dreams, whose analysis leads to childish impressions that are remembered
obscurely or not at all, and that often date back to the first three
years of life. But it is a mistake to draw conclusions from them which
are to apply to the dream in general; we are in every case dealing with
neurotic, particularly with hysterical persons; and the part played by
childhood scenes in these dreams might be conditioned by the nature of
the neurosis, and not by that of the dream. However, I am struck quite
as often in the course of interpreting my own dreams, which I do not do
on account of obvious symptoms of disease, by the fact that I
unsuspectingly come upon a scene of childhood in the latent dream
content, and that a whole series of dreams suddenly falls into line with
conclusions drawn from childish experiences. I have already given
examples of this, and shall give still more upon various occasions.
Perhaps I cannot close the whole chapter more fittingly than by citing
several of my own dreams, in which recent happenings and long-forgotten
experiences of childhood appear together as sources of dreams.
I. After I have been travelling and have gone to bed hungry and tired,
the great necessities of life begin to assert their claims in sleep, and
I dream as follows: _I go into a kitchen to order some pastry. Here
three women are standing, one of whom is the hostess, and is turning
something in her hand as though she were making dumplings. She answers
that I must wait until she has finished_ (not distinctly as a speech).
_I become impatient and go away insulted. I put on an overcoat; but the
first one which I try is too long. I take it off, and am somewhat
astonished to find that it has fur trimming. A second one has sewn into
it a long strip of cloth with Turkish drawings. A stranger with a long
face and a short pointed beard comes up and prevents me from putting it
on, declaring that it belongs to him. I now show him that it is
embroidered all over in Turkish fashion. He asks, “What business are the
Turkish (drawings, strips of cloth ...) of yours?” But we then become
quite friendly with each other._
In the analysis of this dream there occurs to me quite unexpectedly the
novel which I read, that is to say, which I began with the end of the
first volume, when I was perhaps thirteen years old. I have never known
the name of the novel or of its author, but the conclusion remains
vividly in my memory. The hero succumbs to insanity, and continually
calls the names of the three women that have signified the greatest good
and ill fortune for him during life. Pélagie is one of these names. I
still do not know what to make of this name in the analysis. À propos of
the three women there now come to the surface the three Parcæ who spin
the fate of man, and I know that one of the three women, the hostess in
the dream, is the mother who gives life, and who, moreover, as in my
case, gives the first nourishment to the living creature. Love and
hunger meet at the mother’s breast. A young man—so runs an anecdote—who
became a great admirer of womanly beauty, once when the conversation
turned upon a beautiful wet nurse who had nourished him as a child,
expressed himself to the effect that he was sorry that he had not taken
better advantage of his opportunity at the time. I am in the habit of
using the anecdote to illustrate the factor of subsequence in the
mechanism of psychoneuroses.... One of the Parcæ, then, is rubbing the
palms of her hands together as though she were making dumplings. A
strange occupation for one of the Fates, which is urgently in need of an
explanation! This is now found in another and earlier childhood memory.
When I was six years old, and was receiving my first instructions from
my mother, I was asked to believe that we are made of earth, and that
therefore we must return to earth. But this did not suit me, and I
doubted her teaching. Thereupon my mother rubbed the palms of her hands
together—just as in making dumplings, except that there was no dough
between them—and showed me the blackish scales of epidermis which were
thus rubbed off as a proof that it is earth of which we are made. My
astonishment at this demonstration _ad oculos_ was without limit, and I
acquiesced in the idea which I was later to hear expressed in words:
“Thou owest nature a death.”[BF] Thus the women are really Parcæ whom I
visit in the kitchen, as I have done so often in my childhood years when
I was hungry, and when my mother used to order me to wait until lunch
was ready. And now for the dumplings! At least one of my teachers at the
University, the very one to whom I am indebted for my histological
knowledge (epidermis), might be reminded by the name Knoedl (German,
_Knoedel_ = dumplings) of a person whom he had to prosecute for
committing a plagiarism of his writings. To commit plagiarism, to
appropriate anything one can get, even though it belongs to another,
obviously leads to the second part of the dream, in which I am treated
like a certain overcoat thief, who for a time plied his trade in the
auditoria. I wrote down the expression plagiarism—without any
reason—because it presented itself to me, and now I perceive that it
must belong to the latent dream-content, because it will serve as a
bridge between different parts of the manifest dream-content. The chain
of associations—Pélagie—plagiarism—plagiostomi[BG] (sharks)—fish
bladder—connects the old novel with the affair of Knoedl and with the
overcoats (German, _Überzieher_ = thing drawn over—overcoat or condom),
which obviously refer to an object belonging to the technique of sexual
life.[BH] This, it is true, is a very forced and irrational connection,
but it is nevertheless one which I could not establish in waking life if
it had not been already established by the activity of the dream.
