person if he is unwilling to furnish us with the unconscious thoughts
which lie behind the dream content, and for this reason the practical
applicability of our method of dream interpretation is seriously
curtailed.[BR] But there are a certain number of dreams—in contrast with
the usual freedom displayed by the individual in fashioning his dream
world with characteristic peculiarity, and thereby making it
unintelligible—which almost every one has dreamed in the same manner,
and of which we are accustomed to assume that they have the same
significance in the case of every dreamer. A peculiar interest belongs
to these typical dreams for the reason that they probably all come from
the same sources with every person, that they are thus particularly
suited to give us information upon the sources of dreams.
Typical dreams are worthy of the most exhaustive investigation. I shall,
however, only give a somewhat detailed consideration to examples of this
species, and for this purpose I shall first select the so-called
embarrassment dream of nakedness, and the dream of the death of dear
relatives.
The dream of being naked or scantily clad in the presence of strangers
occurs with the further addition that one is not at all ashamed of it,
&c. But the dream of nakedness is worthy of our interest only when shame
and embarrassment are felt in it, when one wishes to flee or to hide,
and when one feels the strange inhibition that it is impossible to move
from the spot and that one is incapable of altering the disagreeable
situation. It is only in this connection that the dream is typical; the
nucleus of its content may otherwise be brought into all kinds of
relations or may be replaced by individual amplifications. It is
essentially a question of a disagreeable sensation of the nature of
shame, the wish to be able to hide one’s nakedness, chiefly by means of
locomotion, without being able to accomplish this. I believe that the
great majority of my readers will at some time have found themselves in
this situation in a dream.
Usually the nature and manner of the experience is indistinct. It is
usually reported, “I was in my shirt,” but this is rarely a clear image;
in most cases the lack of clothing is so indeterminate that it is
designated in the report of the dream by a set of alternatives: “I was
in my chemise or in my petticoat.” As a rule the deficiency in the
toilet is not serious enough to justify the feeling of shame attached to
it. For a person who has served in the army, nakedness is often replaced
by a mode of adjustment that is contrary to regulations. “I am on the
street without my sabre and I see officers coming,” or “I am without my
necktie,” or “I am wearing checkered civilian’s trousers,” &c.
The persons before whom one is ashamed are almost always strangers with
faces that have been left undetermined. It never occurs in the typical
dream that one is reproved or even noticed on account of the dress which
causes the embarrassment to one’s self. Quite on the contrary, the
people have an air of indifference, or, as I had opportunity to observe
in a particularly clear dream, they look stiffly solemn. This is worth
thinking about.
The shamed embarrassment of the dreamer and the indifference of the
spectators form a contradiction which often occurs in the dream. It
would better accord with the feelings of the dreamer if the strangers
looked at him in astonishment and laughed at him, or if they grew
indignant. I think, however, that the latter unpleasant feature has been
obviated by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, while the embarrassment,
being retained on some account or other, has been left standing, and
thus the two parts fail to agree. We have interesting evidence to show
that the dream, whose appearance has been partially disfigured by the
tendency to wish-fulfilment, has not been properly understood. For it
has become the basis of a fairy tale familiar to us all in Andersen’s
version,[BS] and it has recently received poetic treatment by L. Fulda
in the _Talisman_. In Andersen’s fairy tale we are told of two impostors
who weave a costly garment for the Emperor, which, however, shall be
visible only to the good and true. The Emperor goes forth clad in this
invisible garment, and, the fabric serving as a sort of touchstone, all
the people are frightened into acting as though they did not notice the
nakedness of the Emperor.
But such is the situation in our dream. It does not require great
boldness to assume that the unintelligible dream content has suggested
the invention of a state of undress in which the situation that is being
remembered becomes significant. This situation has then been deprived of
its original meaning, and placed at the service of other purposes. But
we shall see that such misunderstanding of the dream content often
occurs on account of the conscious activity of the second psychic
system, and is to be recognised as a factor in the ultimate formation of
the dream; furthermore, that in the development of the obsessions and
phobias similar misunderstandings, likewise within the same psychic
personality, play a leading part. The source from which in our dream the
material for this transformation is taken can also be explained. The
impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the
moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact that the latent
dream content is occupied with forbidden wishes which have become the
victims of repression. The connection in which such dreams appear during
my analysis of neurotics leaves no room for doubting that the dream is
based upon a recollection from earliest childhood. Only in our childhood
was there a time when we were seen by our relatives as well as by
strange nurses, servant girls, and visitors, in scanty clothing, and at
that time we were not ashamed of our nakedness.[BT]
It may be observed in the case of children who are a little older that
being undressed has a kind of intoxicating effect upon them, instead of
making them ashamed. They laugh, jump about, and strike their bodies;
the mother, or whoever is present, forbids them to do this, and says:
“Fie, that is shameful—you mustn’t do that.” Children often show
exhibitional cravings; it is hardly possible to go through a village in
our part of the country without meeting a two or three-year-old tot who
lifts up his or her shirt before the traveller, perhaps in his honour.
