young lady who was in the carriage said that perhaps there was going to
be a collision, and that the best thing to do was to raise the legs
high. This phrase “raise the legs” had associations with many walks and
excursions into the country, which he had shared with the girl mentioned
above in the happy early days of their love. Here was a new argument for
the contention that he would be mad to marry her now; nevertheless, my
knowledge of the situation led me to regard it as certain that there
existed in him all the same the desire to fall a victim to this form of
madness.
THIRTEENTH LECTURE
ARCHAIC AND INFANTILE FEATURES IN DREAMS
Let us start afresh from our conclusion that, under the influence of the
censorship, the dream-work translates the latent dream-thoughts into
another form. These thoughts are of the same nature as the familiar,
conscious thoughts of waking life; the new form in which they are
expressed is, owing to many peculiar characteristics, incomprehensible
to us. We have said that it goes back to phases in our intellectual
development which we have long outgrown—to hieroglyphic writing, to
symbolic-connections, possibly to conditions which existed before the
language of thought was evolved. On this account we called the form of
expression employed by the dream-work _archaic_ or _regressive_.
From this you may draw the inference that a more profound study of the
dream-work must lead to valuable conclusions about the initial stages of
our intellectual development, of which at present little is known. I
hope it will be so, but so far this task has not been attempted. The era
to which the dream-work takes us back is “primitive” in a twofold sense:
in the first place, it means the early days of the _individual_—his
childhood—and, secondly, in so far as each individual repeats in some
abbreviated fashion during childhood the whole course of the development
of the human race, the reference is _phylogenetic_. I believe it not
impossible that we may be able to discriminate between that part of the
latent mental processes which belongs to the early days of the
individual and that which has its roots in the infancy of the race. It
seems to me, for instance, that symbolism, a mode of expression which
has never been individually acquired, may claim to be regarded as a
racial heritage.
This, however, is not the only archaic feature in dreams. You are all
familiar from actual experience with the peculiar _amnesia of childhood_
to which we are subject. I mean that the first years of life, up to the
age of five, six, or eight, have not left the same traces in memory as
our later experiences. True, we come across individuals who can boast of
continuous recollection from early infancy to the present time, but it
is incomparably more common for the opposite, a blank in memory, to be
found. In my opinion, this has not aroused sufficient surprise. At two
years old the child can speak well and soon shows his capacity for
adapting himself to complicated mental situations, and, moreover, says
things which he himself has forgotten when they are repeated to him
years later. And yet memory is more efficient in early years, being less
overburdened than it is later. Again, there is no reason to regard the
function of memory as an especially high or difficult form of mental
activity; on the contrary, excellent memory may be found in people who
are yet on a very low plane intellectually.
But I must draw your attention to a second peculiarity, based upon the
first—namely, that from the oblivion in which the first years of
childhood are shrouded certain clearly retained recollections emerge,
mostly in the form of plastic images, for the retention of which there
seems no adequate ground. Memory deals with the mass of impressions
received in later life by a process of selection, retaining what is
important and omitting what is not; but with the recollections retained
from childhood this is not so. They do not necessarily reflect important
experiences in childhood, not even such as must have seemed important
from the child’s standpoint, but are often so banal and meaningless in
themselves that we can only ask ourselves in amazement why just this
particular detail has escaped oblivion. I have tried, with the help of
analysis, to attack the problem of childhood amnesia and of the
fragments of recollection which break through it, and have come to the
conclusion that, whatever may appear to the contrary, the child no less
than the adult only retains in memory what is important; but that what
is important is represented (by the processes of condensation and, more
especially, of displacement, already familiar to you) in the memory by
something apparently trivial. For this reason I have called these
childhood recollections _screen-memories_; a thorough analysis can
evolve from them all that has been forgotten.
It is a regular task in psycho-analytic treatment to fill in the blank
in infantile memories, and, in so far as the treatment is successful to
any extent at all (very frequently, therefore) we are enabled to bring
to light the content of those early years long buried in oblivion. These
impressions have never really been forgotten, but were only inaccessible
and latent, having become part of the unconscious. But sometimes it
happens that they emerge spontaneously from the unconscious, and it is
in connection with dreams that this happens. It is clear that the
dream-life knows the way back to these latent, infantile experiences.
