proved instructive—I refer to the dream in which friend R. is my uncle
(p. 116). We have carried its interpretation far enough for the
wish-motive, of being appointed professor, to assert itself tangibly;
and we have explained the affection displayed in the dream for friend R.
as a fiction of opposition and spite against the aspersion of the two
colleagues, who appear in the dream thoughts. The dream was my own; I
may, therefore, continue the analysis by stating that my feelings were
not quite satisfied by the solution reached. I know that my opinion of
these colleagues who are so badly treated in the dream thoughts would
have been expressed in quite different terms in waking life; the potency
of the wish not to share their fate in the matter of appointment seemed
to me too slight to account for the discrepancy between my estimate in
the dream and that of waking. If my desire to be addressed by a new
title proves so strong it gives proof of a morbid ambition, which I did
not know to exist in me, and which I believe is far from my thoughts. I
do not know how others, who think they know me, would judge me, for
perhaps I have really been ambitious; but if this be true, my ambition
has long since transferred itself to other objects than the title and
rank of assistant-professor.
Whence, then, the ambition which the dream has ascribed to me? Here I
remember a story which I heard often in my childhood, that at my birth
an old peasant’s wife had prophesied to my happy mother (I was her
first-born) that she had given to the world a great man. Such prophecies
must occur very frequently; there are so many mothers happy in
expectation, and so many old peasant wives whose influence on earth has
waned, and who have therefore turned their eyes towards the future. The
prophetess was not likely to suffer for it either. Might my hunger for
greatness have originated from this source? But here I recollect an
impression from the later years of my childhood, which would serve still
better as an explanation. It was of an evening at an inn on the
Prater,[BA] where my parents were accustomed to take me when I was
eleven or twelve years old. We noticed a man who went from table to
table and improvised verses upon any subject that was given to him. I
was sent to bring the poet to our table and he showed himself thankful
for the message. Before asking for his subject he threw off a few rhymes
about me, and declared it probable, if he could trust his inspiration,
that I would one day become a “minister.” I can still distinctly
remember the impression made by this second prophecy. It was at the time
of the election for the municipal ministry; my father had recently
brought home pictures of those elected to the ministry—Herbst, Giskra,
Unger, Berger, and others—and we had illuminated them in honour of these
gentlemen. There were even some Jews among them; every industrious
Jewish schoolboy therefore had the making of a minister in him. Even the
fact that until shortly before my enrolment in the University I wanted
to study jurisprudence, and changed my plans only at the last moment,
must be connected with the impressions of that time. A minister’s career
is under no circumstances open to a medical man. And now for my dream! I
begin to see that it transplants me from the sombre present to the
hopeful time of the municipal election, and fulfils my wish of that time
to the fullest extent. In treating my two estimable and learned
colleagues so badly, because they are Jews, the one as a simpleton and
the other as a criminal—in doing this I act as though I were the
minister of education, I put myself in his place. What thorough revenge
I take upon his Excellency! He refuses to appoint me professor
extraordinarius, and in return I put myself in his place in the dream.
Another case establishes the fact that although the wish which actuates
the dream is a present one, it nevertheless draws great intensification
from childhood memories. I refer to a series of dreams which are based
upon the longing to go to Rome. I suppose I shall still have to satisfy
this longing by means of dreams for a long time to come, because, at the
time of year which is at my disposal for travelling, a stay at Rome is
to be avoided on account of considerations of health.[BB] Thus I once
dreamt of seeing the Tiber and the bridge of St. Angelo from the window
of a railroad compartment; then the train starts, and it occurs to me
that I have never entered the city at all. The view which I saw in the
dream was modelled after an engraving which I had noticed in passing the
day before in the parlour of one of my patients. On another occasion
some one is leading me upon a hill and showing me Rome half enveloped in
mist, and so far in the distance that I am astonished at the
distinctness of the view. The content of this dream is too rich to be
fully reported here. The motive, “to see the promised land from afar,”
is easily recognisable in it. The city is Lübeck, which I first saw in
the mist; the original of the hill is the Gleichenberg. In a third
dream, I am at last in Rome, as the dream tells me. To my
disappointment, the scenery which I see is anything but urban. _A little
river with black water, on one side of which are black rocks, on the
other large white flowers. I notice a certain Mr. Zucker_ (with whom I
am superficially acquainted), _and make up my mind to ask him to show me
the way into the city._ It is apparent that I am trying in vain to see a
city in the dream which I have never seen in waking life. If I resolve
the landscape into its elements, the white flowers indicate Ravenna,
which is known to me, and which, for a time at least, deprived Rome of
its leading place as capital of Italy. In the swamps around Ravenna we
had seen the most beautiful water-lilies in the middle of black pools of
water; the dream makes them grow on meadows, like the narcissi of our
own Aussee, because at Ravenna it was such tedious work to fetch them
out of the water. The black rock, so close to the water, vividly recalls
the valley of the Tepl at Karlsbad. “Karlsbad” now enables me to account
for the peculiar circumstance that I ask Mr. Zucker the way. In the
material of which the dream is composed appear also two of those amusing
Jewish anecdotes, which conceal so much profound and often bitter
worldly wisdom, and which we are so fond of quoting in our conversation
and letters. One is the story of the “constitution,” and tells how a
poor Jew sneaks into the express train for Karlsbad without a ticket,
how he is caught and is treated more and more unkindly at each call for
tickets by the conductor, and how he tells a friend, whom he meets at
one of the stations during his miserable journey, and who asks him where
he is travelling: “To Karlsbad, if my constitution will stand it.”
