Part 17

You will recognize without any trouble the symbols here employed: the male organ is represented by the trinity of three persons appearing, whilst the female sexual organs are symbolized by a landscape with a chapel, a mountain and a wood, and once more you have the act of going up steps as symbolic of the sexual act. The part of the body called in the dream “a mountain” is similarly termed in anatomy the mons veneris.

7. I will tell you another dream which is to be explained in the light of symbolism, a dream, moreover, which is noteworthy and convincing from the fact that the dreamer himself translated all the symbols, though he brought no previous theoretical knowledge to the interpretation. This is a very unusual circumstance and we have no accurate idea of the conditions which give rise to it.

He was walking with his father in a place which must have been the Prater, for they saw the Rotunda with a little building in front of it, to which was made fast a captive balloon which looked rather slack. His father asked him what it was all for; the son wondered at his asking, but explained it nevertheless. Then they came to a court-yard, where a large sheet of metal lay spread out. His father wanted to break off a big piece, but looked round first in case anyone should notice him. He said to his son that all the same he need only tell the overseer and then he could take it straightaway. Some steps led down from this court to a shaft, the sides of which were upholstered with some soft stuff, something like a leather armchair. At the bottom of this shift was a rather long platform and, beyond it, another shaft.

The following is the dreamer’s own interpretation:—“The Rotunda stands for my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it for the penis, which I have had to complain of for being limp.” A more detailed translation would then run thus: the rotunda stands for the buttocks (regularly included by children amongst the genitals), the smaller structure in front is the scrotum. In the dream, his father asks him what all this is, i.e. what are the purpose and function of the genitals. To invert this situation so that the son asks the questions is an obvious idea, and, since these questions were never asked in reality, we must construe the dream-thoughts as a wish or take them in a conditional sense: “If I had asked my father to explain....” The sequel to this thought we shall find presently.

The court-yard where the sheet-metal lay is not in the first place to be explained symbolically, but is a reference to the father’s place of business. From motives of discretion I have substituted “sheet-metal” for the actual material dealt with by him, but otherwise I have made no alteration in the words of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had been much scandalized by the extremely questionable practices upon which the high profits largely depended. Hence the sequel to the dream-thought mentioned above would run: “(If I had asked him), he would have deceived me as he deceives his customers.” The dreamer himself gives a second explanation for the pulling off the piece of metal which serves to represent commercial dishonesty: it means, he says, the practice of masturbation. Not only is this an explanation with which we have long been familiar, but it is well in accordance with this interpretation that the secret practice of masturbation should be expressed by the opposite idea (“We may do it openly”). So the fact that this practice is imputed to the father, as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream, is exactly what we should expect. The dreamer immediately interpreted the shaft, on account of the soft upholstering of the walls, as the vagina, and I, on my own account, offer the remark that going-down as well as going-up stands for sexual intercourse.

The details of the long platform at the bottom of the first shaft, and beyond that the second shaft, were explained by the dreamer himself from his own history. He had practised intercourse for some time and then given it up on account of inhibitions, but hoped to be able to resume it by the help of the treatment.

8. I quote the two following dreams, dreamt by a foreigner with marked polygamous tendencies, because they may serve to illustrate the statement that the dreamer’s own person is present in every dream, even when it is disguised in the manifest content. The trunks in the dreams are female symbols.

(a) The dreamer was going on a journey and his luggage was being taken to the station on a carriage. There were a number of trunks piled one on the top of the other, and amongst them two large black boxes like those of a commercial traveller. He said consolingly to someone: “You see those are only going as far as the station.”

He does, as a matter of fact, travel with a great deal of luggage, and he also brings many stories about women to the treatment. The two black trunks stand for two dark women who at the moment are playing the principal part in his life. One of them wanted to follow him to Vienna, but on my advice he had telegraphed to put her off.

