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CHAPTER II
THE METHOD OF INTERPRETING DREAMS:
AN ANALYSIS OF A SPECIMEN DREAM
The title that I have chosen for my work makes plain which of the traditional approaches to the problem of dreams I am inclined to follow. The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted; and any contributions I may be able to make towards the solution of the problems dealt with in the last chapter will only arise as by products in the course of carrying out my proper task. My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at once puts me in opposition to the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to every theory of dreams with the single exception of Scherner’s; for ‘interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ to it - that is, replacing it by something which fits into the chain of our mental acts as a link having a validity and importance equal to the rest. As we have seen, the scientific theories of dreams leave no room for any problem of interpreting them, since in their view a dream is not a mental act at all, but a somatic process signalizing its occurrence by indications registered in the mental apparatus. Lay opinion has taken a different attitude throughout the ages. It has exercised its indefeasible right to behave inconsistently; and, though admitting that dreams are unintelligible and absurd, it cannot bring itself to declare that they have no significance at all. Led by some obscure feeling, it seems to assume that, in spite of everything, every dream has a meaning, though a hidden one, that dreams are designed to take the place of some other process of thought, and that we have only to undo the substitution correctly in order to arrive at this hidden meaning.
Thus the lay world has from the earliest times concerned itself with ‘interpreting’ dreams and in its attempts to do so it has made use of two essentially different methods.
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The first of these procedures considers the content of the dream as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and in certain respects analogous to the original one. This is ‘symbolic’ dream-interpreting; and it inevitably breaks down when faced by dreams which are not merely unintelligible but also confused. An example of this procedure is to be seen in the explanation of Pharaoh’s dream propounded by Joseph in the Bible. The seven fat kine followed by seven lean kine that ate up the fat kine - all this was a symbolic substitute for a prophecy of seven years of famine in the land of Egypt which should consume all that was brought forth in the seven years of plenty. Almost of the artificial dreams constructed by imaginative writers are designed for a symbolic interpretation of this sort: they reproduce the writer’s thoughts under a disguise which is regarded as harmonizing with the recognized characteristics of dreams.¹ The idea of dreams being chiefly concerned with the future and being able to foretell it - a remnant of the old prophetic significance of dreams - provides a reason for transposing the meaning of the dream, when it has been arrived at by symbolic interpretation, into the future tense. It is of course impossible to give instructions upon the method of arriving at a symbolic interpretation. Success must be a question of hitting on a clever idea, of direct intuition, and for that reason it was possible for dream-interpretation by means of symbolism to be exalted into an artistic activity dependent on the possession of peculiar gifts.²
¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I found by chance in Gradiva, a story written by Wilhelm Jensen, a number of artificial dreams which were perfectly correctly constructed and could be interpreted just as though they had not been invented but had been dreamt by real people. In reply to an enquiry, the author confirmed the fact that he had no knowledge of my theory of dreams. I have argued that the agreement between my researches and this writer’s creations is evidence in favour of the correctness of my analysis of dreams. (See Freud, 1907a.)
² [Footnote added 1914:] Aristotle remarked in this connection that the best interpreter of dreams was the man who could best grasp similarities; for dream-pictures, like pictures on water, are pulled out of shape by movement, and the most successful interpreter is the man who can detect the truth from the misshapen picture. (Büchenschütz, 1868, 65.)
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The second of the two popular methods of interpreting dreams is far from making any such claims. It might be described as the ‘decoding’ method, since it treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key. Suppose, for instance, that I have dreamt of a letter and also of a funeral. If I consult a ‘dream-book’, I find that ‘letter’ must be translated by ‘trouble’ and ‘funeral’ by ‘betrothal’. It then remains for me to link together the key words which I have deciphered in this way and, once more, to transpose the result into the future tense. An interesting modification of the process of decoding, which to some extent corrects the purely mechanical character of its method of transposing, is to be found in the book written upon the interpretation of dreams by Artemidorus of Daldis.¹ This method takes into account not only the content of the dream but also the character and circumstances of the dreamer; so that the same dream-element will have a different meaning for a rich man, a married man or, let us say, an orator, from what it has for a poor man, a bachelor or a merchant. The essence of the decoding procedure, however, lies in the fact that the work of interpretation is not brought to bear on the dream as a whole but on each portion of the dream’s content independently, as though the dream were a geological conglomerate in which each fragment of rock required a separate assessment. There can be no question that the invention of the decoding method of interpretation was suggested by disconnected and confused dreams.²
¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Artemidorus of Daldis, who was probably born at the beginning of the second century A.D., has left us the most complete and painstaking study of dream-interpretation as practised in the Graeco-Roman world. As Theodor Gomperz (1866, 7 f.) points out, he insisted on the importance of basing the interpretation of dreams on observation and experience, and made a rigid distinction between his own art and others that were illusory. The principle of his interpretative art, according to Gomperz, is identical with magic, the principle of association. A thing in a dream means what it recalls to the mind - to the dream-interpreter’s mind, it need hardly be said. An insuperable source of arbitrariness and uncertainty arises from the fact that the dream-element may recall various things to the interpreter’s mind and may recall something different to different interpreters. The technique which I describe in the pages that follow differs in one essential respect from the ancient method: it imposes the task of interpretation upon the dreamer himself. It is not concerned with what occurs to the interpreter in connection with a particular element of the dream, but with what occurs to the dreamer. - Recent reports, however, from a missionary, Father Tfinkdji (1913), show that modern dream-interpreters in the East also make free use of the dreamer’s collaboration. He writes as follows of dream-interpreters among the Arabs of Mesopotamia: ‘Pour interprêter exactement un songe, les oniromanciens les plus habiles s’informent de ceux qui les consultent de toutes les circonstances qu’ils regardent nécessaires pour la bonne explication. . . . En un mot, nos oniromanciens ne laissent aucune circonstance leur échapper et ne donnent l’interprétation désirée avant d’avoir parfaitement saisi et reçu toutes les interrogations désirables.’ [‘In order to give a precise interpretation of a dream, the most skilful dream-diviners find out from those who consult them all the circumstances which they consider essential in order to arrive at a right explanation. . . . In short, these dream-diviners do not allow a single point to escape them and only give their interpretation after they have completely mastered the replies to all the necessary enquiries.’] Among these enquiries are habitually included questions as to the dreamer’s closest family relations - his parents, wife and children - as well as such a typical formula as: ‘Habuistine in hac nocte copulam conjugam ante vel post somnium?’ [‘Did you copulate with your wife that night before or after you had the dream?’] -’L’idée dominante dans l’interprétation des songes consiste à expliquer le rêve par son opposée.’ [‘The principal idea in interpreting dreams lies in explaining a dream by its opposite.’]
² [Footnote added 1909:] Dr. Alfred Robitsek has pointed out to me that the oriental ‘dream-books’ (of which ours are wretched imitations) base the greater number of their interpretations of dream-elements upon similarity of sounds and resemblance between words. The fact that these connections inevitably disappear in translation accounts for the unintelligibility of the renderings in our own popular dream-books. The extraordinarily important part played by punning and verbal quibbles in the ancient civilizations of the East may be studied in the writings of Hugo Winckler. - [Added 1911:] The nicest instance of a dream-interpretation which has reached us from ancient times is based on a play upon words. It is told by Artemidorus: ‘I think too that Aristander gave a most happy interpretation to Alexander of Macedon when he had surrounded Tyre and was besieging it but was feeling uneasy and disturbed because of the length of time the siege was taking. Alexander dreamt he saw a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander happened to be in the neighbourhood of Tyre, in attendance on the king during his Syrian campaign. By dividing the word for satyr into σάand τύρος he encouraged the king to press home the siege so that he became master of the city.’ (σά Τύρος = Tyre is thine.) - Indeed, dreams are so closely related to linguistic expression that Ferenczi has truly remarked that every tongue has its own dream-language. It is impossible as a rule to translate a dream into a foreign language and this is equally true, I fancy, of a book such as the present one. [Added 1930:] Nevertheless, Dr. A. A. Brill of New York, and others after him, have succeeded in translating The Interpretation of Dreams.
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It cannot be doubted for a moment that neither of the two popular procedures for interpreting dreams can be employed for a scientific treatment of the subject. The symbolic method is restricted in its application and incapable of being laid down on general lines. In the case of the decoding method everything depends on the trustworthiness of the ‘key’ - the dream-book, and of this we have no guarantee. Thus one might feel tempted to agree with the philosophers and the psychiatrists and, like them, rule out the problem of dream-interpretation as a purely fanciful task.¹
But I have been taught better. I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgement of the prevalent science of today. I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.
My knowledge of that procedure was reached in the following manner. I have been engaged for many years (with a therapeutic aim in view) in unravelling certain psychopathological structures - hysterical phobias, obsessional ideas, and so on. I have been doing so, in fact, ever since I learnt from an important communication by Josef Breuer that as regards these structures (which are looked on as pathological symptoms) unravelling these coincides with removing them. (Cf. Breuer and Freud, 1895.) If a pathological idea of this sort can be traced back to the elements in the patient’s mental life from which it originated, it simultaneously crumbles away and the patient is freed from it. Considering the impotence of our other therapeutic efforts and the puzzling nature of these disorders, I felt tempted to follow the path marked out by Breuer, in spite of every difficulty, till a complete explanation was reached. I shall have on another occasion to report at length upon the form finally taken by this procedure and the results of my labours. It was in the course of these psycho-analytic studies that I came upon dream-interpretation. My patients were pledged to communicate to me every idea or thought that occurred to them in connection with some particular subject; amongst other things they told me their dreams and so taught me that a dream can be inserted into the psychical chain that has to be traced backwards in the memory from a pathological idea. It was then only a short step to treating the dream itself as a symptom and to applying to dreams the method of interpretation that had been worked out for symptoms.
¹ After I had completed my manuscript I came across a work by Stumpf (1889) which agrees with my views in seeking to prove that dreams have a meaning and can be interpreted. He effects his interpretation, however, by means of a symbolism of an allegorical character without any guarantee of the general validity of his procedure.
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This involves some psychological preparation of the patient. In the attention he pays to his own psychical perceptions and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally sifts the thoughts that occur to him. In order that he may be able to concentrate his attention on his self-observation it is an advantage for him to lie in a restful attitude and shut his eyes. It is necessary to insist explicitly on his renouncing all criticism of the thoughts that he perceives. We therefore tell him that the success of the psycho-analysis depends on his noticing and reporting whatever comes into his head and not being misled, for instance, into suppressing an idea because it strikes him as unimportant or irrelevant or because it seems to him meaningless. He must adopt a completely impartial attitude to what occurs to him, since it is precisely his critical attitude which is responsible for his being unable, in the ordinary course of things, to achieve the desired unravelling of his dream or obsessional idea or whatever it may be.
I have noticed in my psycho-analytical work that the whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes. In reflection there is one more psychical activity at work than in the most attentive self-observation, and this is shown amongst other things by the tense looks and wrinkled forehead of a person pursuing his reflections as compared with the restful expression of a self-observer. In both cases attention must be concentrated, but the man who is reflecting is also exercising his critical faculty; this leads him to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them, to cut short others without following the trains of thought which they would open up to him, and to behave in such a way towards still others that they never become conscious at all and are accordingly suppressed before being perceived. The self-observer on the other hand need only take the trouble to suppress his critical faculty. If he succeeds in doing that, innumerable ideas come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold. The material which is in this way freshly obtained for his self-perception makes it possible to interpret both his pathological ideas and his dream-structures. What is in question, evidently, is the establishment of a psychical state which, in its distribution of psychical energy (that is, of mobile attention), bears some analogy to the state before falling asleep - and no doubt also to hypnosis. As we fall asleep, ‘involuntary ideas’ emerge, owing to the relaxation of a certain deliberate (and no doubt also critical) activity which we allow to influence the course of our ideas while we are awake. (We usually attribute this relaxation to ‘fatigue’.) As the involuntary ideas emerge they change into visual and acoustic images. (Cf. the remarks by Schleiermacher and others quoted above on p. 559 f.)¹ In the state used for the analysis of dreams and pathological ideas, the patient purposely and deliberately abandons this activity and employs the psychical energy thus saved (or a portion of it) in attentively following the involuntary thoughts which now emerge, and which - and here the situation differs from that of falling asleep - retain the character of ideas. In this way the ‘involuntary’ ideas are transformed into voluntary ones.
¹ [Footnote added 1919:] Silberer (1909, 1910 and 1912) has made important contributions to dream-interpretation by directly observing this transformation of ideas into visual images.
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The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge ‘of their own free will’ and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The ‘involuntary thoughts’ are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude. In a passage in his correspondence with Körner - we have to thank Otto Rank for unearthing it - Schiller (writing on December 1, 1788) replies to his friend’s complaint of insufficient productivity: ‘The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination. I will make my idea more concrete by a simile. It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in - at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with the others. On the other hand, where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass. - You critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are to be found in all truly creative minds and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of your unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.’
Nevertheless, what Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical self-observation, is by no means difficult. Most of my patients achieve it after their first instructions. I myself can do so very completely, by the help of writing down my ideas as they occur to me. The amount of psychical energy by which it is possible to reduce critical activity and increase the intensity of self-observation varies considerably according to the subject on which one is trying to fix one’s attention.
Our first step in the employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content. If I say to a patient who is still a novice: ‘What occurs to you in connection with this dream?’, as a rule his mental horizon becomes a blank. If, however, I put the dream before him cut up into pieces, he will give me a series of associations to each piece, which might be described as the ‘background thoughts’ of that particular part of the dream. Thus the method of dream interpretation which I practise already differs in this first important respect from the popular, historic and legendary method of interpretation by means of symbolism and approximates to the second or ‘decoding’ method. Like the latter, it employs interpretation en détail and not en masse; like the latter, it regards dreams from the very first as being of a composite character, as being conglomerates of psychical formations.
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In the course of my psycho-analyses of neurotics I must already have analysed over a thousand dreams; but I do not propose to make use of this material in my present introduction to the technique and theory of dream-interpretation. Apart from the fact that such a course would be open to the objection that these are the dreams of neuropaths, from which no valid inferences could be made as to the dreams of normal people, there is quite another reason which forces this decision upon me. The subject to which these dreams of my patients lead up is always, of course, the case history which underlies their neurosis. Each dream would therefore necessitate a lengthy introduction and an investigation of the nature and aetiological determinants of the psychoneuroses. But these questions are in themselves novelties and highly bewildering and would distract attention from the problem of dreams. On the contrary, it is my intention to make use of my present elucidation of dreams as a preliminary step towards solving the more difficult problems of the psychology of the neuroses. If, however, I forego my principal material, the dreams of my neurotic patients, I must not be too particular about what is left to me. All that remains are such dreams as have been reported to me from time to time by normal persons of my acquaintance, and such others as have been quoted as instances in the literature dealing with dream-life. Unluckily, however, none of these dreams are accompanied by the analysis without which I cannot discover a dream’s meaning. My procedure is not so convenient as the popular decoding method which translates any given piece of a dream’s content by a fixed key. I, on the contrary, am prepared to find that the same piece of content may conceal a different meaning when it occurs in various people or in various contexts. Thus it comes about that I am led to my own dreams, which offer a copious and convenient material, derived from an approximately normal person and relating to multifarious occasions of daily life. No doubt I shall be met by doubts of the trustworthiness of ‘self-analyses’ of this kind; and I shall be told that they leave the door open to arbitrary conclusions. In my judgement the situation is in fact more favourable in the case of self-observation than in that of other people; at all events we may make the experiment and see how far self-analysis takes us with the interpretation of dreams. But I have other difficulties to overcome, which lie within myself. There is some natural hesitation about revealing so many intimate facts about one’s mental life; nor can there be any guarantee against misinterpretation by strangers. But it must be possible to overcome such hesitations. ‘Tout psychologiste’, writes Delboeuf, ‘est obligé de faire l’aveu même de ses faiblesses s’il croit par là jeter du jour sur quelque problème obscur.’¹ And it is safe to assume that my readers too will very soon find their initial interest in the indiscretions which I am bound to make replaced by an absorbing immersion in the psychological problems upon which they throw light.²
¹ [‘Every psychologist is under an obligation to confess even his own weaknesses, if he thinks that it may throw light upon some obscure problem.’]
² I am obliged to add, however, by way of qualification of what I have said above, that in scarcely any instance have I brought forward the complete interpretation of one of my own dreams, as it is known to me. I have probably been wise in not putting too much faith in my readers’ discretion.
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Accordingly I shall proceed to choose out one of my own dreams and demonstrate upon it my method of interpretation. In the case of every such dream some remarks by way of preamble will be necessary. - And now I must ask the reader to make my interests his own for quite a while, and to plunge, along with me, into the minutest details of my life; for a transference of this kind is peremptorily demanded by our interest in the hidden meaning of dreams.
PREAMBLE
During the summer of 1895 I had been giving psycho-analytic treatment to a young lady who was on very friendly terms with me and my family. It will be readily understood that a mixed relationship such as this may be a source of many disturbed feelings in a physician and particularly in a psychotherapist. While the physician’s personal interest is greater, his authority is less; any failure would bring a threat to the old-established friendship with the patient’s family. This treatment had ended in a partial success; the patient was relieved of her hysterical anxiety but did not lose all her somatic symptoms. At that time I was not yet quite clear in my mind as to the criteria indicating that a hysterical case history was finally closed, and I proposed a solution to the patient which she seemed unwilling to accept. While we were thus at variance, we had broken off the treatment for the summer vacation. - One day I had a visit from a junior colleague, one of my oldest friends, who had been staying with my patient, Irma, and her family at their country resort. I asked him how he had found her and he answered: ‘She’s better, but not quite well.’ I was conscious that my friend Otto’s words, or the tone in which he spoke them, annoyed me. I fancied I detected a reproof in them, such as to the effect that I had promised the patient too much; and, whether rightly or wrongly, I attributed the supposed fact of Otto’s siding against me to the influence of my patient’s relatives, who, as it seemed to me, had never looked with favour on the treatment. However, my disagreeable impression was not clear to me and I gave no outward sign of it. The same evening I wrote out Irma’s case history, with the idea of giving it to Dr. M. (a common friend who was at that time the leading figure in our circle) in order to justify myself. That night (or more probably the next morning) I had the following dream, which I noted down immediately after waking.¹
¹ [Footnote added 1914:] This is the first dream which I submitted to a detailed interpretation.
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DREAM OF JULY 23RD-24TH, 1895
A large hall - numerous guests, whom we were receiving. -Among them was Irma. I at once took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted my ‘solution’ yet. I said to her: ‘If you still get pains, its really only your fault.’ She replied: ‘If you only knew what pains I’ve got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen - its choking me’ -I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat, and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself that there was really no need for her to do that. - She then opened her mouth properly and on the right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelled on the turbinal bones of the nose. - I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it . . . . Dr M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven. . . . My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: ‘She has a dull area low down on her left.’ He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. (I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) . . . M. said ‘There’s no doubt its an infection, but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will eliminated’ . . . We were directly aware, too, of the origin of her infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls . . . propionic acid. . . . trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). . . . Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly . . . . And probably the syringe had not been clean.