Many good illustrations of this are to be found in psycho-analytical
literature, and I myself have been able to furnish a contribution of the
sort. I once dreamt in a particular connection of someone who had
evidently done me a service and whom I saw plainly. He was a one-eyed
man, short, fat and high-shouldered; from the context I gathered that he
was a doctor. Fortunately I was able to ask my mother, who was still
living, what was the personal appearance of the doctor who attended us
at the place where I was born and which I left at the age of three; she
told me that he had only one eye and was short, fat and high-shouldered;
I learnt also of the accident which was the occasion of this doctor’s
being called in and which I had forgotten. This command of the forgotten
material of the earliest years of childhood is thus a further ‘archaic’
feature of dreams.
This knowledge has a bearing on another of the problems which up to the
present have proved insoluble. You will remember the astonishment caused
by our discovery that dreams have their origin in actively evil or in
excessive sexual desires, which have made both the dream-censorship and
dream-distortion necessary. Supposing now that we have interpreted a
dream of this sort, and the circumstances are specially favourable in
that the dreamer does not quarrel with the interpretation itself, he
does nevertheless invariably ask how any such wish could come into his
mind, since it seems quite foreign to him and he is conscious of
desiring the exact opposite. We need have no hesitation in pointing out
to him the origin of the wish he repudiates: these evil impulses may be
traced to the past, often indeed to a past which is not so very far
away. It may be demonstrated that he once knew and was conscious of
them, even if this is no longer so. A woman who had a dream meaning that
she wished to see her only daughter (then seventeen years old) lying
dead found, with our help, that at one time she actually had cherished
this death-wish. The child was the offspring of an unhappy marriage,
which ended in the speedy separation of husband and wife. Once when the
child was as yet unborn the mother, in an access of rage after a violent
scene with her husband, beat her body with her clenched fists in order
to kill the baby in her womb. How many mothers who to-day love their
children tenderly, perhaps with excessive tenderness, yet conceived them
unwillingly and wished that the life within them might not develop
further; and have indeed turned this wish into various actions,
fortunately of a harmless kind. The later death-wish against beloved
persons, which appears so puzzling, thus dates from the early days of
the relationship to them.
A father, whose dream when interpreted shows that he wished for the
death of his eldest and favourite child, is in the same way obliged to
recall that there was a time when this wish was not unknown to him. The
man, whose marriage had proved a disappointment, often thought when the
child was still an infant that if the little creature who meant nothing
to him were to die he would again be free and would make better use of
his freedom. A large number of similar impulses of hate are to be traced
to a similar source; they are recollections of something belonging to
the past, something which was once in consciousness and played its part
in mental life. From this you will be inclined to draw the conclusion
that such dreams and such wishes would not occur in cases where there
have been no changes of this sort in the relations between two persons,
that is to say, where the relation has been of the same character from
the beginning. I am prepared to grant you this conclusion, only I must
warn you that you have to consider, not the literal meaning of the
dream, but what it signifies on interpretation. It may be that the
manifest dream of the death of some beloved person was only using this
as a terrible mask, whilst really meaning something totally different,
or it is possible that the beloved person is an illusory substitute for
someone else.
This situation will, however, raise in you another and much more serious
question. You will say: “Even though this death-wish did at one time
actually exist and this is confirmed by recollection, that is still no
true explanation; for the desire has long since been overcome and surely
at the present time can exist in the unconscious merely as a
recollection, of no affective value, and not as a powerful exciting
agent. For this later assumption we have no evidence. Why is the wish
recollected at all in dreams?” This is a question which you are really
justified in asking; the attempt to answer it would take us far afield
and would oblige us to define our position with regard to one of the
most important points in the theory of dreams. But I must keep within
the limits of our discussion and must forbear to follow up this
question; so you must be reconciled to leaving it for the present. Let
us content ourselves with the actual evidence that this wish, long since
subdued, can be proved to have given rise to the dream, and let us
continue our enquiry whether other evil wishes also can be traced in the
same way to the past.
