Part 89

Footnote BL:

Translator’s note.

Footnote BM:

In his significant work (“Phantasie und Mythos,” Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse, Bd. ii., 1910), H. Silberer has endeavoured to show from this part of the dream that the dream-work is able to reproduce not only the latent dream thoughts, but also the psychic processes in the dream formation (“Das functionale Phänomen”).

Footnote BN:

Another interpretation: He is one-eyed like Odin, the father of the gods ... Odin’s consolation. The consolation in the childish scene, that I will buy him a new bed.

Footnote BO:

I here add some material for interpretation. Holding the urinal recalls the story of a peasant who tries one glass after another at the opticians, but still cannot read (peasant-catcher, like girl-catcher in a portion of the dream). The treatment among the peasants of the father who has become weak-minded in Zola’s La Terre. The pathetic atonement that in his last days the father soils his bed like a child; hence, also, I am his sick-attendant in the dream. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were; the same thing recalls a highly revolutionary closet drama by Oscar Panizza, in which the Godhead is treated quite contemptuously, as though he were a paralytic old man. There occurs a passage: “Will and deed are the same thing with him, and he must be prevented by his archangel, a kind of Ganymede, from scolding and swearing, because these curses would immediately be fulfilled.” Making plans is a reproach against my father, dating from a later period in the development of my critical faculty; just as the whole rebellious, sovereign-offending dream, with its scoff at high authority, originates in a revolt against my father. The sovereign is called father of the land (Landesvater), and the father is the oldest, first and only authority for the child, from the absolutism of which the other social authorities have developed in the course of the history of human civilisation (in so far as the “mother’s right” does not force a qualification of this thesis). The idea in the dream, “thinking and experiencing are the same thing,” refers to the explanation of hysterical symptoms, to which the male urinal (glass) also has a relation. I need not explain the principle of the “Gschnas” to a Viennese; it consists in constructing objects of rare and costly appearance out of trifles, and preferably out of comical and worthless material—for example, making suits of armour out of cooking utensils, sticks and “salzstangeln” (elongated rolls), as our artists like to do at their jolly parties. I had now learned that hysterical subjects do the same thing; besides what has actually occurred to them, they unconsciously conceive horrible or extravagant fantastic images, which they construct from the most harmless and commonplace things they have experienced. The symptoms depend solely upon these phantasies, not upon the memory of their real experiences, be they serious or harmless. This explanation helped me to overcome many difficulties and gave me much pleasure. I was able to allude to it in the dream element “male urinal” (glass) because I had been told that at the last “Gschnas” evening a poison chalice of Lucretia Borgia had been exhibited, the chief constituent of which had consisted of a glass urinal for men, such as is used in hospitals.

Footnote BP:

Cf. the passage in Griesinger and the remarks in my second essay on the “defence-neuropsychoses”—Selected Papers on Hysteria, translated by A. A. Brill.

Footnote BQ:

In the two sources from which I am acquainted with this dream, the report of its contents do not agree.

Footnote BR:

An exception is furnished by those cases in which the dreamer utilises in the expression of his latent dream thoughts the symbols which are familiar to us.

Footnote BS:

“The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

Footnote BT:

The child also appears in the fairy tale, for there a child suddenly calls: “Why, he hasn’t anything on at all.”

Footnote BU:

Ferenczi has reported a number of interesting dreams of nakedness in women which could be traced to an infantile desire to exhibit, but which differ in some features from the “typical” dream of nakedness discussed above.

Footnote BV:

For obvious reasons the presence of the “whole family” in the dream has the same significance.

Footnote BW:

A supplementary interpretation of this dream: To spit on the stairs, led me to “esprit d’escalier” by a free translation, owing to the fact that “Spucken” (English: spit, and also to act like a spook, to haunt) is an occupation of ghosts. “Stair-wit” is equivalent to lack of quickness at repartee (German: Schlagfertigkeit—readiness to hit back, to strike), with which I must really reproach myself. Is it a question, however, whether the nurse was lacking in “readiness to hit”?

Footnote BX:

Cf. “Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben” in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, vol. i., 1909, and “Ueber infantile Sexualtheorien,” in Sexualprobleme, vol. i., 1908.

Footnote BY:

The three-and-a-half-year-old Hans, whose phobia is the subject of analysis in the above-mentioned publication, cries during fever shortly after the birth of his sister: “I don’t want a little sister.” In his neurosis, one and a half years later, he frankly confesses the wish that the mother should drop the little one into the bath-tub while bathing it, in order that it may die. With all this, Hans is a good-natured, affectionate child, who soon becomes fond of his sister, and likes especially to take her under his protection.