One of my patients has reserved in his conscious memory a scene from the
eighth year of his life in which he had just undressed previous to going
to bed, and was about to dance into the room of his little sister in his
undershirt when the servant prevented his doing it. In the childhood
history of neurotics, denudation in the presence of children of the
opposite sex plays a great part; in paranoia the desire to be observed
while dressing and undressing may be directly traced to these
experiences; among those remaining perverted there is a class which has
accentuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the
exhibitionists.
This age of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to
our later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but a
composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual. It is for this
reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked and are not ashamed
until the moment arrives when the sense of shame and of fear are
aroused; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development
begin. Into this Paradise the dream can take us back every night; we
have already ventured the conjecture that the impressions from earliest
childhood (from the prehistoric period until about the end of the fourth
year) in themselves, and independently of everything else, crave
reproduction, perhaps without further reference to their content, and
that the repetition of them is the fulfilment of a wish. Dreams of
nakedness, then, are exhibition dreams.[BU]
One’s own person, which is seen not as that of a child, but as belonging
to the present, and the idea of scanty clothing, which became buried
beneath so many later _négligée_ recollections or because of the censor,
turns out to be obscure—these two things constitute the nucleus of the
exhibition dream. Next come the persons before whom one is ashamed. I
know of no example where the actual spectators at those infantile
exhibitions reappear in the dream. For the dream is hardly ever a simple
recollection. Strangely enough, those persons who are the objects of our
sexual interest during childhood are omitted from all the reproductions
of the dream, of hysteria, and of the compulsion neurosis; paranoia
alone puts the spectators back into their places, and is fanatically
convinced of their presence, although they remain invisible. What the
dream substitutes for these, the “many strange people,” who take no
notice of the spectacle which is presented, is exactly the wish-opposite
of that single, intimate person for whom the exposure was intended.
“Many strange people,” moreover, are often found in the dream in any
other favourable connection; as a wish-opposite they always signify “a
secret.”[BV] It may be seen how the restoration of the old condition of
affairs, as it occurs in paranoia, is subject to this antithesis. One is
no longer alone. One is certainly being watched, but the spectators are
“many strange, curiously indeterminate people.”
Furthermore, repression has a place in the exhibition dream. For the
disagreeable sensation of the dream is the reaction of the second
psychic instance to the fact that the exhibition scene which has been
rejected by it has in spite of this succeeded in securing
representation. The only way to avoid this sensation would be not to
revive the scene.
Later on we shall again deal with the sensation of being inhibited. It
serves the dream excellently in representing the conflict of the will,
the negation. According to our unconscious purpose exhibition is to be
continued; according to the demands of the censor, it is to be stopped.
The relation of our typical dreams to fairy tales and to other poetic
material is neither a sporadic nor an accidental one. Occasionally the
keen insight of a poet has analytically recognised the transforming
process—of which the poet is usually the tool—and has followed it
backwards, that is to say, traced it to the dream. A friend has called
my attention to the following passage in G. Keller’s _Der Grüne
Heinrich_: “I do not wish, dear Lee, that you should ever come to
realise from experience the peculiar piquant truth contained in the
situation of Odysseus, when he appears before Nausikaa and her
playmates, naked and covered with mud! Would you like to know what it
means? Let us consider the incident closely. If you are ever separated
from your home, and from everything that is dear to you, and wander
about in a strange country, when you have seen and experienced much,
when you have cares and sorrows, and are, perhaps, even miserable and
forlorn, you will some night inevitably dream that you are approaching
your home; you will see it shining and beaming in the most beautiful
colours; charming, delicate and lovely figures will come to meet you;
and you will suddenly discover that you are going about in rags, naked
and covered with dust. A nameless feeling of shame and fear seizes you,
you try to cover yourself and to hide, and you awaken bathed in sweat.
As long as men exist, this will be the dream of the care-laden,
fortune-battered man, and thus Homer has taken his situation from the
profoundest depths of the eternal character of humanity.”
This profound and eternal character of humanity, upon the touching of
which in his listeners the poet usually calculates, is made up of the
stirrings of the spirit which are rooted in childhood, in the period
which later becomes prehistoric. Suppressed and forbidden wishes of
childhood break forth under cover of those wishes of the homeless man
which are unobjectionable and capable of becoming conscious, and for
that reason the dream which is made objective in the legend of Nausikaa
regularly assumes the form of a dream of anxiety.