Let us keep to the death-wishes, which we shall certainly find mostly
derived from the unbounded egoism of the dreamer. Wishes of this sort
are very often found to be the underlying agents of dreams. Whenever
anyone gets in our way in life—and how often must this happen when our
relations to one another are so complicated!—a dream is immediately
prepared to make away with that person, even if it be father, mother,
brother or sister, husband or wife. It appeared to us amazing that such
wickedness should be innate in humanity, and certainly we were not
inclined to admit without further evidence that this result of our
interpretation of dreams was correct. But, when once we had seen that
the origin of wishes of this sort must be looked for in the past, we had
little difficulty in finding the period in the past of the individual in
which there is nothing strange in such egoism and such wishes, even when
directed against the nearest and dearest. A child in his earliest years
(which later are veiled in oblivion) is just the person who frequently
displays such egoism in boldest relief; invariably, unmistakable
tendencies of this kind, or, more accurately, surviving traces of them,
are plainly visible in him. For a child loves himself first and only
later learns to love others and to sacrifice something of his own ego to
them. Even the people whom he seems to love from the outset are loved in
the first instance because he needs them and cannot do without
them—again therefore, from motives of egoism. Only later does the
impulse of love detach itself from egoism: it is a literal fact that the
child learns how to love through his own egoism.
In this connection it will be instructive to compare a child’s attitude
towards his brothers and sisters with his attitude towards his parents.
The little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, and
often he is quite frank about it. It is unquestionable that in them he
sees and hates his rivals, and it is well known how commonly this
attitude persists without interruption for many years, till the child
reaches maturity and even later. Of course it often gives place to a
more tender feeling, or perhaps we should say it is overlaid by this,
but the hostile attitude seems very generally to be the earlier. We can
most easily observe it in children of two and a half to four years old
when a new baby arrives, which generally meets with a very unfriendly
reception; remarks such as “I don’t like it. The stork is to take it
away again” are very common. Subsequently every opportunity is seized to
disparage the new-comer; attempts are even made to injure it and actual
attacks upon it are by no means unheard-of. If the difference in age is
less, by the time the child’s mental activity is more fully developed
the rival is already in existence and he adapts himself to the
situation; if on the other hand there is a greater difference between
their ages, the new baby may rouse certain kindly feelings from the
first, as an object of interest, a sort of living doll; and when there
is as much as eight years or more between them, especially if the elder
child is a girl, protective, motherly impulses may at once come into
play. But, speaking honestly, when we find a wish for the death of a
brother or a sister latent in a dream we need seldom be puzzled, for we
find its origin in early childhood without much trouble, or indeed,
quite often in the later years when they still lived together.
There is probably no nursery without violent conflicts between the
inhabitants, actuated by rivalry for the love of the parents,
competition for possessions shared by them all, even for the actual
space in the room they occupy. Such hostility is directed against older
as well as younger brothers and sisters. I think it was Bernard Shaw who
said: “If there is anyone whom a young English lady hates more than her
mother it is her elder sister.” Now there is something in this dictum
which jars upon us; it is hard enough to bring ourselves to understand
hatred and rivalry between brothers and sisters, but how can feelings of
hate force themselves into the relation between mother and daughter,
parents and children?
This relationship is no doubt a more favourable one, also from the
children’s point of view; and this too is what our expectations require:
we find it far more offensive for love to be lacking between parents and
children than between brothers and sisters. We have, so to speak,
sanctified the former love while allowing the latter to remain profane.
Yet everyday observation may show us how frequently the sentiments
entertained towards each other by parents and grown-up children fall
short of the ideal set up by society, and how much hostility lies
smouldering, ready to burst into flame if it were not stifled by
considerations of filial or parental duty and by other, tender impulses.
The motives for this hostility are well known, and we recognize a
tendency for those of the same sex to become alienated, daughter from
mother and father from son. The daughter sees in her mother the
authority which imposes limits to her will, whose task it is to bring
her to that renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in
certain cases, too, the mother is still a rival, who objects to being
set aside. The same thing is repeated still more blatantly between
father and son. To the son the father is the embodiment of the social
compulsion to which he so unwillingly submits, the person who stands in
the way of his following his own will, of his early sexual pleasures
and, when there is family property, of his enjoyment of it. When a
throne is involved this impatience for the death of the father may
approach tragic intensity. The relation between father and daughter or
mother and son would seem less liable to disaster; the latter relation
furnishes the purest examples of unchanging tenderness, undisturbed by
any egoistic considerations.