This dream has one advantage over many others. It was immediately clear what events of the previous day provided its starting-point. My preamble makes that plain. The news which Otto had given me of Irma’s condition and the case history which I had been engaged in writing till far into the night continued to occupy my mental activity even after I was asleep. Nevertheless, no one who had only read the preamble and the content of the dream itself could have the slightest notion of what the dream meant. I myself had no notion. I was astonished at the symptoms of which Irma complained to me in the dream, since they were not the same as those for which I had treated her. I smiled at the senseless idea of an injection of propionic acid and at Dr. M.’s consoling reflections. Towards its end the dream seemed to me to be more obscure and compressed than it was at the beginning. In order to discover the meaning of all this it was necessary to undertake a detailed analysis.
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ANALYSIS
The hall - numerous guests whom we were receiving. We were spending that summer at Bellevue, a house standing by itself on one of the hills adjoining the Kahlenberg. The house had formerly been designed as a place of entertainment and its reception-rooms were in consequence unusually lofty and hall like. It was at Bellevue that I had the dream, a few days before my wife’s birthday. On the previous day my wife had told me that she expected that a number of friends, including Irma, would be coming out to visit us on her birthday. My dream was thus anticipating this occasion: it was my wife’s birthday and a number of guests, including Irma, were being received by us in the large hall at Bellevue.
I reproached Irma for not having accepted my solution. I said: ‘If you still get pains, it’s your own fault.’ I might have said this to her in waking life, and I may actually have done so. It was my view at that time (though I have since recognized it as a wrong one) that my task was fulfilled when I had informed a patient of the hidden meaning of his symptoms: I considered that I was not responsible for whether he accepted the solution or not - though this was what success depended on. I owe it to this mistake, which I have now fortunately corrected, that my life was made easier at a time when, in spite of all my inevitable ignorance, I was expected to produce therapeutic successes. -I noticed, however, that the words which I spoke to Irma in the dream showed that I was specially anxious not to be responsible for the pains which she still had. If they were her fault they could not be mine. Could it be that the purpose of the dream lay in this direction?
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Irma’s complaint: pains in her throat and abdomen and stomach; it was choking her. Pains in the stomach were among my patient’s symptoms but were not very prominent; she complained more of feelings of nausea and disgust. Pains in the throat and abdomen and constriction of the throat played scarcely any part in her illness. I wondered why I decided upon this choice of symptoms in the dream but could not think of an explanation at the moment.
She looked pale and puffy. My patient always had a rosy complexion. I began to suspect that someone else was being substituted for her.
I was alarmed at the idea that I had missed an organic illness. This, as may well be believed, is a perpetual source of anxiety to a specialist whose practice is almost limited to neurotic patients and who is in the habit of attributing to hysteria a great number of symptoms which other physicians treat as organic. On the other hand, a faint doubt crept into my mind - from where, I could not tell - that my alarm was not entirely genuine. If Irma’s pains had an organic basis, once again I could not be held responsible for curing them; my treatment only set out to get rid of hysterical pains. It occurred to me, in fact, that I was actually wishing that there had been a wrong diagnosis; for, if so, the blame for my lack of success would also have been got rid of.
I took her to the window to look down her throat. She showed some recalcitrance, like women with false teeth. I thought to myself that really there was no need for her to do that. I had never had any occasion to examine Irma’s oral cavity. What happened in the dream reminded me of an examination I had carried out some time before of a governess: at a first glance she had seemed a picture of youthful beauty, but when it came to opening her mouth she had taken measures to conceal her plate. This led to recollections of other medical examinations and of little secrets revealed in the course of them - to the satisfaction of neither party.‘There was really no need for her to do that’ was no doubt intended in the first place as a compliment to Irma; but I suspected that it had another meaning besides. (If one carries out an analysis attentively, one gets a feeling of whether or not one has exhausted all the background thoughts that are to be expected.) The way in which Irma stood by the window suddenly reminded me of another experience. Irma had an intimate woman friend of whom I had a very high opinion. When I visited this lady one evening I had found her by a window in the situation reproduced in the dream, and her physician, the same Dr. M., had pronounced that she had a diphtheritic membrane. The figure of Dr. M. and the membrane reappear later in the dream. It now occurred to me that for the last few months I had had every reason to suppose that this other lady was also a hysteric. Indeed, Irma herself had betrayed the fact to me. What did I know of her condition? One thing precisely: that, like my Irma of the dream, she suffered from hysterical choking. So in the dream I had replaced my patient by her friend. I now recollected that I had often played with the idea that she too might ask me to relieve her of her symptoms. I myself, however, had thought this unlikely, since she was of a very reserved nature. She was recalcitrant, as was shown in the dream. Another reason was that there was need for her to do it: she had so far shown herself strong enough to master her condition without outside help. There still remained a few features that I could not attach either to Irma or to her friend: pale; puffy; false teeth. The false teeth took me to the governess whom I have already mentioned; I now felt inclined to be satisfied with bad teeth. I then thought of someone else to whom these features might be alluding. She again was not one of my patients, nor should I have liked to have her as a patient, since I had noticed that she was bashful in my presence and I could not think she would make an amenable patient. She was usually pale, and once, while she had been in specially good health, she had looked puffy.¹Thus I had been comparing my patient Irma with two other people who would also have been recalcitrant to treatment. What could the reason have been for my having exchanged her in the dream for her friend? Perhaps it was that I should have liked to exchange her: either I felt more sympathetic towards her friend or had a higher opinion of her intelligence. For Irma seemed to me foolish because she had not accepted my solution. Her friend would have been wiser, that is to say she would have yielded sooner. She would then have opened her mouth properly, and have told me more than Irma.²
¹ The still unexplained complaint about pains in the abdomen could also be traced back to this third figure. The person in question was, of course, my own wife; the pains in the abdomen reminded me of one of the occasions on which I had noticed her bashfulness. I was forced to admit to myself that I was not treating either Irma or my wife very kindly in this dream; but it should be observed by way of excuse that I was measuring them both by the standard of the good and amenable patient.
² I had a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed meaning. If I had pursued my comparison between the three women, it would have taken me far afield. There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable - a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.
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What I saw in her throat: a white patch and turbinal bones with scabs on them. The white patch reminded me of diphtheritis and so of Irma’s friend, but also of a serious illness of my eldest daughter’s almost two years earlier and of the fright I had had in those anxious days. The scabs on the turbinal bones recalled a worry about my own state of health. I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time to reduce some troublesome nasal swellings, and I had heard a few days earlier that one of my women patients who had followed my example had developed an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane. I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of that drug had hastened the death of a dear friend of mine. This had been before 1895.
I at once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination. This simply corresponded to the position occupied by M. in our circle. But the ‘at once’ was sufficiently striking to require a special explanation. It reminded me of a tragic event in my practice. I had on one occasion produced a severe toxic state in a woman patient by repeatedly prescribing what was at that time regarded as a harmless remedy (sulphonal), and had hurriedly turned for assistance and support to my experienced senior colleague. There was a subsidiary detail which confirmed the idea that I had this incident in mind. My patient - who succumbed to the poison - had the same name as my eldest daughter. It had never occurred to me before, but it struck me now almost like an act of retribution on the part of destiny. It was as though the replacement of one person by another was to be continued in another sense: this Mathilde for that Mathilde, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It seemed as if I had been collecting all the occasions which I could bring up against myself as evidence of lack of medical conscientiousness.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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Dr. M. was pale, had a clean-shaven chin and walked with a limp. This was true to the extent that his unhealthy appearance often caused his friends anxiety. The two other features could only apply to someone else. I thought of my elder brother, who lives abroad, who is clean-shaven and whom, if I remembered right, the M. of the dream closely resembled. We had had news a few days earlier that he was walking with a limp owing to an arthritic affection of his hip. There must, I reflected, have been some reason for my fusing into one the two figures in the dream. I then remembered that I had a similar reason for being in an ill-humour with each of them: they had both rejected a certain suggestion I had recently laid before them.
My friend Otto was now standing beside the patient and my friend Leopold was examining her and indicated that there was a dull area low down on the left. My friend Leopold was also a physician and a relative of Otto’s. Since they both specialized in the same branch of medicine, it was their fate to be in competition with each other, and comparisons were constantly being drawn between them. Both of them acted as my assistants for years while I was still in charge of the neurological out-patients’ department of a children’s hospital. Scenes such as the one represented in the dream used often to occur there. While I was discussing the diagnosis of a case with Otto, Leopold would be examining the child once more and would make an unexpected contribution to our decision. The difference between their characters was like that between the bailiff Bräsig and his friend Karl: one was distinguished for his quickness, while the other was slow but sure. If in the dream I was contrasting Otto with the prudent Leopold, I was evidently doing so to the advantage of the latter. The comparison was similar to the one between my disobedient patient Irma and the, friend whom I regarded as wiser than she was. I now perceived another of the lines along which the chain of thought in the dream branched off: from the sick child to the children’s hospital. - The dull area low down on the left seemed to me to agree in every detail with one particular case in which Leopold had struck me by his thoroughness. I also had a vague notion of something in the nature of a metastatic affection; but this may also have been a reference to the patient whom I should have liked to have in the place of Irma. So far as I had been able to judge, she had produced an imitation of a tuberculosis.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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A portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated. I saw at once that this was the rheumatism in my own shoulder, which I invariably notice if I sit up late into the night. Moreover the wording in the dream was most ambiguous: ‘I noticed this, just as he did . . . .’ I noticed it in my own body, that is. I was struck, too, by the unusual phrasing: ‘a portion of the skin was infiltrated.’ We are in the habit of speaking of ‘a left upper posterior infiltration’, and this would refer to the lung and so once more to tuberculosis.
In spite of her dress. This was in any case only an interpolation. We naturally used to examine the children in the hospital undressed: and this would be a contrast to the manner in which adult female patients have to be examined. I remembered that it was said of a celebrated clinician that he never made a physical examination of his patients except through their clothes. Further than this I could not see. Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point.
Dr. M. said: ‘Its an infection, but no matter. Dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.’ At first this struck me as ridiculous. But nevertheless, like all the rest, it had to be carefully analysed. When I came to look at it more closely it seemed to have some sort of meaning all the same. What I discovered in the patient was a local diphtheritis. I remembered from the time of my daughter’s illness a discussion on diphtheritis and diphtheria, the latter being the general infection that arises from the local diphtheritis. Leopold indicated the presence of a general infection of this kind from the existence of a dull area, which might thus be regarded as a metastatic focus. I seemed to think, it is true, that metastases like this do not in fact occur with diphtheria: it made me think rather of pyaemia.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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No matter. This was intended as a consolation. It seemed to fit into the context as follows. The content of the preceding part of the dream had been that my patient’s pains were due to a severe organic affection. I had a feeling that I was only trying in that way to shift the blame from myself. Psychological treatment could not be held responsible for the persistence of diphtheritic pains. Nevertheless I had a sense of awkwardness at having invented such a severe illness for Irma simply in order to clear myself. It looked so cruel. Thus I was in need of an assurance that all would be well in the end, and it seemed to me that to have put the consolation into the mouth precisely of Dr. M. had not been a bad choice. But here I was taking up a superior attitude towards the dream, and this itself required explanation.
And why was the consolation so nonsensical?
Dysentery. There seemed to be some remote theoretical notion that morbid matter can be eliminated through the bowels. Could it be that I was trying to make fun of Dr. M.’s fertility in producing far-fetched explanations and making unexpected pathological connections? Something else now occurred to me in relation to dysentery. A few months earlier I had taken on the case of a young man with remarkable difficulties associated with defaecating, who had been treated by other physicians as a case of ‘anaemia accompanied by malnutrition’. I had recognized it as a hysteria, but had been unwilling to try him with my psychotherapeutic treatment and had sent him on a sea voyage. Some days before, I had had a despairing letter from him from Egypt, saying that he had had a fresh attack there which a doctor had declared was dysentery. I suspected that the diagnosis was an error on the part of an ignorant practitioner who had allowed himself to be taken in by the hysteria. But I could not help reproaching myself for having put my patient in a situation in which he might have contracted some organic trouble on top of his hysterical intestinal disorder. Moreover, ‘dysentery’ sounds not unlike ‘diphtheria’ - a word of ill omen which did not occur in the dream.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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Yes, I thought to myself, I must have been making fun of Dr. M. with the consoling prognosis ‘Dysentery will supervene’, etc.: for it came back to me that, years before, he himself had told an amusing story of a similar kind about another doctor. Dr. M. had been called in by him for consultation over a patient who was seriously ill, and had felt obliged to point out, in view of the very optimistic view taken by his colleague, that he had found albumen in the patient’s urine. The other, however, was not in the least put out: ‘No matter’, he had said, ‘the albumen will soon be eliminated!’ - I could no longer feel any doubt, therefore, that this part of the dream was expressing derision at physicians who are ignorant of hysteria. And, as though to confirm this, a further idea crossed my mind: ‘Does Dr. M. realize that the symptoms in his patient (Irma’s friend) which give grounds for fearing tuberculosis also have a hysterical basis? Has he spotted this hysteria? or has he been taken in by it?’
But what could be my motive for treating this friend of mine so badly? That was a very simple matter. Dr. M. was just as little in agreement with my ‘solution’ as Irma herself. So I had already revenged myself in this dream on two people: on Irma with the words ‘If you still get pains, it’s your own fault’, and on Dr. M. by the wording of the nonsensical consolation that I put into his mouth.
We were directly aware of the origin of the infection. This direct knowledge in the dream was remarkable. Only just before we had had no knowledge of it, for the infection was only revealed by Leopold.
When she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection. Otto had in fact told me that during his short stay with Irma’s family he had been called in to a neighbouring hotel to give an injection to someone who had suddenly felt unwell. These injections reminded me once more of my unfortunate friend who had poisoned himself with cocaine. I had advised him to use the drug internally only, while morphia was being withdrawn; but he had at once given himself cocaine injections.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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A preparation of propyl . . . propyls . . . propionic acid. How could I have come to think of this? During the previous evening, before I wrote out the case history and had the dream, my wife had opened a bottle of liqueur, on which the word ‘Ananas’¹ appeared and which was a gift from our friend Otto: for he has a habit of making presents on every possible occasion. It was to be hoped, I thought to myself, that some day he would find a wife to cure him of the habit. This liqueur gave off such a strong smell of fusel oil that I refused to touch it. My wife suggested our giving the bottle to the servants, but I - with even greater prudence - vetoed the suggestion, adding in a philanthropic spirit that there was no need for them to be poisoned either. The smell of fusel oil (amyl . . .) evidently stirred up in my mind a recollection of the whole series - propyl, methyl, and so on - and this accounted for the propyl preparation in the dream. It is true that I carried out a substitution in the process: I dreamt of propyl after having smelt amyl. But substitutions of this kind are perhaps legitimate in organic chemistry.
Trimethylamin. I saw the chemical formula of this substance in my dream, which bears witness to a great effort on the part of my memory. Moreover, the formula was printed in heavy type, as though there had been a desire to lay emphasis on some part of the context as being of quite special importance. What was it, then, to which my attention was to be directed in this way by trimethylamin? It was to a conversation with another friend who had for many years been familiar with all my writings during the period of their gestation, just as I had been with his. He had at that time confided some ideas to me on the subject of the chemistry of the sexual processes, and had mentioned among other things that he believed that one of the products of sexual metabolism was trimethylamin. Thus this substance led me to sexuality, the factor to which I attributed the greatest importance in the origin of the nervous disorders which it was my aim to cure. My patient Irma was a young widow; if I wanted to find an excuse for the failure of my treatment in her case, what I could best appeal to would no doubt be this fact of her widowhood, which her friends would be so glad to see changed. And how strangely, I thought to myself, a dream like this is put together! The other woman, whom I had as a patient in the dream instead of Irma, was also a young widow.
¹ I must add that the sound of the word ‘Ananas’ bears a remarkable resemblance to that of my patient Irma’s family name.
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I began to guess why the formula for trimethylamin had been so prominent in the dream. So many important subjects converged upon that one word. Trimethylamin was an allusion not only to the immensely powerful factor of sexuality, but also to a person whose agreement I recalled with satisfaction whenever I felt isolated in my opinions. Surely this friend who played so great a part in my life must appear again elsewhere in these trains of thought. Yes. For he had a special knowledge of the consequences of affections of the nose and its accessory cavities; and he had drawn scientific attention to some very remarkable connections between the turbinal bones and the female organs of sex. (Cf. the three curly structures in Irma’s throat.) I had had Irma examined by him to see whether her gastric pains might be of nasal origin. But he suffered himself from suppurative rhinitis, which caused me anxiety; and no doubt there was an allusion to this in the pyaemia which vaguely came into my mind in connection with the metastases in the dream.
Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. Here an accusation of thoughtlessness was being made directly against my friend Otto. I seemed to remember thinking something of the same kind that afternoon when his words and looks had appeared to show that he was siding against me. It had been some such notion as: ‘How easily his thoughts are influenced! How thoughtlessly he jumps to conclusions!’ -Apart from this, this sentence in the dream reminded me once more of my dead friend who had so hastily resorted to cocaine injections. As I have said, I had never contemplated the drug being given by injection. I noticed too that in accusing Otto of thoughtlessness in handling chemical substances I was once more touching upon the story of the unfortunate Mathilde, which gave grounds for the same accusation against myself. Here I was evidently collecting instances of my conscientiousness, but also of the reverse.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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And probably the syringe had not been clean. This was yet another accusation against Otto, but derived from a different source. I had happened the day before to meet the son of an old lady of eighty-two, to whom I had to give an injection of morphia twice a day. At the moment she was in the country and he told me that she was suffering from phlebitis. I had at once thought it must be an infiltration caused by a dirty syringe. I was proud of the fact that in two years I had not caused a single infiltration; I took constant pains to be sure that the syringe was clean. In short, I was conscientious. The phlebitis brought me back once more to my wife, who had suffered from thrombosis during one of her pregnancies; and now three similar situations came to my recollection involving my wife, Irma and the dead Mathilde. The identity of these situations had evidently enabled me to substitute the three figures for one another in the dream.
I have now completed the interpretation of the dream.¹ While I was carrying it out I had some difficulty in keeping at bay all the ideas which were bound to be provoked by a comparison between the content of the dream and the concealed thoughts lying behind it. And in the meantime the ‘meaning’ of the dream was borne in upon me. I became aware of an intention which was carried into effect by the dream and which must have been my motive for dreaming it. The dream fulfilled certain wishes which were started in me by the events of the previous evening (the news given me by Otto and my writing out of the case history). The conclusion of the dream, that is to say, was that I was not responsible for the persistence of Irma’s pains, but that Otto was. Otto had in fact annoyed me by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure, and the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him. The dream acquitted me of the responsibility for Irma’s condition by showing that it was due to other factors - it produced a whole series of reasons. The dream represented a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus its content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish.
