Part 28

In order that we may have at our disposal a third example for the study of condensation in dream formation, I shall cite the partial analysis of another dream for which I am indebted to an elderly lady who is being psychoanalytically treated. In harmony with the condition of severe anxiety from which the patient suffered, her dreams contained a great abundance of sexual thought material, the discovery of which astonished as well as frightened her. Since I cannot carry the interpretation of the dream to completion, the material seems to fall apart into several groups without apparent connection.

III. Content of the dream: She remembers that she has two June bugs in a box, which she must set at liberty, for otherwise they will suffocate. She opens the box, and the bugs are quite exhausted; one of them flies out of the window, but the other is crushed on the casement while she is shutting the window, as some one or other requests her to do (expressions of disgust).

Analysis: Her husband is away travelling, and her fourteen-year-old daughter is sleeping in the bed next to her. In the evening the little one calls her attention to the fact that a moth has fallen into her glass of water; but she neglects to take it out, and feels sorry for the poor little creature in the morning. A story which she had read in the evening told of boys throwing a cat into boiling water, and the twitchings of the animal were described. These are the occasions for the dream, both of which are indifferent in themselves. She is further occupied with the subject of cruelty to animals. Years before, while they were spending the summer at a certain place, her daughter was very cruel to animals. She started a butterfly collection, and asked her for arsenic with which to kill the butterflies. Once it happened that a moth flew about the room for a long time with a needle through its body; on another occasion she found that some moths which had been kept for metamorphosis had died of starvation. The same child while still at a tender age was in the habit of pulling out the wings of beetles and butterflies; now she would shrink in horror from these cruel actions, for she has grown very kind.

Her mind is occupied with this contrast. It recalls another contrast, the one between appearance and disposition, as it is described in Adam Bede by George Eliot. There a beautiful but vain and quite stupid girl is placed side by side with an ugly but high-minded one. The aristocrat who seduces the little goose, is opposed to the working man who feels aristocratic, and behaves accordingly. It is impossible to tell character from people’s looks. Who could tell from her looks that she is tormented by sensual desires?

In the same year in which the little girl started her butterfly collection, the region in which they were staying suffered much from a pest of June bugs. The children made havoc among the bugs, and crushed them cruelly. At that time she saw a person who tore the wings off the June bugs and ate them. She herself had been born in June and also married in June. Three days after the wedding she wrote a letter home, telling how happy she was. But she was by no means happy.

During the evening before the dream she had rummaged among her old letters and had read various ones, comical and serious, to her family—an extremely ridiculous letter from a piano-teacher who had paid her attention when she was a girl, as well as one from an aristocratic admirer.

She blames herself because a bad book by de Maupassant had fallen into the hands of one of her daughters. The arsenic which her little girl asks for recalls the arsenic pills which restored the power of youth to the Duc de Mora in Nabab.

“Set at liberty” recalls to her a passage from the Magic Flute:

“I cannot compel you to love, But I will not give you your liberty.”

“June bugs” suggests the speech of Katie:

“I love you like a little beetle.”

Meanwhile the speech from Tannhauser: “For you are wrought with evil passion.”

She is living in fear and anxiety about her absent husband. The dread that something may happen to him on the journey is expressed in numerous fancies of the day. A little while before, during the analysis, she had come upon a complaint about his “senility” in her unconscious thoughts. The wish thought which this dream conceals may perhaps best be conjectured if I say that several days before the dream she was suddenly astounded by a command which she directed to her husband in the midst of her work: “Go hang yourself.” It was found that a few hours before she had read somewhere that a vigorous erection is induced when a person is hanged. It was for the erection which freed itself from repression in this terror-inspiring veiled form. “Go hang yourself” is as much as to say: “Get up an erection, at any cost.” Dr. Jenkin’s arsenic pills in Nabab belong in this connection; for it was known to the patient that the strongest aphrodisiac, cantharides, is prepared by crushing bugs (so-called Spanish flies). The most important part of the dream content has a significance to this effect.

Opening and shutting the window is the subject of a standing quarrel with her husband. She herself likes to sleep with plenty of air, and her husband does not. Exhaustion is the chief ailment of which she complains these days.

In all three of the dreams just cited I have emphasized by italics those phrases where one of the elements of the dream recurs in the dream thoughts in order to make the manifold references of the former obvious. Since, however, the analysis of none of these dreams has been carried to completion, it will be well worth while to consider a dream with a fully detailed analysis, in order to demonstrate the manifold determination of its content. I select the dream of Irma’s injection for this purpose. We shall see without effort in this example that the condensation work has used more than one means for the formation of the dream.

