Part 22

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]

I must not leave the typical dream of the death of dear relatives without somewhat further elucidating the subject of their significance for the theory of the dream in general. These dreams show us a realisation of the very unusual case where the dream thought, which has been created by the repressed wish, completely escapes the censor, and is transferred to the dream without alteration. There must be present peculiar conditions making possible such an outcome. I find circumstances favourable to these dreams in the two following factors: First, there is no wish which we believe further from us; we believe such a wish “would never occur to us in a dream”; the dream censor is therefore not prepared for this monstrosity, just as the legislation of Solon was incapable of establishing a punishment for patricide. Secondly, the repressed and unsuspected wish is in just this case particularly often met by a fragment of the day’s experience in the shape of a concern about the life of the beloved person. This concern cannot be registered in the dream by any other means than by taking advantage of the wish that has the same content; but it is possible for the wish to mask itself behind the concern which has been awakened during the day. If one is inclined to think all this a more simple process, and that one merely continues during the night and in dreams what one has been concerned with during the day, the dream of the death of beloved persons is removed from all connection with dream explanation, and an easily reducible problem is uselessly retained.

It is also instructive to trace the relation of these dreams to anxiety dreams. In the dream of the death of dear persons the repressed wish has found a way of avoiding the censor, and the distortion which it causes. In this case the inevitable concomitant manifestation is that disagreeable sensations are felt in the dream. Thus the dream of fear is brought about only when the censor is entirely or partially overpowered, and, on the other hand, the overpowering of the censor is made easier when fear has already been furnished by somatic sources. Thus it becomes obvious for what purpose the censor performs its office and practises dream distortion; it does this _in order to prevent the development of fear or other forms of disagreeable emotion_.

I have spoken above of the egotism of the infantile mind, and I may now resume this subject in order to suggest that dreams preserve this characteristic—thus showing their connection with infantile life. Every dream is absolutely egotistical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though it may be in a disguised form. The wishes that are realised in dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only a deceptive appearance if interest in another person is thought to have caused the dream. I shall subject to analysis several examples which appear to contradict this assertion.

I. A boy not yet four years old relates the following: _He saw a large dish garnished, and upon it a large piece of roast meat, and the meat was all of a sudden—not cut to pieces—but eaten up. He did not see the person who ate it._[CE]

Who may this strange person be of whose luxurious repast this little fellow dreams? The experiences of the day must give us the explanation of this. For a few days the boy had been living on a diet of milk according to the doctor’s prescription; but on the evening of the day before the dream he had been naughty, and as a punishment he had been deprived of his evening meal. He had already undergone one such hunger-cure, and had acted very bravely. He knew that he would get nothing to eat, but he did not dare to indicate by a word that he was hungry. Education was beginning to have its influence upon him; this is expressed even in the dream which shows the beginnings of dream disfigurement. There is no doubt that he himself is the person whose wishes are directed toward this abundant meal, and a meal of roast meat at that. But since he knows that this is forbidden him, he does not dare, as children do in the dream (_cf._ the dream about strawberries of my little Anna, p. 110), to sit down to the meal himself. The person remains anonymous.

II. Once I dream that I see on the show-table of a book store a new number in the Book-lovers’ Collection—the collection which I am in the habit of buying (art monographs, monographs on the history of the world, famous art centres, &c.). _The new collection is called Famous Orators (or Orations), and the first number bears the name of Doctor Lecher._