Part 34

According to information I have received from Hebrew scholars, _Geseres_ is a genuine Hebrew word derived from the verb _goiser_, and may best be rendered by “ordained sufferings, fated disaster.” From its use in the Jewish jargon one might think it signified “wailing and lamentation.” _Ungeseres_ is a coinage of my own and first attracts my attention; but for the present it baffles me. The little observation at the end of the dream, that _Ungeseres_ indicates an advantage over _Geseres_ opens the way to the associations and to an explanation. The same relation holds good with caviare; the unsalted kind[EU] is more highly prized than the salted. Caviare to the general, “noble passions”; herein lies concealed a joking allusion to a member of my household, of whom I hope—for she is younger than I—that she will watch over the future of my children; this, too, agrees with the fact that another member of my household, our worthy nurse, is clearly indicated in the nurse (or nun) of the dream. But a connecting link is wanting between the pair, _salted_ and _unsalted_, and _Geseres—ungeseres_. This is to be found in _soured and unsoured_. In their flight or exodus out of Egypt, the children of Israel did not have time to allow their bread to be leavened, and in memory of the event to this day they eat unsoured bread at Easter time. Here I can also find room for the sudden notion which came to me in this part of the analysis. I remembered how we promenaded about the city of Breslau, which was strange to us, at the end of the Easter holidays, my friend from Berlin and I. A little girl asked me to tell her the way to a certain street; I had to tell her I did not know it, whereupon I remarked to my friend, “I hope that later on in life the little one will show more perspicacity in selecting the persons by whom she allows herself to be guided.” Shortly afterwards a sign caught my eye: “Dr. _Herod_, office hours....” I said to myself: “I hope this colleague does not happen to be a children’s specialist.” Meanwhile my friend had been developing his views on the biological significance of _bilateral_ symmetry, and had begun a sentence as follows: “If we had but one eye in the middle of our foreheads like _Cyclops_....” This leads us to the speech of the professor in the preliminary dream: “My son, the _myopic_.” And now I have been led to the chief source for _Geseres_. Many years ago, when this son of Professor M., who is to-day an independent thinker, was still sitting on his school-bench, he contracted a disease of the eye, which the doctor declared gave cause for anxiety. He was of the opinion that as long as it remained in one eye it would not matter; if, however, it should extend to the other eye, it would be serious. The disease healed in the one eye without leaving any bad effects; shortly afterwards, however, its symptoms actually appeared in the other eye. The terrified mother of the boy immediately summoned the physician to the seclusion of her country resort. But he took _another view_ of the matter. “_What sort of ‘Geseres’ is this you are making?_” he said to his mother with impatience. “If one side got well, the other side will get well too.” And so it turned out.

And now as to the connection between this and myself and those dear to me. The school-bench upon which the son of Professor M. learned his first lessons has become the property of my eldest son—it was given to his mother-into whose lips I put the words of parting in the dream. One of the wishes that can be attached to this transference may now easily be guessed. This school-bench is intended by its construction to guard the child from becoming shortsighted and one-sided. Hence, myopia (and behind the Cyclops) and the discussion about _bilateralism_. The concern about one-sidedness is of two-fold signification; along with the bodily one-sidedness, that of intellectual development may be referred to. Does it not seem as though the scene in the dream, with all its madness, were putting its negative on just this anxiety? After the child has said his word of parting _on the one side_, he calls out its opposite on the _other side_, as though in order to establish an equilibrium. _He is acting, as it were, in obedience to bilateral symmetry!_

Thus the dream frequently has the profoundest meaning in places where it seems most absurd. In all ages those who had something to say and were unable to say it without danger to themselves gladly put on the cap and bells. The listener for whom the forbidden saying was intended was more likely to tolerate it if he was able to laugh at it, and to flatter himself with the comment that what he disliked was obviously something absurd. The dream proceeds in reality just as the prince does in the play who must counterfeit the fool, and hence the same thing may be said of the dream which Hamlet says of himself, substituting an unintelligible witticism for the real conditions: “I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”[EV]

Thus my solution of the problem of the absurdity of dreams is that the dream thoughts are never absurd—at least not those belonging to the dreams of sane persons—and that the dream activity produces absurd dreams and dreams with individual absurd elements if criticism, ridicule, and derision in the dream thoughts are to be represented by it in its manner of expression. My next concern is to show that the dream activity is primarily brought about by the co-operation of the three factors which have been mentioned—and of a fourth one which remains to be cited—that it accomplishes nothing short of a transposition of the dream thoughts, observing the three conditions which are prescribed for it, and that the question whether the mind operates in the dream with all its faculties, or only with a portion of them, is deprived of its cogency and is inapplicable to the actual circumstances. But since there are plenty of dreams in which judgments are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognised, in which astonishment at some single element of the dream appears, and arguments and explanations are attempted, I must meet the objections which may be inferred from these occurrences by the citation of selected examples.