The chief person in the content of the dream is my patient Irma, who is seen with the features which belong to her in waking life, and who therefore in the first instance represents herself. But her attitude as I examine her at the window is taken from the recollection of another person, of the lady for whom I should like to exchange my patient, as the dream thoughts show. In as far as Irma shows a diphtheritic membrane which recalls my anxiety about my eldest daughter, she comes to represent this child of mine, behind whom is concealed the person of the patient who died from intoxication and who is brought into connection by the identity of her name. In the further course of the dream the significance of Irma’s personality changes (without the alteration of her image as it is seen in the dream); she becomes one of the children whom we examine in the public dispensaries for children’s diseases, where my friends show the difference of their mental capabilities. The transference was obviously brought about through the idea of my infant daughter. By means of her unwillingness to open her mouth the same Irma is changed into an allusion to another lady who was once examined by me, and besides that to my wife, in the same connection. Furthermore, in the morbid transformations which I discover in her throat I have gathered allusions to a great number of other persons.

All these people whom I encounter as I follow the associations suggested by “Irma,” do not appear personally in the dream; they are concealed behind the dream person “Irma,” who is thus developed into a collective image, as might be expected, with contradictory features. Irma comes to represent these other persons, who are discarded in the work of condensation, in that I cause to happen to her all the things which recall these persons detail for detail.

I may also construct a collective person for the condensation of the dream in another manner, by uniting the actual features of two or more persons in one dream image. It is in this manner that Dr. M. in my dream was constructed, he bears the name of Dr. M., and speaks and acts as Dr. M. does, but his bodily characteristics and his suffering belong to another person, my eldest brother; a single feature, paleness, is doubly determined, owing to the fact that it is common to both persons. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle is a similar composite person. But here the dream image is prepared in still another manner. I have not united features peculiar to the one with features of the other, and thereby abridged the remembered image of each by certain features, but I have adopted the method employed by Galton in producing family portraits, by which he projects both pictures upon one another, whereupon the common features stand out in stronger relief, while those which do not coincide neutralize one another and become obscure in the picture. In the dream of my uncle the blond beard stands out in relief, as an emphasized feature, from the physiognomy, which belongs to two persons, and which is therefore blurred; furthermore the beard contains an allusion to my father and to myself, which is made possible by its reference to the fact of growing grey.

The construction of collective and composite persons is one of the chief resources of the activity of dream condensation. There will soon be an occasion for treating of this in another connection.

The notion “dysentery” in the dream about the injection likewise has a manifold determination, on the one hand because of its paraphasic assonance with diphtheria, and on the other because of its reference to the patient, whom I have sent to the Orient, and whose hysteria has been wrongly recognised.

The mention of “propyls” in the dream also proves to be an interesting case of condensation. Not “propyls” but “amyls” were contained in the dream thoughts. One might think that here a simple displacement had occurred in the dream formation. And this is the case, but the displacement serves the purposes of condensation, as is shown by the following supplementary analysis. If I dwell for a moment upon the word “propyls,” its assonance to the word “propylæum” suggests itself to me. But the propylæum is to be found not only in Athens but also in Munich. In the latter city I visited a friend the year before who was seriously ill, and the reference to him becomes unmistakable on account of trimethylamin, which follows closely upon propyls.

I pass over the striking circumstance that here, as elsewhere in the analysis of dreams, associations of the most widely different values are employed for the establishment of thought connections as though they were equivalent, and I yield to the temptation to regard the process by which amyls in the dream thoughts are replaced by propyls, as though it were plastic in the dream content.

On the one hand is the chain of ideas about my friend Otto, who does not understand me, who thinks I am in the wrong, and who gives me the cordial that smells like amyls; on the other the chain of ideas—connected with the first by contrast—about my friend William, who understands me and who would always think I was in the right, and to whom I am indebted for so much valuable information about the chemistry of the sexual processes.