¹ [Footnote added 1909] Though it will be understood that I have not reported everything that occurred to me during the process of interpretation.
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Thus much leapt to the eyes. But many of the details of the dream also became intelligible to me from the point of view of wish-fulfilment. Not only did I revenge myself on Otto for being too hasty in taking sides against me by representing him as being too hasty in his medical treatment (in giving the injection); but I also revenged myself on him for giving me the bad liqueur which had an aroma of fusel oil. And in the dream I found an expression which united the two reproaches: the injection was of a preparation of propyl. This did not satisfy me and I pursued my revenge further by contrasting him with his more trustworthy competitor. I seemed to be saying: ‘I like him better than you.’ But Otto was not the only person to suffer from the vials of my wrath. I took revenge as well on my disobedient patient by exchanging her for one who was wiser and less recalcitrant. Nor did I allow Dr. M. to escape the consequences of his contradiction but showed him by means of a clear allusion that he was an ignoramus on the subject. (‘Dysentery will supervene’, etc.) Indeed I seemed to be appealing from him to someone else with greater knowledge (to my friend who had told me of trimethylamin) just as I had turned from Irma to her friend and from Otto to Leopold. ‘Take these people away! Give me three others of my choice instead! Then I shall be free of these undeserved reproaches!’ The groundlessness of the reproaches was proved for me in the dream in the most elaborate fashion. I was not to blame for Irma’s pains, since she herself was to blame for them by refusing to accept my solution. I was not concerned with Irma’s pains, since they were of an organic nature and quite incurable by psychological treatment. Irma’s pains could be satisfactorily explained by her widowhood (cf. the trimethylamin) which I had no means of altering. Irma’s pains had been caused by Otto giving her an incautious injection of an unsuitable drug - a thing I should never have done. Irma’s pains were the result of an injection with a dirty needle, like my old lady’s phlebitis - whereas I never did any harm with my injections. I noticed, it is true, that these explanations of Irma’s pains (which agreed in exculpating me) were not entirely consistent with one another, and indeed that they were mutually exclusive. The whole plea - for the dream was nothing else - reminded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbours with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour at all. So much the better: if only a single one of these three lines of defence were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be acquitted.
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Certain other themes played a part in the dream, which were not so obviously connected with my exculpation from Irma’s illness: my daughter’s illness and that of my patient who bore the same name, the injurious effect of cocaine, the disorder of my patient who was travelling in Egypt, my concern about my wife’s health and about that of my brother and of Dr. M., my own physical ailments, my anxiety about my absent friend who suffered from suppurative rhinitis. But when I came to consider all of these, they could all be collected into a single group of ideas and labelled, as it were, ‘concern about my own and other people’s health - professional conscientiousness’. I called to mind the obscure disagreeable impression I had had when Otto brought me the news of Irma’s condition. This group of thoughts that played a part in the dream enabled me retrospectively to put this transient impression into words. It was as though he had said to me: ‘You don’t take your medical duties seriously enough. You’re not conscientious; you don’t carry out what you’ve undertaken.’ Thereupon, this group of thoughts seemed to have put itself at my disposal, so that I could produce evidence of how highly conscientious I was, of how deeply I was concerned about the health of my relations, my friends and my patients. It was a noteworthy fact that this material also included some disagreeable memories, which supported my friend Otto’s accusation rather than my own vindication. The material was, as one might say, impartial; but nevertheless there was an unmistakable connection between this more extensive group of thoughts which underlay the dream and the narrower subject of the dream which gave rise to the wish to be innocent of Irma’s illness.
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I will not pretend that I have completely uncovered the meaning of this dream or that its interpretation is without a gap. I could spend much more time over it, derive further information from it and discuss fresh problems raised by it. I myself know the points from which further trains of thought could be followed. But considerations which arise in the case of every dream of my own restrain me from pursuing my interpretative work. If anyone should feel tempted to express a hasty condemnation of my reticence, I would advise him to make the experiment of being franker than I am. For the moment I am satisfied with the achievement of this one piece of fresh knowledge. If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams which I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.
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CHAPTER III
A DREAM IS THE FULFILMENT OF A WISH
When, after passing through a narrow defile, we suddenly emerge upon a piece of high ground, where the path divides and the finest prospects open up on every side, we may pause for a moment and consider in which direction we shall first turn our steps. Such is the case with us, now that we have surmounted the first interpretation of a dream. We find ourselves in the full daylight of a sudden discovery. Dreams are not to be likened to the unregulated sounds that rise from a musical instrument struck by the blow of some external force instead of by a player’s hand; they are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is asleep while another portion is beginning to wake. On the contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete validity - fulfilments of wishes; they can be inserted into the chain of intelligible waking mental acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.
But no sooner have we begun to rejoice at this discovery than we are assailed by a flood of questions. If, as we are told by dream-interpretation, a dream represents a fulfilled wish, what is the origin of the remarkable and puzzling form in which the wish-fulfilment is expressed? What alteration have the dream thoughts undergone before being changed into the manifest dream which we remember when we wake up? How does that alteration take place? What is the source of the material that has been modified into the dream? What is the source of the many peculiarities that are to be observed in the dream-thoughts - such, for instance, as the fact that they may be mutually contradictory? (Cf. the analogy of the borrowed kettle on p. 619.) Can a dream tell us anything new about our internal psychical processes? Can its content correct opinions we have held during the day?
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I propose that for the moment we should leave all these questions on one side and pursue our way further along one particular path. We have learnt that a dream can represent a wish as fulfilled. Our first concern must be to enquire whether this is a universal characteristic of dreams or whether it merely happened to be the content of the particular dream (the dream of Irma’s injection) which was the first that we analysed. For even if we are prepared to find that every dream has a meaning and a psychical value, the possibility must remain open of this meaning not being the same in every dream. Our first dream was the fulfilment of a wish; a second one might turn out to be a fulfilled fear; the content of a third might be a reflection; while a fourth might merely reproduce a memory. Shall we find other wishful dreams besides this one? or are there perhaps no dreams but wishful ones?
It is easy to prove that dreams often reveal themselves without any disguise as fulfilments of wishes; so that it may seem surprising that the language of dreams was not understood long ago. For instance, there is a dream that I can produce in myself as often as I like - experimentally, as it were. If I eat anchovies or olives or any other highly salted food in the evening, I develop thirst during the night which wakes me up. But my waking is preceded by a dream; and this always has the same content, namely, that I am drinking. I dream I am swallowing down water in great gulps, and it has the delicious taste that nothing can equal but a cool drink when one is parched with thirst. Then I wake up and have to have a real drink. This simple dream is occasioned by the thirst which I become aware of when I wake. The thirst gives rise to a wish to drink, and the dream shows me that wish fulfilled. In doing so it is performing a function - which it was easy to divine. I am a good sleeper and not accustomed to be woken by any physical need. If I can succeed in appeasing my thirst by dreaming that I am drinking, then I need not wake up in order to quench it. This, then, is a dream of convenience. Dreaming has taken the place of action, as it often does elsewhere in life. Unluckily my need for water to quench my thirst cannot be satisfied by a dream in the same way as my thirst for revenge against my friend Otto and Dr. M.; but the good intention is there in both cases. Not long ago this same dream of mine showed some modification. I had felt thirsty even before I fell asleep, and I had emptied a glass of water that stood on the table beside my bed. A few hours later during the night I had a fresh attack of thirst, and this had inconvenient results. In order to provide myself with some water I should have had to get up and fetch the glass standing on the table by my wife’s bed. I therefore had an appropriate dream that my wife was giving me a drink out of a vase; this vase was an Etruscan cinerary urn which I had brought back from a journey to Italy and had since given away. But the water in it tasted so salty (evidently because of the ashes in the urn) that I woke up. It will be noticed how conveniently everything was arranged in this dream. Since its only purpose was to fulfil a wish, it could be completely egoistical. A love of comfort and convenience is not really compatible with consideration for other people. The introduction of the cinerary urn was probably yet another wish-fulfilment. I was sorry that the vase was no longer in my possession - just as the glass of water on my wife’s table was out of my reach. The urn with its ashes fitted in, too, with the salty taste in my mouth which had now grown stronger and which I knew was bound to wake me.¹
¹ Weygandt (1893, 41) was aware of the occurrence of thirst dreams, for he writes: ‘The sensation of thirst is perceived with greater precision than any other; it always gives rise to an idea of its being quenched. The manner in which the thirst is represented as being quenched in the dream varies, and derives its special form from some near-by memory. Another general feature in these cases is that immediately after the idea of the thirst being quenched there follows a disappointment over the small effect produced by the imaginary refreshment.’ Weygandt, however, overlooks the fact that this reaction of a dream to a stimulus is one which holds good universally. Other people who are attacked by thirst in the night may wake up without having had a dream; but that is no objection to my experiment. It merely shows that they are worse sleepers than I am. - Compare in this connection Isaiah xxix, 8: ‘It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite.’
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Dreams of convenience like these were very frequent in my youth. Having made it a practice as far back as I can remember to work late into the night, I always found it difficult to wake early. I used then to have a dream of being out of bed and standing by the washing-stand; after a while I was no longer able to disguise from myself the fact that I was really still in bed, but in the meantime I had had a little more sleep. A slothful dream of this kind, which was expressed in a particularly amusing and elegant form, has been reported to me by a young medical colleague who seems to share my liking for sleep. The landlady of his lodgings in the neighbourhood of the hospital had strict instructions to wake him in time every morning but found it no easy job to carry them out. One morning sleep seemed peculiarly sweet. The landlady called through the door: ‘Wake up, Herr Pepi! It’s time to go to the hospital!’ In response to this he had a dream that he was lying in bed in a room in the hospital, and that there was a card over the bed on which was written: ‘Pepi H., medical student, age 22.’ While he was dreaming, he said to himself ‘As I’m already in the hospital, there’s no need for me to go there ' - and turned over and went on sleeping. In this way he openly confessed the motive for his dream.
Here is another dream in which once again the stimulus produced its effect during actual sleep. One of my women patients, who had been obliged to undergo an operation on her jaw which had taken an unfavourable course, was ordered by her doctors to wear a cooling apparatus on the side of her face day and night. But as soon as she fell asleep she used to throw it off. One day, after she had once more thrown the apparatus on the floor, I was asked to speak to her seriously about it. ‘This time I really couldn’t help it’, she answered. ‘It was because of a dream I had in the night. I dreamt I was in a box at the opera and very much enjoying the performance. But Herr Karl Meyer was in the nursing-home and complaining bitterly of pains in his jaw. So I told myself that as I hadn’t any pain I didn’t need the apparatus; and I threw it away.’ The dream of this poor sufferer seems almost like a concrete representation of a phrase that sometimes forces its way on to people’s lips in unpleasant situations: ‘I must say I could think of something more agreeable than this.’ The dream gives a picture of this more agreeable thing. The Herr Karl Meyer on to whom the dreamer transplanted her pains was the most indifferent young man of her acquaintance that she could call to mind.
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The wish-fulfilment can be detected equally easily in some other dreams which I have collected from normal people. A friend of mine, who knows my theory of dreams and has told his wife of it, said to me one day: ‘My wife has asked me to tell you that she had a dream yesterday that she was having her period. You can guess what that means.’ I could indeed guess it. The fact that this young married woman dreamt that she was having her period meant that she had missed her period. I could well believe that she would have been glad to go on enjoying her freedom a little longer before shouldering the burden of motherhood. It was a neat way of announcing her first pregnancy. Another friend of mine wrote and told me that, not long before, his wife had dreamt that she had noticed some milk stains on the front of her vest. This too was an announcement of pregnancy, but not of a first one. The young mother was wishing that she might have more nourishment to give her second child than she had had for her first.
A young woman had been cut off from society for weeks on end while she nursed her child through an infectious illness. After the child’s recovery, she had a dream of being at a party at which, among others, she met Alphonse Daudet, Paul Bourget, and Marcel Prévost; they were all most affable to her and highly amusing. All of the authors resembled their portraits, except Marcel Prévost, of whom she had never seen a picture; and he looked like . . . the disinfection officer who had fumigated the sick-room the day before and who had been her first visitor for so long. Thus it seems possible to give a complete translation of the dream: ‘It’s about time for something more amusing than this perpetual sick-nursing.’
These examples will perhaps be enough to show that dreams which can only be understood as fulfilments of wishes and which bear their meaning upon their faces without disguise are to be found under the most frequent and various conditions. They are mostly short and simple dreams, which afford a pleasant contrast to the confused and exuberant compositions that have in the main attracted the attention of the authorities. Nevertheless, it will repay us to pause for a moment over these simple dreams. We may expect to find the very simplest forms of dreams in children, since there can be no doubt that their psychical productions are less complicated than those of adults. Child psychology, in my opinion, is destined to perform the same useful services for adult psychology that the investigation of the structure or development of the lower animals has performed for research into the structure of the higher classes of animals. Few deliberate efforts have hitherto been made to make use of child psychology for this purpose.
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The dreams of young children are frequently pure wish-fulfilments and are in that case quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults. They raise no problems for solution; but on the other hand they are of inestimable importance in proving that, in their essential nature, dreams represent fulfilments of wishes. I have been able to collect a few instances of such dreams from material provided by my own children.
I have to thank an excursion which we made to the lovely village of Hallstatt in the summer of 1896 for two dreams: one of these was dreamt by my daughter, who was then eight and a half, and the other by her brother of five and a quarter. I must explain by way of preamble that we had been spending the summer on a hillside near Aussee, from which, in fine weather, we enjoyed a splendid view of the Dachstein. The Simony Hütte could be clearly distinguished through a telescope. The children made repeated attempts at seeing it through the telescope - I cannot say with what success. Before our excursion I had told the children that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein. They very much looked forward to the day. From Hallstatt we walked up the Echerntal, which delighted the children with its succession of changing landscapes. One of them, however, the five year-old boy, gradually became fretful. Each time a new mountain came into view he asked if that was the Dachstein and I had to say ‘No, only one of the foothills.’ After he had asked the question several times, he fell completely silent; and he refused point-blank to come with us up the steep path to the waterfall. I thought he was tired. But next morning he came to me with a radiant face and said: ‘Last night I dreamt we were at the Simony Hütte.’ I understood him then. When I had spoken about the Dachstein, he had expected to climb the mountain in the course of our excursion to Hallstatt and to find himself at close quarters with the hut which there had been so much talk about in connection with the telescope. But when he found that he was being fobbed off with foothills and a waterfall, he felt disappointed and out of spirits. The dream was a compensation. I tried to discover its details, but they were scanty: ‘You have to climb up steps for six hours’ - which was what he had been told.
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The same excursion stirred up wishes in the eight-and-a-half year-old girl as well - wishes which had to be satisfied in a dream. We had taken our neighbour’s twelve-year-old son with us to Hallstatt. He was already a full-blown gallant, and there were signs that he had engaged the young lady’s affections. Next morning she told me the following dream: ‘Just fancy! I had a dream that Emil was one of the family and called you "Father" and "Mother" and slept with us in the big room like the boys. Then Mother came in and threw a handful of big bars of chocolate, wrapped up in blue and green paper, under our beds.’ Her brothers, who have evidently not inherited a faculty for understanding dreams, followed the lead of the authorities and declared that the dream was nonsense. The girl herself defended one part of the dream at least; and it throws light on the theory of the neuroses to learn which part. ‘Of course it’s nonsense Emil being one of the family; but the part about the bars of chocolate isn’t.’ It had been precisely on that point that I had been in the dark, but the girl’s mother now gave me the explanation. On their way home from the station the children had stopped in front of a slot-machine from which they were accustomed to obtain bars of chocolate of that very kind, wrapped in shiny metallic paper. They had wanted to get some; but their mother rightly decided that the day had already fulfilled enough wishes and left this one over to be fulfilled by the dream. I myself had not observed the incident. But the part of the dream which had been proscribed by my daughter was immediately clear to me. I myself had heard our well-behaved guest telling the children on the walk to wait till Father and Mother caught up with them. The little girl’s dream turned this temporary kinship into permanent adoption. Her affection was not yet able to picture any other forms of companionship than those which were represented in the dream and which were based on her relation to her brothers. It was of course impossible to discover without questioning her why the bars of chocolate were thrown under the beds.
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A friend of mine has reported a dream to me which was very much like my son’s. The dreamer was an eight-year-old girl. Her father had started off with several children on a walk to Dornbach, with the idea of visiting the Rohrer Hütte. As it was getting late, however, he had turned back, promising the children to make up for the disappointment another time. On their way home they had passed the sign-post that marks the path up to the Hameau. The children had then asked to be taken up to the Hameau; but once again for the same reason they had to be consoled with the promise of another day. Next morning the eight-year-old girl came to her father and said in satisfied tones: ‘Daddy, I dreamt last night that you went with us to the Rohrer Hütte and the Hameau.’ In her impatience she had anticipated the fulfilment of her father’s promises.
Here is an equally straightforward dream, provoked by the beauty of the scenery at Aussee in another of my daughters, who was at that time three and a quarter. She had crossed the lake for the first time, and the crossing had been too short for her: when we reached the landing-stage she had not wanted to leave the boat and had wept bitterly. Next morning she said: ‘Last night I went on the lake.’ Let us hope that her dream-crossing had been of a more satisfying length.
My eldest boy, then eight years old, already had dreams of his phantasies coming true: he dreamt that he was driving in a chariot with Achilles and that Diomede was the charioteer. As may be guessed, he had been excited the day before by a book on the legends of Greece which had been given to his elder sister.
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If I may include words spoken by children in their sleep under the heading of dreams, I can at this point quote one of the most youthful dreams in my whole collection. My youngest daughter, then nineteen months old, had had an attack of vomiting one morning and had consequently been kept without food all day. During the night after this day of starvation she was heard calling out excitedly in her sleep: ‘Anna Fweud, stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet, pudden!’ At that time she was in the habit of using her own name to express the idea of taking possession of something. The menu included pretty well everything that must have seemed to her to make up a desirable meal. The fact that strawberries appeared in it in two varieties was a demonstration against the domestic health regulations. It was based upon the circumstance, which she had no doubt observed, that her nurse had attributed her indisposition to a surfeit of strawberries. She was thus retaliating in her dream against this unwelcome verdict.¹
Though we think highly of the happiness of childhood because it is still innocent of sexual desires, we should not forget what a fruitful source of disappointment and renunciation, and consequently what a stimulus to dreaming, may be provided by the other of the two great vital instincts.² Here is another instance of this. My nephew, aged 22 months, had been entrusted with the duty of congratulating me on my birthday and of presenting me with a basket of cherries, which are still scarcely in season at that time of year. He seems to have found the task a hard one, for he kept on repeating ‘Chewwies in it’ but could not be induced to hand the present over. However, he found a means of compensation. He had been in the habit every morning of telling his mother that he had a dream of the ‘white soldier’ - a Guards officer in his white cloak whom he had once gazed at admiringly in the street. On the day after his birthday sacrifice he awoke with a cheerful piece of news, which could only have originated from a dream: ‘Hermann eaten all the chewwies!³
¹ The same feat was accomplished shortly afterwards by a dream produced by this little girl’s grandmother - their combined ages came to some seventy years. She had been obliged to go without food for a whole day on account of a disturbance due to a floating kidney. During the following night, no doubt imagining herself back in the heyday of her girlhood, she dreamt that she had been ‘asked out’ to both of the principal meals and been served at both with the most appetizing delicacies.
