the death of brothers and sisters denoting exaggerated hostility. I have
met with only one exception, which could easily be reinterpreted into a
confirmation of the rule. Once in the course of a sitting while I was
explaining this condition of affairs to a lady, as it seemed to have a
bearing upon the symptoms under consideration, she answered, to my
astonishment, that she had never had such dreams. However, she thought
of another dream which supposedly had nothing to do with the matter—a
dream which she had first dreamed at the age of four, when she was the
youngest child, and had since dreamed repeatedly. “A great number of
children, all of them the dreamer’s brothers and sisters, and male and
female cousins, were romping about in a meadow. Suddenly they all got
wings, flew up, and were gone.” She had no idea of the significance of
the dream; but it will not be difficult for us to recognise it as a
dream of the death of all the brothers and sisters, in its original
form, and little influenced by the censor. I venture to insert the
following interpretation: At the death of one out of a large number of
children—in this case the children of two brothers were brought up in
common as brothers and sisters—is it not probable that our dreamer, at
that time not yet four years old, asked a wise, grown-up person: “What
becomes of children when they are dead?” The answer probably was: “They
get wings and become angels.” According to this explanation all the
brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings like angels
and—this is the important thing—they fly away. Our little angel-maker
remains alone, think of it, the only one after such a multitude! The
feature that the children are romping about on a meadow points with
little ambiguity to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the
same association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche as having
the wings of a butterfly.
Perhaps some one will now object that, although the inimical impulses of
children towards their brothers and sisters may well enough be admitted,
how does the childish disposition arrive at such a height of wickedness
as to wish death to a competitor or stronger playmate, as though all
transgressions could be atoned for only by the death-punishment? Whoever
talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of “being dead” has
little else but the words in common with our own. The child knows
nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the
terror of the infinite Nothing, which the grown-up person, as all the
myths concerning the Great Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in
his conception. Fear of death is strange to the child; therefore it
plays with the horrible word and threatens another child: “If you do
that again you will die, as Francis died,” whereat the poor mother
shudders, for perhaps she cannot forget that the great majority of
mortals do not succeed in living beyond the years of childhood. It is
still possible, even for a child eight years old, on returning from a
museum of natural history, to say to its mother: “Mamma, I love you so;
if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in
the room so I can always, always see you!” So little does the childish
conception of being dead resemble our own.[CA]
Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of
suffering previous to dying, the same as “being gone,” not disturbing
the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and
means by which this absence is brought about, whether by travelling,
estrangement, or death. If, during the prehistoric years of a child, a
nurse has been sent away and its mother has died a short while after,
the two experiences, as is revealed by analysis, overlap in his memory.
The fact that the child does not miss very intensely those who are
absent has been realised by many a mother to her sorrow, after she has
returned home after a summer journey of several weeks, and has been told
upon inquiry: “The children have not asked for their mother a single
time.” But if she really goes to that “undiscovered country from whose
bourn no traveller returns,” the children seem at first to have
forgotten her, and begin only _subsequently_ to remember the dead
mother.
If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another
child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing
this wish in the form that the child may die, and the psychic reaction
to the dream of wishing death proves that, in spite of all the
differences in content, the wish in the case of the child is somehow or
other the same as it is with adults.
If now the death-wish of the child towards its brothers and sisters has
been explained by the childish egotism, which causes the child to regard
its brothers and sisters as competitors, how may we account for the same
wish towards parents, who bestow love on the child and satisfy its
wants, and whose preservation it ought to desire from these very
egotistical motives?
In the solution of this difficulty we are aided by the experience that
dreams of the death of parents predominantly refer to that member of the
parental couple which shares the sex of the dreamer, so that the man
mostly dreams of the death of his father, the woman of the death of her
mother. I cannot claim that this happens regularly, but the
predominating occurrence of this dream in the manner indicated is so
evident that it must be explained through some factor that is
universally operative. To express the matter boldly, it is as though a
sexual preference becomes active at an early period, as though the boy
regards his father as a rival in love, and as though the girl takes the
same attitude toward her mother—a rival by getting rid of whom he or she
cannot but profit.
Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader consider the
actual relations between parents and children. What the requirements of
culture and piety demand of this relation must be distinguished from
what daily observation shows us to be the fact. More than one cause for
hostile feeling is concealed within the relations between parents and
children; the conditions necessary for the actuation of wishes which
cannot exist in the presence of the censor are most abundantly provided.
Let us dwell at first upon the relation between father and son. I
believe that the sanctity which we have ascribed to the injunction of
the decalogue dulls our perception of reality. Perhaps we hardly dare to
notice that the greater part of humanity neglects to obey the fifth
commandment. In the lowest as well as in the highest strata of human
society, piety towards parents is in the habit of receding before other
interests. The obscure reports which have come to us in mythology and
legend from the primeval ages of human society give us an unpleasant
idea of the power of the father and the ruthlessness with which it was
used. Kronos devours his children, as the wild boar devours the brood of
the sow; Zeus emasculates his father[CB] and takes his place as a ruler.
The more despotically the father ruled in the ancient family, the more
must the son have taken the position of an enemy, and the greater must
have been his impatience, as designated successor, to obtain the mastery
himself after his father’s death. Even in our own middle-class family
the father is accustomed to aid the development of the germ of hatred
which naturally belongs to the paternal relation by refusing the son the
disposal of his own destiny, or the means necessary for this. A
physician often has occasion to notice that the son’s grief at the loss
of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction at the liberty which he
has at last obtained. Every father frantically holds on to whatever of
the sadly antiquated _potestas patris_ still remains in the society of
to-day, and every poet who, like Ibsen, puts the ancient strife between
father and son in the foreground of his fiction is sure of his effect.
The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the
daughter grows up and finds a guardian in her mother, while she desires
sexual freedom, and when, on the other hand, the mother has been warned
by the budding beauty of her daughter that the time has come for her to
renounce sexual claims.
All these conditions are notorious and open to everyone’s inspection.
But they do not serve to explain dreams of the death of parents found in
the case of persons to whom piety towards their parents has long since
come to be inviolable. We are furthermore prepared by the preceding
discussion to find that the death-wish towards parents is to be
explained by reference to earliest childhood.
This conjecture is reaffirmed with a certainty that makes doubt
impossible in its application to psychoneurotics through the analyses
that have been undertaken with them. It is here found that the sexual
wishes of the child—in so far as they deserve this designation in their
embryonic state—awaken at a very early period, and that the first
inclinations of the girl are directed towards the father, and the first
childish cravings of the boy towards the mother. The father thus becomes
an annoying competitor for the boy, as the mother does for the girl, and
we have already shown in the case of brothers and sisters how little it
takes for this feeling to lead the child to the death-wish. Sexual
selection, as a rule, early becomes evident in the parents; it is a
natural tendency for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for
the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for
the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not
prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any
partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who
discourages it. To find love in a grown-up person is for the child not
only the satisfaction of a particular craving, but also means that the
child’s will is to be yielded to in other respects. Thus the child obeys
its own sexual impulse, and at the same time re-enforces the feeling
which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the
parents that corresponds to theirs.
Most of the signs of these infantile inclinations are usually
overlooked; some of them may be observed even after the first years of
childhood. An eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is
called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim
herself her successor. “Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some
more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,” &c. A particularly gifted and
vivacious girl, not yet four years old, with whom this bit of child
psychology is unusually transparent, says outright: “Now mother can go
away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.” Nor does this
wish by any means exclude from child life the possibility that the child
may love his mother affectionately. If the little boy is allowed to
sleep at his mother’s side whenever his father goes on a journey, and if
after his father’s return he must go back to the nursery to a person
whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father
may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to his
dear, beautiful mamma; and the father’s death is obviously a means for
the attainment of this wish; for the child’s experience has taught him
that “dead” folks, like grandpa, for example, are always absent; they
never return.