(b) A scene at a customs house:—A fellow-traveller opened his trunk and said nonchalantly, smoking a cigarette: “There is nothing to declare in that.” The customs official seemed to believe him, but felt in the trunk again and found a strictly prohibited article. The traveller then said in a resigned way: “Well, it can’t be helped.” The dreamer himself is the traveller and I am the official. He is generally very straightforward with me, but had made up his mind to conceal from me a relation which he had recently formed with a lady, for he assumed quite correctly that I knew her. He displaces on to a stranger the embarrassing situation of being detected, so that he himself does not seem to come into the dream at all.

9. Here we have an example of a symbol which I have not yet mentioned:—

The dreamer met his sister with two friends who were themselves sisters. He shook hands with these two, but not with his sister.

There was no real episode connected with this in his mind. Instead, his thoughts went back to a time when his observations led him to wonder why a girl’s breasts are so late in developing. The two sisters, therefore, stand for the breasts; he would have liked to grasp them with his hand, if only it had not been his sister.

10. Here is an example of death symbolism in dreams:—The dreamer was crossing a very high, steep, iron bridge, with two people whose names he knew, but forgot on waking. Suddenly both of them had vanished and he saw a ghostly man in a cap and an overall. He asked him whether he were the telegraph messenger.... “No.” Or the coachman?... “No.” He then went on, and in the dream, had a feeling of great dread; on waking, he followed it up with the phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and that he fell into the abyss.

When stress is laid upon the fact that people in a dream are unknown to the dreamer, or that he has forgotten their names, they are, as a rule, persons with whom he is intimately connected. The dreamer was one of a family of three children; if he had ever wished for the death of the other two, it would be only just that he should be visited with the fear of death. With reference to the telegraph messenger, he remarked that they always bring bad news. From his uniform, the man in the dream might have been a lamp-lighter, who also puts out the lights, as the spirit of death extinguishes the torch of life. With the coachman he associated Uhland’s poem of the voyage of King Karl, and recalled a dangerous sail on a lake with two companions, when he played the part of the king in the poem. The iron bridge suggested to him a recent accident, also the stupid saying: “Life is a suspension bridge.”

11. The following may be regarded as another example of a death-dream:—

An unknown gentleman was leaving a black-edged visiting card on the dreamer.

12. I give another dream which will interest you from several points of view; it is to be traced partly, however, to a neurotic condition in the dreamer:—

He was in a train which stopped in the open country. He thought there was going to be an accident and that he must make his escape, so he went through all the compartments, killing everyone he met,—driver, guard, and so on.

This dream recalls a story told him by a friend. On a certain Italian line, an insane man was being conveyed in a small compartment, but by some mistake a passenger was allowed to get in with him. The madman murdered the other traveller. Thus the dreamer identified himself with this insane man, his reason being that he was at times tormented by an obsession that he must make away with “everyone who shared his knowledge.” Then he himself found a better motivation for the dream. The day before, he had seen at the theatre a girl he had meant to marry but had given up because she gave him cause for jealousy. Knowing the intensity which jealousy could assume in him, he would really have been mad to want to marry her. That is to say, he thought her so unreliable that his jealousy would have led him to murder everyone who got in his way. The going through a number of rooms, or, as here, compartments, we have already learnt to know as a symbol of marriage (the expression of monogamy according to the rule of opposites).

With reference to the train’s stopping in the open country and the fear of an accident, he told the following story:—

Once when such a sudden halt occurred on the line outside a station, a young lady who was in the carriage said that perhaps there was going to be a collision, and that the best thing to do was to raise the legs high. This phrase “raise the legs” had associations with many walks and excursions into the country, which he had shared with the girl mentioned above in the happy early days of their love. Here was a new argument for the contention that he would be mad to marry her now; nevertheless, my knowledge of the situation led me to regard it as certain that there existed in him all the same the desire to fall a victim to this form of madness.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE ARCHAIC AND INFANTILE FEATURES IN DREAMS

Let us start afresh from our conclusion that, under the influence of the censorship, the dream-work translates the latent dream-thoughts into another form. These thoughts are of the same nature as the familiar, conscious thoughts of waking life; the new form in which they are expressed is, owing to many peculiar characteristics, incomprehensible to us. We have said that it goes back to phases in our intellectual development which we have long outgrown—to hieroglyphic writing, to symbolic-connections, possibly to conditions which existed before the language of thought was evolved. On this account we called the form of expression employed by the dream-work archaic or regressive.

