to tell us: “I recently fell in love with a girl, just from seeing her
in the street; but I had no means of introduction to her. I should have
liked best to make her acquaintance through her dachshund, for I am a
great animal-lover myself and was attracted by seeing that she was one
too.” He adds that several times he had separated fighting dogs very
skilfully, often to the amazement of the onlookers. Now we learn that
the girl who had taken his fancy was always seen walking with this
particular dog. She, however, has been eliminated from the manifest
dream; only the dog associated with her has remained. Possibly the
elderly ladies who grinned at him represented her, but the rest of what
he tells us does not clear up this point. The fact that he was riding a
bicycle in the dream was a direct repetition of the situation as he
remembered it, for he had not met the girl with the dog except when he
was bicycling.
3. When a man has lost someone dear to him, for a considerable period
afterwards he produces a special type of dream, in which the most
remarkable compromises are effected between his knowledge that that
person is dead and his desire to call him back to life. Sometimes the
deceased is dreamt of as being dead, and yet still alive because he does
not know that he is dead, as if he would only really die if he did know
it; at other times he is half dead and half alive, and each of these
conditions has its distinguishing marks. We must not call these dreams
merely nonsensical, for to come to life again is no more inadmissible in
dreams than in fairy tales, in which it is quite a common fate. As far
as I have been able to analyse such dreams, it appeared that they were
capable of a reasonable explanation, but that the pious wish to recall
the departed is apt to manifest itself in the strangest ways. I will
submit a dream of this sort to you, which certainly sounds strange and
absurd enough, and the analysis of which will demonstrate many points
already indicated in our theoretical discussions. The dreamer was a man
who had lost his father some years previously:—
_My father was dead but had been exhumed and looked ill. He went on
living, and I did all I could to prevent his noticing it._ Then the
dream goes on to other matters, apparently very remote.
That the father was dead we know to be a fact; but the exhumation had
not taken place in reality: indeed, the question of real fact has
nothing to do with anything that follows. But the dreamer went on to say
that after he returned from his father’s funeral one of his teeth began
to ache. He wanted to treat it according to the Jewish precept: “If thy
tooth offend thee, pluck it out,” and accordingly went to the dentist.
The latter, however, said that that was not the way to treat a tooth;
one must have patience with it. “I will put something in it,” he said,
“to kill the nerve, and you must come back in three days’ time, when I
will take it out again.” “This ‘taking out,’” said the dreamer suddenly,
“is the exhuming.”
Now was he right? True, the parallel is not exact, for it was not the
tooth which was taken out, but only a dead part of it. As a result of
experience, however, we can well credit the dream-work with inaccuracies
of this sort. We must suppose that the dreamer had, by a process of
condensation, combined the dead father with the tooth, which was dead
and which he yet retained. No wonder then that an absurdity was the
result in the manifest dream, for obviously not all that was said about
the tooth could apply to the father. What then are we to regard as the
_tertium comparationis_ between the father and the tooth,—what common
factor makes the comparison possible?
Such a factor must have existed, for the dreamer went on to observe that
he knew the saying that if one dreams of losing a tooth it means that
one is about to lose a member of his family.
We know that this popular interpretation is incorrect or at least
correct only in a very distorted sense. We shall therefore be the more
surprised actually to discover the subject thus touched upon behind the
other elements of the dream-content.
Without being pressed further, the dreamer then began to talk of his
father’s illness and death, and of the relations which had existed
between father and son. The illness had been a long one, and the care
and treatment of the invalid had cost the son a large sum of money. Yet
it never seemed too much to him, nor did his patience ever fail or the
wish occur to him that the end should come. He prided himself on his
true Jewish filial piety and on his strict observance of the Jewish law.
