. “I dreamt of doing something,” she relates, “which I actually did during the day, that is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of hooks that I had difficulty in closing it. My dream was just like the actual occurrence.” Here the person relating the dream herself attaches chief importance to the correspondence between the dream and reality. All such criticisms upon the dream and remarks about it, although they have secured a place in waking thought, regularly belong to the latent dream content, as later examples will further demonstrate. We are told, then, that what the dream relates has actually taken place during the day. It would take us too far afield to tell how we reach the idea of using the English language to help us in the interpretation of this dream. Suffice it to say that it is again a question of a little box (cf. p. 130, the dream of the dead child in the box) which has been filled so full that nothing more can go into it. Nothing in the least sinister this time.

In all these “harmless” dreams the sexual factor as a motive for the exercise of the censor receives striking prominence. But this is a matter of primary importance, which we must postpone.

(b) Infantile Experiences as the Source of Dreams

As the third of the peculiarities of the dream content, we have cited from all the authors (except Robert) the fact that impressions from the earliest times of our lives, which seem not to be at the disposal of the waking memory, may appear in the dream. It is, of course, difficult to judge how often or how seldom this occurs, because the respective elements of the dream are not recognised according to their origin after waking. The proof that we are dealing with childhood impressions must thus be reached objectively, and the conditions necessary for this happen to coincide only in rare instances. The story is told by A. Maury, as being particularly conclusive, of a man who decided to visit his birthplace after twenty years’ absence. During the night before his departure, he dreams that he is in an altogether strange district, and that he there meets a strange man with whom he has a conversation. Having afterward returned to his home, he was able to convince himself that this strange district really existed in the neighbourhood of his home town, and the strange man in the dream turned out to be a friend of his dead father who lived there. Doubtless, a conclusive proof that he had seen both the man and the district in his childhood. The dream, moreover, is to be interpreted as a dream of impatience, like that of the girl who carries her ticket for the concert of the evening in her pocket (p. 110), of the child whose father had promised him an excursion to the Hameau, and the like. The motives explaining why just this impression of childhood is reproduced for the dreamer cannot, of course, be discovered without an analysis.

One of the attendants at my lectures, who boasted that his dreams were very rarely subject to disfigurement, told me that he had sometime before in a dream seen his former tutor in bed with his nurse, who had been in the household until he was eleven years old. The location of this scene does not occur to him in the dream. As he was much interested, he told the dream to his elder brother, who laughingly confirmed its reality. The brother said he remembered the affair very well, for he was at the time six years old. The lovers were in the habit of making him, the elder boy, drunk with beer, whenever circumstances were favourable for nocturnal relations. The smaller child, at that time three years old—our dreamer—who slept in the same room as the nurse, was not considered an obstacle.

In still another case it may be definitely ascertained, without the aid of dream interpretation, that the dream contains elements from childhood; that is, if it be a so-called perennial dream, which being first dreamt in childhood, later appears again and again after adult age has been reached. I may add a few examples of this sort to those already familiar, although I have never made the acquaintance of such a perennial dream in my own case. A physician in the thirties tells me that a yellow lion, about which he can give the most detailed information, has often appeared in his dream-life from the earliest period of his childhood to the present day. This lion, known to him from his dreams, was one day discovered in natura as a long-forgotten object made of porcelain, and on that occasion the young man learned from his mother that this object had been his favourite toy in early childhood, a fact which he himself could no longer remember.

If we now turn from the manifest dream content to the dream thoughts which are revealed only upon analysis, the co-operation of childhood experiences may be found to exist even in dreams whose content would not have led us to suspect anything of the sort. I owe a particularly delightful and instructive example of such a dream to my honoured colleague of the “yellow lion.” After reading Nansen’s account of his polar expedition, he dreamt that he was giving the bold explorer electrical treatment in an ice field for an ischæmia of which the latter complained! In the analysis of this dream, he remembered a story of his childhood, without which the dream remains entirely unintelligible. When he was a child, three or four years old, he was listening attentively to a conversation of older people about trips of exploration, and presently asked papa whether exploration was a severe illness. He had apparently confused “trips” with “rips,” and the ridicule of his brothers and sisters prevented his ever forgetting the humiliating experience.

The case is quite similar when, in the analysis of the dream of the monograph on the genus cyclamen, I happen upon the recollection, retained from childhood, that my father allowed me to destroy a book embellished with coloured plates when I was a little boy five years old. It will perhaps be doubted whether this recollection actually took part in the composition of the dream content, and it will be intimated that the process of analysis has subsequently established the connection. But the abundance and intricacy of the ties of association vouch for the truth of my explanation: cyclamen—favourite flower—favourite dish—artichoke; to pick to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a phrase which at that time rang in our ears à propos of the dividing up of the Chinese Empire)—herbarium-bookworm, whose favourite dish is books. I may state further that the final meaning of the dream, which I have not given here, has the most intimate connection with the content of the childhood scene.

