afternoon in summer; in the evening I had given a lecture on the
relation between hysteria and the perversions, and everything which I
had to say displeased me thoroughly, appeared to me stripped of all
value. I was tired, found no trace of pleasure in my difficult task, and
longed to get away from this rummaging in human filth, to see my
children and then the beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the
auditorium to a café, to find some modest refreshment in the open air,
for my appetite had left me. But one of my audience went with me; he
begged for permission to sit with me while I drank my coffee and gulped
down my roll, and began to say flattering things to me. He told me how
much he had learned from me, and that he now looked at everything
through different eyes, that I had cleansed the Augean stables, _i.e._
the theory of the neuroses, of its errors and prejudices—in short, that
I was a very great man. My mood was ill-suited to his song of praise; I
struggled with disgust, and went home earlier in order to extricate
myself. Before I went to sleep I turned over the leaves of Rabelais, and
read a short story by C. F. Meyer entitled _Die Leiden eines Knaben_
(The Hardships of a Boy).
The dream had been drawn from these materials, and the novel by Meyer
added the recollection of childish scenes (_cf._ the dream about Count
Thun, last scene). The mood of the day, characterised by disgust and
annoyance, is continued in the dream in the sense that it is permitted
to furnish nearly the entire material for the dream content. But during
the night the opposite mood of vigorous and even exaggerated
self-assertion was awakened, and dissipated the earlier mood. The dream
had to take such a form as to accommodate the expression of
self-depreciation and exaggerated self-assertion in the same material.
This compromise formation resulted in an ambiguous dream content, but
likewise in an indifferent strain of feeling owing to the restraint of
the contrasts upon each other.
According to the theory of wish-fulfilment this dream could not have
happened had not the suppressed, but at the same time pleasurable, train
of thought concerning personal aggrandisement been coupled with the
opposing thoughts of disgust. For disagreeable things are not intended
to be represented by the dream; painful thoughts that have occurred
during the day can force their way into the dream only if they lend a
cloak to the wish-fulfilment. The dream activity can dispose of the
affects in the dream thoughts in still another way, besides admitting
them or reducing them to zero. _It can change them into their opposite._
We have already become acquainted with the rule of interpretation that
every element of the dream may be interpreted by its opposite, as well
as by itself. One can never tell at the outset whether to set down the
one or the other; only the connection can decide this point. A suspicion
of this state of affairs has evidently got into popular consciousness;
dream books very often proceed according to the principle of contraries
in their interpretation. Such transformation into opposites is made
possible by the intimate concatenation of associations, which in our
thoughts finds the idea of a thing in that of its opposite. Like every
other displacement this serves the purposes of the censor, but it is
also often the work of the wish-fulfilment, for wish-fulfilment consists
precisely in this substitution of an unwelcome thing by its opposite.
The emotions of the dream thoughts may appear in the dream transformed
into their opposites just as well as the ideas, and it is probable that
this inversion of emotions is usually brought about by the dream censor.
The _suppression_ and _inversion of affects_ are useful in social life,
as the current analogy for the dream censor has shown us—above all, for
purposes of dissimulation. If I converse with a person to whom I must
show consideration while I am saying unpleasant things to him, it is
almost more important that I should conceal the expression of my emotion
from him, than that I modify the wording of my thoughts. If I speak to
him in polite words, but accompany them by looks or gestures of hatred
and disdain, the effect which I produce upon this person is not very
different from what it would have been if I had recklessly thrown my
contempt into his face. Above all, then, the censor bids me suppress my
emotions, and if I am master of the art of dissimulation, I can
hypocritically show the opposite emotion—smiling where I should like to
be angry, and pretending affection where I should like to destroy.