Associated with this in memory is another story about a Jew who is
ignorant of French, and who has express instructions to ask in Paris for
the way to the Rue Richelieu. Paris was for many years the object of my
own longing, and I took the great satisfaction with which I first set
foot on the pavement in Paris as a warrant that I should also attain the
fulfilment of other wishes. Asking for the way is again a direct
allusion to Rome, for of course all roads lead to Rome. Moreover, the
name Zucker (English, sugar) again points to _Karlsbad_, whither we send
all persons afflicted with the _constitutional_ disease, diabetes
(_Zuckerkrankheit_, sugar-disease). The occasion for this dream was the
proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A
further allusion to sugar and diabetes was to be found in the matters
which I had to talk over with him.
A fourth dream, occurring shortly after the last one mentioned, brings
me back to Rome. I see a street-corner before me and am astonished to
see so many German placards posted there. On the day before I had
written my friend with prophetic vision that Prague would probably not
be a comfortable resort for German travellers. The dream, therefore,
simultaneously expressed the wish to meet him at Rome instead of at the
Bohemian city, and a desire, which probably originated during my student
days, that the German language might be accorded more tolerance in
Prague. Besides I must have understood the Czech language in the first
three years of my childhood, because I was born in a small village of
Moravia, inhabited by Slavs. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my
seventeenth year, became, without effort on my part, so imprinted upon
my memory that I can repeat it to this day, although I have no idea of
its meaning. There is then no lack in these dreams also of manifold
relations to impressions from the first years of my life.
It was during my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took
me past Lake Trasimenus, that I at last found what re-enforcement my
longing for the Eternal City had received from the impressions of my
youth; this was after I had seen the Tiber, and had turned back with
painful emotions when I was within eighty kilometers of Rome. I was just
broaching the plan of travelling to Naples via Rome the next year, when
this sentence, which I must have read in one of our classical authors,
occurred to me: “It is a question which of the two paced up and down in
his room the more impatiently after he had made the plan to go to
Rome—Assistant-Headmaster Winckelman or the great general Hannibal.” I
myself had walked in Hannibal’s footsteps; like him I was destined never
to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania after the whole world had
expected him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had reached this point of
similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium;
like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies during the Punic
war, not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Then, when I came
finally to understand the consequences of belonging to an alien race,
and was forced by the anti-semitic sentiment among my class-mates to
assume a definite attitude, the figure of the semitic commander assumed
still greater proportions in my eyes. Hannibal and Rome symbolised for
me as a youth the antithesis between the tenaciousness of the Jews and
the organisation of the Catholic Church. The significance for our
emotional life which the anti-semitic movement has since assumed helped
to fix the thoughts and impressions of that earlier time. Thus the wish
to get to Rome has become the cover and symbol in my dream-life for
several warmly cherished wishes, for the realisation of which one might
work with the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Punic general,
and whose fulfilment sometimes seems as little favoured by fortune as
the wish of Hannibal’s life to enter Rome.
And now for the first time I happen upon the youthful experience which,
even to-day, still manifests its power in all these emotions and dreams.
I may have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me
with him on his walks, and to reveal to me his views about the things of
this world in his conversation. In this way he once told me, in order to
show into how much better times I had been born than he, the following:
“While I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday on a street in the
village where you were born; I was handsomely dressed and wore a new fur
cap. Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one
blow and shouts: “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” “And what did you do?” “I
went into the street and picked up the cap,” was the calm answer. That
did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading
me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did
not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings—the scene
in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar[BC] Barka made his boy swear at the
domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Since that time Hannibal
has had a place in my phantasies.”
I think I can follow my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general still
further back into my childhood, so that possibly we have here the
transference of an already formed emotional relation to a new vehicle.
One of the first books which fell into my childish hands, after I
learned to read, was Thiers’ _Konsulat und Kaiserreich_ (Consulship and
Empire); I remember I pasted on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers
little labels with the names of the Imperial marshals, and that at that
time Masséna (as a Jew Menasse) was already my avowed favourite.