In another series of dreams we learn from analysis that the wish itself, which has given rise to the dream, and whose fulfilment the dream turns out to be, has originated in childhood—until one is astonished to find that the child with all its impulses lives on in the dream.

I shall now continue the interpretation of a dream which has already proved instructive—I refer to the dream in which friend R. is my uncle (p. 116). We have carried its interpretation far enough for the wish-motive, of being appointed professor, to assert itself tangibly; and we have explained the affection displayed in the dream for friend R. as a fiction of opposition and spite against the aspersion of the two colleagues, who appear in the dream thoughts. The dream was my own; I may, therefore, continue the analysis by stating that my feelings were not quite satisfied by the solution reached. I know that my opinion of these colleagues who are so badly treated in the dream thoughts would have been expressed in quite different terms in waking life; the potency of the wish not to share their fate in the matter of appointment seemed to me too slight to account for the discrepancy between my estimate in the dream and that of waking. If my desire to be addressed by a new title proves so strong it gives proof of a morbid ambition, which I did not know to exist in me, and which I believe is far from my thoughts. I do not know how others, who think they know me, would judge me, for perhaps I have really been ambitious; but if this be true, my ambition has long since transferred itself to other objects than the title and rank of assistant-professor.

Whence, then, the ambition which the dream has ascribed to me? Here I remember a story which I heard often in my childhood, that at my birth an old peasant’s wife had prophesied to my happy mother (I was her first-born) that she had given to the world a great man. Such prophecies must occur very frequently; there are so many mothers happy in expectation, and so many old peasant wives whose influence on earth has waned, and who have therefore turned their eyes towards the future. The prophetess was not likely to suffer for it either. Might my hunger for greatness have originated from this source? But here I recollect an impression from the later years of my childhood, which would serve still better as an explanation. It was of an evening at an inn on the Prater, where my parents were accustomed to take me when I was eleven or twelve years old. We noticed a man who went from table to table and improvised verses upon any subject that was given to him. I was sent to bring the poet to our table and he showed himself thankful for the message. Before asking for his subject he threw off a few rhymes about me, and declared it probable, if he could trust his inspiration, that I would one day become a “minister.” I can still distinctly remember the impression made by this second prophecy. It was at the time of the election for the municipal ministry; my father had recently brought home pictures of those elected to the ministry—Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger, and others—and we had illuminated them in honour of these gentlemen. There were even some Jews among them; every industrious Jewish schoolboy therefore had the making of a minister in him. Even the fact that until shortly before my enrolment in the University I wanted to study jurisprudence, and changed my plans only at the last moment, must be connected with the impressions of that time. A minister’s career is under no circumstances open to a medical man. And now for my dream! I begin to see that it transplants me from the sombre present to the hopeful time of the municipal election, and fulfils my wish of that time to the fullest extent. In treating my two estimable and learned colleagues so badly, because they are Jews, the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal—in doing this I act as though I were the minister of education, I put myself in his place. What thorough revenge I take upon his Excellency! He refuses to appoint me professor extraordinarius, and in return I put myself in his place in the dream.