We already know of an excellent example of such an inversion of emotion
for the purposes of the dream censor. In the dream about my uncle’s
beard I feel great affection for my friend R., at the same time that,
and because, the dream thoughts berate him as a simpleton. We have drawn
our first proof for the existence of the censor from this example of the
inversion of emotions. Nor is it necessary here to assume that the dream
activity creates a counter emotion of this kind out of nothing; it
usually finds it lying ready in the material of the dream thoughts, and
intensifies it solely with the psychic force of the resisting impulse
until a point is reached where the emotion can be won over for the
formation of the dream. In the dream of my uncle, just mentioned, the
affectionate counter emotion has probably originated from an infantile
source (as the continuation of the dream would suggest), for the
relation between uncle and nephew has become the source of all my
friendships and hatreds, owing to the peculiar nature of my childish
experiences (_cf._ analysis on p. 334).
There is a class of dreams deserving the designation “hypocritical,”
which puts the theory of wish-fulfilment to a severe test. My attention
was called to them when Mrs. Dr. M. Hilferding brought up for discussion
in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society the dream reported by Rosegger,
which is reprinted below.
In _Waldheimat_, vol. xi., Rosegger writes as follows in his story,
_Fremd gemacht_, p. 303:
“I have usually enjoyed healthful sleep, but I have lost the rest of
many a night. With my modest existence as a student and literary man,
I have for long years dragged along with me the shadow of a veritable
tailor’s life, like a ghost from which I could not become separated. I
cannot say that I have occupied myself so often and so vividly with
thoughts of my past during the day. An assailer of heaven and earth
arising from the skin of the Philistine has other things to think
about. Nor did I, as a dashing young fellow, think about my nocturnal
dreams; only later, when I got into the habit of thinking about
everything or when the Philistine within me again asserted itself, it
struck me that whenever I dreamed I was always the journeyman tailor,
and was always working in my master’s shop for long hours without any
remuneration. As I sat there and sewed and pressed I was quite aware
that I no longer belonged there, and that as a burgess of a town I had
other things to attend to; but I was for ever having vacations, and
going out into the country, and it was then that I sat near my boss
and assisted him. I often felt badly, and regretted the loss of time
which I might spend for better and more useful purposes. If something
did not come up to the measure and cut exactly, I had to submit to a
reproach from the boss. Often, as I sat with my back bent in the dingy
shop, I decided to give notice that I was going to quit. On one
occasion I actually did so, but the boss took no notice of it, and the
next time I was again sitting near him and sewing.
“How happy I was when I woke up after such weary hours! And I then
resolved that, if this dream came intruding again, I would throw it
off with energy and would cry aloud: ‘It is only a delusion, I am in
bed, and I want to sleep.’... And the next night I would be sitting in
the tailor shop again.
“Thus years passed with dismal regularity. While the boss and I were
working at Alpelhofer’s, at the house of the peasant where I began my
apprenticeship, it happened that he was particularly dissatisfied with
my work. ‘I should like to know where in the world your thoughts are?’
cried he, and looked at me gloomily, I thought the most sensible thing
for me to do would be to get up and explain to the boss that I was
with him only as a favour, and then leave. But I did not do this. I
submitted, however, when the boss engaged an apprentice, and ordered
me to make room for him on the bench. I moved into the corner, and
kept on sewing. On the same day another tailor was engaged; he was
bigoted, as he was a Czech who had worked for us nineteen years
before, and then had fallen into the lake on his way home from the
public-house. When he tried to sit down there was no room for him. I
looked at the boss inquiringly, and he said to me, ‘You have no talent
for the tailoring business; you may go; you are free.’ My fright on
that occasion was so overpowering that I awoke.
“The morning gray glimmered through the clear window of my beloved
home. Objects of art surrounded me; in the tasteful bookcase stood the
eternal Homer, the gigantic Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the
glorious Goethe—all shining and immortal. From the adjoining room
resounded the clear little voices of the children, who were waking and
prattling with their mother. I felt as if I had found again that
idyllically sweet, that peaceful, poetical, and spiritual life which I
have so often and so deeply conceived as the contemplative fortune of
mankind. And still I was vexed that I had not given my boss notice
first, instead of allowing him to discharge me.