Indeed, as though nothing were sacred for this impulse to force
connections, the beloved name, Bruecke (bridge of words, see above), now
serves to remind me of the institution in which I spent my happiest
hours as a student, quite without any cares (“So you will ever find more
pleasure at the breasts of knowledge without measure”), in the most
complete contrast to the urgent desires which vex me while I dream. And
finally there comes to the surface the recollection of another dear
teacher, whose name again sounds like something to eat (Fleischl—German,
_Fleisch_ = meat—like Knoedl), and of a pathetic scene, in which the
scales of epidermis play a part (mother—hostess), and insanity (the
novel), and a remedy from the Latin kitchen which numbs the sensation of
hunger, to wit, cocaine.
In this manner I could follow the intricate trains of thought still
further, and could fully explain the part of the dream which is missing
in the analysis; but I must refrain, because the personal sacrifices
which it would require are too great. I shall merely take up one of the
threads, which will serve to lead us directly to the dream thoughts that
lie at the bottom of the confusion. The stranger, with the long face and
pointed beard, who wants to prevent me from putting on the overcoat, has
the features of a tradesman at Spalato, of whom my wife made ample
purchases of Turkish cloths. His name was Popovic̓, a suspicious name,
which, by the way, has given the humorist Stettenheim a chance to make a
significant remark: “He told me his name, and blushingly shook my
hand.”[BI] Moreover, there is the same abuse of names as above with
Pélagie, Knoedl, Bruecke, Fleischl. That such playing with names is
childish nonsense can be asserted without fear of contradiction; if I
indulge in it, this indulgence amounts to an act of retribution, for my
own name has numberless times fallen a victim to such weak-minded
attempts at humour. Goethe once remarked how sensitive a man is about
his name with which, as with his skin, he feels that he has grown up,
whereupon Herder composed the following on his name:
“Thou who art born of _gods_, of _Goths_, or of _Kot_ (mud)—
Thy _god_like images, too, are dust.”
I perceive that this digression about the abuse of names was only
intended to prepare for this complaint. But let us stop here.... The
purchase at Spalato reminds me of another one at Cattaro, where I was
too cautious, and missed an opportunity for making some desirable
acquisitions. (Missing an opportunity at the breast of the nurse, see
above.) Another dream thought, occasioned in the dreamer by the
sensation of hunger, is as follows: _One should let nothing which one
can have escape, even if a little wrong is done; no opportunity should
be missed, life is so short, death inevitable._ Owing to the fact that
this also has a sexual significance, and that desire is unwilling to
stop at a wrong, this philosophy of _carpe diem_ must fear the censor
and must hide behind a dream. This now makes articulate counter-thoughts
of all kinds, recollections of a time when spiritual food alone was
sufficient for the dreamer; it suggests repressions of every kind, and
even threats of disgusting sexual punishments.