Does not a certain contradiction strike us here in the thoughts relating
to the dream? He had identified the tooth with the father. He wanted to
treat the former according to the Jewish law which commanded that a
tooth which causes pain and annoyance should be plucked out. His father
he also wanted to treat according to the precepts of the law, but here
the command was that he must pay no heed to expense and annoyance, must
take the whole burden upon himself, and not allow any hostile intention
to arise against the cause of the trouble. Would not the agreement
between the two situations be much more convincing if he had really
gradually come to have the same feelings towards his sick father as he
had towards his diseased tooth, that is to say, if he had wished for
death to put a speedy end to his father’s superfluous, painful and
costly existence?
I have no doubt that this was, in reality, his attitude towards his
father during the protracted illness and that his boastful assertions of
filial piety were designed to divert his mind from any recollections of
the sort. Under conditions such as these it is no uncommon thing for the
death-wish against the father to be roused, and to mask itself with some
ostensibly compassionate reflection, such as: “It would be a blessed
release for him.” But I want you particularly to notice that here in the
latent thoughts themselves a barrier has been broken down. The first
part of the thoughts was, we may be sure, only temporarily unconscious,
that is, during the actual process of the dream-work; the hostile
feelings towards the father, on the other hand, had probably been
permanently so, possibly dating from childhood and having at times,
during the father’s illness, crept as it were timidly and in a disguised
form into consciousness. We can maintain this with even greater
certainty of other latent thoughts which have unmistakably contributed
to the content of the dream. There are, it is true, no indications in it
of hostile feelings towards the father; but when we enquire into the
origin of such hostility in the life of the child we remember that fear
of the father arises from the fact that in the earliest years of life it
is he who opposes the sexual activity of the boy, as he is usually
compelled to do again, after puberty, from motives of social expediency.
This was the relation in which our dreamer stood to his father; his
affection for him had been tinged with a good deal of respect and dread,
the source of which was early sexual intimidation.
We can now explain the further phrases in the dream from the onanism
complex. “_He looked ill_” was an allusion to another remark of the
dentist’s—that it did not look well for a tooth to be missing just
there—but it also refers at the same time to the “looking ill” by which
the young man, during the period of puberty, betrays, or fears lest he
might betray, his excessive sexual activity. It was with a lightening of
his own heart that in the manifest dream the dreamer transferred the
look of illness from himself to his father, an inversion with which you
are familiar as a device of the dream-work. “_He went on living_”
accords both with the wish to recall the father to life and the promise
of the dentist to save the tooth. The phrase “_I did everything I could
to prevent his noticing_” is extremely subtly designed to lead us to
complete it with the words “that he was dead.” The only completion of
them that really makes sense, however, is again to be traced to the
onanism complex, where it is a matter of course that the young man
should do all he can to conceal his sexual life from his father.
Finally, I would remind you that the so-called “toothache dreams” always
refer to onanism, and the punishment for it that is feared.
You see how this incomprehensible dream is built up by a piece of
remarkable and misleading condensation, by omitting from it all the
thoughts that belong to the core of the latent train of thought, and by
the creation of ambiguous substitute-formations to represent those
thoughts which were deepest and most remote in time.
4. We have already tried repeatedly to get to the bottom of those
prosaic and banal dreams which have nothing absurd or strange in them,
but which suggest the question: Why should we dream about such
trivialities at all? I will therefore quote a fresh example of this sort
in the shape of three dreams connected with one another and dreamt by a
young lady in the course of a single night.
(_a_) _She was going through the hall in her house and struck her head
on a low-hanging chandelier with such force as to draw blood._ This
episode did not remind her of anything that had actually happened; her
remarks led in quite another direction: “You know how terribly my hair
is coming out. Well, yesterday my mother said to me: ‘My dear child, if
it goes on like this, your head will soon be as bald as your buttocks.’”
We see here that the head stands for the other end of the body. No
further assistance is required to understand the symbolism of the
chandelier: all objects capable of elongation are symbols of the male
organ. The real subject of the dream then is a bleeding at the lower end
of the body, caused by contact with the penis. This might still have
other meanings; the dreamer’s further associations show that the dream
has to do with the belief that menstruation results from sexual
intercourse with a man, a notion about sexual matters which is by no
means uncommon amongst immature girls.