“And how remarkable it is; after the night when the boss ‘discharged
me’ I enjoyed rest; I no longer dreamed of my tailoring—of this
experience which lay in the remote past, which in its simplicity was
really happy, and which, nevertheless, threw a long shadow over the
later years of my life.”
I. In this dream, the series of the poet who, in his younger years, has
been a journeyman tailor, it is hard to recognise the domination of the
wish-fulfilment. All the delightful things occurred during the waking
state, while the dream seemed to drag along the ghostlike shadow of an
unhappy existence which had been long forgotten. My own dreams of a
similar nature have put me in a position to give some explanation for
such dreams. As a young doctor I for a long time worked in the chemical
institute without being able to accomplish anything in that exacting
science, and I therefore never think in my waking state about this
unfruitful episode in my life, of which I am really ashamed. On the
other hand, it has become a recurring dream with me that I am working in
the laboratory, making analyses, and having experiences there, &c.; like
the examination dreams, these dreams are disagreeable, and they are
never very distinct. During the analysis of one of these dreams my
attention was directed to the word “analysis,” which, gave me the key to
an understanding of these dreams. For I had since become an “analyst.” I
make analyses which are highly praised—to be sure, psychoanalyses. I
then understood that when I grew proud of these analyses of the waking
state, and wanted to boast how much I had accomplished thereby, the
dream would hold up to me at night those other unsuccessful analyses of
which I had no reason to be proud; they are the punitive dreams of the
upstart, like those of the tailor who became a celebrated poet. But how
is it possible for the dream to place itself at the service of
self-criticism in its conflict with parvenu-pride, and to take as its
content a rational warning instead of the fulfilment of a prohibitive
wish? I have already mentioned that the answer to this question entails
many difficulties. We may conclude that the foundation of the dream was
at first formed by a phantasy of overweening ambition, but that only its
suppression and its abashment reached the dream content in its stead.
One should remember that there are masochistic tendencies in the psychic
life to which such an inversion might be attributed. But a more thorough
investigation of the individual dreams allows the recognition of still
another element. In an indistinct subordinate portion of one of my
laboratory dreams, I was just at the age which placed me in the most
gloomy and most unsuccessful year of my professional career; I still had
no position and no means of support, when I suddenly found that I had
the choice of many women whom I could marry! I was, therefore, young
again, and, what is more, she was young again—the woman who has shared
with me all these hard years. In this way one of the wishes which
constantly frets the heart of the ageing man was revealed as the
unconscious dream inciter. The struggle raging in the other psychic
strata between vanity and self-criticism has certainly determined the
dream content, but the more deeply-rooted wish of youth has alone made
it possible as a dream. One may say to himself even in the waking state:
To be sure it is very nice now, and times were once very hard; but it
was nice, too, even then, you were still so young.
In considering dreams reported by a poet one may often assume that he
has excluded from the report those details which he perceived as
disturbing and which he considered unessential. His dreams, then, give
us a riddle which could be readily solved if we had an exact
reproduction of the dream content.
O. Rank has called my attention to the fact that in Grimm’s fairy tale
of the valiant little tailor, or “Seven at one Stroke,” a very similar
dream of an upstart is related. The tailor, who became the hero and
married the king’s daughter, dreamed one night while with the princess,
his wife, about his trade; the latter, becoming suspicious, ordered
armed guards for the following night, who should listen to what was
spoken in the dream, and who should do away with the dreamer. But the
little tailor was warned, and knew enough to correct his dream.
The complex of processes—of suspension, subtraction, and
inversion—through which the affects of the dream thoughts finally become
those of the dream, may well be observed in the suitable synthesis of
completely analysed dreams. I shall here treat a few cases of emotional
excitement in the dream which furnish examples of some of the cases
discussed.