II. A second dream requires a longer preliminary statement:
I have taken a car to the West Station in order to begin a vacation
journey to the Aussee, and I reach the station in time for the train to
Ischl, which leaves earlier. Here I see Count Thun, who is again going
to see the Emperor at Ischl. In spite of the rain, he has come in an
open carriage, has passed out at once through the door for local trains,
and has motioned back the gate-keeper, who does not know him and who
wants to take his ticket, with a little wave of his hand. After the
train to Ischl has left, I am told to leave the platform and go back
into the hot waiting-room; but with difficulty I secure permission to
remain. I pass the time in watching the people who make use of bribes to
secure a compartment; I make up my mind to insist on my rights—that is,
to demand the same privilege. Meanwhile I sing something to myself,
which I afterwards recognise to be the aria from Figaro’s Wedding:
“If my lord Count wishes to try a dance,
Try a dance,
Let him but say so,
I’ll play him a tune.”
(Possibly another person would not have recognised the song.)
During the whole afternoon I have been in an insolent, combative mood;
I have spoken roughly to the waiter and the cabman, I hope without
hurting their feelings; now all kinds of bold and revolutionary
thoughts come into my head, of a kind suited to the words of Figaro
and the comedy of Beaumarchais, which I had seen at the Comédie
Française. The speech about great men who had taken the trouble to be
born; the aristocratic prerogative, which Count Almaviva wants to
apply in the case of Susan; the jokes which our malicious journalists
of the Opposition make upon the name of Count Thun (German, _thun_ =
doing) by calling him Count Do-Nothing. I really do not envy him; he
has now a difficult mission with the Emperor, and I am the real Count
Do-Nothing, for I am taking a vacation. With this, all kinds of
cheerful plans for the vacation. A gentleman now arrives who is known
to me as a representative of the Government at the medical
examinations, and who has won the flattering nickname of “Governmental
bed-fellow” by his activities in this capacity. By insisting on his
official station he secures half of a first-class compartment, and I
hear one guard say to the other: “Where are we going to put the
gentleman with the first-class half-compartment?” A pretty
favouritism; I am paying for a whole first-class compartment. Now I
get a whole compartment for myself, but not in a through coach, so
that there is no toilet at my disposal during the night. My complaints
to the guard are without result; I get even by proposing that at least
there be a hole made in the floor of this compartment for the possible
needs of the travellers. I really awake at a quarter of three in the
morning with a desire to urinate, having had the following dream:
Crowd of people, meeting of students.... _A certain Count (Thun or
Taafe) is making a speech. Upon being asked to say something about the
Germans, he declares with contemptuous mien that their favourite flower
is Colt’s-foot, and then puts something like a torn leaf, really the
crumpled skeleton of a leaf, into his buttonhole. I make a start, I make
a start then,[BJ] but I am surprised at this idea of mine._ Then more
indistinctly: _It seems as though it were the vestibule (Aula), the
exits are jammed, as though it were necessary to flee. I make my way
through a suite of handsomely furnished rooms, apparently governmental
chambers, with furniture of a colour which is between brown and violet,
and at last I come to a passage where a housekeeper, an elderly, fat
woman (Frauenzimmer), is seated. I try to avoid talking to her, but
apparently she thinks I have a right to pass because she asks whether
she shall accompany me with the lamp. I signify to her to tell her that
she is to remain standing on the stairs, and in this I appear to myself
very clever, for avoiding being watched at last. I am downstairs now,
and I find a narrow, steep way along which I go._
Again indistinctly.... _It is as if my second task were to get away out
of the city, as my earlier was to get out of the house. I am riding in a
one-horse carriage, and tell the driver to take me to a railway station.
“I cannot ride with you on the tracks,” I say, after he has made the
objection that I have tired him out. Here it seems as though I had
already driven with him along a course which is ordinarily traversed on
the railroad. The stations are crowded; I consider whether I shall go to
Krems or to Znaim, but I think that the court will be there, and I
decide in favour of Graz or something of the sort. Now I am seated in
the coach, which is something like a street-car, and I have in my
buttonhole a long braided thing, on which are violet-brown violets of
stiff material, which attracts the attention of many people. Here the
scene breaks off._
_I am again in front of the railroad station, but I am with a elderly
gentleman. I invent a scheme for remaining unrecognised, but I also see
this plan already carried out. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it
were, the same thing. He pretends to be blind, at least in one eye, and
I hold a male urinal in front of him (which we have had to buy in the
city or did buy), I am thus a sick attendant, and have to give him the
urinal because he is blind. If the conductor sees us in this position,
he must pass us by without drawing attention. At the same time the
attitude of the person mentioned is visually observed._ Then I awake
with a desire to urinate.