Napoleon himself follows Hannibal in crossing the Alps. And perhaps the
development of this martial ideal can be traced still further back into
my childhood, to the wish which the now friendly, now hostile,
intercourse during my first three years with a boy a year older than
myself must have actuated in the weaker of the two playmates.
The deeper one goes in the analysis of dreams, the more often one is put
on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream
sources in the latent dream content.
We have learned (p. 16) that the dream very rarely reproduces
experiences in such a manner that they constitute the sole manifest
dream content, unabridged and unchanged. Still some authentic examples
showing this process have been reported, and I can add some new ones
which again refer to infantile scenes. In the case of one of my
patients, a dream once gave a barely disfigured reproduction of a sexual
occurrence, which was immediately recognised as an accurate
recollection. The memory of it indeed had never been lost in waking
life, but it had been greatly obscured, and its revivification was a
result of the preceding work of analysis. The dreamer had at the age of
twelve visited a bed-ridden schoolmate, who had exposed himself by a
movement in bed, probably only by chance. At the sight of the genitals,
he was seized by a kind of compulsion, exposed himself and took hold of
the member belonging to the other boy, who, however, looked at him with
surprise and indignation, whereupon he became embarrassed and let go. A
dream repeated this scene twenty-three years later, with all the details
of the emotions occurring in it, changing it, however, in this respect,
that the dreamer took the passive part instead of the active one, while
the person of the schoolmate was replaced by one belonging to the
present.
As a rule, of course, a childhood scene is represented in the manifest
dream content only by an allusion, and must be extricated from the dream
by means of interpretation. The citation of examples of this kind cannot
have a very convincing effect, because every guarantee that they are
experiences of childhood is lacking; if they belong to an earlier time
of life, they are no longer recognised by our memory. Justification for
the conclusion that such childish experiences generally exist in dreams
is based upon a great number of factors which become apparent in
psychoanalytical work, and which seem reliable enough when regarded as a
whole. But when, for the purposes of dream interpretation, such
references of dreams to childish experiences are torn from their
context, they will perhaps not make much impression, especially since I
never give all the material upon which the interpretation depends.
However, I shall not let this prevent me from giving some examples.
I. The following dream is from another female patient: _She is in a
large room, in which there are all kinds of machines, perhaps, as she
imagines, an orthopædic institute. She hears that I have no time, and
that she must take the treatment along with five others. But she
resists, and is unwilling to lie down on the bed—or whatever it is—which
is intended for her. She stands in a corner and waits for me to say “It
is not true.” The others, meanwhile, laugh at her, saying it is all
foolishness on her part. At the same time it is as if she were called
upon to make many small squares._
The first part of the content of this dream is an allusion to the
treatment and a transference on me. The second contains an allusion to a
childhood scene; the two portions are connected by the mention of the
bed. The orthopædic institute refers to one of my talks in which I
compared the treatment as to its duration and nature with an orthopædic
treatment. At the beginning of the treatment I had to tell her that _for
the present_ I had little time for her, but that later on I would devote
a whole hour to her daily. This aroused in her the old sensitiveness,
which is the chief characteristic of children who are to be hysterical.
Their desire for love is insatiable. My patient was the youngest of six
brothers and sisters (hence, “_with five others_”), and as such the
favourite of her father, but in spite of that she seems to have found
that her beloved father devoted too little time and attention to her.
The detail of her waiting for me to say “It is not true,” has the
following explanation: A tailor’s apprentice had brought her a dress,
and she had given him the money for it. Then she asked her husband
whether she would have to pay the money again if the boy were to lose
it. To tease her, her husband answered “Yes” (the teasing in the dream),
and she asked again and again, and _waited for him to say_ “_It is not
true._” The thought of the latent dream-content may now be construed as
follows: Will she have to pay me the double amount if I devote twice the
time to her? a thought which is stingy or filthy. (The uncleanliness of
childhood is often replaced in the dream by greediness for money; the
word filthy here supplies the bridge.) If all that about waiting until I
should say, &c., serves as a dream circumlocution for the word “filthy,”
the standing-in-a-corner and not lying down-on-the-bed are in keeping;
for these two features are component parts of a scene of childhood, in
which she had soiled her bed, and for punishment was put into a corner,
with the warning that papa would not love her any more, and her brothers
and sisters laughed at her, &c. The little squares refer to her young
niece, who has shown her the arithmetical trick of writing figures in
nine squares, I believe it is, in such a way that upon being added
together in any direction they make fifteen.