(_b_) _The dreamer saw in a vineyard a deep hole which she knew had been
caused by the uprooting of a tree._ Her remark on this point was that
“the tree was _missing_,” meaning that she did not see the tree in the
dream; but the same phrase serves to express another thought, which
leaves us in no doubt as to the symbolic interpretation. The dream
refers to another infantile notion on the subject of sex, to the belief
that girls originally had the same genital organ as boys and that the
later conformation of this organ has been brought about by castration
(uprooting the tree).
(_c_) _The dreamer was standing in front of her writing-table drawer
which she knows so well that, if anyone touched it, she would
immediately be aware of it._ The writing-table drawer, like all drawers,
chests and boxes, is a symbol of the female genital. She knew that when
sexual intercourse (or, as she thought, any contact at all) has taken
place the genital shows certain indications of the fact, and she had
long had a fear of being convicted of this. I think that in all three
dreams the main emphasis lies on the idea of _knowing_. She had in mind
the time of childish investigations into sexual matters, of the results
of which she had been very proud at the time.
5. Here is another example of symbolism. But this time I must preface it
with a short account of the mental situation in which the dream
occurred. A man and a woman who were in love had spent a night together;
he described her nature as maternal, she was one of those women whose
desire to have a child comes out irresistibly during caresses. The
conditions of their meeting, however, made it necessary to take
precautions to prevent the semen from entering the womb. On waking the
next morning, the woman related the following dream:—
_An officer with a red cap was pursuing her in the street. She fled from
him and ran up the staircase, with him after her. Breathless, she
reached her rooms and slammed and locked the door behind her. The man
remained outside and, peeping through the keyhole in the door, she saw
him sitting on a bench outside, weeping._
In the pursuit by the officer with the red cap and the breathless
climbing of the stairs you will recognize the representation of the
sexual act. That the dreamer shuts her pursuer out may serve as an
example of the device of inversion so frequently employed in dreams, for
in reality it was the man who withdrew before the completion of the
sexual act. In the same way, she has projected her own feeling of grief
on to her partner, for it is he, who weeps in the dream, his tears at
the same time alluding to the seminal fluid.
You will certainly have heard it said at some time or other that
psycho-analysis maintains that all dreams have a sexual meaning. You are
now in a position yourselves to form an opinion as to the falseness of
this reproach. You have learnt of wish-fulfilment dreams, dealing with
the gratification of the most obvious needs—hunger, thirst, and the
longing for liberty—comfort-dreams and impatience-dreams, as well as
those which are frankly avaricious and egoistical. You may, however,
certainly bear it in mind that, according to the results of
psycho-analysis, dreams in which a marked degree of distortion is
present _mainly_ (but here again not exclusively) give expression to
sexual desires.
6. I have a special motive in giving many instances of the use of
symbols in dreams. In our first lecture I complained of the difficulty
of demonstrating my statements in such a way as to carry conviction with
regard to the findings of psycho-analysis, and since then you have
doubtless agreed with me. Now the separate propositions of
psycho-analysis are nevertheless so intimately related that conviction
on a single point easily leads to acceptance of the greater part of the
whole theory. It might be said of psycho-analysis that if you give it
your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. If you accept the
explanation of errors as satisfactory, you cannot logically stop short
of belief in all the rest. Now dream-symbolism provides another, equally
good, approach to such acceptance. I will recount to you a dream, which
has already been published, of a woman of the poorer classes, whose
husband was a watchman and of whom we may be sure that she had never
heard of dream-symbolism and psycho-analysis. You can then judge for
yourselves whether the interpretation arrived at with the help of sexual
symbols can justly be called arbitrary or forced.