The whole dream seems a sort of phantasy, which takes the dreamer back
to the revolutionary year 1848, the memory of which had been renewed by
the anniversary year 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau,
where I had become acquainted with Emmersdorf, a town which I wrongly
supposed to be the resting-place of the student leader Fischof, to whom
several features of the dream content might refer. The thought
associations then lead me to England, to the house of my brother, who
was accustomed jokingly to tell his wife of “Fifty years ago,” according
to the title of a poem by Lord Tennyson, whereupon the children were in
the habit of correcting: “Fifteen years ago.” This phantasy, however,
which subtilely attaches itself to the thoughts which the sight of the
Count Thun has given rise to, is only like the façade of Italian
churches which is superimposed without being organically connected with
the building behind it; unlike these façades, however, the phantasy is
filled with gaps and confused, and the parts from within break through
at many places. The first situation of the dream is concocted from
several scenes, into which I am able to separate it. The arrogant
attitude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at the
Gymnasium which took place in my fifteenth year. We had contrived a
conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant teacher, the leading spirit
in which was a schoolmate who seems to have taken Henry VIII. of England
as his model. It fell to me to carry out the _coup-d’état_, and a
discussion of the importance of the Danube (German _Donau_) for Austria
(Wachau!) was the occasion upon which matters came to open indignation.
A fellow-conspirator was the only aristocratic schoolmate whom we had—he
was called the “giraffe” on account of his conspicuous longitudinal
development—and he stood just like the Count in the dream, while he was
being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the Professor of the
German language. The explanation of the favourite flower and the putting
into the buttonhole of something which again must have been a flower
(which recalls the orchids, which I had brought to a lady friend on the
same day, and besides that the rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the
scene in Shakespeare’s historical plays which opens the civil wars of
the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII. has opened the
way to this reminiscence. It is not very far now from roses to red and
white carnations. Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other
Spanish, insinuate themselves into the analysis: “Roses, tulips,
carnations, all flowers fade,” and “Isabelita, no llores que se
marchitan las flores.” The Spanish is taken from _Figaro_. Here in
Vienna white carnations have become the insignia of the Anti-Semites,
the red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of
an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway trip in beautiful Saxony
(Anglo-Saxon). The third scene contributing to the formation of the
first situation in the dream takes place in my early student life. There
was a discussion in the German students’ club about the relation of
philosophy to the general sciences. A green youth, full of the
materialistic doctrine, I thrust myself forward and defended a very
one-sided view. Thereupon a sagacious older school-fellow, who has since
shown his capacity for leading men and organising the masses, and who,
moreover, bears a name belonging to the animal kingdom, arose and called
us down thoroughly; he too, he said, had herded swine in his youth, and
had come back repentant to the house of his father. I started up (as in
the dream), became very uncivil, and answered that since I knew he had
herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse. (In the
dream I am surprised at my national German sentiment.) There was great
commotion; and the demand came from all sides that I take back what I
had said, but I remained steadfast. The man who had been insulted was
too sensible to take the advice, which was given him, to send a
challenge, and let the matter drop.
The remaining elements of this scene of the dream are of more remote
origin. What is the meaning of the Count’s proclaiming the colt’s foot?