Another case establishes the fact that although the wish which actuates the dream is a present one, it nevertheless draws great intensification from childhood memories. I refer to a series of dreams which are based upon the longing to go to Rome. I suppose I shall still have to satisfy this longing by means of dreams for a long time to come, because, at the time of year which is at my disposal for travelling, a stay at Rome is to be avoided on account of considerations of health. Thus I once dreamt of seeing the Tiber and the bridge of St. Angelo from the window of a railroad compartment; then the train starts, and it occurs to me that I have never entered the city at all. The view which I saw in the dream was modelled after an engraving which I had noticed in passing the day before in the parlour of one of my patients. On another occasion some one is leading me upon a hill and showing me Rome half enveloped in mist, and so far in the distance that I am astonished at the distinctness of the view. The content of this dream is too rich to be fully reported here. The motive, “to see the promised land from afar,” is easily recognisable in it. The city is Lübeck, which I first saw in the mist; the original of the hill is the Gleichenberg. In a third dream, I am at last in Rome, as the dream tells me. To my disappointment, the scenery which I see is anything but urban. A little river with black water, on one side of which are black rocks, on the other large white flowers. I notice a certain Mr. Zucker (with whom I am superficially acquainted), and make up my mind to ask him to show me the way into the city. It is apparent that I am trying in vain to see a city in the dream which I have never seen in waking life. If I resolve the landscape into its elements, the white flowers indicate Ravenna, which is known to me, and which, for a time at least, deprived Rome of its leading place as capital of Italy. In the swamps around Ravenna we had seen the most beautiful water-lilies in the middle of black pools of water; the dream makes them grow on meadows, like the narcissi of our own Aussee, because at Ravenna it was such tedious work to fetch them out of the water. The black rock, so close to the water, vividly recalls the valley of the Tepl at Karlsbad. “Karlsbad” now enables me to account for the peculiar circumstance that I ask Mr. Zucker the way. In the material of which the dream is composed appear also two of those amusing Jewish anecdotes, which conceal so much profound and often bitter worldly wisdom, and which we are so fond of quoting in our conversation and letters. One is the story of the “constitution,” and tells how a poor Jew sneaks into the express train for Karlsbad without a ticket, how he is caught and is treated more and more unkindly at each call for tickets by the conductor, and how he tells a friend, whom he meets at one of the stations during his miserable journey, and who asks him where he is travelling: “To Karlsbad, if my constitution will stand it.” Associated with this in memory is another story about a Jew who is ignorant of French, and who has express instructions to ask in Paris for the way to the Rue Richelieu. Paris was for many years the object of my own longing, and I took the great satisfaction with which I first set foot on the pavement in Paris as a warrant that I should also attain the fulfilment of other wishes. Asking for the way is again a direct allusion to Rome, for of course all roads lead to Rome. Moreover, the name Zucker (English, sugar) again points to Karlsbad, whither we send all persons afflicted with the constitutional disease, diabetes (Zuckerkrankheit, sugar-disease). The occasion for this dream was the proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A further allusion to sugar and diabetes was to be found in the matters which I had to talk over with him.

A fourth dream, occurring shortly after the last one mentioned, brings me back to Rome. I see a street-corner before me and am astonished to see so many German placards posted there. On the day before I had written my friend with prophetic vision that Prague would probably not be a comfortable resort for German travellers. The dream, therefore, simultaneously expressed the wish to meet him at Rome instead of at the Bohemian city, and a desire, which probably originated during my student days, that the German language might be accorded more tolerance in Prague. Besides I must have understood the Czech language in the first three years of my childhood, because I was born in a small village of Moravia, inhabited by Slavs. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my seventeenth year, became, without effort on my part, so imprinted upon my memory that I can repeat it to this day, although I have no idea of its meaning. There is then no lack in these dreams also of manifold relations to impressions from the first years of my life.

It was during my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimenus, that I at last found what re-enforcement my longing for the Eternal City had received from the impressions of my youth; this was after I had seen the Tiber, and had turned back with painful emotions when I was within eighty kilometers of Rome. I was just broaching the plan of travelling to Naples via Rome the next year, when this sentence, which I must have read in one of our classical authors, occurred to me: “It is a question which of the two paced up and down in his room the more impatiently after he had made the plan to go to Rome—Assistant-Headmaster Winckelman or the great general Hannibal.” I myself had walked in Hannibal’s footsteps; like him I was destined never to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania after the whole world had expected him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had reached this point of similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium; like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies during the Punic war, not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Then, when I came finally to understand the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-semitic sentiment among my class-mates to assume a definite attitude, the figure of the semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my eyes. Hannibal and Rome symbolised for me as a youth the antithesis between the tenaciousness of the Jews and the organisation of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of that earlier time. Thus the wish to get to Rome has become the cover and symbol in my dream-life for several warmly cherished wishes, for the realisation of which one might work with the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Punic general, and whose fulfilment sometimes seems as little favoured by fortune as the wish of Hannibal’s life to enter Rome.

And now for the first time I happen upon the youthful experience which, even to-day, still manifests its power in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and to reveal to me his views about the things of this world in his conversation. In this way he once told me, in order to show into how much better times I had been born than he, the following: “While I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday on a street in the village where you were born; I was handsomely dressed and wore a new fur cap. Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one blow and shouts: “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” “And what did you do?” “I went into the street and picked up the cap,” was the calm answer. That did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings—the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barka made his boy swear at the domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies.”

I think I can follow my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general still further back into my childhood, so that possibly we have here the transference of an already formed emotional relation to a new vehicle. One of the first books which fell into my childish hands, after I learned to read, was Thiers’ Konsulat und Kaiserreich (Consulship and Empire); I remember I pasted on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers little labels with the names of the Imperial marshals, and that at that time Masséna (as a Jew Menasse) was already my avowed favourite. Napoleon himself follows Hannibal in crossing the Alps. And perhaps the development of this martial ideal can be traced still further back into my childhood, to the wish which the now friendly, now hostile, intercourse during my first three years with a boy a year older than myself must have actuated in the weaker of the two playmates.