Although observations upon little children lend themselves, without
being forced, to the proposed interpretation, they do not carry the full
conviction which psychoanalyses of adult neurotics obtrude upon the
physician. The dreams in question are here cited with introductions of
such a nature that their interpretation as wish-dreams becomes
unavoidable. One day I find a lady sad and weeping. She says: “I do not
want to see my relatives any more; they must shudder at me.” Thereupon,
almost without any transition, she tells that she remembers a dream,
whose significance, of course, she does not know. She dreamed it four
years before, and it is as follows: _A fox or a lynx is taking a walk on
the roof; then something falls down, or she falls down, and after that
her mother is carried out of the house dead_—whereat the dreamer cries
bitterly. No sooner had I informed her that this dream must signify a
wish from her childhood to see her mother dead, and that it is because
of this dream that she thinks that her relatives must shudder at her,
than she furnished some material for explaining the dream. “Lynx-eye” is
an opprobrious epithet which a street boy once bestowed on her when she
was a very small child; when she was three years old a brick had fallen
on her mother’s head so that she bled severely.
I once had opportunity to make a thorough study of a young girl who
underwent several psychic states. In the state of frenzied excitement
with which the illness started, the patient showed a very strong
aversion to her mother; she struck and scolded her as soon as she
approached the bed, while at the same time she remained loving and
obedient to a much older sister. Then there followed a clear but
somewhat apathetic state with very much disturbed sleep. It was in this
phase that I began to treat her and to analyse her dreams. An enormous
number of these dealt in a more or less abstruse manner with the death
of the mother; now she was present at the funeral of an old woman, now
she saw her sisters sitting at the table dressed in mourning; the
meaning of the dreams could not be doubted. During the further progress
of the convalescence hysterical phobias appeared; the most torturing of
these was the idea that something happened to her mother. She was always
having to hurry home from wherever she happened to be in order to
convince herself that her mother was still alive. Now this case, in view
of my other experiences, was very instructive; it showed in polyglot
translations, as it were, the different ways in which the psychic
apparatus reacts to the same exciting idea. In the state of excitement
which I conceive as the overpowering of the second psychic instance, the
unconscious enmity towards the mother became potent as a motor impulse;
then, after calmness set in, following the suppression of the tumult,
and after the domination of the censor had been restored, this feeling
of enmity had access only to the province of dreams in order to realise
the wish that the mother might die; and after the normal condition had
been still further strengthened, it created the excessive concern for
the mother as a hysterical counter-reaction and manifestation of
defence. In the light of these considerations it is no longer
inexplicable why hysterical girls are so often extravagantly attached to
their mothers.
On another occasion I had opportunity to get a profound insight into the
unconscious psychic life of a young man for whom a compulsion-neurosis
made life almost unendurable, so that he could not go on the street,
because he was harassed by the obsession that he would kill every one he
met. He spent his days in arranging evidence for an alibi in case he
should be charged with any murder that might have occurred in the city.
It is superfluous to remark that this man was as moral as he was highly
cultured. The analysis—which, moreover, led to a cure—discovered
murderous impulses toward the young man’s somewhat over-strict father as
the basis of these disagreeable ideas of compulsion—impulses which, to
his great surprise, had received conscious expression when he was seven
years old, but which, of course, had originated in much earlier years of
childhood. After the painful illness and death of the father, the
obsessive reproach transferred to strangers in the form of the
afore-mentioned phobia, appeared when the young man was thirty-one years
old. Anyone capable of wishing to push his own father from a
mountain-top into an abyss is certainly not to be trusted to spare the
lives of those who are not so closely bound to him; he does well to lock
himself into his room.
According to my experience, which is now large, parents play a leading
part in the infantile psychology of all later neurotics, and falling in
love with one member of the parental couple and hatred of the other help
to make up that fateful sum of material furnished by the psychic
impulses, which has been formed during the infantile period, and which
is of such great importance for the symptoms appearing in the later
neurosis. But I do not think that psychoneurotics are here sharply
distinguished from normal human beings, in that they are capable of
creating something absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far
more probable, as is shown also by occasional observation upon normal
children, that in their loving or hostile wishes towards their parents
psychoneurotics only show in exaggerated form feelings which are present
less distinctly and less intensely in the minds of most children.
Antiquity has furnished us with legendary material to confirm this fact,
and the deep and universal effectiveness of these legends can only be
explained by granting a similar universal applicability to the
above-mentioned assumption in infantile psychology.