Those characteristics of the associations centering about Otto which ought particularly to attract my attention are determined by the recent occasions which are responsible for the dream; amyls belong to these elements so determined which are destined to get into the dream content. The group of associations “William” is distinctly vivified by the contrast to Otto, and the elements in it which correspond to those already excited in the “Otto” associations are thrown into relief. In this whole dream I am continually referring to a person who excites my displeasure and to another person whom I can oppose to him or her at will, and I conjure up the friend as against the enemy, feature for feature. Thus amyls in the Otto-group suggests recollections in the other group belonging to chemistry; trimethylamin, which receives support from several quarters, finds its way into the dream content. “Amyls,” too, might have got into the dream content without undergoing change, but it yields to the influence of the “William” group of associations, owing to the fact that an element which is capable of furnishing a double determination for amyls is sought out from the whole range of recollections which the name “William” covers. The association “propyls” lies in the neighbourhood of amyls; Munich with the propylæum comes to meet amyls from the series of associations belonging to “William.” Both groups are united in propyls—propylœum. As though by a compromise, this intermediary element gets into the dream content. Here a common mean which permits of a manifold determination has been created. It thus becomes perfectly obvious that manifold determination must facilitate penetration into the dream content. A displacement of attention from what is really intended to something lying near in the associations has thoughtlessly taken place, for the sake of this mean-formation.

The study of the injection dream has now enabled us to get some insight into the process of condensation which takes place in the formation of dreams. The selection of those elements which occur in the dream content more than once, the formation of new unities (collective persons, composite images), and the construction of the common mean, these we have been able to recognise as details of the condensing process. The purpose which is served by condensation and the means by which it is brought about will be investigated when we come to study the psychic processes in the formation of dreams as a whole. Let us be content for the present with establishing dream condensation as an important relation between the dream thoughts and the dream content.

The condensing activity of the dream becomes most tangible when it has selected words and names as its object. In general words are often treated as things by the dream, and thus undergo the same combinations, displacements, and substitutions, and therefore also condensations, as ideas of things. The results of such dreams are comical and bizarre word formations. Upon one occasion when a colleague had sent me one of his essays, in which he had, in my judgment, overestimated the value of a recent physiological discovery and had expressed himself in extravagant terms, I dreamed the following night a sentence which obviously referred to this treatise: “That is in true norekdal style.” The solution of this word formation at first gave me difficulties, although it was unquestionably formed as a parody after the pattern of the superlatives “colossal,” “pyramidal”; but to tell where it came from was not easy. At last the monster fell apart into the two names Nora and Ekdal from two well-known plays by Ibsen. I had previously read a newspaper essay on Ibsen by the same author, whose latest work I was thus criticising in the dream.

II. One of my female patients dreams that a man with a light beard and a peculiar glittering eye is pointing to a sign board attached to a tree which reads: uclamparia—wet.

Analysis. The man was rather authoritative looking, and his peculiar glittering eye at once recalled St. Paul’s Cathedral, near Rome, where she saw in mosaics the Popes that have so far ruled. One of the early Popes had a golden eye (this was really an optical illusion which the guides usually call attention to). Further associations showed that the general physiognomy corresponded to her own clergyman (Pope), and the shape of the light beard recalled her doctor (myself), while the stature of the man in the dream recalled her father. All these persons stand in the same relation to her; they are all guiding and directing her course of life. On further questioning, the golden eye recalled gold—money—the rather expensive psychoanalytic treatment which gives her a great deal of concern. Gold, moreover, recalls the gold cure for alcoholism—Mr. D., whom she would have married if it had not been for his clinging to the disgusting alcohol habit—she does not object to a person taking an occasional drink; she herself sometimes drinks beer and cordials—this again brings her back to her visit to St. Paul’s without the walls and its surroundings. She remembers that in the neighbouring monastery of the Three Fountains she drank a liquor made of eucalyptus by the Trappist monks who inhabit this monastery. She then relates how the monks transformed this malarial and swampy region into a dry and healthful neighbourhood by planting there many eucalyptus trees. The word “uclamparia” then resolves itself into eucalyptus and malaria, and the word “wet” refers to the former swampy nature of the place. Wet also suggests dry. Dry is actually the name of the man whom she would have married except for his over-indulgence in alcohol. The peculiar name of Dry is of Germanic origin (drei = three) and hence alludes to the Abbey of the Three (drei) Fountains above mentioned. In talking about Mr. Dry’s habit she used the strong words, “He could drink a fountain.” Mr. Dry jocosely refers to his habit by saying, “You know I must drink because I am always dry” (referring to his name). The eucalyptus also refers to her neurosis, which was at first diagnosed as malaria. She went to Italy because her attacks of anxiety, which were accompanied by marked trembling and shivering, were thought to be of malarial origin. She bought some eucalyptus oil from the monks, and she maintains that it has done her much good.