Why, you ask, do I speak of things so banal and so well-known to
everybody? Because there exists an unmistakable tendency in people’s
minds to deny the significance of these things in real life and to
pretend that the social ideal is much more frequently realized than it
actually is. But it is better that psychology should tell the truth than
that it should be left to cynics to do so. This general denial is only
applied to real life, it is true; for fiction and drama are free to make
use of the motives laid bare when these ideals are rudely disturbed.
There is nothing to wonder at therefore if the dreams of a great number
of people bring to light the wish for the removal of their parents,
especially of the parent whose sex is the same as the dreamer’s. We may
assume that the wish exists in waking life as well, sometimes even in
consciousness if it can disguise itself behind another motive, as the
dreamer in our third example disguised his real thought by pity for his
father’s useless suffering. It is but rarely that hostility reigns
alone,—far more often it yields to more tender feelings which finally
suppress it, when it has to wait in abeyance till a dream shows it, as
it were, in isolation. That which the dream shows in a form magnified by
this very isolation resumes its true proportions when our interpretation
has assigned to it its proper place in relation to the rest of the
dreamer’s life. (H. Sachs.) But we also find this death-wish where there
is no basis for it in real life and where the adult would never have to
confess to entertaining it in his waking life. The reason for this is
that the deepest and most common motive for estrangement, especially
between parent and child of the same sex, came into play in the earliest
years of childhood.
I refer to that rivalry of affections in which sexual elements are
plainly emphasized. The son, when quite a little child, already begins
to develop a peculiar tenderness towards his mother, whom he looks upon
as his own property, regarding his father in the light of a rival who
disputes this sole possession of his; similarly the little daughter sees
in her mother someone who disturbs her tender relation to her father and
occupies a place which she feels she herself could very well fill.
Observation shows us how far back these sentiments date, sentiments
which we describe by the term _Oedipus complex_, because in the Oedipus
myth the two extreme forms of the wishes arising from the situation of
the son—the wish to kill the father and to marry the mother—are realized
in an only slightly modified form. I do not assert that the Oedipus
complex exhausts all the possible relations which may exist between
parents and children; these relations may well be a great deal more
complicated. Again, this complex may be more or less strongly developed,
or it may even become inverted, but it is a regular and very important
factor in the mental life of the child; we are more in danger of
underestimating than of overestimating its influence and that of the
developments which may follow from it. Moreover, the parents themselves
frequently stimulate the children to react with an Oedipus complex, for
parents are often guided in their preferences by the difference in sex
of their children, so that the father favours the daughter and the
mother the son; or else, where conjugal love has grown cold, the child
may be taken as a substitute for the love-object which has ceased to
attract.
It cannot be said that the world has shown great gratitude to
psycho-analytic research for the discovery of the Oedipus complex; on
the contrary, the idea has excited the most violent opposition in
grown-up people; and those who omitted to join in denying the existence
of sentiments so universally reprehended and tabooed have later made up
for this by proffering interpretations so wide of the mark as to rob the
complex of its value. My own unchanged conviction is that there is
nothing in it to deny or to gloss over. We ought to reconcile ourselves
to facts in which the Greek myth itself saw the hand of inexorable
destiny. Again, it is interesting to find that the Oedipus complex,
repudiated in actual life and relegated to fiction, has there come to
its own. O. Rank in a careful study of this theme has shown how this
very complex has supplied dramatic poetry with an abundance of motives
in countless variations, modifications and disguises, in short, subject
to just the distortion familiar to us in the work of the
dream-censorship. So we may look for the Oedipus complex even in those
dreamers who have been fortunate enough to escape conflicts with their
parents in later life; and closely connected with this we shall find
what is termed the _castration complex_, the reaction to that
intimidation in the field of sex or to that restraint of early infantile
sexual activity which is ascribed to the father.