² [Footnote added in 1911:] A closer study of the mental life of children has taught us, to be sure, that sexual instinctual forces, in infantile form, play a large enough part, and one that has been too long overlooked, in the psychical activity of children. Closer study, too, has given us grounds for feeling some doubt in regard to the happiness of childhood as it has been constructed by adults in retrospect. Cf. my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).
³ [Footnote added 1911:] The fact should be mentioned that children soon begin to have more complicated and less transparent dreams, and that, on the other hand, adults in certain circumstances often have dreams of a similarly simple, infantile character. The wealth of unexpected material that may occur in the dreams of children of four or five is shown by examples in my ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909b) and in Jung (1910a). - [Added 1914:] For analytical interpretations of children’s dreams see also von Hug-Hellmuth (1911 and 1913), Putnam (1912), van Raalte (1912), Spielrein (1913) and Tausk (1913). Children’s dreams are also reported by Bianchieri (1912), Busemann (1909 and 1910), Doglia and Bianchieri (1910-11) and, in particular, Wiggam (1909), who laid stress on their trend towards wish-fulfilment. - [Added 1911:] On the other hand, dreams of an infantile type seem to occur in adults with special frequency when they find themselves in unusual external circumstances. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld (1904, 1, 336 f.) writes as follows of the members of his expedition while they were wintering in the Antarctic: ‘The direction taken by our innermost thoughts was very clearly shown by our dreams, which were never more vivid or numerous than at this time. Even those of us who otherwise dreamt but rarely had long stories to tell in the morning when we exchanged our latest experiences in this world of the imagination. They were all concerned with the outside world which was now so remote from us, though they were often adapted to our actual circumstances. One of my companions had a particularly characteristic dream of being back in his school class-room, where it was his task to skin miniature seals which had been specially prepared for instructional purposes. Eating and drinking, however, were the pivot round which our dreams most often revolved. One of us, who had a special gift for attending large luncheon parties during the night, was proud if he was able to report in the morning that he had "got though a three-course dinner". Another of us dreamt of tobacco, of whole mountains of tobacco; while a third dreamt of a ship in full sail coming in across open water. Yet another dream is worth repeating. The postman brought round the mail and gave a long explanation of why we had had to wait so long for it: he had delivered it at the wrong address and had only succeeded in recovering it with great difficulty. We dreamt, of course, of still more impossible things. But there was a most striking lack of imaginativeness shown by almost all the dreams that I dreamt myself or heard described. It would certainly be of great psychological interest if all these dreams could be recorded. And it will easily be understood how much we longed for sleep, since it could offer each one of us everything that he most eagerly desired.’. - [Added 1914:] According to Du Prel (1885, 231), ’Mungo Park, when he was almost dying of thirst on one of his African journeys, dreamt unceasingly of the well-watered valleys and meadows of his home. Similarly, Baron Trenck suffering torments of hunger while he was a prisoner in the fortress at Magdeburg, dreamt of being surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part in Franklin’s first expedition, when he was almost dying of starvation as a result of his fearful privations, dreamt constantly and regularly of copious meals.’
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I do not myself know what animals dream of. But a proverb, to which my attention was drawn by one of my students, does claim to know. ‘What’, asks the proverb, ‘do geese dream of?’ And it replies: ‘Of maize.’¹ The whole theory that dreams are wish-fulfilments is contained in these two phrases.²
It will be seen that we might have arrived at our theory of the hidden meaning of dreams most rapidly merely by following linguistic usage. It is true that common language sometimes speaks of dreams with contempt. (The phrase ‘Träume sind Schäume [Dreams are froth]’ seems intended to support the scientific estimate of dreams.) But, on the whole, ordinary usage treats dreams above all as the blessed fulfillers of wishes. If ever we find our expectation surpassed by the event, we exclaim in our delight: ‘I should never have imagined such a thing even in my wildest dreams.
¹ [Footnote added 1911:] A Hungarian proverb quoted by Ferenczi goes further and declares that ‘pigs dream of acorns and geese dream of maize’. - [Added 1914:] A Jewish proverb runs: ‘What do hens dream of? - of millet.’ (Bernstein and Segel, 1908, 116.)
² [Footnote added 1914:] I am far from seeking to maintain that I am the first writer to have had the idea of deriving dreams from wishes. (Cf. the opening sentence of my next chapter.) Those who attach any importance to anticipations of this kind may go back to classical antiquity and quote Herophilus, a physician who lived under the first Ptolemy. According to Büchsenschütz (1868, 33), he distinguished three sorts of dreams: those which are sent by the gods, those which are natural and arise when the mind forms a picture of something that is agreeable to it and will come about, and those which are of a mixed nature and which arise of their own accord from the emergence of pictures in which we see what we wish for. J. Stärcke (1913, ) has drawn attention to a dream in Scherner’s collection which that writer himself describes as the fulfilment of a wish. Scherner (1861, 239) writes: ‘The dreamer’s imagination fulfilled her waking wish so promptly, simply because that wish was emotionally active in her.’ Scherner classes this dream among ‘dreams of mood’; alongside it he places ‘dreams of erotic yearning’ in men and women, and ‘dreams of ill-temper’. There is clearly no question of Scherner attributing any more importance to wishes in the instigation of dreams than to any other waking mental state: still less is there any question of his having related wishes to the essential nature of dreaming.
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CHAPTER IV
DISTORTION IN DREAMS
If I proceed to put forward the assertion that the meaning of every dream is the fulfilment of a wish, that is to say that there cannot be any dreams but wishful dreams, I feel certain in advance that I shall meet with the most categorical contradiction.
‘There is nothing new,’ I shall be told, ‘in the idea that some dreams are to be regarded as wish-fulfilments; the authorities noticed that fact long ago. Cf. Radestock (1879, 137 f.), Volkelt (1875, 110 f.), Purkinje (1846, 456), Tissié (1898, 70), Simon (1888, 42, on the hunger dreams of Baron Trenck while he was a prisoner), and a passage in Griesinger (1845, 89).¹ But to assert that there are no dreams other than wish-fulfilment dreams is only one more unjustifiable generalization, though fortunately one which it is easy to disprove. After all, plenty of dreams occur which contain the most distressing subject matter but never a sign of any wish-fulfilment. Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of pessimism, is probably furthest removed from the wish-fulfilment theory. In his Philosophie des Unbewussten (1890, 2, 344) he writes: "When it comes to dreams, we find all the annoyances of waking life carried over into the state of sleep; the only thing we do not find is what can to some extent reconcile an educated man to life - scientific and artistic enjoyment. . . ." But even less disgruntled observers have insisted that pain and unpleasure are more common in dreams than pleasure: for instance, Scholz (1893, 57), Volkelt (1875, 80), and others. Indeed two ladies, Florence Hallam and Sarah Weed (1896, 499), have actually given statistical expression, based on a study of their own dreams, to the preponderance of unpleasure in dreaming. They find that 57.2 per cent of dreams are "disagreeable" and only 28.6 percent positively "pleasant". And apart from these dreams, which carry over into sleep the various distressing emotions of life, there are anxiety-dreams, in which that most dreadful of all unpleasurable feelings holds us in its grasp till we awaken. And the commonest victims of these anxiety-dreams are precisely children,² whose dreams you have described as undisguised wish-fulfilments.’
¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A writer as early as Plotinus, the Neoplatonist, is quoted by Du Prel (1885, 276) as saying: ‘When our desires are aroused, imagination comes along and, as it were, presents us with the objects of those desires.’
² Cf. Debacker (1881) on pavor nocturnus.
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It does in fact look as though anxiety-dreams make it impossible to assert as a general proposition (based on the examples quoted in my last chapter) that dreams are wish-fulfilments; indeed they seem to stamp any such proposition as an absurdity.
Nevertheless, there is no great difficulty in meeting these apparently conclusive objections. It is only necessary to take notice of the fact that my theory is not based on a consideration of the manifest content of dreams but refers to the thoughts which are shown by the work of interpretation to lie behind dreams. We must make a contrast between the manifest and the latent content of dreams. There is no question that there are dreams whose manifest content is of the most distressing kind. But has anyone tried to interpret such dreams? to reveal the latent thoughts behind them? If not, then the two objections raised against my theory will not hold water: it still remains possible that distressing dreams and anxiety-dreams, when they have been interpreted, may turn out to be fulfilments of wishes.¹
¹ [Footnote added 1909:] It is hard to credit the obstinacy with which readers and critics of this book shut their eyes to this consideration and overlook the fundamental distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams. - On the other hand, nothing in the literature of the subject comes so near to my hypothesis as a passage in James Sully’s essay ‘The Dream as a Revelation’ (1893, 364). The fact that I am only now quoting it for the first time is no sign of disparagement: ‘It would seem then, after all, that dreams are not the utter nonsense they have been said to be by such authorities as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. The chaotic aggregations of our night-fancy have a significance and communicate new knowledge. Like some letter in cypher, the dream-inscription when scrutinized closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message. Or, to vary the figure slightly, we may say that, like some palimpsest, the dream discloses beneath its worthless surface-characters traces of an old and precious communication.’
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When in the course of a piece of scientific work we come upon a problem which is difficult to solve, it is often a good plan to take up a second problem along with the original one - just as it is easier to crack two nuts together than each separately. Thus we are not only faced by the question ‘How can distressing dreams and anxiety-dreams be wish-fulfilments?’; our reflections enable us to add a second question: ‘Why is it that dreams with an indifferent content, which turn out to be wish-fulfilments, do not express their meaning undisguised?’ Take, for instance, the dream which I treated at such length of Irma’s injection. It was not by any means of a distressing nature and interpretation showed it as a striking example of the fulfilment of a wish. But why should it have needed any interpretation at all? Why did it not say what it meant straight out? At first sight the dream of Irma’s injection gave no impression that it represented a wish of the dreamer’s as fulfilled. My readers will have had no such impression; but neither did I myself before I carried out the analysis. Let us describe this behaviour of dreams, which stands in so much need of explanation, as ‘the phenomenon of distortion in dreams’. Thus our second problem is: what is the origin of dream-distortion?
A number of possible solutions of the problem may at once occur to us: as, for instance, that some incapacity exists during sleep for giving direct expression to our dream-thoughts. But the analysis of certain dreams forces us to adopt another explanation of distortion in dreams. I will exemplify this by another dream of my own. Once again this will involve me in a variety of indiscretions; but a thorough elucidation of the problem will compensate for my personal sacrifice.
PREAMBLE. - In the spring of 1897 I learnt that two professors at our university had recommended me for appointment as professor extraordinarius. The news surprised and greatly delighted me, since it implied recognition by two eminent men, which could not be put down to any considerations of a personal kind. But I at once warned myself not to attach any expectations to the event. During the last few years the Ministry had disregarded recommendations of that sort; and several of my colleagues who were my seniors in age and at least my equals in merit had been waiting vainly for appointment. I had no reason to believe that I should be more fortunate. I therefore determined to meet the future with resignation. So far as I knew, I was not an ambitious man; I was following my profession with gratifying success even without the advantages afforded by a title. Moreover there was no question of my pronouncing the grapes sweet or sour: they hung far too high over my head.
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One evening I had a visit from a friend - one of the men whose example I had taken as a warning to me. For a consider able time he had been a candidate for promotion to a professorship, a rank which in our society turns its holder into a demi-god to his patients. Less resigned than I was, however, he was in the habit of paying his respects from time to time in the offices of the Ministry with a view to advancing his prospects. He had been paying one of these visits just before calling on me. He told me that on this occasion he had driven the exalted official into a corner and had asked straight out whether the delay over his appointment was not in fact due to denominational considerations. The reply had been that, in view of the present state of feeling, it was no doubt true that, for the moment, His Excellency was not in a position, etc. etc. ‘At least I know where I am now’, my friend had concluded. It was not news to me, though it was bound to strengthen my feeling of resignation; for the same denominational considerations applied to my own case.
On the morning after this visit I had the following dream, which was remarkable among other things for its form. It consisted of two thoughts and two pictures - each thought being succeeded by a picture. I shall, however, report only the first half of the dream here, since the other half has no connection with the purpose for which I am describing the dream.
I. . . . My friend R. was my uncle. - I had a great feeling of affection for him.
II. I saw before me his face, somewhat changed. It was a though it had been drawn out lengthways. A yellow beard that surrounded it stood out especially clearly.
Then followed the two other pieces which I shall pass over - once more a thought followed by a picture.
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The interpretation of the dream took place as follows.
When, during the course of the morning, the dream came into my head, I laughed aloud and said: ‘The dream’s nonsense!’ But it refused to go away and followed me about all day, till at last in the evening I began to reproach myself: ‘If one of your patients who was interpreting a dream could find nothing better to say than that it was nonsense, you would take him up about it and suspect that the dream had some disagreeable story at the back of it which he wanted to avoid becoming aware of. Treat yourself in the same way. Your opinion that the dream is nonsense only means that you have an internal resistance against interpreting it. Don’t let yourself be put off like this.’ So I set about the interpretation.
‘R. was my uncle.’ What could that mean? I never had more than one uncle - Uncle Josef.¹ There was an unhappy story attached to him. Once - more than thirty years ago - in his eagerness to make money, he allowed himself to be involved in a transaction of a kind that is severely punished by the law, and he was in fact punished for it. My father, whose hair turned grey from grief in a few days, used always to say that Uncle Josef was not a bad man but only a simpleton; those were his words. So that if my friend R. was my Uncle Josef, what I was meaning to say was that R. was a simpleton. Hardly credible and most disagreeable! - But there was the face which I saw in the dream with its elongated features and yellow beard. My uncle did in fact have a face like that, elongated and framed in a handsome fair beard. My friend R. had originally been extremely dark; but when black-haired people begin to turn grey they pay for the splendour of their youth. Hair by hair, their black beards go through an unpleasing change of colour: first they turn to a reddish brown, then to a yellowish brown, and only then to a definite grey. My friend R.’s beard was at that time passing through this stage - and so, incidentally, was my own, as I had noticed with dissatisfaction. The face that I saw in the dream was at once my friend R.’s and my uncle’s. It was like one of Galton’s composite photographs. (In order to bring out family likenesses, Galton used to photograph several faces on the same plate.) So there could be no doubt that I really did mean that my friend R. was a simpleton - like my Uncle Josef.
¹ It is astonishing to observe the way in which my memory - my waking memory - was narrowed at this point, for the purposes of the analysis. Actually I have known five of my uncles and loved and honoured one of them. But at the moment at which I overcame my resistance to interpreting the dream I said to myself that I never had more than one uncle - the one that was intended in the dream.
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I still had no idea at all what could be the purpose of this comparison, against which I continued to struggle. It did not go very deep, after all, since my uncle was a criminal, whereas my friend R. bore an unblemished character . . . except for having been fined for knocking a boy down with his bicycle. Could I have had that crime in mind? That would have been making fun of the comparison. At this point I remembered another conversation which I had had a few days earlier with another colleague, N., and, now I came to think of it, upon the same subject. I had met N. in the street. He too had been recommended for a professorship. He had heard of the honour that had been paid me and had offered me his congratulations on it; but I had unhesitatingly refused to accept them. ‘You are the last person’, I had said, ‘to make that kind of joke; you know what such a recommendation is worth from your own experience.’ ‘Who can say?’ he had answered - jokingly, it seemed; ‘there was something definite against me. Don’t you know that a woman once started legal proceedings against me? I needn’t assure you that the case was dismissed.(It was a disgraceful attempt at blackmail; and I had the greatest difficulty in saving the prosecutrix from being punished. But perhaps they may be using this at the Ministry as an excuse for not appointing me. But you have an unblemished character.’ This told me who the criminal was, and at the same time showed me how the dream was to be interpreted and what its purpose was. My Uncle Josef represented my two colleagues who had not been appointed to professorships - the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal. I now saw too why they were represented in this light. If the appointment of my friends R. and N. had been postponed for ‘denominational’ reasons, my own appointment was also open to doubt; if, however, I could attribute the rejection of my two friends to other reasons, which did not apply to me, my hopes would remain untouched. This was the procedure adopted by my dream: it made one of them, R., into a simpleton and the other, N., into a criminal, whereas I was neither the one nor the other; thus we no longer had anything in common; I could rejoice at my appointment to a professorship, and I could avoid drawing the distressing conclusion that R.’s report of what the high official had said to him must apply equally to me.
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But I felt obliged to proceed still further with my interpretation of the dream; I felt I had not yet finished dealing with it satisfactorily. I was still uneasy over the light-heartedness with which I had degraded two of my respected colleagues in order to keep open my own path to a professorship. My dissatisfaction with my conduct, however, had diminished since I had come to realize the worth that was to be attached to expressions in dreams. I was prepared to deny through thick and thin that I really considered that R. was a simpleton and that I really disbelieved N.’s account of the blackmailing affair. Nor did I believe that Irma was really made dangerously ill through being injected with Otto’s preparation of propyl. In both these cases what my dreams had expressed was only my wish that it might be so. The assertion in which my wish was realized sounded less absurd in the later dream than in the earlier one; it made cleverer use of the actual facts in its construction, like a well designed slander of the kind that makes people feel that ‘there’s something in it’. For one of the professors in his own faculty had voted against my friend R., and my friend N. had himself innocently provided me with the material for my aspersions. Nevertheless, I must repeat, the dream seemed to me to stand in need of further elucidation.