From this you may draw the inference that a more profound study of the dream-work must lead to valuable conclusions about the initial stages of our intellectual development, of which at present little is known. I hope it will be so, but so far this task has not been attempted. The era to which the dream-work takes us back is “primitive” in a twofold sense: in the first place, it means the early days of the individual—his childhood—and, secondly, in so far as each individual repeats in some abbreviated fashion during childhood the whole course of the development of the human race, the reference is phylogenetic. I believe it not impossible that we may be able to discriminate between that part of the latent mental processes which belongs to the early days of the individual and that which has its roots in the infancy of the race. It seems to me, for instance, that symbolism, a mode of expression which has never been individually acquired, may claim to be regarded as a racial heritage.

This, however, is not the only archaic feature in dreams. You are all familiar from actual experience with the peculiar amnesia of childhood to which we are subject. I mean that the first years of life, up to the age of five, six, or eight, have not left the same traces in memory as our later experiences. True, we come across individuals who can boast of continuous recollection from early infancy to the present time, but it is incomparably more common for the opposite, a blank in memory, to be found. In my opinion, this has not aroused sufficient surprise. At two years old the child can speak well and soon shows his capacity for adapting himself to complicated mental situations, and, moreover, says things which he himself has forgotten when they are repeated to him years later. And yet memory is more efficient in early years, being less overburdened than it is later. Again, there is no reason to regard the function of memory as an especially high or difficult form of mental activity; on the contrary, excellent memory may be found in people who are yet on a very low plane intellectually.

But I must draw your attention to a second peculiarity, based upon the first—namely, that from the oblivion in which the first years of childhood are shrouded certain clearly retained recollections emerge, mostly in the form of plastic images, for the retention of which there seems no adequate ground. Memory deals with the mass of impressions received in later life by a process of selection, retaining what is important and omitting what is not; but with the recollections retained from childhood this is not so. They do not necessarily reflect important experiences in childhood, not even such as must have seemed important from the child’s standpoint, but are often so banal and meaningless in themselves that we can only ask ourselves in amazement why just this particular detail has escaped oblivion. I have tried, with the help of analysis, to attack the problem of childhood amnesia and of the fragments of recollection which break through it, and have come to the conclusion that, whatever may appear to the contrary, the child no less than the adult only retains in memory what is important; but that what is important is represented (by the processes of condensation and, more especially, of displacement, already familiar to you) in the memory by something apparently trivial. For this reason I have called these childhood recollections screen-memories; a thorough analysis can evolve from them all that has been forgotten.

It is a regular task in psycho-analytic treatment to fill in the blank in infantile memories, and, in so far as the treatment is successful to any extent at all (very frequently, therefore) we are enabled to bring to light the content of those early years long buried in oblivion. These impressions have never really been forgotten, but were only inaccessible and latent, having become part of the unconscious. But sometimes it happens that they emerge spontaneously from the unconscious, and it is in connection with dreams that this happens. It is clear that the dream-life knows the way back to these latent, infantile experiences. Many good illustrations of this are to be found in psycho-analytical literature, and I myself have been able to furnish a contribution of the sort. I once dreamt in a particular connection of someone who had evidently done me a service and whom I saw plainly. He was a one-eyed man, short, fat and high-shouldered; from the context I gathered that he was a doctor. Fortunately I was able to ask my mother, who was still living, what was the personal appearance of the doctor who attended us at the place where I was born and which I left at the age of three; she told me that he had only one eye and was short, fat and high-shouldered; I learnt also of the accident which was the occasion of this doctor’s being called in and which I had forgotten. This command of the forgotten material of the earliest years of childhood is thus a further ‘archaic’ feature of dreams.