Here I must consult my train of associations. Colt’s-foot (German:
_Huflattich_)—lattice—lettuce—salad-dog (the dog that grudges others
what he cannot eat himself). Here plenty of opprobrious epithets may be
discerned: Gir-affe (German _Affe_ = monkey, ape), pig, sow, dog; I
might even find means to arrive at donkey, on a detour by way of a name,
and thus again at contempt for an academic teacher. Furthermore I
translate colt’s-foot (_Huflattich_)—I do not know how correctly—by
“pisse-en-lit.” I got this idea from Zola’s _Germinal_, in which
children are ordered to bring salad of this kind. The dog—_chien_—has a
name sounding like the major function (_chier_, as _pisser_ stands for
the minor one). Now we shall soon have before us the indecent in all
three of its categories; for in the same _Germinal_, which has a lot to
do with the future revolution there is described a very peculiar
contest, depending upon the production of gaseous excretions, called
flatus.[BK] And now I must remark how the way to this flatus has been
for a long while preparing, beginning with the flowers, and proceeding
to the Spanish rhyme of Isabelita to Ferdinand and Isabella, and, by way
of Henry VIII., to English history at the time of the expedition of the
Armada against England, after the victorious termination of which the
English struck a medal with the inscription: “_Afflavit_ et dissipati
sunt,” for the storm had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had thought of
taking this phrase for the title of a chapter on “Therapeutics”—to be
meant half jokingly—if I should ever have occasion to give a detailed
account of my conception and treatment of hysteria.
I cannot give such a detailed solution of the second scene of the dream,
out of regard for the censor. For at this point I put myself in the
place of a certain eminent gentleman of that revolutionary period, who
also had an adventure with an eagle, who is said to have suffered from
incontinence of the bowels, and the like; and I believe I _should not be
justified at this point in passing_ the censor, although it was an aulic
councillor (_aula_, _consilarius aulicus_) who told me the greater part
of these stories. The allusion to the suite of rooms in the dream
relates to the private car of his Excellency, into which I had
opportunity to look for a moment; but it signifies, as so often in
dreams, a woman (Frauenzimmer; German _Zimmer_—room is appended to
_Frauen_—woman, in order to imply a slight amount of contempt).[BL] In
the person of the housekeeper I give scant recognition to an intelligent
elderly lady for the entertainment and the many good stories which I
have enjoyed at her house.... The feature of the lamp goes back to
Grillparzer, who notes a charming experience of a similar nature, which
he afterwards made use of in “Hero and Leander” (the billows of the
ocean and of love—the Armada and the storm).[BM]
I must also forgo detailed analysis of the two remaining portions of the
dream; I shall select only those elements which lead to two childhood
scenes, for the sake of which alone I have taken up the dream. The
reader will guess that it is sexual matter which forces me to this
suppression; but he need not be content with this explanation. Many
things which must be treated as secrets in the presence of others are
not treated as such with one’s self, and here it is not a question of
considerations inducing me to hide the solution, but of motives of the
inner censor concealing the real content of the dream from myself. I may
say, then, that the analysis shows these three portions of the dream to
be impertinent boasting, the exuberance of an absurd grandiose idea
which has long since been suppressed in my waking life, which, however,
dares show itself in the manifest dream content by one or two
projections (_I seem clever to myself_), and which makes the arrogant
mood of the evening before the dream perfectly intelligible. It is
boasting, indeed, in all departments; thus the mention of Graz refers to
the phrase: What is the price of Graz? which we are fond of using when
we feel over-supplied with money. Whoever will recall Master Rabelais’s
unexcelled description of the “Life and Deeds of Gargantua and his Son
Pantagruel,” will be able to supply the boastful content intimated in
the first portion of the dream. The following belongs to the two
childhood scenes which have been promised. I had bought a new trunk for
this journey, whose colour, a brownish violet, appears in the dream
several times. (Violet-brown violets made of stiff material, next to a
thing which is called “girl-catcher”—the furniture in the governmental
chambers). That something new attracts people’s attention is a
well-known belief of children. Now I have been told the following story
of my childhood; I remember hearing the story rather than the occurrence
itself. I am told that at the age of two I still occasionally wetted my
bed, that I was often reproached on this subject, and that I consoled my
father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the
nearest large city). (Hence the detail inserted in the dream that _we
bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it_; one must keep one’s
promises. Attention is further called to the identity of the male urinal
and the feminine trunk, box). All the megalomania of the child is
contained in this promise. The significance of the dream of difficulty
in urinating in the case of the child has been already considered in the
interpretation of an earlier dream (_cf._ the dream on p. 145).