I then recalled that there was still a piece of the dream which the interpretation had not touched. After the idea had occurred to me that R. was my uncle, I had had a warm feeling of affection for him in the dream. Where did that feeling belong? I had naturally never had any feeling of affection for my Uncle Josef. I had been fond of my friend R. and had esteemed him for many years; but if I had gone up to him and expressed my sentiments in terms approaching the degree of affection I had felt in the dream, there could be no doubt that he would have been astonished. My affection for him struck me as ungenuine and exaggerated - like the judgement of his intellectual qualities which I had expressed by fusing his personality with my uncle’s, though there the exaggeration had been in the opposite direction. But a new light began to dawn on me. The affection in the dream did not belong to the latent content, to the thoughts that lay behind the dream; it stood in contradiction to them and was calculated to conceal the true interpretation of the dream. And probably that was precisely its raison d’être. I recalled my resistance against embarking on the interpretation, how long I had put it off and how I had declared that the dream was sheer nonsense. My psycho-analytic treatments taught me how a repudiation of that kind was to be interpreted: it had no value as a judgement but was simply an expression of emotion. If my little daughter did not want an apple that was offered to her, she asserted that the apple tasted sour without having tasted it. And if my patients behaved like the child, I knew that they were concerned with an idea which they wanted to repress. The same was true of my dream. I did not want to interpret it, because the interpretation contained something that I was struggling against. When I had completed the interpretation I learnt what it was that I had been struggling against - namely, the assertion that R. was a simpleton. The affection that I felt for R. could not be derived from the latent dream-thoughts; but no doubt it originated from this struggle of mine. If my dream was distorted in this respect from its latent content - and distorted into its opposite - then the affection that was manifest in the dream served the purpose of this distortion. In other words, distortion was shown in this case to be deliberate and to be a means of dissimulation. My dream thoughts had contained a slander against R.; and, in order that I might not notice this, what appeared in the dream was the opposite, a feeling of affection for him.
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It seemed as though this might be a discovery of general validity. It is true that, as was shown by the instances quoted in Chapter III, there are some dreams which are undisguised fulfilments of wishes. But in cases where the wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defence against the wish; and owing to this defence the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape. I will try to seek a social parallel to this internal event in the mind. Where can we find a similar distortion of a psychical act in social life? Only where two persons are concerned, one of whom possesses a certain degree of power which the second is obliged to take into account. In such a case the second person will distort his psychical acts or, as we might put it, will dissimulate. The politeness which I practise every day is to a large extent dissimulation of this kind; and when I interpret my dreams for my readers I am obliged to adopt similar distortions. The poet complains of the need for these distortions in the words:
Das Beste, was du wissen kannst,
Darfst du den Buben doch nicht sagen.¹
A similar difficulty confronts the political writer who has disagreeable truths to tell to those in authority. If he presents them undisguised, the authorities will suppress his words - after they have been spoken, if his pronouncement was an oral one, but beforehand, if he had intended to make it in print. A writer must beware of the censorship, and on its account he must soften and distort the expression of his opinion. According to the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship he finds himself compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or he must conceal his objectionable pronouncement beneath some apparently innocent disguise: for instance, he may describe a dispute between two Mandarins in the Middle Kingdom, when the people he really has in mind are officials in his own country. The stricter the censorship, the more far-reaching will be the disguise and the more ingenious too may be the means employed for putting the reader on the scent of the true meaning.²
¹ [‘After all, the best of what you know may not be told to boys.’]
² [Footnote added 1919:] Frau Dr. H. von Hug-Hellmuth (1915) has recorded a dream which is perhaps better fitted than any to justify my choice of nomenclature. In this example the dream-distortion adopted the same methods as the postal censorship for expunging passages which were objectionable to it. The postal censorship makes such passages unreadable by blacking them out; the dream-censorship replaced them by an incomprehensible mumble.
In order to make the dream intelligible, I must explain that the dreamer, a cultivated and highly esteemed lady, was fifty years of age. She was the widow of an officer of high rank who had died some twelve years previously and was the mother of grown sons, one of whom was in the field at the time of the dream.
Here then is the dream - which deals with ‘love services’ in war-time. ‘The patient went to Garrison Hospital No. 1 and informed the sentry at the gate that she must speak to the Chief Medical Officer (mentioning a name that was unknown to her) as she wanted to volunteer for service at the hospital. She pronounced the word "service" in such a way that the N.C.O. at once understood that she meant "love service". Since she was an elderly lady, after some hesitation he allowed her to pass. Instead of finding the Chief Medical Officer, however, she reached a large and gloomy apartment in which a number of officers and army doctors were standing and sitting round a long table. She approached a staff surgeon with her request, and he understood her meaning after she had said only a few words. The actual wording of her speech in the dream was: "I and many other women and girls in Vienna are ready to . . ." at this point in the dream her words turned into a mumble " . . . for the troops - officers and other ranks without distinction." She could tell from the expressions on the officers’ faces, partly embarrassed and partly sly, that everyone had understood her meaning correctly. The lady went on: "I’m aware that our decision must sound surprising, but we mean it in bitter earnest. No one asks a soldier in the field whether he wishes to die or not." There followed an awkward silence of some minutes. The staff surgeon then put his arm round her waist and said: "Suppose, madam, it actually came to . . . (mumble)." She drew away from him, thinking to herself: "He’s like all the rest of them", and replied: "Good gracious, I’m an old woman and I might never come to that. Besides, there’s one condition that must be observed: age must be respected. It must never happen that an elderly woman . . . (mumble) . . . a mere boy. That would be terrible." "I understand perfectly," replied the staff surgeon. Some of the officers, and among them one who had been a suitor of hers in her youth, laughed out loud. The lady then asked to be taken to the Chief Medical Officer, with whom she was acquainted, so that the whole matter could be thrashed out; but she found, to her consternation, that she could not recall his name. Nevertheless, the staff surgeon, most politely and respectfully, showed her the way up to the second floor by a very narrow, iron, spiral staircase, which led directly from the room to the upper storeys of the building. As she went up she heard an officer say: "That’s a tremendous decision to make - no matter whether a woman’s young or old! Splendid of her!" Feeling simply that she was doing her duty, she walked up an interminable staircase. The dream was repeated twice in the course of a few weeks, with, as the lady remarked, some quite unimportant and meaningless modifications.’
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The fact that the phenomena of censorship and of dream-distortion correspond down to their smallest details justifies us in presuming that they are similarly determined. We may therefore suppose that dreams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of these forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish. It remains to enquire as to the nature of the power enjoyed by this second agency which enables it to exercise its censorship. When we bear in mind that the latent dream-thoughts are not conscious before an analysis has been carried out, whereas the manifest content of the dream is consciously remembered, it seems plausible to suppose that the privilege enjoyed by the second agency is that of permitting thoughts to enter consciousness. Nothing, it would seem, can reach consciousness from the first system without passing the second agency; and the second agency allows nothing to pass without exercising its rights and making such modifications as it thinks fit in the thought which is seeking admission to consciousness. Incidentally, this enables us to form a quite definite view of the ‘essential nature’ of consciousness: we see the process of a thing becoming conscious as a specific psychical act, distinct from and independent of the process of the formation of a presentation or idea; and we regard consciousness as a sense organ which perceives data that arise elsewhere. It can be demonstrated that these basic assumptions are absolutely indispensable to psychopathology. We must, however, postpone our further consideration of them to a later stage.
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If this picture of the two psychical agencies and their relation to consciousness is accepted, there is a complete analogy in political life to the extraordinary affection which I felt in my dream for my friend R., who was treated with such contumely during the dream’s interpretation. Let us imagine a society in which a struggle is in process between a ruler who is jealous of his power and an alert public opinion. The people are in revolt against an unpopular official and demand his dismissal. But the autocrat, to show that he need take no heed of the popular wish, chooses that moment for bestowing a high distinction upon the official, though there is no other reason for doing so. In just the same way my second agency, which commands the approaches to consciousness, distinguished my friend R. by a display of excessive affection simply because the wishful impulses belonging to the first system, for particular reasons of their own on which they were intent at the moment, chose to condemn him as a simpleton.¹
¹ [Footnote added 1911:] Hypocritical dreams of this description are not uncommon events in my own case or in that of other people. While I was engaged in working out a certain scientific problem, I was troubled for several nights in close succession by a somewhat confusing dream which had as its subject a reconciliation with a friend whom I had dropped many years before. On the fourth or fifth occasion I at last succeeded in understanding the meaning of the dream. It was an incitement to abandon my last remnants of consideration for the person in question and to free myself from him completely, and it had been hypocritically disguised as its opposite. I have reported elsewhere a ‘hypocritical Oedipus dream’, dreamt by a man, in which the hostile impulses and death-wishes contained in the dream-thoughts were replaced by manifest affection. Another kind of hypocritical dream will be mentioned below in Chapter VI.
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These considerations may lead us to feel that the interpretation of dreams may enable us to draw conclusions as to the structure of our mental apparatus which we have hoped for in vain from philosophy. I do not propose, however, to follow this line of thought; but, having cleared up the matter of distortion in dreams, I shall go back to the problem from which we started. The question raised was how dreams with a distressing content can be resolved into wish-fulfilments. We now see that this is possible if dream-distortion has occurred and if the distressing content serves only to disguise something that is wished for. Bearing in mind our assumption of the existence of two psychical agencies, we can further say that distressing dreams do in fact contain something which is distressing to the second agency, but something which at the same time fulfils a wish on the part of the first agency. They are wishful dreams in so far as every dream arises from the first agency; the relation of the second agency towards dreams is of a defensive and not of a creative kind.¹ If we were to restrict ourselves to considering what the second agency contributes to dreams, we could never arrive at an understanding of them: all the conundrums which the authorities have observed in dreams would remain unsolved.
The fact that dreams really have a secret meaning which represents the fulfilment of a wish must be proved afresh in each particular case by analysis. I shall therefore select a few dreams with a distressing content and attempt to analyse them. Some of them are the dreams of hysterical patients which require lengthy preambles and an occasional excursus into the psychical processes characteristic of hysteria. But I cannot escape this aggravation of the difficulties of presenting my argument.
As I have already explained, when I undertake the analytic treatment of a psycho-neurotic patient his dreams are invariably discussed between us. In the course of these discussions I am obliged to give him all the psychological explanations which have enabled me myself to reach an understanding of his symptoms. I am thereupon subjected to a remorseless criticism, certainly no less severe than I have to expect from the members of my own profession. And my patients invariably contradict my assertion that all dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Here, then, are some instances from the material of dreams that have been brought up against me as evidence to the contrary.
¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Later we shall also come across instance in which, on the contrary, a dream expresses a wish on the part of the second agency.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
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‘You’re always saying to me’, began a clever woman patient of mine, ‘that a dream is a fulfilled wish. Well, I’ll tell you a dream whose subject was the exact opposite - a dream in which one of my wishes was not fulfilled. How do you fit that in with your theory? This was the dream:
‘I wanted to give a supper-party, but I had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon. I thought I would go out and buy something, but remembered then that it was Sunday afternoon and all the shops would be shut. Next I tried to ring up some caterers, but the telephone was out of order. So I had to abandon my wish to give a supper-party.’
I answered, of course, that analysis was the only way of deciding on the meaning of the dream; though I admitted that at first sight it seemed sensible and coherent and looked like the reverse of a wish-fulfilment. ‘But what material did the dream arise from? As you know, the instigation to a dream is always to be found in the events of the previous day.’
ANALYSIS. - My patient’s husband, an honest and capable wholesale butcher, had remarked to her the day before that he was getting too stout and therefore intended to start on a course of weight-reduction. He proposed to rise early, do physical exercises, keep to a strict diet, and above all accept no more invitations to supper. -She laughingly added that her husband, at the place where he regularly lunched, had made the acquaintance of a painter, who had pressed him to be allowed to paint his portrait, as he had never seen such expressive features. Her husband however had replied in his blunt manner that he was much obliged, but he was sure the painter would prefer a piece of a pretty young girl’s behind to the whole of his face.¹ She was very much in love with her husband now and teased him a lot. She had begged him, too, not to give her any caviare.
I asked her what that meant; and she explained that she had wished for a long time that she could have a caviare sandwich every morning but had grudged the expense. Of course her husband would have let her have it at once if she had asked him. But, on the contrary, she had asked him not to give her any caviare, so that she could go on teasing him about it.
¹ Cf. the phrase ‘sitting for one’s portrait’ and Goethe’s lines:
Und wenn er keinen Hintern hat,
Wie mag der Edle sitzen?
[And if he hasn’t a behind,
How can his Lordship sit?]
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This explanation struck me as unconvincing. Inadequate reasons like this usually conceal unconfessed motives. They remind one of Bernheim’s hypnotized patients. When one of these carries out a post-hypnotic suggestion and is asked why he is acting in this way, instead of saying that he has no idea he feels compelled to invent some obviously unsatisfactory reason. The same was no doubt true of my patient and the caviare. I saw that she was obliged to create an unfulfilled wish for herself in her actual life; and the dream represented this renunciation as having been put into effect. But why was it that she stood in need of an unfulfilled wish?
The associations which she had so far produced had not been sufficient to interpret the dream. I pressed her for some more. After a short pause, such as would correspond to the over coming of a resistance, she went on to tell me that the day before she had visited a woman friend of whom she confessed she felt jealous because her (my patient’s) husband was constantly singing her praises. Fortunately this friend of hers is very skinny and thin and her husband admires a plumper figure. I asked her what she had talked about to her thing friend. Naturally, she replied, of that lady’s wish to grow a little stouter. Her friend had enquired, too: ‘When are you going to ask us to another meal? You always feed one so well.’
The meaning of the dream was now clear, and I was able to say to my patient: ‘It is just as though when she made this suggestion you said to yourself: "A likely thing! I’m to ask you to come and eat in my house so that you may get stout and attract my husband still more! I’d rather never give another supper-party." What the dream was saying to you was that you were unable to give any supper-parties, and it was thus fulfilling your wish not to help your friend to grow plumper. The fact that what people eat at parties makes them stout had been brought home to you by your husband’s decision not to accept any more invitations to supper in the interests of his plan to reduce his weight.’ All that was now lacking was some coincidence to confirm the solution. The smoked salmon in the dream had not yet been accounted for. ‘How’, I asked, ‘did you arrive at the salmon that came into your dream?’ ‘Oh’, she replied, ‘smoked salmon is my friend’s favourite dish.’ I happen to be acquainted with the lady in question myself, and I can confirm the fact that she grudges herself salmon no less than my patient grudges herself caviare.
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The same dream admits of another and subtler interpretation, which in fact becomes unavoidable if we take a subsidiary detail into account. (The two interpretations are not mutually contradictory, but both cover the same ground; they are a good instance of the fact that dreams, like all other psychopathological structures, regularly have more than one meaning.) My patient, it will be remembered, at the same time as she was occupied with her dream of the renunciation of a wish, was also trying to bring about a renounced wish (for the caviare sandwich) in real life. Her friend had also given expression to a wish - to become stouter - and it would not have been surprising if my patient had dreamt that her friend’s wish was unfulfilled; for my patient’s own wish was that her friend’s wish (to put on weight) should not be fulfilled. But instead of this she dreamt that one of her own wishes was not fulfilled. Thus the dream will acquire a new interpretation if we suppose that the person indicated in the dream was not herself but her friend, that she had put herself in her friend’s place, or, as we might say, that she had ‘identified’ herself with her friend. I believe she had in fact done this; and the circumstance of her having brought about a renounced wish in real life was evidence of this identification.
What is the meaning of hysterical identification? It requires a somewhat lengthy explanation. Identification is a highly important factor in the mechanism of hysterical symptoms. It enables patients to express in their symptoms not only their own experiences but those of a large number of other people; it enables them, as it were, to suffer on behalf of a whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play single-handed. I shall be told that this is not more than the familiar hysterical imitation, the capacity of hysterics to imitate any symptoms in other people that may have struck their attention - sympathy, as it were, intensified to the point of reproduction. This, however, does no more than show us the path along which the psychical process in hysterical imitation proceeds. The path is something different from the mental act which proceeds along it. The latter is a little more complicated than the common picture of hysterical imitation; it consists in the unconscious drawing of an inference, as an example will make clear. Supposing a physician is treating a woman patient, who is subject to a particular kind of spasm, in a hospital ward among a number of other patients. He will show no surprise if he finds one morning that this particular kind of hysterical attack has found imitators. He will merely say: ‘The other patients have seen it and copied it; it’s a case of psychical infection.’ That is true; but the psychical infection has occurred along some such lines as these. As a rule, patients know more about one another than the doctor does about any of them; and after the doctor’s visit is over they turn their attention to one another. Let us imagine that this patient had her attack on a particular day; then the others will quickly discover that it was caused by a letter from home, the revival of some unhappy love-affair, or some such thing. Their sympathy is aroused and they draw the following inference, though it fails to penetrate into consciousness: ‘If a cause like this can produce an attack like this, I may have the same kind of attack since I have the same grounds for having it.’ If this inference were capable of entering consciousness, it might possibly give rise to a fear of having the same kind of attack. But in fact the inference is made in a different psychical region, and consequently results in the actual realization of the dreaded symptom. Thus identification is not simple imitation but assimilation on the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a resemblance and is derived from a common element which remains in the unconscious.
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Identification is most frequently used in hysteria to express a common sexual element. A hysterical woman identifies herself in her symptoms most readily - though not exclusively - with people with whom she has had sexual relations or with people who have had sexual relations with the same people as herself. Linguistic usage takes this into account, for two lovers are spoken of as being ‘one’. In hysterical phantasies, just as in dreams, it is enough for purposes of identification that the subject should have thoughts of sexual relations without their having necessarily taken place in reality. Thus the patient whose dream I have been discussing was merely following the rules of hysterical processes of thought in expressing her jealousy of her friend (which incidentally she herself knew was unjustified) by taking her place in the dream and identifying herself with her by creating a symptom - the renounced wish. The process might be expressed verbally thus: my patient put herself in her friend’s place in the dream because her friend was taking my patient’s place with her husband and because she (my patient) wanted to take her friend’s place in her husband’s high opinion.¹
¹ I myself regret the insertion into my argument of excerpts from the psychopathology of hysteria. Their fragmentary presentation and detachment from their context cannot fail to detract from their enlightening effect. If, however, they serve to indicate the intimate connection between the topic of dreams and that of the psychoneuroses, they will have fulfilled the purpose for which they are inserted.
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A contradiction to my theory of dreams produced by another of my women patients (the cleverest of all my dreamers) was resolved more simply, but upon the same pattern: namely that the non-fulfilment of one wish meant the fulfilment of another. One day I had been explaining to her that dreams are fulfilments of wishes. Next day she brought me a dream in which she was travelling down with her mother-in-law to the place in the country where they were to spend their holidays together. Now I knew that she had violently rebelled against the idea of spending the summer near her mother-in-law and that a few days earlier she had successfully avoided the propinquity she dreaded by engaging rooms in a far distant resort. And now her dream had undone the solution she had wished for: was not this the sharpest possible contradiction of my theory that in dreams wishes are fulfilled? No doubt; and it was only necessary to follow the dream’s logical consequence in order to arrive at its interpretation. The dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled. But her wish that I might be wrong, which was fulfilled in connection with her summer holidays, related in fact to another and more serious matter. For at about the same time I had inferred from the material produced in her analysis that at a particular period of her life something must have occurred that was of importance in determining her illness. She had disputed this, since she had no recollection of it; but soon afterwards it had turned out that I was right. Thus her wish that I might be wrong, which was transformed into her dream of spending her holidays with her mother-in-law, corresponded to a well-justified wish that the events of which she was then becoming aware for the first time might never have occurred.
