Part 95

Footnote EH:

For the explanation of this composite image, see p. 296; innocence, menstruation, Camille.

Footnote EI:

Referring to the plurality of the persons who serve the purpose of her fancy.

Footnote EJ:

Whether it is permitted to “pull one off,” i.e. to masturbate.

Footnote EK:

The bough has long since been used to represent the male genital, and besides that it contains a very distinct allusion to the family name of the dreamer.

Footnote EL:

Refers to matrimonial precautions, as does that which follows.

Footnote EM:

An analogous “biographical” dream was reported on p. 252, as the third of the examples of dream symbolism; a second example is the one fully reported by Rank under the title “Traum der sich selbst deutet”; for another one which must be read in the “opposite direction,” see Stekel, p. 486.

Footnote EN:

Given by translator as author’s example could not be translated.

Footnote EO:

The neurosis also proceeds in the same manner. I know a patient who involuntarily—contrary to her own wishes—hears (hallucinatory) songs or fragments of songs without being able to understand their meaning to her psychic life. She is surely not a paranoiac. Analysis showed that she wrongly utilised the text of these songs by means of a certain license. “Oh thou blissful one, Oh thou happy one,” is the beginning of a Christmas song. By not continuing it to the word “Christmas time” she makes a bridal song out of it, &c. The same mechanism of disfigurement may take place also without hallucinations as a mere mental occurrence.

Footnote EP:

As a contribution to the over-determination: My excuse for coming late was that after working late at night I had in the morning to make the long journey from Kaiser Josef Street to Waehringer Street.

Footnote EQ:

In addition Cæsar—Kaiser.

Footnote ER:

I have forgotten in what author I found a dream mentioned that was overrun with unusually small figures, the source of which turned out to be one of the engravings of Jacques Callot, which the dreamer had looked at during the day. These engravings contained an enormous number of very small figures; a series of them treats of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.

Footnote ES:

The frequency with which in the dream dead persons appear as living, act, and deal with us, has called forth undue astonishment and given rise to strange explanations, from which our ignorance of the dream becomes strikingly evident. And yet the explanation for these dreams lies very close at hand. How often we have occasion to think: “If father were still alive, what would he say to it?” The dream can express this if in no other way than by present time in a definite situation. Thus, for instance, a young man, whose grandfather has left him a great inheritance, dreams that his grandfather is alive and demands an accounting of him, upon an occasion when the young man had been reproached for making too great an expenditure of money. What we consider a resistance to the dream—the objection made by our better knowledge, that after all the man is already dead—is in reality a consolation, because the dead person did not have this or that experience, or satisfaction at the knowledge that he has nothing more to say.

Another form of absurdity found in dreams of deceased relatives does not express folly and absurdity, but serves to represent the most extreme rejection; as the representation of a repressed thought which one would gladly have appear as something least thought of. Dreams of this kind are only solvable if one recalls that the dream makes no distinction between things desired and realities. Thus, for example, a man who nursed his father during his sickness, and who felt his death very keenly, sometime afterward dreamed the following senseless dream: The father was again living, and conversed with him as usual, but (the remarkable thing about it) he had nevertheless died, though he did not know it. This dream can be understood if after “he had nevertheless died,” one inserts in consequence of the dreamer’s wish, and if after “but he did not know it” one adds that the dreamer has entertained this wish. While nursing his father, the son often wishes his father’s death; i.e. he entertained the really compassionate desire that death finally put an end to his suffering. While mourning after his death, this very wish of compassion became an unconscious reproach, as if it had really contributed to shorten the life of the sick man. Through the awakening of early infantile feelings against the father, it became possible to express this reproach as a dream; and it was just because of the world-wide contrast between the dream inciter and day thought that this dream had to come out so absurdly (cf. with this, “Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des seelischen Geschehens,” Jahrbuch, Bleuler-Freud, III, 1, 1911).

Footnote ET:

Here the dream activity parodies the thought which it designates as ridiculous, in that it creates something ridiculous in relation to it. Heine does something similar when he tries to mock the bad rhymes of the King of Bavaria. He does it in still worse rhymes:

“Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet Und singt er, so stuerzt Apollo Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht, ‘Halt ein, ich werde sonst toll oh!’”