My own dream, mentioned on p. 201, of hurrying up the stairs, which is
soon afterward changed into that of being glued to the steps, is
likewise an exhibition dream, because it shows the essential components
of such a dream. It must thus permit of being referred to childish
experiences, and the possession of these ought to tell us how far the
behaviour of the servant girl towards me—her reproach that I had soiled
the carpet—helped her to secure the position which she occupies in the
dream. I am now able to furnish the desired explanation. One learns in
psychoanalysis to interpret temporal proximity by objective connection;
two thoughts, apparently without connection, which immediately follow
one another, belong to a unity which can be inferred; just as an _a_ and
a _t_, which I write down together, should be pronounced as one
syllable, _at_. The same is true of the relation of dreams to one
another. The dream just cited, of the stairs, has been taken from a
series of dreams, whose other members I am familiar with on account of
having interpreted them. The dream which is included in this series must
belong to the same connection. Now the other dreams of the series are
based upon the recollection of a nurse to whom I was entrusted from some
time in the period when I was suckling to the age of two and a half
years, and of whom a hazy recollection has remained in my consciousness.
According to information which I have recently obtained from my mother,
she was old and ugly, but very intelligent and thorough; according to
inferences which I may draw from my dreams, she did not always give me
the kindest treatment, and said hard words to me when I showed
insufficient aptitude for education in cleanliness. Thus by attempting
to continue this educational work the servant girl develops a claim to
be treated by me, in the dream, as an incarnation of the prehistoric old
woman. It is to be assumed that the child bestowed his love upon this
governess in spite of her bad treatment of him.[BW]
Another series of dreams which might be called typical are those which
have the content that a dear relative, parent, brother, or sister, child
or the like, has died. Two classes of these dreams must immediately be
distinguished—those in which the dreamer remains unaffected by sorrow
while dreaming, and those in which he feels profound grief on account of
the death, in which he even expresses this grief during sleep by fervid
tears.
We may ignore the dreams of the first group; they have no claim to be
reckoned as typical. If they are analysed, it is found that they signify
something else than what they contain, that they are intended to cover
up some other wish. Thus it is with the dream of the aunt who sees the
only son of her sister lying on a bier before her (p 129). This does not
signify that she wishes the death of her little nephew; it only
conceals, as we have learned, a wish to see a beloved person once more
after long separation—the same person whom she had seen again after a
similar long intermission at the funeral of another nephew. This wish,
which is the real content of the dream, gives no cause for sorrow, and
for that reason no sorrow is felt in the dream. It may be seen in this
case that the emotion which is contained in the dream does not belong to
the manifest content of the dream, but to the latent one, and that the
emotional content has remained free from the disfigurement which has
befallen the presentation content.
It is a different story with the dreams in which the death of a beloved
relative is imagined and where sorrowful emotion is felt. These signify,
as their content says, the wish that the person in question may die, and
as I may here expect that the feelings of all readers and of all persons
who have dreamt anything similar will object to my interpretation, I
must strive to present my proof on the broadest possible basis.
We have already had one example to show that the wishes represented in
the dream as fulfilled are not always actual wishes. They may also be
dead, discarded, covered, and repressed wishes, which we must
nevertheless credit with a sort of continuous existence on account of
their reappearance in the dream. They are not dead like persons who have
died in our sense, but they resemble the shades in the _Odyssey_ which
awaken a certain kind of life as soon as they have drunk blood. In the
dream of the dead child in the box (p. 130) we were concerned with a
wish that had been actual fifteen years before, and which had been
frankly admitted from that time. It is, perhaps, not unimportant from
the point of view of dream theory if I add that a recollection from
earliest childhood is at the basis even of this dream. While the dreamer
was a little child—it cannot be definitely determined at what time—she
had heard that during pregnancy of which she was the fruit her mother
had fallen into a profound depression of spirits and had passionately
wished for the death of her child before birth. Having grown up herself
and become pregnant, she now follows the example of her mother.