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I have ventured to interpret - without any analysis, but only by a guess - a small episode which occurred to a friend of mine who was in the same class as I was all through our career at a secondary school. One day he listened to a lecture which I gave before a small audience on the novel idea that dreams were wish-fulfilments. He went home and dreamt that he had lost all his cases (he was a barrister) and afterwards arraigned me on the subject. I evaded the issue by telling him that after all one can’t win all one’s cases. But to myself I thought: ‘Considering that for eight whole years I sat on the front bench as top of the class while he drifted about somewhere in the middle, he can hardly fail to nourish a wish, left over from his school-days, that some day or other I may come a complete cropper.’
A dream of a gloomier kind was also brought up against me by a patient as an objection to the theory of wishful dreams.
The patient, who was a young girl, began thus: ‘As you will remember, my sister has only one boy left now - Karl; she lost his elder brother, Otto, while I was still living with her. Otto was my favourite; I more or less brought him up. I’m fond of the little one too, but of course not nearly so fond as I was of the one who died. Last night, then, I dreamt that I saw Karl lying before me dead. He was lying in his little coffin with his hands folded and with candles all around - in fact just like little Otto, whose death was such a blow to me. Now tell me, what can that mean? You know me. Am I such a wicked person that I can wish my sister to lose the one child she still has? Or does the dream mean that I would rather Karl were dead than Otto whom I was so much fonder of?
I assured her that this last interpretation was out of question. And after reflecting a little I was able to give her the correct interpretation of the dream, which she afterwards confirmed. I was able to do so because I was familiar with the whole of the dreamer’s previous history.
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The girl had early been left an orphan and had been brought up in the house of a much older sister. Among the friends who visited at the house was a man who made a lasting impression on her heart. For a time it had seemed as though her scarcely acknowledged relations with him would lead to marriage; but this happy outcome was brought to nothing by her sister, whose motives were never fully explained. After the breach the man ceased to visit the house; and shortly after the death of little Otto, on to whom she had meanwhile turned her affection, my patient herself set up on her own. She did not succeed, however, in freeing herself from her attachment to her sister’s friend. Her pride bade her avoid him; but she was unable to transfer her love to any of the other admirers who presented themselves later. Whenever it was announced that the object of her affections, who was by profession a literary man, was to give a lecture anywhere, she was invariably in the audience; and she took every possible opportunity of seeing him from a distance on neutral ground. I remembered that she had told me the day before that the Professor was going to a particular concert and that she intended to go to it as well so as to enjoy a glimpse of him once more. That had been on the day before the dream, and the concert was to take place on the day on which she told me the dream. It was therefore easy for me to construct the correct interpretation, and I asked her whether she could think of anything that happened after little Otto’s death. She answered at once: ‘Of course! the Professor came to see us again after a long absence, and I saw him once more beside little Otto’s coffin.’ This was exactly what I had expected, and I interpreted the dream in this way: ‘If now the other boy were to die, the same thing would happen. You would spend the day with your sister and the Professor would be certain to come to offer his condolences, so that you would see him again under the same conditions as the other time. The dream means no more than your wish to see him once more, a wish which you are inwardly struggling against. I know you have a ticket for to-day’s concert in your pocket. Your dream was a dream of impatience: it anticipated the glimpse you are to have of him to-day by a few hours.’
In order to conceal her wish, she had evidently chosen a situation in which such wishes are usually suppressed, a situation in which one is so much filled with grief that one has no thought of love. Yet it is quite possible that even in the real situation of which the dream was an exact replica, beside the coffin of the elder boy whom she had loved still more, she may have been unable to suppress her tender feelings for the visitor who had been absent so long.
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A similar dream of another woman patient had a different explanation. When she was young the had been remarkable for her ready wit and cheerful disposition; and these characteristics were still to be seen, at all events in the ideas that occurred to her during the treatment. In the course of a longish dream, this lady imagined that she saw her only, fifteen-year-old daughter lying dead ‘in a case.’ She had half a mind to use the scene as an objection to the wish-fulfilment theory, though she herself suspected that the detail of the ‘case’ must point the way to another view of the dream.¹ In the course of the analysis she recalled that at a party the evening before there had been some talk about the English word ‘box’ and the various ways in which it could be translated into German - such as ‘Schachtel’, ‘Loge’, ‘Kasten’, ‘Ohrfeige’, and so on. Other portions of the same dream enabled us to discover further that she had guessed that the English ‘box’ was related to the German ‘Büchse’, and that she had then been plagued by a recollection that ‘Büchse’ is used as a vulgar term for the female genitals. If some allowance was made for the limits of her knowledge of topographical anatomy, it might be presumed, therefore, that the child lying in the case meant an embryo in the womb. After being enlightened up to this point, she no longer denied that the dream-picture corresponded to a wish of hers. Like so many young married women, she had been far from pleased when she became pregnant; and more than once she had allowed herself to wish that the child in her womb might die. Indeed, in a fit of rage after a violent scene with her husband, she had beaten with her fists on her body so as to hit the child inside it. Thus the dead child was in fact the fulfilment of a wish, but of a wish that had been put aside fifteen years earlier. It is scarcely to be wondered at if a wish that was fulfilled after such a long delay was not recognized. Too much had changed in the interval.
¹ Like the smoked salmon in the dream of the abandoned supper party.
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I shall have to return to the group of dreams to which the last two examples belong (dreams dealing with the death of relatives of whom the dreamer is fond) when I come to consider ‘typical’ dreams. I shall then be able to show from further instances that, in spite of their unwished for contents, all such dreams must be interpreted as wish-fulfilments.
I owe the following dream, not to a patient, but to an intelligent jurist of my acquaintance. He told it to me, once again, in order to restrain me from rash generalizing on the theory of wishful dreams. ‘I dreamt’, said my informant, ‘that I came up to my house with a lady on my arm. A closed carriage was standing in front of it and a man came up to me, showed me his credentials as a police officer and requested me to follow him. I asked him to allow me a little time to put my affairs in order. Can you suppose that I have a wish to be arrested?’ - Of course not, I could only agree. Do you happen to know the charge on which you were arrested? - ‘Yes, for infanticide, I believe.’ - Infanticide? But surely you’re aware that that’s a crime that can only be committed by a mother on a new-born child? - ‘Quite true.’¹ - And what were the circumstances in which you had the dream? What happened on the previous evening? - ‘I would prefer not to tell you. It’s a delicate matter.’ - Nevertheless I shall have to hear it; otherwise we shall have to give up the idea of interpreting the dream. - ‘Very well then, listen. I didn’t spend last night at home but with a lady who means a great deal to me. When we woke up in the morning there was a further passage between us, after which I went to sleep again and had the dream I described to you.’ - Is she a married woman? - ‘Yes.’ - And you don’t want to have a child by her? - ‘Oh, no; that might give us away.’ - So you don’t practice normal intercourse? - ‘I take the precaution of withdrawing before ejaculation.’ - I think I may assume that you had used this device several times during the night, and that after repeating it in the morning you felt a little uncertain whether you had carried it out success fully. - ‘That’s possible, no doubt.’ - In that case your dream was the fulfilment of a wish. It gave you a reassurance that you had not procreated a child, or, what amounts to the same thing, that you had killed a child. The intermediate links are easily indicated. You remember that a few days ago we were talking about marriage difficulties and how inconsistent it is that there should be no objection to carrying out intercourse in such a way that no fertilization takes place, whereas any interference when once the ovum and semen have come together and a foetus has been formed is punished as a crime. We went on to recall the mediaeval controversy over the exact point of time at which the soul enters the foetus, since it is not until after that that the concept of murder becomes applicable. No doubt, too, you know Lenau’s gruesome poem in which child murder and child prevention are equated. - ‘Oddly enough I happened to think of Lenau this morning, quite by chance, as it seemed.’ - An after-echo of your dream. And now I can show you another incidental wish-fulfilment contained in your dream. You came up to your house with the lady on your arm. Thus you were bringing her home, instead of spending the night in her house as you did in reality. There may be more than one reason why the wish-fulfilment which constitutes the core of the dream was disguised in such a disagreeable form. Perhaps you have learned from my paper on the aetiology of anxiety neurosis that I regard coitus interruptus as one of the aetiological factors in the development of neurotic anxiety? It would tally with this if, after carrying out sexual intercourse in this way several times, you were left in an uneasy mood which afterwards became an element in the construction of your dream. Moreover, you made use of this moodiness to help disguise the wish-fulfilment. Incidentally, your reference to infanticide has not been explained. How did you come to light on this specifically feminine crime? - ‘I must admit that some years ago I became involved in an occurrence of that kind. I was responsible for a girl’s trying to avoid the consequence of a love-affair with me by means of an abortion. I had nothing to do with her carrying out her intention, but for a long time I naturally felt very nervous in case the business came out.’ - I quite understand that. This recollection provides a second reason why you must have been worried by your suspicion that your device might have gone wrong.
¹ It often happens that the account first given of a dream is incomplete and that the memory of the omitted portions only emerges in the course of analysis. These subsequently added portions regularly turn out to provide the key to the dream’s interpretation. Cf. the discussion below on the forgetting of dreams.
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A young physician who heard me describe this dream during a course of lectures must have been greatly struck by it, for he promptly re-dreamt it, applying the same pattern of thought to another theme. The day before, he had sent in his income tax return, which he had filled in perfectly honestly, since he had very little to declare. He then had a dream that an acquaintance of his had come to him from a meeting of the tax commissioners and informed him that, while no objection had been raised to any of the other tax returns, general suspicion had been aroused by his and a heavy fine had been imposed on him. The dream was a poorly disguised fulfilment of his wish to be known as a doctor with a large income. It recalls the well-known story of the girl who was advised not to accept a suitor because he had a violent temper and would be sure to beat her if they were married. ‘If only he’d begun beating me already!’ the girl replied. Her wish to be married was so intense that she was ready to take the threatened unpleasantness into the bargain, and even went so far as to turn it into a wish.
The very frequent dreams, which appear to stand in contradiction to my theory because their subject-matter is the frustration of a wish or the occurrence of something clearly unwished-for, may be brought together under the heading of ‘counter-wish dreams’. If these dreams are considered as a whole, it seems to me possible to trace them back to two principles; I have not yet mentioned one of these, although it plays a large part not only in people’s dreams but in their lives as well. One of the two motive forces leading to such dreams is the wish that I may be wrong. These dreams appear regularly in the course of my treatments when a patient is in a state of resistance to me; and I can count almost certainly on provoking one of them after I have explained to a patient for the first time my theory that dreams are fulfilments of wishes.¹ Indeed, it is to be expected that the same thing will happen to some of the readers of the present book: they will be quite ready to have one of their wishes frustrated in a dream if only their wish that I may be wrong can be fulfilled.
¹ [Footnote added 1911:] During the last few years similar ‘counter-wish dreams’ have repeatedly been reported to me by people who have heard me lecturing, as a reaction to first making the acquaintance of my ‘wishful’ theory of dreams.
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The same point is illustrated by one last dream of the kind which I will quote from a patient under treatment. This was the dream of a girl who had succeeded in her struggle to continue her treatment with me against the will of her relatives and of the authorities whose opinions had been consulted. She dreamt that her people forbade her to go on coming to me. She then reminded me of a promise I had given her that if necessary I would continue the treatment without a fee. To this I replied: ‘I cannot make any allowances in money matters.’ It must be admitted that it was not easy to point to the wish-fulfilment in this instance. But in all such cases one discovers a second riddle, the solution of which helps one to solve the original one. What was the origin of the words she put into my mouth? Of course I had said nothing of the kind to her; but one of her brothers, and the one by whom she was most influenced, had been good enough to attribute this sentiment to me. The dream was thus intended to prove her brother right. And it was not only in her dreams that she insisted on his being right; the same idea dominated her whole life and it was the motive of her illness.
A dream which seems at first sight to put special difficulties in the way of the wish-fulfilment theory was dreamt and interpreted by a physician, and reported by August Stärcke (1911): ‘I saw upon my left index-finger the first indication of syphilis on the terminal phalange.’ The reflection that, apart from the dream’s unwished-for content, it appears to be clear and coherent, might dissuade us from analysing it. If, however, we are prepared to face the trouble involved, we shall find that ‘Primäraffekt’ was equivalent to a ‘prima affectio’ (a first love), and that the repellent ulcer turned out, to quote Stärcke’s words, to ‘stand for wish-fulfilments that were highly charged with emotion’.
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The second motive for counter-wish dreams is so obvious that it is easy to overlook it, as I did myself for some considerable time. There is a masochistic component in the sexual constitution of many people, which arises from the reversal of an aggressive, sadistic component into its opposite. Those who find their pleasure, not in having physical pain inflicted on them, but in humiliation and mental torture, may be described as ‘mental masochists’. It will at once be seen that people of this kind can have counter-wish dreams and unpleasurable dreams, which are none the less wish-fulfilments since they satisfy their masochistic inclinations. I will quote one such dream, produced by a young man who in his earlier years had greatly tormented his elder brother, to whom he had a homosexual attachment. His character having undergone a fundamental change, he had the following dream, which was in three pieces: I. His elder brother was chaffing him. II. Two grown men were caressing each other with a homosexual purpose. III. His brother had sold the business of which he himself had looked forward to becoming the director. He awoke from the last dream with the most distressing feelings. Nevertheless it was a masochistic wishful dream, and might be translated thus: ‘It would serve me right if my brother were to confront me with this sale as a punishment for all the torments he had to put up with from me.
I hope that the foregoing examples will be enough (till the next objection is raised) to make it seem plausible that even dreams with a distressing content are to be construed as wish-fulfilments. Nor will anyone regard it as a chance coincidence that the interpretation of these dreams has brought us up each time against topics about which people are loth to speak or to think. The distressing feeling aroused by these dreams is no doubt identical with the repugnance which tends (usually with success) to restrain us from discussing or mentioning such topics, and which each of us has to overcome if we nevertheless find ourselves compelled to embark on them. But the unpleasurable feeling which thus recurs in dreams does not disprove the existence of a wish. Everyone has wishes that he would prefer not to disclose to other people, and wishes that he will not admit even to himself. On the other hand, we are justified in linking the unpleasurable character of all these dreams with the fact of dream-distortion. And we are justified in concluding that these dreams are distorted and the wish-fulfilment contained in them disguised to the point of being unrecognizable precisely owing to the repugnance felt for the topic of the dream or for the wish derived from it and to an intention to repress them. The distortion in the dream is thus shown in fact to be an act of the censorship. We shall be taking into account everything that has been brought to light by our analysis of unpleasurable dreams if we make the following modification in the formula in which we have sought to express the nature of dreams: a dream is a (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.¹
¹ [Footnote added 1914:] A great living writer, who, as I have been told, refuses to hear anything of psycho-analysis or the interpretation of dreams, has independently arrived at an almost identical formula for the nature of dreams. He speaks of a dream as ‘the unauthorized emergence of suppressed desires and wishes, under false features and name’. (Spitteler, 1914, 1.)
[Added 1911:] I shall anticipate questions which will be discussed later by quoting at this point Otto Rank’s enlargement and modification of the above basic formula: ‘On the basis and with the help of repressed, infantile sexual material, dreams regularly represent present-day, and also as a rule erotic, wishes as fulfilled, in a veiled and symbolically disguised shape.’ (Rank, 1910.)
[Added 1925:] I have nowhere stated that I adopted Rank’s formula as my own. The shorter version, as stated in the text above, seems to me adequate. But the mere fact of my having mentioned Rank’s modification has been enough to unleash countless accusations against psycho-analysis of having asserted that ‘all dreams have a sexual content’.
If this sentence is taken in the sense in which it was intended, it merely shows the unconscientious manner in which critics are accustomed to perform their functions, and the readiness with which opponents overlook the clearest statements if they do not give scope to their aggressive inclinations. For only a few pages earlier I had mentioned the variety of the wishes whose fulfilments are to be found in children’s dreams (wishes to take part in an excursion or a sail on a lake, or to make up for a missed meal, and so on ); and in other passages I had discussed dreams of hunger, dreams stimulated by thirst or by excretory needs, and dreams of mere convenience. Even Rank himself made no absolute assertion. The words he used were ‘also as a rule erotic wishes’, and what he said can be amply confirmed in the dreams of most adults.
The situation would be different if ‘sexual’ was being used by my critics in the sense in which it is now commonly employed in psycho-analysis - in the sense of ‘Eros’. But my opponents are scarcely likely to have had in mind the interesting problem of whether all dreams are created by ‘libidinal’ instinctual forces as contrasted with ‘destructive’ ones.
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There remain to be discussed anxiety-dreams as a special sub-species of dreams with a distressing content. The notion of regarding these as wishful dreams will meet with very little sympathy from the unenlightened. Nevertheless I can deal with anxiety-dreams very briefly at this point. They do not present us with a new aspect of the dream-problem; what they face us with is the whole question of neurotic anxiety. The anxiety that we feel in a dream is only apparently explained by the dream’s content. If we submit the content of the dream to analysis, we find that the anxiety in the dream is no better justified by the dream’s content than, let us say, the anxiety in a phobia is justified by the idea to which the phobia relates. No doubt it is true, for instance, that it is possible to fall out of a window and that there is therefore reason for exercising a certain degree of caution in the neighbourhood of a window; but we cannot see why the anxiety felt in a phobia on this subject is so great and pursues the patient far beyond its occasion. We find then that the same thing may be validly asserted both of phobias and of anxiety-dreams: in both cases the anxiety is only superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it; it originates from another source.
Since this intimate connection exists between anxiety in dreams and in neuroses, in discussing the former I must refer to the latter. In a short paper on anxiety-neurosis (Freud, 1895b), I argued some time ago that neurotic anxiety is derived from sexual life and corresponds to libido which has been diverted from its purpose and has found no employment. Since then this formula has met the test of time; and it enables us now to infer from it that anxiety-dreams are dreams with a sexual content, the libido belonging to which has been transformed into anxiety. There will be an opportunity later to support this assertion by the analysis of some neurotic patients’ dreams. In the course, too, of a further attempt to arrive at a theory of dreams, I shall have occasion to discuss once more the determinants of anxiety-dreams and their compatibility with the theory of wish-fulfilment.
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CHAPTER V
THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS
When the analysis of the dream of Irma’s injection showed us that a dream could be the fulfilment of a wish, our interest was at first wholly absorbed by the question of whether we had come upon a universal characteristic of dreams, and for the time being we stifled our curiosity about any other scientific problems that may have arisen during the work of the interpretation. Having followed one path to its end, we may now retrace our steps and choose another starting-point for our rambles through the problems of dream-life: for the time being, we may leave the topic of wish-fulfilment on one side, though we are still far from having exhausted it.