My answer is as follows: _Everything in the dream which occurs as an apparent exercise of the critical faculty is to be regarded, not as an intellectual accomplishment of the dream activity, but as belonging to the material of the dream thoughts, and it has found its way from them as a finished structure to the manifest dream content_. I may go even further than this. Even the judgments which are passed upon the dream as it is remembered after awakening and the feelings which are aroused by the reproduction of the dream, belong in good part to the latent dream content, and must be fitted into their place in the interpretation of the dream.

I. A striking example of this I have already given. A female patient does not wish to relate her dream because it is too vague. She has seen a person in the dream, and does not know whether it is her husband or her father. Then follows a second dream fragment in which there occurs a “manure-can,” which gives rise to the following reminiscence. As a young housewife, she once jokingly declared in the presence of a young relative who frequented the house that her next care would be to procure a new manure-can. The next morning one was sent to her, but it was filled with lilies of the valley. This part of the dream served to represent the saying, “Not grown on your own manure.”[EW] When we complete the analysis we find that in the dream thoughts it is a matter of the after-effects of a story heard in youth, to the effect that a girl had given birth to a child _concerning whom it was not clear who was the real father_. The dream representation here goes over into the waking thought, and allows one element of the dream thoughts to be represented by a judgment expressed in the waking state upon the whole dream.

II. A similar case: One of my patients has a dream which seems interesting to him, for he says to himself immediately after awakening: “_I must tell that to the doctor_.” The dream is analysed, and shows the most distinct allusion to an affair in which he had become involved during the treatment, and of which he had decided “_to tell me nothing_.”[EX]

III. Here is a third example from my own experience:

_I go to the hospital with P. through a region in which houses and gardens occur. With this comes the idea that I have already seen this region in dreams several times. I do not know my way very well; P. shows me a way which leads through a corner to a restaurant (a room, not a garden); here I ask for Mrs. Doni, and I hear that she is living in the background in a little room with three children. I go there, and while on the way I meet an indistinct person with my two little girls, whom I take with me after I have stood with them for a while. A kind of reproach against my wife for having left them there._

Upon awakening I feel great _satisfaction_, the cause for this being the fact that I am now going to learn from the analysis what is meant by the idea “_I have already dreamed of that_.”[EY] But the analysis of the dream teaches me nothing on the subject; it only shows me that the satisfaction belongs to the latent dream content, and not to my judgment upon the dream. It is _satisfaction over the fact that I have had children by my marriage_. P. is a person in whose company I walked the path of life for a certain space, but who has since far outdistanced me socially and materially—whose marriage, however, has remained childless. The two occasions for the dream furnishing the proof of this may be found by means of complete analysis. On the previous day I had read in the paper the obituary notice of a certain Mrs. Dona A——y (out of which I make Doni), who had died in childbirth; I was told by my wife that the dead woman had been nursed by the same midwife she herself had had at the birth of our two youngest boys. The name Dona had caught my attention, for I had recently found it for the first time in an English novel. The other occasion for the dream may be found in the date on which it was dreamed; it was on the night before the birthday of my eldest boy, who, it seems, is poetically gifted.

IV. The same satisfaction remained with me after awakening from the absurd dream that my father, after his death, had played a political part among the Magyars, and it is motivated by a continuance of the feeling which accompanied the last sentence of the dream: “_I remember that on his death-bed he looked so much like Garibaldi, and I am glad that it has really come true. (Here belongs a forgotten continuation.)_” I can now supply from the analysis what belongs in this gap of the dream. It is the mention of my second boy, to whom I have given the first name of a great historical personage, who attracted me powerfully during my boyhood, especially during my stay in England. I had to wait for a year after making up my mind to use this name in case the expected child should be a son, and I greeted him with it _in high satisfaction_ as soon as he was born. It is easy to see how the father’s lust for greatness is transferred in his thoughts to his children; it will readily be believed that this is one of the ways in which the suppression of this lust which becomes necessary in life is brought about. The little fellow won a place in the text of this dream by virtue of the fact that the same accident—quite pardonable in a child or a dying person—of soiling his clothes had happened to him. With this may be compared the allusion “_Stuhlrichter_” (judge on the stool-bench, _i.e._ presiding judge) and the wish of the dream: To stand before one’s children great and pure.