“_... Then someone broke into the house and in terror she cried for a
watchman. But the watchman, accompanied by two tramps, had gone into a
church, which had several steps leading up to it. Behind the church
there was a mountain and, up above, a thick wood. The watchman wore a
helmet, gorget and cloak, and had a full brown beard. The two tramps,
who had gone along peaceably with him, had aprons twisted round their
hips like sacks. A path led from the church to the mountain and was
overgrown on both sides with grass and bushes which grew denser and
denser, and at the top of the mountain there was a regular wood._”
You will recognize without any trouble the symbols here employed: the
male organ is represented by the trinity of _three_ persons appearing,
whilst the female sexual organs are symbolized by a landscape with a
chapel, a mountain and a wood, and once more you have the act of going
up steps as symbolic of the sexual act. The part of the body called in
the dream “a mountain” is similarly termed in anatomy the mons veneris.
7. I will tell you another dream which is to be explained in the light
of symbolism, a dream, moreover, which is noteworthy and convincing from
the fact that the dreamer himself translated all the symbols, though he
brought no previous theoretical knowledge to the interpretation. This is
a very unusual circumstance and we have no accurate idea of the
conditions which give rise to it.
_He was walking with his father in a place which must have been the
Prater,[41] for they saw the Rotunda with a little building in front of
it, to which was made fast a captive balloon which looked rather slack.
His father asked him what it was all for; the son wondered at his
asking, but explained it nevertheless. Then they came to a court-yard,
where a large sheet of metal lay spread out. His father wanted to break
off a big piece, but looked round first in case anyone should notice
him. He said to his son that all the same he need only tell the overseer
and then he could take it straightaway. Some steps led down from this
court to a shaft, the sides of which were upholstered with some soft
stuff, something like a leather armchair. At the bottom of this shift
was a rather long platform and, beyond it, another shaft._
The following is the dreamer’s own interpretation:—“The Rotunda stands
for my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it for the penis,
which I have had to complain of for being limp.” A more detailed
translation would then run thus: the rotunda stands for the buttocks
(regularly included by children amongst the genitals), the smaller
structure in front is the scrotum. In the dream, his father asks him
what all this is, i.e. what are the purpose and function of the
genitals. To invert this situation so that the son asks the questions is
an obvious idea, and, since these questions were never asked in reality,
we must construe the dream-thoughts as a wish or take them in a
conditional sense: “If I had asked my father to explain....” The sequel
to this thought we shall find presently.
The court-yard where the sheet-metal lay is not in the first place to be
explained symbolically, but is a reference to the father’s place of
business. From motives of discretion I have substituted “sheet-metal”
for the actual material dealt with by him, but otherwise I have made no
alteration in the words of the dream. The dreamer had entered his
father’s business and had been much scandalized by the extremely
questionable practices upon which the high profits largely depended.
Hence the sequel to the dream-thought mentioned above would run: “(If I
had asked him), he would have deceived me as he deceives his customers.”
The dreamer himself gives a second explanation for the pulling off the
piece of metal which serves to represent commercial dishonesty: it
means, he says, the practice of masturbation. Not only is this an
explanation with which we have long been familiar, but it is well in
accordance with this interpretation that the secret practice of
masturbation should be expressed by the opposite idea (“_We may do it
openly_”). So the fact that this practice is imputed to the father, as
was the questioning in the first scene of the dream, is exactly what we
should expect. The dreamer immediately interpreted the shaft, on account
of the soft upholstering of the walls, as the vagina, and I, on my own
account, offer the remark that going-down as well as going-up stands for
sexual intercourse.
The details of the long platform at the bottom of the first shaft, and
beyond that the second shaft, were explained by the dreamer himself from
his own history. He had practised intercourse for some time and then
given it up on account of inhibitions, but hoped to be able to resume it
by the help of the treatment.
8. I quote the two following dreams, dreamt by a foreigner with marked
polygamous tendencies, because they may serve to illustrate the
statement that the dreamer’s own person is present in every dream, even
when it is disguised in the manifest content. The trunks in the dreams
are female symbols.