Now that the application of our procedure for interpreting dreams enables us to disclose a latent content in them which is of far greater significance than their manifest one, the pressing task at once arises of re-examining one by one the various problems raised by dreams, to see whether we may not now be in a position to find satisfactory solutions for the conundrums and contradictions which seemed intractable so long as we were only acquainted with the manifest content.
In the first chapter I have given a detailed account of the views of the authorities on the relation of dreams with waking life and on the origin of the material of dreams. No doubt, too, my readers will recall the three characteristics of memory in dreams, which have been so often remarked on but which have never been explained:
(1) Dreams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days. Cf. Robert, Strümpell, Hildebrandt and Hallam and Weed.
(2) They make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed.
(3) They have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.¹
All these peculiarities shown by dreams in their choice of material have, of course, only been studied by earlier writers in connection with their manifest content.
¹ The view adopted by Robert that the purpose of dreams is to unburden our memory of the useless impressions of daytime is plainly no longer tenable if indifferent memory images from our childhood appear at all frequently in dreams. Otherwise we could only conclude that dreams perform their function most inadequately.
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(A)
RECENT AND INDIFFERENT MATERIAL IN DREAMS
If I examine my own experience on the subject of the origin of the elements included in the content of dreams, I must begin with an assertion that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous day. This view is confirmed by every dream that I look into, whether my own or anyone else’s. Bearing this fact in mind, I am able, on occasion, to begin a dream’s interpretation by looking for the event of the previous day which set it in motion; in many instances, indeed, this is the easiest method. In the two dreams which I have analysed in detail in my last chapters (the dream of Irma’s injection and the dream of my uncle with a yellow beard) the connection with the previous day is so obvious as to require no further comment. But in order to show the regularity with which such a connection can be traced, I will go through the records of my own dreams and give some instances. I shall only quote enough of the dream to indicate the source we are looking for:
(1) I was visiting a house into which I had difficulty in gaining admittance . . .; in the meantime I kept a lady WAITING.
Source: I had had a conversation with a female relative the evening before in which I had told her that she would have to wait for a purchase she wanted to make till . . . etc.
(2) I had written a MONOGRAPH on certain (indistinct) species of plant.
Source: That morning I had seen a monograph on the genus Cyclamen in the window of a book-shop.
(3) I saw two women in the street, A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, the latter of whom was a patient of mine.
Source: One of my patients had explained to me the previous evening the difficulties her mother was putting in the way of her continuing her treatment.
(4) I took out a subscription in S. and R.’s bookshop for a periodical costing TWENTY FLORINS a year.
Source: My wife had reminded me the day before that I still owed her twenty florins for the weekly household expenses.
(5) I received a COMMUNICATION from the Social Democratic COMMITTEE, treating me as though I were a MEMBER.
Source: I had received communications simultaneously from the Liberal Election Committee and from the Council of the Humanitarian League, of which latter body I was in fact a member.
(6) A man standing on A CLIFF IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA, IN THE STYLE OF BÖCKLIN.
Source: Dreyfus on the Ile di Diable; I had had news at the same time from my relatives in England, etc.
The question may be raised whether the point of contact with the dream is invariably the events of the immediately preceding day or whether it may go back to impressions derived from a rather more extensive period of the most recent past. It is unlikely that this question involves any matter of theoretical importance; nevertheless I am inclined to decide in favour of the exclusiveness of the claims of the day immediately preceding the dream - which I shall speak of as the ‘dream-day’. Whenever it has seemed at first that the source of a dream was an impression two or three days earlier, closer enquiry has convinced me that the impression had been recalled on the previous day and thus that it was possible to show that a reproduction of the impression, occurring on the previous day, could be inserted between the day of the original event and the time of the dream; moreover it has been possible to indicate the contingency on the previous day which may have led to the recalling of the older impression.
On the other hand I do not feel convinced that there is any regular interval of biological significance between the instigating daytime impression and its recurrence in the dream. (Swoboda, 1904, has mentioned an initial period of eighteen hours in this connection.)¹
¹ [Footnote added 1911:] As I have mentioned in a postscript to my first chapter (p. 599 f.), Hermann Swoboda has made a far-reaching application to the mental field of the biological periodic intervals of 23 and 28 days discovered by Wilhelm Fliess. He has asserted in particular that these periods determine the emergence of the elements which appear in dreams. No essential modification in dream-interpretation would be involved if this fact were to be established; it would merely provide a fresh source of origin of dream-material. I have, however, recently made some investigations upon my own dreams, to test now far the ‘theory of periodicity’ is applicable to them. For this purpose I chose some specially outstanding dream-elements the time of whose appearance in real life could be determined with certainty.
I. DREAM OF OCTOBER 1ST-2ND, 1910
(Fragment) . . . Somewhere in Italy. Three daughters were showing me some small curios, as though we were in an antique shop, and were sitting on my lap. I commented on one of the objects: ‘Why, you got that from me’, and saw plainly before me a small profile relief with the clear-cut features of Savonarola.
When had I last seen a portrait of Savonarola? My travel-diary proved that I had been in Florence on September 4th and 5th. While I was there I thought I would show my travelling companion the medallion bearing the fanatical monk’s features, let into the pavement of the Piazza della Signoria, which marks the place where he was burned. I pointed it out to him, I believe, on the morning of the 3rd. Between this impression and its reappearance in the dream 27 + 1 days elapsed - Fliess’s ‘female period’. Unluckily for the conclusiveness of this example, however, I must add that on the actual ‘dream-day’ I had a visit (for the first time since my return) from a capable but gloomy-looking medical colleague of mine whom I had many years before nick-named ‘Rabbi Savonarola’. He introduced a patient to me who was suffering from the effects of an accident to the Pontebba express, in which I myself had travelled a week earlier, and my thoughts were thus led back to my recent visit to Italy. The appearance in the content of the dream of the outstanding element ‘Savonarola’ is thus accounted for by my colleague’s visit on the dream-day; and the interval of 28 days is deprived of its significance.
II. DREAM OF OCTOBER 10TH-11TH, 1910
I was once more working at chemistry in the University laboratory. Hofrat L. invited me to come somewhere and walked in front of me in the corridor, holding a lamp or some other instrument before him in his uplifted hand and with his head stretched forward in a peculiar attitude, with a clear-sighted (? far-sighted) look about him. Then we crossed an open space. . . . (The remainder was forgotten.)
The most outstanding point in the content of this dream was the way in which Hofrat L. held the lamp (or magnifying glass ) before him, with his eyes peering into the distance. It was many years since I had last seen him; but I knew at once that he was only a substitute figure in the place of someone else, someone greater than he - Archimedes, whose statue stands near the Fountain of Arethusa at Syracuse in that very attitude, holding up his burning-glass and peering out towards the besieging army of the Romans. When did I see that statue for the first (and last) time? According to my diary it was on the evening of September 17th; and between then and the time of the dream 13 + 10 = 23 days had elapsed - Fliess’s ‘male period’.
Unfortunately, when we go into the interpretation of this dream in greater detail, we once again find that the coincidence loses some of its conclusiveness. The exciting cause of the dream was the news I received on the dream-day that the clinic, in whose lecture room I was able by courtesy to deliver my lectures, was shortly to be removed to another locality. I took it for granted that its new situation would be very out of the way and told myself that in that case I might just as well not have a lecture room at my disposal at all. From that point my thoughts must have gone back to the beginning of my career as University Lecturer when I in fact had no lecture room and when my efforts to get hold of one met with little response from the powerfully placed Hofrats and Professors. In those circumstances I had gone to L., who at that time held the office of Dean of the Faculty and who I believed was friendlily disposed to me, to complain of my troubles. He promised to help me, but I beard nothing more from him. In the dream he was Archimedes, giving me a pousuv [footing] and himself leading me to the new locality. Anyone who is an adept at interpretation will guess that the dream-thoughts were not exactly free from ideas of vengeance and self-importance. It seems clear, in any case, that without this exciting cause Archimedes would scarcely have found his way into my dream that night; nor am I convinced that the powerful and still recent impression made on me by the statue in Syracuse might not have produced its effect after some different interval of time.
III. DREAM OF OCTOBER 2ND-3rd, 1910
(Fragment) . . . Something about Professor Oser, who had drawn up the menu for me himself, which had a very soothing effect. . . . (Some more that was forgotten.)
This dream was a reaction to a digestive disturbance that day, which made me consider whether I should go to one of my colleagues to have a dietary prescribed for me. My reason for choosing Oser for that purpose, who had died in the course of the summer, went back to the death of another University teacher whom I greatly admired, which had occurred shortly before (on October 1st). When had Oser died? and when had I heard of his death? According to a paragraph in the papers he had died on August 22nd. I had been in Holland at that time and had my Vienna newspaper sent on to me regularly; so that I must have read of his death on August 24th or 25th. But here the interval no longer corresponds to either period. It amounts to 7 + 30 + 2 = 39 days or possibly 40 days. I could not recall having spoken or thought of Oser in the meantime.
Intervals such as this one, which cannot be fitted into the theory of periodicity without further manipulation, occur far more frequently in my dreams than intervals which can be so fitted. The only relation which I find occurs with regularity is the relation which I have insisted upon in the text and which connects the dream with some impression of the dream-day.
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Havelock Ellis, who has also given some attention to this point, declares that he was unable to find any such periodicity in his dreams in spite of looking for it. He records a dream of being in Spain and of wanting to go to a place called Daraus, Varaus or Zaraus. On waking he could not recall any such place-name, and put the dream on one side. A few months later he discovered that Zaraus was in fact the name of a station on the line between San Sebastian and Bilbao, through which his train had passed 250 days before he had the dream.
I believe, then, that the instigating agent of every dream is to be found among the experiences which one has not yet ‘slept on’. Thus the relations of a dream’s content to impressions of the most recent past (with the single exception of the day immediately preceding the night of the dream) differ in no respect from its relations to impressions dating from any remoter period. Dreams can select their material from any part of the dreamer’s life, provided only that there is a train of thought linking the experience of the dream-day (the ‘recent’ impressions) with the earlier ones.
But why this preference for recent impressions? We shall form some notion on this point, if we submit one of the dreams in the series I have just quoted to a fuller analysis. For this purpose I shall choose the
DREAM OF THE BOTANICAL MONOGRAPH
I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the plant, as though it had been taken from a herbarium.
ANALYSIS
That morning I had seen a new book in the window of a book-shop, bearing the title The Genus Cyclamen - evidently a monograph on that plant.
Cyclamens, I reflected, were my wife’s favourite flowers and I reproached myself for so rarely remembering to bring her flowers, which was what she liked. - The subject of ‘bringing flowers’ recalled an anecdote which I had recently repeated to a circle of friends and which I had used as evidence in favour of my theory that forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and that it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets. A young woman was accustomed to receiving a bouquet of flowers from her husband on her birthday. One year this token of his affection failed to appear, and she burst into tears. Her husband came in and had no idea why she was crying till she told him that to-day was her birthday. He clasped his hand to his head and exclaimed: ‘I’m so sorry, but I’d quite forgotten. I’ll go out at once and fetch your flowers.’ But she was not to be consoled; for she recognized that her husband’s forgetfulness was a proof that she no longer had the same place in his thoughts as she had formerly. - This lady, Frau L., had met my wife two days before I had the dream, had told her that she was feeling quite well and enquired after me. Some years ago she had come to me for treatment.
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I now made a fresh start. Once, I recalled, I really had written something in the nature of a monograph on a plant, namely a dissertation on the coca-plant, which had drawn Karl Koller’s attention to the anaesthetic properties of cocaine. I had myself indicated this application of the alkaloid in my published paper, but I had not been thorough enough to pursue the matter further. This reminded me that on the morning of the day after the dream - I had not found time to interpret it till the evening - I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream. If ever I got glaucoma, I had thought, I should travel to Berlin and get myself operated on, incognito, in my friend’s house, by a surgeon recommended by him. The operating surgeon, who would have no idea of my identity, would boast once again of how easily such operations could be per formed since the introduction of cocaine; and I should not give the slightest hint that I myself had had a share in the discovery. This phantasy had led on to reflections of how awkward it is, when all is said and done, for a physician to ask for medical treatment for himself from his professional colleagues. The Berlin eye-surgeon would not know me, and I should be able to pay his fees like anyone else. It was not until I had recalled this day-dream that I realized that the recollection of a specific event lay behind it. Shortly after Koller’s discovery, my father had in fact been attacked by glaucoma; my friend Dr. Königstein, the ophthalmic surgeon, had operated on him; while Dr. Koller had been in charge of the cocaine anaesthesia and had commented on the fact that this case had brought together all of the three men who had had a share in the introduction of cocaine.
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My thoughts then went on to the occasion when I had last been reminded of this business of the cocaine. It had been a few days earlier, when I had been looking at a copy of a Festschrift in which grateful pupils had celebrated the jubilee of their teacher and laboratory director. Among the laboratory’s claims to distinction which were enumerated in this book I had seen a mention of the fact that Koller had made his discovery there of the anaesthetic properties of cocaine. I then suddenly perceived that my dream was connected with an event of the previous evening. I had walked home precisely with Dr. Königstein and had got into conversation with him about a matter which never fails to excite my feelings whenever it is raised. While I was talking to him in the entrance-hall, Professor Gärtner and his wife had joined us; and I could not help congratulating them both on their blooming looks. But Professor Gärtner was one of the authors of the Festschrift I have just mentioned, and may well have reminded me of it. Moreover, the Frau L., whose disappointment on her birthday I described earlier, was mentioned - though only, it is true, in another connection - in my conversation with Dr. Königstein.
I will make an attempt at interpreting the other determinants of the content of the dream as well. There was a dried specimen of the plant included in the monograph, as though it had been a herbarium. This led me to a memory from my secondary school. Our headmaster once called together the boys from the higher forms and handed over the school’s herbarium to them to be looked through and cleaned. Some small worms - book worms - had found their way into it. He does not seem to have had much confidence in my helpfulness, for he handed me only a few sheets. These, as I could still recall, included some Crucifers. I never had a specially intimate contact with botany. In my preliminary examination in botany I was also given a Crucifer to identify - and failed to do so. My prospects would not have been too bright, if I had not been helped out by my theoretical knowledge. I went on from the Cruciferae to the Compositae. It occurred to me that artichokes were Compositae, and indeed I might fairly have called them my favourite flowers. Being more generous than I am, my wife often brought me back these favourite flowers of mine from the market.
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I saw the monograph which I had written lying before me. This again led me back to something. I had had a letter from my friend in Berlin the day before in which he had shown his power of visualization: ‘I am very much occupied with your dream-book. I see it lying finished before me and I see myself turning over its pages. How much I envied him his gift as a seer! If only I could have seen it lying finished before me!
The folded coloured plate. While I was a medical student I was the constant victim of an impulse only to learn things out of monographs. In spite of my limited means, I succeeded in getting hold of a number of volumes of the proceedings of medical societies and was enthralled by their coloured plates. I was proud of my hankering for thoroughness. When I myself had begun to publish papers, I had been obliged to make my own drawings to illustrate them and I remembered that one of them had been so wretched that a friendly colleague had jeered at me over it. There followed, I could not quite make out how, a recollection from very early youth. It had once amused my father to hand over a book with coloured plates (an account of a journey through Persia) for me and my eldest sister to destroy. Not easy to justify from the educational point of view! I had been five years old at the time and my sister not yet three; and the picture of the two of us blissfully pulling the book to pieces (leaf by leaf, like an artichoke, I found myself saying) was almost the only plastic memory that I retained from that period of my life. Then, when I became a student, I had developed a passion for collecting and owning books, which was analogous to my liking for learning out of monographs: a favourite hobby. (The idea of ‘favourite’ had already appeared in connection with cyclamens and artichokes.) I had become a book-worm. I had always, from the time I first began to think about myself, referred this first passion of mine back to the childhood memory I have mentioned. Or rather, I had recognized that the childhood scene was a ‘screen memory’ for my later bibliophile propensities.¹ And I had early discovered, of course, that passions often lead to sorrow. When I was seventeen I had run up a largish account at the bookseller’s and had nothing to meet it with; and my father had scarcely taken it as an excuse that my inclinations might have chosen a worse outlet. The recollection of this experience from the later years of my youth at once brought back to my mind the conversation with my friend Dr. Königstein. For in the course of it we had discussed the same question of my being blamed for being too much absorbed in my favourite hobbies.
¹ Cf. my paper on screen memories.
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For reasons with which we are not concerned, I shall not pursue the interpretation of this dream any further, but will merely indicate the direction in which it lay. In the course of the work of analysis I was reminded of my conversation with Dr. Königstein, and I was brought to it from more than one direction. When I take into account the topics touched upon in that conversation, the meaning of the dream becomes intelligible to me. All the trains of thought starting from the dream - the thoughts about my wife’s and my own favourite flowers, about cocaine, about the awkwardness of medical treatment among colleagues, about my preference for studying monographs and about my neglect of certain branches of science such as botany - all of these trains of thought, when they were further pursued, led ultimately to one or other of the many ramifications of my conversation with Dr. Königstein. Once again the dream, like the one we first analysed - the dream of Irma’s injection - turns out to have been in the nature of a self-justification, a plea on behalf of my own rights. Indeed, it carried the subject that was raised in the earlier dream a stage further and discussed it with reference to fresh material that had arisen in the interval between the two dreams. Even the apparently indifferent form in which the dream was couched turns out to have had significance. What it meant was: ‘After all, I’m the man who wrote the valuable and memorable paper (on cocaine)', just as in the earlier dream I had said on my behalf: ‘I’m a conscientious and hard-working student.’ In both cases what I was insisting was: ‘I may allow myself to do this.’ There is, however, no need for me to carry the interpretation of the dream any further, since my only purpose in reporting it was to illustrate by an example the relation between the content of a dream and the experience of the previous day which provoked it. So long as I was aware only of the dream’s manifest content, it appeared to be related only to a single event of the dream-day. But when the analysis was carried out, a second source of the dream emerged in another experience of the same day. The first of these two impressions with which the dream was connected was an indifferent one, a subsidiary circumstance: I had seen a book in a shop-window whose title attracted my attention for a moment but whose subject-matter could scarcely be of interest to me. The second experience had a high degree of psychical importance: I had had a good hour’s lively conversation with my friend the eye-surgeon; in the course of it I had given him some information which was bound to affect both of us closely, and I had had memories stirred up in me which had drawn my attention to a great variety of internal stresses in my own mind. Moreover, the conversation had been interrupted before its conclusion because we had been joined by acquaintances.