V. I am now called upon to find expressions of judgment which remain in the dream itself, and are not retained in or transferred to our waking thoughts, and I shall consider it a great relief if I may find examples in dreams, which have already been cited for other purposes. The dream about Goethe’s attacking Mr. M. seems to contain a considerable number of acts of judgment. _I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations, which seem improbable to me._ Does not this look like a critical impulse directed against the nonsensical idea that Goethe should have made a literary attack upon a young man of my acquaintance? “_It seems plausible to me_ that he was 18 years old.” That sounds quite like the result of a dull-witted calculation; and “_I do not know exactly what year it is_” would be an example of uncertainty or doubt in the dream.

But I know from analysis that these acts of judgment, which seem to have been performed in the dream for the first time, admit of a different construction in the light of which they become indispensable for interpreting the dream, and at the same time every absurdity is avoided. With the sentence, “_I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations_,” I put myself in the place of my friend who is actually trying to explain the chronological relations of life. The sentence then loses its significance as a judgment that objects to the nonsense of the previous sentences. The interposition, “_which seems improbable to me_,” belongs to the subsequent “_it seems plausible to me_.” In about the same words I had answered the lady who told me the story of her brother’s illness: “_It seems improbable to me_ that the cry of ‘Nature, Nature,’ had anything to do with Goethe; _it appears much more plausible_ that it had the sexual significance which is known to you.” To be sure, a judgment has been passed here, not, however, in the dream but in reality, on an occasion which is remembered and utilised by the dream thoughts. The dream content appropriates this judgment like any other fragment of the dream thoughts.

The numeral 18, with which the judgment in the dream is meaninglessly connected, still preserves a trace of the context from which the real judgment was torn. Finally, “_I am not certain what year it is_” is intended for nothing else than to carry out my identification with the paralytic, in the examination of whom this point of confirmation had actually been established.

In the solution of these apparent acts of judgment, in the dream, it may be well to call attention to the rule of interpretation which says that the coherence which is fabricated in the dream between its constituent parts is to be disregarded as specious and unessential, and that every dream element must be taken by itself and traced to its source. The dream is a conglomeration, which is to be broken up into its elements for the purposes of investigation. But other circumstances call our attention to the fact that a psychic force is expressed in dreams which establishes this apparent coherence—that is to say, which subjects the material that is obtained by the dream activity to a _secondary elaboration_. We are here confronted with manifestations of this force, upon which we shall later fix our attention as being the fourth of the factors which take part in the formation of the dream.

VI. I select other examples of critical activity in the dreams which have already been cited. In the absurd dream about the communication from the common council I ask the question: “_You married shortly after? I figure that I was born in 1856, which appears to me as though following immediately_.” This quite takes the form of an _inference_. My father married shortly after his attack in the year 1851; I am the oldest son, born in 1856; this agrees perfectly. We know that this inference has been interpolated by the wish-fulfilment, and that the sentence which dominates the dream thoughts is to the following effect: _4 or 5 years, that is no time at all, that need not enter the calculation_. But every part of this chain of inferences is to be determined from the dream thoughts in a different manner, both as to its content and as to its form. It is the patient—about whose endurance my colleague complains—who intends to marry immediately after the close of the treatment. The manner in which I deal with my father in the dream recalls an _inquest_ or _examination_, and with that the person of a university instructor who was in the habit of taking a complete list of credentials at the enrolment of his class: “You were born when?” In 1856. “Patre?” Then the applicant gave the first name of his father with a Latin ending, and we students assumed that the Aulic Councillor drew _inferences_ from the first name of the father which the name of the enrolled student would not always have supplied. According to this, the _drawing of inferences_ in the dream would be merely a repetition of the _drawing of inferences_ which appears as part of the subject-matter in the dream thoughts. From this we learn something new. If an inference occurs in the dream content, it invariably comes from the dream thoughts; it may be contained in these as a bit of remembered material, or it may serve as a logical connective in a series of dream thoughts. In any case an inference in the dream represents an inference in the dream thoughts.[EZ]

The analysis of this dream should be continued here. With the inquest of the Professor there is connected the recollection of an index (published in Latin during my time) of the university students; also of my course of studies. The _five years_ provided for the study of medicine were as usual not enough for me. I worked along unconcernedly in the succeeding years; in the circle of my acquaintances I was considered a loafer, and there was doubt as to whether I would “get through.” Then all at once I decided to take my examinations; and I got “through,” _in spite of the postponement_. This is a new confirmation of the dream thoughts, which I defiantly hold up to my critics: “Even though you are unwilling to believe it, because I take my time, I shall reach a conclusion (German _Schluss_, meaning either end or conclusion, _inference_). It has often happened that way.”