I refer to the legend of King Oedipus and the drama of the same name by
Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and of Jocasta, is
exposed while a suckling, because an oracle has informed the father that
his son, who is still unborn, will be his murderer. He is rescued, and
grows up as the king’s son at a foreign court, until, being uncertain
about his origin, he also consults the oracle, and is advised to avoid
his native place, for he is destined to become the murderer of his
father and the husband of his mother. On the road leading away from his
supposed home he meets King Laius and strikes him dead in a sudden
quarrel. Then he comes to the gates of Thebes, where he solves the
riddle of the Sphynx who is barring the way, and he is elected king by
the Thebans in gratitude, and is presented with the hand of Jocasta. He
reigns in peace and honour for a long time, and begets two sons and two
daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a plague breaks out
which causes the Thebans to consult the oracle anew. Here Sophocles’
tragedy begins. The messengers bring the advice that the plague will
stop as soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But
where is he hidden?
“Where are they to be found? How shall we trace the perpetrators of so
old a crime where no conjecture leads to discovery?”[CC]
The action of the play now consists merely in a revelation, which is
gradually completed and artfully delayed—resembling the work of a
psychoanalysis—of the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of
Laius, and the son of the dead man and of Jocasta. Oedipus, profoundly
shocked at the monstrosities which he has unknowingly committed, blinds
himself and leaves his native place. The oracle has been fulfilled.
The _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is a so-called tragedy of fate; its tragic effect
is said to be found in the opposition between the powerful will of the
gods and the vain resistance of the human beings who are threatened with
destruction; resignation to the will of God and confession of one’s own
helplessness is the lesson which the deeply-moved spectator is to learn
from the tragedy. Consequently modern authors have tried to obtain a
similar tragic effect by embodying the same opposition in a story of
their own invention. But spectators have sat unmoved while a curse or an
oracular sentence has been fulfilled on blameless human beings in spite
of all their struggles; later tragedies of fate have all remained
without effect.
If the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ is capable of moving modern men no less than
it moved the contemporary Greeks, the explanation of this fact cannot
lie merely in the assumption that the effect of the Greek tragedy is
based upon the opposition between fate and human will, but is to be
sought in the peculiar nature of the material by which the opposition is
shown. There must be a voice within us which is prepared to recognise
the compelling power of fate in _Oedipus_, while we justly condemn the
situations occurring in _Die Ahnfrau_ or in other tragedies of later
date as arbitrary inventions. And there must be a factor corresponding
to this inner voice in the story of King Oedipus. His fate moves us only
for the reason that it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the
same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. Perhaps we are all
destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and
our first hatred and violent washes towards our fathers; our dreams
convince us of it. King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead
and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realised wish of
our childhood. But more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded,
unless we have become psychoneurotics, in withdrawing our sexual
impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.
We recoil from the person for whom this primitive wish has been
fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have
suffered within us. By his analysis, showing us the guilt of Oedipus,
the poet urges us to recognise our own inner self, in which these
impulses, even if suppressed, are still present. The comparison with
which the chorus leaves us—
“... Behold! this Oedipus, who unravelled the famous riddle and who
was a man of eminent virtue; a man who trusted neither to popularity
nor to the fortune of his citizens; see how great a storm of adversity
hath at last overtaken him” (Act v. sc. 4).
This warning applies to ourselves and to our pride, to us, who have
grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation since the years of
our childhood. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that
offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the
revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our
childhood.
In the very text of Sophocles’ tragedy there is an unmistakable
reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend originates in an extremely
old dream material, which consists of the painful disturbance of the
relation towards one’s parents by means of the first impulses of
sexuality. Jocasta comforts Oedipus—who is not yet enlightened, but who
has become worried on account of the oracle—by mentioning to him the
dream which is dreamt by so many people, though she attaches no
significance to it—
“For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams to think
themselves partners of their mother’s bed. But he passes most easily
through life to whom these circumstances are trifles” (Act iv. sc. 3).
The dream of having sexual intercourse with one’s mother occurred at
that time, as it does to-day, to many people, who tell it with
indignation and astonishment. As may be understood, it is the key to the
tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father. The
story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical
dreams, and just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced
with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and
self-chastisement. The appearance which it further assumes is the result
of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration which tries to make it serve
theological purposes (_cf._ the dream material of exhibitionism, p.
206). The attempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with human
responsibility must, of course, fail with this material as with every
other.[CD]