We must now ask what was the relation of the two impressions of the dream-day to each other and to the dream of the subsequent night. In the manifest content of the dream only the indifferent impression was alluded to, which seems to confirm the notion that dreams have a preference for taking up unimportant details of waking life. All the strands of the interpretation, on the other hand, led to the important impression, to the one which had justifiably stirred my feelings. If the sense of the dream is judged, as it can only rightly be, by its latent content as revealed by the analysis, a new and significant fact is unexpectedly brought to light. The conundrum of why dreams are concerned only with worthless fragments of waking life seems to have lost all its meaning; nor can it any longer be maintained that waking life is not pursued further in dreams and that dreams are thus psychical activity wasted upon foolish material. The contrary is true: our dream-thoughts are dominated by the same material that has occupied us during the day and we only bother to dream of things which have given us cause for reflection in the daytime.
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Why is it, then, that, though the occasion of my dreaming was a daytime impression by which I had been justifiably stirred, I nevertheless actually dreamt of something indifferent? The most obvious explanation, no doubt, is that we are once more faced by one of the phenomena of dream-distortion, which in my last chapter I traced to a psychical force acting as a censorship. My recollection of the monograph on the genus Cyclamen would thus serve the purpose of being an allusion to the conversation with my friend, just as the ‘smoked salmon’ in the dream of the abandoned supper-party served as an allusion to the dreamer’s thought of her woman friend. The only question is as to the intermediate links which enabled the impression of the monograph to serve as an allusion to the conversation with the eye-surgeon, since at first sight there is no obvious connection between them. In the example of the abandoned supper-party the connection was given at once: ‘smoked salmon’, being the friend’s favourite dish, was an immediate constituent of the group of ideas which were likely to be aroused in the dreamer’s mind by the personality of her friend. In this later example there were two detached impressions which at a first glance only had in common the fact of their having occurred on the same day: I had caught sight of the monograph in the morning and had had the conversation the same evening. The analysis enabled us to solve the problem as follows: connections of this kind, when they are not present in the first instance, are woven retrospectively between the ideational content of one impression and that of the other. I have already drawn attention to the intermediate links in the present case by the words I have italicized in my record of the analysis. If there had been no influences from another quarter, the idea of the monograph on the Cyclamen would only, I imagine, have led to the idea of its being my wife’ s favourite flower, and possibly also to Frau L.’s absent bouquet. I scarcely think that these background thoughts would have sufficed to evoke a dream. As we are told in Hamlet:
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave
To tell us this.
But, lo and behold, I was reminded in the analysis that the man who interrupted our conversation was called Gärtner and that I had thought his wife looked blooming. And even as I write these words I recall that one of my patients, who bore the charming name of Flora, was for a time the pivot of our discussion. These must have been the intermediate links, arising from the botanical group of ideas, which formed the bridge between the two experiences of that day, the indifferent and the stirring one. A further set of connections was then established - those surrounding the idea of cocaine, which had every right to serve as a link between the figure of Dr. Königstein and a botanical monograph which I had written; and these connections strengthened the fusion between the two groups of ideas so that it became possible for a portion of the one experience to serve as an allusion to the other one.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
663
I am prepared to find this explanation attacked on the ground of its being arbitrary or artificial. What, it may be asked, would have happened if Professor Gärtner and his wife with her blooming looks had not come up to us or if the patient we were talking about had been called Anna instead of Flora? The answer is simple. If these chains of thought had been absent others would no doubt have been selected. It is easy enough to construct such chains, as is shown by the puns and riddles that people make every day for their entertainment. The realm of jokes knows no boundaries. Or, to go a stage further, if there had been no possibility of forging enough intermediate links between the two impressions, the dream would simply have been different. Another indifferent impression of the same day - for crowds of such impressions enter our minds and are then forgotten - would have taken the place of the ‘monograph’ in the dream, would have linked up with the subject of the conversation and would have represented it in the content of the dream. Since it was in fact the monograph and not any other idea that was chosen to serve this function, we must suppose that it was the best adapted for the connection. There is no need for us to emulate Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau and feel astonished that ‘only the rich people own the most money’.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
664
A psychological process by which, according to our account, indifferent experiences take the place of psychically significant ones, cannot fail to arouse suspicion and bewilderment. It will be our task in a later chapter to make the peculiarities of this apparently irrational operation more intelligible. At this point we are only concerned with the effects of a process whose reality I have been driven to assume by innumerable and regularly recurrent observations made in analysing dreams. What takes place would seem to be something in the nature of a ‘displacement’ - of psychical emphasis, shall we say? - by means of intermediate links; in this way, ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were originally intensely cathected and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness. Displacements of this kind are no surprise to us where it is a question of dealing with quantities of affect or with motor activities in general. When a lonely old maid transfers her affection to animals, or a bachelor becomes an enthusiastic collector, when a soldier defends a scrap of coloured cloth - a flag - with his life’s blood, when a few seconds’ extra pressure in a hand-shake means bliss to a lover, or when, in Othello, a lost handkerchief precipitates an outburst of rage - all of these are instances of psychical displacements to which we raise no objection. But when we hear that a decision as to what shall reach our consciousness and what shall be kept out of it - what we shall think, in short - has been arrived at in the same manner and on the same principles, we have an impression of a pathological event and, if such things happen in waking life, we describe them as errors in thought. I will anticipate the conclusions to which we shall later be led, and suggest that the psychical process which we have found at work in dream-displacement, though it cannot be described as a pathological disturbance, nevertheless differs from the normal and is to be regarded as a process of a more primary nature.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
665
Thus the fact that the content of dreams includes remnants of trivial experiences is to be explained as a manifestation of dream-distortion (by displacement); and it will be recalled that we came to the conclusion that dream-distortion was the product of a censorship operating in the passage-way between two psychical agencies. It is to be expected that the analysis of a dream will regularly reveal its true, psychically significant source in waking life, though the emphasis has been displaced from the recollection of that source on to that of an indifferent one. This explanation brings us into complete conflict with Robert’s theory, which ceases to be of any service to us. For the fact which Robert sets out to explain is a non-existent one. His acceptance of it rests on a misunderstanding, on his failure to replace the apparent content of dreams by their real meaning. And there is another objection that can be raised to Robert’s theory. If it were really the business of dreams to relieve our memory of the ‘dregs’ of daytime recollections by a special psychical activity, our sleep would be more tormented and harder worked than our mental life while we are awake. For the number of indifferent impressions from which our memory would need to be protected is clearly immensely large: the night would not be long enough to cope with such a mass. It is far more likely that the process of forgetting indifferent impressions goes forward without the active intervention of our psychical forces.
Nevertheless we must not be in a hurry to take leave of Robert’s ideas without further consideration. We have still not explained the fact that one of the indifferent impressions of waking life, one, moreover, dating from the day preceding the dream, invariably contributes towards the dream’s content. The connections between this impression and the true source of the dream in the unconscious are not always there ready-made; as we have seen, they may only be established retrospectively, in the course of the dream-work, with a view, as it were, to making the intended displacement feasible. There must therefore be some compelling force in the direction of establishing connections precisely with a recent, though indifferent, impression; and the latter must possess some attribute which makes it especially suitable for this purpose. For if that were not so, it would be just as easy for the dream-thoughts to displace their emphasis on to an unimportant component in their own circle of ideas.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
666
The following observations may help us towards clearing up this point. If in the course of a single day we have two or more experiences suitable for provoking a dream, the dream will make a combined reference to them as a single whole; it is under a necessity to combine them into a unity. Here is an instance. One afternoon during the summer I entered a railway compartment in which I found two acquaintances who were strangers to each other. One of them was an eminent medical colleague and the other was a member of a distinguished family with which I had professional relations. I introduced the two gentlemen to each other, but all through the long journey they conducted their conversation with me as a go-between, so that I presently found myself discussing various topics alternately, first with the one and then with the other. I asked my doctor friend to use his influence on behalf of a common acquaintance of ours who was just starting a medical practice. The doctor replied that he was convinced of the young man’s capacity, but that his homely appearance would make it hard for him to make his way in families of the better class; to which I replied that that was the very reason why he needed influential assistance. Turning to my other fellow-traveller, I enquired after the health of his aunt - the mother of one of my patients - who was lying seriously ill at the time. During the night following the journey I had a dream that the young friend on whose behalf I had pleaded was sitting in a fashionable drawing-room in a select company composed of all the distinguished and wealthy people of my acquaintance and, with the easy bearing of a man of the world, was delivering a funeral oration on the old lady (who was already dead so far as my dream was concerned), the aunt of my second fellow-traveller. (I must confess that I had not been on good terms with that lady.) Thus my dream had, once again, worked out connections between the two sets of impressions of the previous day and had combined them into a single situation.
Many experiences such as this lead me to assert that the dream-work is under some kind of necessity to combine all the sources which have acted as stimuli for the dream into a single unity in the dream itself.¹
¹ The tendency of the dream-work to fuse into a single action all events of interest which occur simultaneously has already been remarked on by several writers; e.g. Delage (1891, 41) and Delboeuf (1885, 237), who speaks of ‘rapprochement forcé' [‘enforced convergence’].
The Interpretation Of Dreams
667
I will now proceed to the question of whether the instigating source of a dream, revealed by analysis, must invariably be a recent (and significant) event or whether an internal experience, that is, the recollection of a psychically important event - a train of thought - can assume the role of a dream-instigator. The answer, based upon a large number of analyses, is most definitely in favour of the latter alternative. A dream can be instigated by an internal process which has, as it were, become a recent event, owing to thought-activity during the previous day. This seems to be the appropriate moment for tabulating the different conditions to which we find that the sources of dreams are subject. The source of a dream may be either -
(a) a recent and psychically significant experience which is represented in the dream directly,¹ or
(b) several recent and significant experiences which are combined into a single unity by the dream,² or
(c) one or more recent and significant experiences which are represented in the content of the dream by a mention of a contemporary but indifferent experience,³ or
(d) an internal significant experience (e.g. a memory or a train of thought), which is in that case invariably represented in the dream by a mention of a recent but indifferent impression.4
It will be seen that in interpreting dreams we find one condition always fulfilled: one component of the content of the dream is a repetition of a recent impression of the previous day. This impression that is to be represented in the dream may either itself belong to the circle of ideas surrounding the actual instigator of the dream - whether as an essential or as a trivial portion of it - or it may be derived from the field of an indifferent impression which has been brought into connection with the ideas surrounding the dream-instigator by more or less numerous links. The apparent multiplicity of governing conditions is in fact merely dependent upon the two alternatives of whether a displacement has or has not taken place; and it is worth pointing out that we are enabled by these alternatives to explain the range of contrast between different dreams just as easily as the medical theory is enabled to do by its hypothesis of brain-cells ranging from partial to total wakefulness. (See above, p. 583 ff.)
¹ As in the dream of Irma’s injection and in the dream of my uncle with the yellow beard.
² As in the young doctor’s funeral oration.
³ As in the dream of the botanical monograph.
4 Most of my patient’s dreams during analysis are of this kind.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
668
It will further be observed, if we consider these four possible cases, that a psychical element which is significant but not recent (e.g. a train of thought or a memory) can be replaced, for the purpose of forming a dream, by an element which is recent but indifferent, provided only that two conditions are fulfilled: (1) the content of the dream must be connected with a recent experience, and (2) the instigator of the dream must remain a psychically significant process. Only in one case - case (a) - are both of these conditions fulfilled by one and the same impression. It is to be noticed, moreover, that indifferent impressions which are capable of being used for constructing a dream so long as they are recent lose that capacity as soon as they are a day (or at the most a few days) older. From this we must conclude that the freshness of an impression gives it some kind of psychical value for purposes of dream-construction equivalent in some way to the value of emotionally coloured memories or trains of thought. The basis of the value which thus attaches to recent impressions in connection with the construction of dreams will only become evident in the course of our subsequent psychological discussions.¹
In this connection it will be noticed, incidentally, that modifications in our mnemic and ideational material may take place during the night unobserved by our consciousness. We are often advised that before coming to a final decision on some subject we should ‘sleep on it’, and this advice is evidently justified. But here we have passed from the psychology of dreams to that of sleep, and this is not the last occasion on which we shall be tempted to do so.²
¹ See the passage on ‘transference’ in Chapter VII.
² [Footnote added 1919:] An important contribution to the part played by recent material in the construction of dreams has been made by Pötzl (1917) in a paper which carries a wealth of implications. In a series of experiments Pötzl required the subjects to make a drawing of what they had consciously noted of a picture exposed to their view in a tachistoscope. He then turned his attention to the dreams dreamt by the subjects during the following night and required them once more to make drawings of appropriate portions of these dreams. It was shown unmistakably that those details of the exposed picture which had not been noted by the subject provided material for the construction of the dream, whereas those details which had been consciously perceived and recorded in the drawing made after the exposure did not recur in the manifest content of the dream manifest content of the dream. The material that was taken over by the dream-work was modified by it for the purposes of dream-construction in its familiar ‘arbitrary’ (or, more properly, ‘autocratic’) manner. The questions raised by Pötzl’s experiment go far beyond the sphere of dream-interpretation as dealt with in the present volume. In passing, it is worth remarking on the contrast between this new method of studying the formation of dreams experimentally and the earlier, crude technique for introducing into the dream stimuli which interrupted the subject’s sleep.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
669
An objection, however, may be raised which threatens to upset these last conclusions. If indifferent impressions can only find their way into a dream provided they are recent, how does it happen that the content of dreams also includes elements from an earlier period of life which at the time when they were recent possessed, to use Strümpell’s words, no psychical value, and should therefore have been long since forgotten - elements, that is to say, which are neither fresh nor psychically significant?
This objection can be completely dealt with by a reference to the findings of the psycho-analysis of neurotics. The explanation is that the displacement which replaces psychically important by indifferent material (alike in dreaming and in thinking) has in these cases already taken place at the early period of life in question and since then become fixed in the memory. These particular elements which were originally indifferent are indifferent no longer, since taking over (by means of displacement) the value of psychically significant material. Nothing that has really remained indifferent can be reproduced in a dream.
The reader will rightly conclude from the foregoing arguments that I am asserting that there are no indifferent dream-instigators - and consequently no ‘innocent’ dreams. Those are, in the strictest and most absolute sense, my opinions - if I leave on one side the dreams of children and perhaps brief reactions in dreams to sensations felt during the night. Apart from this, what we dream is either manifestly recognizable as psychically significant, or it is distorted and cannot be judged till the dream has been interpreted, after which it will once more be found to be significant. Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles.¹ The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyse them. They are, if I may say so, wolves in sheep’s clothing. Since this is another point upon which I may expect to be contradicted, and since I am glad of an opportunity of showing dream-distortion at work, I will select a number of ‘innocent’ dreams from my records and submit them to analysis.
¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Havelock Ellis, a friendly critic of this book, writes (1911, 166): ‘This is the point at which many of us are no longer able to follow Freud.’ Havelock Ellis has not, however, carried out any analyses of dreams and refuses to believe how impossible it is to base one’s judgement on their manifest content.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
670
An intelligent and cultivated young woman, reserved and undemonstrative in her behaviour, reported as follows: I dreamt that I arrived too late at the market and could get nothing either from the butcher or from the woman who sells vegetables. An innocent dream, no doubt; but dreams are not as simple as that, so I asked to be told it in greater detail. She thereupon gave me the following account. She dreamt she was going to the market with her cook, who was carrying the basket. After she had asked for something, the butcher said to her: ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’, and offered her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’ She rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it.’
The dream’s connection with the previous day was quite straightforward. She had actually gone to the market too late and had got nothing. The situation seemed to shape itself into the phrase ‘Die Flieschbank war schon gescholossen’. I pulled myself up: was not that, or rather its opposite, a vulgar description of a certain sort of slovenliness in a man’s dress? However, the dreamer herself did not use the phrase; she may perhaps have avoided using it. Let us endeavour, then, to arrive at an interpretation of the details of the dream.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
671
When anything in a dream has the character of direct speech, that is to say, when it is said or heard and not merely thought (and it is easy as a rule to make the distinction with certainty), then it is derived from something actually spoken in waking life-though, to be sure, this something is merely treated as raw material and may be cut up and slightly altered and, more especially, divorced from its context.¹ In carrying out an interpretation, one method is to start from spoken phrases of this kind. What, then, was the origin of the butcher’s remark ‘That’s not obtainable any longer’? The answer was that it came from me myself. A few days earlier I had explained to the patient that the earliest experiences of childhood were ‘not obtainable any longer as such’, but were replaced in analysis by ‘transferences’ and dreams. So I was the butcher and she was rejecting these transferences into the present of old habits of thinking and feeling. -What, again, was the origin of her own remark in the dream ‘I don’t recognize that; I won’t take it’? For the purposes of the analysis this had to be divided up. ‘I don’t recognize that’ was something she had said the day before to her cook, with whom she had had a dispute; but at the time she had gone on: ‘Behave yourself properly!’ At this point there had clearly been a displacement. Of the two phrases that she had used in the dispute with her cook, she had chosen the insignificant one for inclusion in the dream. But it was only the suppressed one, ‘Behave yourself properly!’ that fitted in with the rest of the content of the dream: those would have been the appropriate words to use if someone had ventured to make improper suggestions and had forgotten ‘to close his meat-shop’. The allusions underlying the incident with the vegetable-seller were a further confirmation that our interpretation was on the right track. A vegetable that is sold tied up in bundles (lengthways, as the patient added afterwards) and is also black, could only be a dream-combination of asparagus and black (Spanish) radishes. No knowledgeable person of either sex will ask for an interpretation of asparagus. But the other vegetable - ’Schwarzer Retting’ - can be taken as an exclamation - ‘Schwarzer rett’ dich!’ -, and accordingly it too seems to hint at the same sexual topic which we suspected at the very beginning, when we felt inclined to introduce the phrase about the meat-shop being closed into the original account of the dream. We need not enquire now into the full meaning of the dream. So much is quite clear: it had a meaning and that meaning was far from innocent.²
¹ See my discussion of speeches in dreams in my chapter on the dream-work. Only one writer on the subject seems to have recognized the source of spoken phrases occurring in dreams, namely Delboeuf (1885, 226), who compares them to clichés.
² If anyone is curious to know, I may add that the dream concealed a phantasy of my behaving in an improper and sexually provocative manner, and of the patient putting up a defence against my conduct. If this interpretation seems incredible, I need only point to the numerous instances in which doctors have charges of the same kind brought against them by hysterical women. But in such cases the phantasy emerges into consciousness undisguised and in the form of a delusion, instead of being distorted and appearing only as a dream. - [Added 1909:] This dream occurred at the beginning of the patient’s psycho-analytic treatment. It was not until later that I learnt that she had been repeating in it the initial trauma from which her neurosis had arisen. I have since then come across the same behaviour in other patients; having been exposed to a sexual assault in their childhood, they seek, as it were, to bring about a repetition of it in their dreams.