In its introductory portion this dream contains several sentences which cannot well be denied the character of an argumentation. And this argumentation is not at all absurd; it might just as well belong to waking thought. _In the dream I make sport of the communication of the Common Council, for in the first place I was not yet in the world in 1851, and in the second place, my father, to whom it might refer, is already dead._ Both are not only correct in themselves, but coincide completely with the arguments that I should use in case I should receive a communication of the sort mentioned. We know from our previous analysis that this dream has sprung from deeply embittered and scornful dream thoughts; if we may assume further that the motive for censorship is a very strong one, we shall understand that the dream activity has every reason to create _a flawless refutation of a baseless insinuation_ according to the model contained in the dream thoughts. But analysis shows that in this case the dream activity has not had the task of making a free copy, but it has been required to use subject-matter from the dream thoughts for its purpose. It is as if in an algebraic equation there occurred plus and minus signs, signs of powers and of roots, besides the figures, and as if someone, in copying this equation without understanding it, should take over into his copy the signs of operation as well as the figures, and fail to distinguish between the two kinds. The two arguments may be traced to the following material. It is painful for me to think that many of the assumptions upon which I base my solution of psychoneuroses, as soon as they have become known, will arouse scepticism and ridicule. Thus I must maintain that impressions from the second year of life, or even from the first, leave a lasting trace upon the temperament of persons who later become diseased, and that these impressions—greatly distorted it is true, and exaggerated by memory—are capable of furnishing the original and fundamental basis of hysterical symptoms. Patients to whom I explain this in its proper place are in the habit of making a parody upon the explanation by declaring themselves willing to look for reminiscences of the period _when they were not yet alive_. It would quite accord with my expectation, if enlightenment on the subject of the unsuspected part played by the father in the earliest sexual impulses of feminine patients should get a similar reception. (_Cf._ the discussion on p. 218.) And, nevertheless, both positions are correct according to my well-founded conviction. In confirmation I recall certain examples in which the death of the father happened when the child was very young, and later events, otherwise inexplicable, proved that the child had unconsciously preserved recollections of the persons who had so early gone out of its life. I know that both of my assertions are based upon _inferences_ the validity of which will be attacked. If the subject-matter of these very inferences which I fear will be contested is used by the dream activity for setting up _incontestable inferences_, this is a performance of the wish-fulfilment.

VII. In a dream which I have hitherto only touched upon, astonishment at the subject to be broached is distinctly expressed at the outset.

“_The elder Bruecke must have given me some task or other; strangely enough it relates to the preparation of my own lower body, pelvis and legs, which I see before me as though in the dissecting room, but without feeling my lack of body and without a trace of horror. Louise N. is standing near, and doing her work next to me. The pelvis is eviscerated; now the upper, now the lower view of the same is seen, and the two views mingle. Thick fleshy red lumps (which even in the dream make me think of hæmorrhoids) are to be seen. Also something had to be carefully picked out, which lay over these and which looked like crumpled tinfoil.[FA] Then I was again in possession of my legs and made a journey through the city, but took a wagon (owing to my fatigue). To my astonishment the wagon drove into a house door, which opened and allowed it to pass into a passage that was snapped off at the end, and finally led further on into the open.[FB] At last I wandered through changing landscapes with an Alpine guide, who carried my things. He carried, me for some way, out of consideration for my tired legs. The ground was muddy, and we went along the edge; people sat on the ground, a girl among them, like Indians or Gypsies. Previously I had moved myself along on the slippery ground, with constant astonishment that I was so well able to do it after the preparation. At last we came to a small wooden house which ended in an open window. Here the guide set me down, and laid two wooden boards which stood in readiness on the window sill, in order that in this way the chasm might be bridged which had to be crossed in order to get to the window. Now, I grew really frightened about my legs. Instead of the expected crossing, I saw two grown-up men lying upon wooden benches which were on the walls of the hut, and something like two sleeping children next to them. It seems as though not the boards but the children were intended to make possible the crossing. I awakened with frightened thoughts._”