In the dream about the odd task which the elder Bruecke gives me to
perform—of preparing my own pelvis—the _appropriate horror is absent in
the dream itself_. Now this is a wish-fulfilment in various senses.
Preparation signifies self-analysis, which I accomplish, as it were, by
publishing my book on dreams, and which has been so disagreeable to me
that I have already postponed printing the finished manuscript for more
than a year. The wish is now actuated that I may disregard this feeling
of opposition, and for that reason I feel no horror (_Grauen_, which
also means to grow grey) in the dream. I should also like to escape the
horror—in the other (German) sense—of growing grey; for I am already
growing grey fast, and the grey in my hair warns me withal to hold back
no longer. For we know that at the end of the dream the thought secures
expression in that I should have to leave my children to get to the goal
of their difficult journey.
In the two dreams that shift the expression of satisfaction to the
moments immediately after awakening, this satisfaction is in the one
case motivated by the expectation that I am now going to learn what is
meant by “I have already dreamed of it,” and refers in reality to the
birth of my first child, and in the other case it is motivated by the
conviction that “that which has been announced by a sign” is now going
to happen, and the latter satisfaction is the same which I felt at the
arrival of my second son. Here the same emotions that dominated in the
dream thoughts have remained in the dream, but the process is probably
not so simple as this in every dream. If the two analyses are examined a
little, it will be seen that this satisfaction which does not succumb to
the censor receives an addition from a source which must fear the
censor; and the emotion drawn from this source would certainly arouse
opposition if it did not cloak itself in a similar emotion of
satisfaction that is willingly admitted, if it did not, as it were,
sneak in behind the other. Unfortunately, I am unable to show this in
the case of the actual dream specimen, but an example from another
province will make my meaning intelligible. I construct the following
case: Let there be a person near me whom I hate so that a strong feeling
arises in me that I should be glad if something were to happen to him.
But the moral part of my nature does not yield to this sentiment; I do
not dare to express this ill-wish, and when something happens to him
which he does not deserve, I suppress my satisfaction at it, and force
myself to expressions and thoughts of regret. Everyone will have found
himself in such a position. But now let it happen that the hated person
draws upon himself a well-deserved misfortune by some fault; now I may
give free rein to my satisfaction that he has been visited by a just
punishment, and I express opinion in the matter which coincides with
that of many other people who are impartial. But I can see that my
satisfaction turns out to be more intense than that of the others, for
it has received an addition from another source—from my hatred, which
has hitherto been prevented by the inner censor from releasing an
emotion, but which is no longer prevented from doing so under the
altered circumstances. This case is generally typical of society, where
persons who have aroused antipathy or are adherents of an unpopular
minority incur guilt. Their punishment does not correspond to their
transgression but to their transgression _plus_ the ill-will directed
against them that has hitherto been ineffective. Those who execute the
punishment doubtless commit an injustice, but they are prevented from
becoming aware of it by the satisfaction arising from the release within
themselves of a suppression of long standing. In such cases the emotion
is justified according to its quality, but not according to its
quantity; and the self-criticism that has been appeased as to the one
point is only too ready to neglect examination of the second point. Once
you have opened the doors, more people get through than you originally
intended to admit.
The striking feature of the neurotic character, that incitements capable
of producing emotion bring about a result that is qualitatively
justified but is quantitatively excessive, is to be explained in this
manner, in so far as it admits of a psychological explanation at all.