If some one dreams with expressions of grief that his father or mother,
his brother or sister, has died, I shall not use the dream as a proof
that he wishes them dead _now_. The theory of the dreams does not
require so much; it is satisfied with concluding that the dreamer has
wished them dead—at some one time in childhood. I fear, however, that
this limitation will not contribute much to quiet the objectors; they
might just as energetically contest the possibility that they have ever
had such thoughts as they are sure that they do not cherish such wishes
at present. I must, therefore, reconstruct a part of the submerged
infantile psychology on the basis of the testimony which the present
still furnishes.[BX]
Let us at first consider the relation of children to their brothers and
sisters. I do not know why we presuppose that it must be a loving one,
since examples of brotherly and sisterly enmity among adults force
themselves upon every one’s experience, and since we so often know that
this estrangement originated even during childhood or has always
existed. But many grown-up people, who to-day are tenderly attached to
their brothers and sisters and stand by them, have lived with them
during childhood in almost uninterrupted hostility. The older child has
ill-treated the younger, slandered it, and deprived it of its toys; the
younger has been consumed by helpless fury against the elder, has envied
it and feared it, or its first impulse toward liberty and first feelings
of injustice have been directed against the oppressor. The parents say
that the children do not agree, and cannot find the reason for it. It is
not difficult to see that the character even of a well-behaved child is
not what we wish to find in a grown-up person. The child is absolutely
egotistical; it feels its wants acutely and strives remorselessly to
satisfy them, especially with its competitors, other children, and in
the first instance with its brothers and sisters. For doing this we do
not call the child wicked—we call it naughty; it is not responsible for
its evil deeds either in our judgment or in the eyes of the penal law.
And this is justifiably so; for we may expect that within this very
period of life which we call childhood, altruistic impulses and morality
will come to life in the little egotist, and that, in the words of
Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay and restrain the primary one. It
is true that morality does not develop simultaneously in all
departments, and furthermore, the duration of the unmoral period of
childhood is of different length in different individuals. In cases
where the development of this morality fails to appear, we are pleased
to talk about “degeneration”; they are obviously cases of arrested
development. Where the primary character has already been covered up by
later development, it may be at least partially uncovered again by an
attack of hysteria. The correspondence between the so-called hysterical
character and that of a naughty child is strikingly evident. A
compulsion neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a super-morality,
imposed upon the primary character that is again asserting itself, as an
increased check.
Many persons, then, who love their brothers and sisters, and who would
feel bereaved by their decease, have evil wishes towards them from
earlier times in their unconscious wishes, which are capable of being
realised in the dream. It is particularly interesting to observe little
children up to three years old in their attitude towards their brothers
and sisters. So far the child has been the only one; he is now informed
that the stork has brought a new child. The younger surveys the arrival,
and then expresses his opinion decidedly: “The stork had better take it
back again.”[BY]
I subscribe in all seriousness to the opinion that the child knows
enough to calculate the disadvantage it has to expect on account of the
new-comer. I know in the case of a lady of my acquaintance who agrees
very well with a sister four years younger than herself, that she
responded to the news of her younger sister’s arrival with the following
words: “But I shan’t give her my red cap, anyway.” If the child comes to
this realisation only at a later time, its enmity will be aroused at
that point. I know of a case where a girl, not yet three years old,
tried to strangle a suckling in the cradle, because its continued
presence, she suspected, boded her no good. Children are capable of envy
at this time of life in all its intensity and distinctness. Again,
perhaps, the little brother or sister has really soon disappeared; the
child has again drawn the entire affection of the household to itself,
and then a new child is sent by the stork; is it then unnatural for the
favourite to wish that the new competitor may have the same fate as the
earlier one, in order that he may be treated as well as he was before
during the interval? Of course this attitude of the child towards the
younger infant is under normal circumstances a simple function of the
difference of age. After a certain time the maternal instincts of the
girl will be excited towards the helpless new-born child.
Feelings of enmity towards brothers and sisters must occur far more
frequently during the age of childhood than is noted by the dull
observation of adults.
In case of my own children, who followed one another rapidly, I missed
the opportunity to make such observations; I am now retrieving it
through my little nephew, whose complete domination was disturbed after
fifteen months by the arrival of a female competitor. I hear, it is
true, that the young man acts very chivalrously towards his little
sister, that he kisses her hand and pets her; but in spite of this I
have convinced myself that even before the completion of his second year
he is using his new facility in language to criticise this person who
seems superfluous to him. Whenever the conversation turns upon her, he
chimes in and cries angrily: “Too (l)ittle, too (l)ittle.” During the
last few months, since the child has outgrown this unfavourable
criticism, owing to its splendid development, he has found another way
of justifying his insistence that she does not deserve so much
attention. On all suitable occasions he reminds us, “She hasn’t any
teeth.”[BZ] We have all preserved the recollection of the eldest
daughter of another sister of mine—how the child which was at that time
six years old sought assurance from one aunt after another for an hour
and a half with the question: “Lucy can’t understand that yet, can she?”
Lucy was the competitor, two and a half years younger.