(_a_) _The dreamer was going on a journey and his luggage was being
taken to the station on a carriage. There were a number of trunks piled
one on the top of the other, and amongst them two large black boxes like
those of a commercial traveller. He said consolingly to someone: “You
see those are only going as far as the station.”_
He does, as a matter of fact, travel with a great deal of luggage, and
he also brings many stories about women to the treatment. The two black
trunks stand for two dark women who at the moment are playing the
principal part in his life. One of them wanted to follow him to Vienna,
but on my advice he had telegraphed to put her off.
(_b_) A scene at a customs house:—_A fellow-traveller opened his trunk
and said nonchalantly, smoking a cigarette: “There is nothing to declare
in that.” The customs official seemed to believe him, but felt in the
trunk again and found a strictly prohibited article. The traveller then
said in a resigned way: “Well, it can’t be helped.”_ The dreamer himself
is the traveller and I am the official. He is generally very
straightforward with me, but had made up his mind to conceal from me a
relation which he had recently formed with a lady, for he assumed quite
correctly that I knew her. He displaces on to a stranger the
embarrassing situation of being detected, so that he himself does not
seem to come into the dream at all.
9. Here we have an example of a symbol which I have not yet mentioned:—
_The dreamer met his sister with two friends who were themselves
sisters. He shook hands with these two, but not with his sister._
There was no real episode connected with this in his mind. Instead, his
thoughts went back to a time when his observations led him to wonder why
a girl’s breasts are so late in developing. The two sisters, therefore,
stand for the breasts; he would have liked to grasp them with his hand,
if only it had not been his sister.
10. Here is an example of death symbolism in dreams:—_The dreamer was
crossing a very high, steep, iron bridge, with two people whose names he
knew, but forgot on waking. Suddenly both of them had vanished and he
saw a ghostly man in a cap and an overall. He asked him whether he were
the telegraph messenger.... “No.” Or the coachman?... “No.” He then went
on_, and in the dream, had a feeling of great dread; on waking, he
followed it up with the phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and
that he fell into the abyss.
When stress is laid upon the fact that people in a dream are unknown to
the dreamer, or that he has forgotten their names, they are, as a rule,
persons with whom he is intimately connected. The dreamer was one of a
family of three children; if he had ever wished for the death of the
other two, it would be only just that he should be visited with the fear
of death. With reference to the telegraph messenger, he remarked that
they always bring bad news. From his uniform, the man in the dream might
have been a lamp-lighter, who also puts out the lights, as the spirit of
death extinguishes the torch of life. With the coachman he associated
Uhland’s poem of the voyage of King Karl, and recalled a dangerous sail
on a lake with two companions, when he played the part of the king in
the poem. The iron bridge suggested to him a recent accident, also the
stupid saying: “Life is a suspension bridge.”
11. The following may be regarded as another example of a death-dream:—
_An unknown gentleman was leaving a black-edged visiting card on the
dreamer._
12. I give another dream which will interest you from several points of
view; it is to be traced partly, however, to a neurotic condition in the
dreamer:—
_He was in a train which stopped in the open country. He thought there
was going to be an accident and that he must make his escape, so he went
through all the compartments, killing everyone he met,—driver, guard,
and so on._
This dream recalls a story told him by a friend. On a certain Italian
line, an insane man was being conveyed in a small compartment, but by
some mistake a passenger was allowed to get in with him. The madman
murdered the other traveller. Thus the dreamer identified himself with
this insane man, his reason being that he was at times tormented by an
obsession that he must make away with “everyone who shared his
knowledge.” Then he himself found a better motivation for the dream. The
day before, he had seen at the theatre a girl he had meant to marry but
had given up because she gave him cause for jealousy. Knowing the
intensity which jealousy could assume in him, he would really have been
mad to want to marry her. That is to say, he thought her so unreliable
that his jealousy would have led him to murder everyone who got in his
way. The going through a number of rooms, or, as here, compartments, we
have already learnt to know as a symbol of marriage (the expression of
monogamy according to the rule of opposites).
With reference to the train’s stopping in the open country and the fear
of an accident, he told the following story:—