The excess is due to sources of emotion which have remained unconscious
and have hitherto been suppressed, which can establish in the
associations a connection with the actual incitement, and which can thus
find release for its emotions through the vent which the unobjectionable
and admitted source of emotion opens. Our attention is thus called to
the fact that we may not consider the relation of mutual restraint as
obtaining exclusively between the suppressed and the suppressing psychic
judgment. The cases in which the two judgments bring about a
pathological emotion by co-operation and mutual strengthening deserve
just as much attention. The reader is requested to apply these hints
regarding the psychic mechanism for the purpose of understanding the
expressions of emotion in the dream. A satisfaction which makes its
appearance in the dream, and which may readily be found at its proper
place in the dream thoughts, may not always be fully explained by means
of this reference. As a rule it will be necessary to search for a second
source in the dream thoughts, upon which the pressure of the censor is
exerted, and which under the pressure would have resulted not in
satisfaction, but in the opposite emotion—which, however, is enabled by
the presence of the first source to free its satisfaction affect from
suppression and to reinforce the satisfaction springing from the other
source. Hence emotions in the dream appear as though formed by the
confluence of several tributaries, and as though over-determined in
reference to the material of the dream thoughts; _sources of affect
which can furnish the same affect join each other in the dream activity
in order to produce it_.[FE]
Some insight into these tangled relations is gained from analysis of the
admirable dream in which “Non vixit” constitutes the central point
(_cf._ p. 333). The expressions of emotion in this dream, which are of
different qualities, are forced together at two points in the manifest
content. Hostile and painful feelings (in the dream itself we have the
phrase, “seized by strange emotions”) overlap at the point where I
destroy my antagonistic friend with the two words. At the end of the
dream I am greatly pleased, and am quite ready to believe in a
possibility which I recognise as absurd when I am awake, namely, that
there are _revenants_ who can be put out of the way by a mere wish.
I have not yet mentioned the occasion for this dream. It is an
essential one, and goes a long way towards explaining it. I had
received the news from my friend in Berlin (whom I have designated as
F.) that he is about to undergo an operation and that relatives of his
living in Vienna would give me information about his condition. The
first few messages after the operation were not reassuring, and caused
me anxiety. I should have liked best to go to him myself, but at that
time I was affected with a painful disease which made every movement a
torture for me. I learn from the dream thoughts that I feared for the
life of my dear friend. I knew that his only sister, with whom I had
not been acquainted, had died early after the shortest possible
illness. (In the dream _F. tells about his sister, and says: “In
three-quarters of an hour she was dead.”_) I must have imagined that
his own constitution was not much stronger, and that I should soon be
travelling, in spite of my health, in answer to far worse news—and
that I should arrive too _late_, for which I should reproach myself
for ever.[FF] This reproach about arriving too late has become the
central point of the dream, but has been represented in a scene in
which the honoured teacher of my student years—Bruecke—reproaches me
for the same thing with a terrible look from his blue eyes. The cause
of this deviation from the scene will soon be clear; the dream cannot
reproduce the scene itself in the manner in which it occurred to me.
To be sure, it leaves the blue eyes to the other man, but it gives me
the part of the annihilator, an inversion which is obviously the
result of the wish-fulfilment. My concern for the life of my friend,
my self-reproach for not having gone to him, my shame (he had
repeatedly come to me in Vienna), my desire to consider myself excused
on account of my illness—all of this makes up a tempest of feeling
which is distinctly felt in sleep, and which raged in every part of
the dream thoughts.
But there was another thing about the occasion for the dream which had
quite the opposite effect. With the unfavourable news during the first
days of the operation, I also received the injunction to speak to no one
about the whole affair, which hurt my feelings, for it betrayed an
unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I knew, of course, that this
request did not proceed from my friend, but that it was due to
clumsiness or excessive timidity on the part of the messenger, but the
concealed reproach made me feel very badly because it was not altogether
unjustified. Only reproaches which “have something in them” have power
to irritate, as everyone knows. For long before, in the case of two
persons who were friendly to each other and who were willing to honour
me with their friendship, I had quite needlessly tattled what the one
had said about the other; to be sure this incident had nothing to do
with the affairs of my friend F. Nor have I forgotten the reproaches
which I had to listen to at that time. One of the two friends between
whom I was the trouble-maker was Professor Fleischl; the other one I may
name Joseph, a name which was also borne by my friend and antagonist P.,
who appears in the dream.