The deeper one goes in the analysis of dreams, the more often one is put on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream sources in the latent dream content.

We have learned (p. 16) that the dream very rarely reproduces experiences in such a manner that they constitute the sole manifest dream content, unabridged and unchanged. Still some authentic examples showing this process have been reported, and I can add some new ones which again refer to infantile scenes. In the case of one of my patients, a dream once gave a barely disfigured reproduction of a sexual occurrence, which was immediately recognised as an accurate recollection. The memory of it indeed had never been lost in waking life, but it had been greatly obscured, and its revivification was a result of the preceding work of analysis. The dreamer had at the age of twelve visited a bed-ridden schoolmate, who had exposed himself by a movement in bed, probably only by chance. At the sight of the genitals, he was seized by a kind of compulsion, exposed himself and took hold of the member belonging to the other boy, who, however, looked at him with surprise and indignation, whereupon he became embarrassed and let go. A dream repeated this scene twenty-three years later, with all the details of the emotions occurring in it, changing it, however, in this respect, that the dreamer took the passive part instead of the active one, while the person of the schoolmate was replaced by one belonging to the present.

As a rule, of course, a childhood scene is represented in the manifest dream content only by an allusion, and must be extricated from the dream by means of interpretation. The citation of examples of this kind cannot have a very convincing effect, because every guarantee that they are experiences of childhood is lacking; if they belong to an earlier time of life, they are no longer recognised by our memory. Justification for the conclusion that such childish experiences generally exist in dreams is based upon a great number of factors which become apparent in psychoanalytical work, and which seem reliable enough when regarded as a whole. But when, for the purposes of dream interpretation, such references of dreams to childish experiences are torn from their context, they will perhaps not make much impression, especially since I never give all the material upon which the interpretation depends. However, I shall not let this prevent me from giving some examples.

I. The following dream is from another female patient: She is in a large room, in which there are all kinds of machines, perhaps, as she imagines, an orthopædic institute. She hears that I have no time, and that she must take the treatment along with five others. But she resists, and is unwilling to lie down on the bed—or whatever it is—which is intended for her. She stands in a corner and waits for me to say “It is not true.” The others, meanwhile, laugh at her, saying it is all foolishness on her part. At the same time it is as if she were called upon to make many small squares.

The first part of the content of this dream is an allusion to the treatment and a transference on me. The second contains an allusion to a childhood scene; the two portions are connected by the mention of the bed. The orthopædic institute refers to one of my talks in which I compared the treatment as to its duration and nature with an orthopædic treatment. At the beginning of the treatment I had to tell her that for the present I had little time for her, but that later on I would devote a whole hour to her daily. This aroused in her the old sensitiveness, which is the chief characteristic of children who are to be hysterical. Their desire for love is insatiable. My patient was the youngest of six brothers and sisters (hence, “with five others”), and as such the favourite of her father, but in spite of that she seems to have found that her beloved father devoted too little time and attention to her. The detail of her waiting for me to say “It is not true,” has the following explanation: A tailor’s apprentice had brought her a dress, and she had given him the money for it. Then she asked her husband whether she would have to pay the money again if the boy were to lose it. To tease her, her husband answered “Yes” (the teasing in the dream), and she asked again and again, and waited for him to say “It is not true.” The thought of the latent dream-content may now be construed as follows: Will she have to pay me the double amount if I devote twice the time to her? a thought which is stingy or filthy. (The uncleanliness of childhood is often replaced in the dream by greediness for money; the word filthy here supplies the bridge.) If all that about waiting until I should say, &c., serves as a dream circumlocution for the word “filthy,” the standing-in-a-corner and not lying down-on-the-bed are in keeping; for these two features are component parts of a scene of childhood, in which she had soiled her bed, and for punishment was put into a corner, with the warning that papa would not love her any more, and her brothers and sisters laughed at her, &c. The little squares refer to her young niece, who has shown her the arithmetical trick of writing figures in nine squares, I believe it is, in such a way that upon being added together in any direction they make fifteen.

II. Here is the dream of a man: He sees two boys tussling with each other, and they are cooper’s boys, as he concludes from the implements which are lying about; one of the boys has thrown the other down, the prostrate one wears ear-rings with blue stones. He hurries after the wrongdoer with lifted cane, in order to chastise him. The latter takes refuge with a woman who is standing against a wooden fence, as though it were his mother. She is the wife of a day labourer, and she turns her back to the man who is dreaming. At last she faces about and stares at him with a horrible look, so that he runs away in fright; in her eyes the red flesh of the lower lid seems to stand out.