II. Here is the dream of a man: _He sees two boys tussling with each
other, and they are cooper’s boys, as he concludes from the implements
which are lying about; one of the boys has thrown the other down, the
prostrate one wears ear-rings with blue stones. He hurries after the
wrongdoer with lifted cane, in order to chastise him. The latter takes
refuge with a woman who is standing against a wooden fence, as though it
were his mother. She is the wife of a day labourer, and she turns her
back to the man who is dreaming. At last she faces about and stares at
him with a horrible look, so that he runs away in fright; in her eyes
the red flesh of the lower lid seems to stand out._
The dream has made abundant use of trivial occurrences of the previous
day. The day before he actually saw two boys on the street, one of whom
threw the other one down. When he hurried up to them in order to settle
the quarrel, both of them took flight. Coopers’ boys: this is explained
only by a subsequent dream, in the analysis of which he used the
expression, “_To knock the bottom out of the barrel._” Ear-rings with
blue stones, according to his observation, are chiefly worn by
prostitutes. Furthermore, a familiar doggerel rhyme about two boys comes
up: “The other boy, his name was Mary” (that is, he was a girl). The
woman standing up: after the scene with the two boys, he took a walk on
the bank of the Danube, and took advantage of being alone to urinate
_against a wooden fence_. A little later during his walk, a decently
dressed elderly lady smiled at him very pleasantly, and wanted to hand
him her card with her address.
Since in the dream the woman stood as he had while urinating, it is a
question of a woman urinating, and this explains the “horrible look,”
and the prominence of the red flesh, which can only refer to the
genitals which gap in squatting. He had seen genitals in his childhood,
and they had appeared in later recollection as “proud flesh” and as
“wound.” The dream unites two occasions upon which, as a young boy, the
dreamer had had opportunity to see the genitals of little girls, in
throwing one down, and while another was urinating; and, as is shown by
another association, he had kept in memory a punishment or threat of his
father’s, called forth by the sexual curiosity which the boy manifested
on these occasions.
III. A great mass of childish memories, which have been hastily united
in a phantasy, is to be found behind the following dream of a young
lady.
_She goes out in trepidation, in order to do some shopping. On the
Graben[BD] she sinks to her knees as though broken down. Many people
collect around her, especially the hackney-coach drivers; but no one
helps her to get up. She makes many unavailing attempts; finally she
must have succeeded, for she is put into a hackney-coach which is to
take her home. A large, heavily laden basket (something like a
market-basket) is thrown after her through the window._
This is the same woman who is always harassed in her dreams as she was
harassed when a child. The first situation of the dream is apparently
taken from seeing a horse that had fallen, just as “broken down” points
to horse-racing. She was a rider in her early years, still earlier she
was probably also a horse. Her first childish memory of the
seventeen-year-old son of the porter, who, being seized on the street by
an epileptic fit, was brought home in a coach, is connected with the
idea of falling down. Of this, of course, she has only heard, but the
idea of epileptic fits and of falling down has obtained great power over
her phantasies, and has later influenced the form of her own hysterical
attacks. When a person of the female sex dreams of falling, this almost
regularly has a sexual significance; she becomes a “fallen woman,” and
for the purpose of the dream under consideration this interpretation is
probably the least doubtful, for she falls on the Graben, the place in
Vienna which is known as the concourse of prostitutes. The market-basket
admits of more than one interpretation; in the sense of refusal (German,
_Korb_ = basket—snub, refusal), she remembers the many snubs which she
first gave her suitors, and which she later, as she thinks, received
herself. Here belongs also the detail that _no one will help her up_,
which she herself interprets as being disdained. Furthermore, the
market-basket recalls phantasies that have already appeared in the
course of analysis, in which she imagines she has married far beneath
her station, and now goes marketing herself. But lastly the
market-basket might be interpreted as the mark of a servant. This
suggests further childhood memories—of a cook who was sent away because
she stole; she, too, sank to her knees and begged for mercy. The dreamer
was at that time twelve years old. Then there is a recollection of a
chamber-maid, who was dismissed because she had an affair with the
coachman of the household, who, incidentally, married her afterwards.
This recollection, therefore, gives us a clue to the coachman in the
dream (who do not, in contrast with what is actually the case, take the
part of the fallen woman). But there still remains to be explained the
throwing of the basket, and the throwing of it through the window. This
takes her to the transference of baggage on the railroad, to the
_Fensterln_,[BE] in the country, and to minor impressions received at a
country resort, of a gentleman throwing some blue plums to a lady
through her window, and of the dreamer’s little sister being frightened
because a cretin who was passing looked in at the window. And now from
behind this there emerges an obscure recollection, from her tenth year,
of a nurse who made love at the country resort with a servant of the
household, of which the child had opportunity to see something, and who
was “fired” (thrown out) (in the dream the opposite: “thrown into”), a
story which we had also approached by several other paths. The baggage,
moreover, or the trunk of a servant, is disparagingly referred to in
Vienna as “seven plums.” “Pack up your seven plums and get out.”