Part 36

The localities in this dream are put together from several journeys to the Adriatic Sea (Miramare, Duino, Venice, Aquileja). A short but enjoyable Easter trip to Aquileja with my brother, a few weeks before the dream, was still fresh in my memory. Besides, the naval war between America and Spain, and the worry connected with it about my relatives living in America, play a part. Manifestations of emotion appear at two places in this dream. In one place an emotion that would be expected is lacking—it is expressly emphasized that the death of the governor makes no impression upon me; at another point, where I see the warships I am _frightened_, and experience all the sensations of fright while I sleep. The distribution of affects in this well-constructed dream has been made in such a way that every obvious contradiction is avoided. For there is no reason why I should be frightened at the governor’s death, and it is fitting that as the commander of the castle I should be alarmed by the sight of the warship. Now analysis shows that Mr. P. is nothing but a substitute for my own Ego (in the dream I am his substitute). I am the governor who suddenly dies. The dream thoughts deal with the future of those dear to me after my premature death. No other disagreeable thought is to be found among the dream thoughts. The fright which is attached to the sight of the warship must be transferred from it to this disagreeable thought. Inversely, the analysis shows that the region of the dream thoughts from which the warship comes is filled with most joyous reminiscences. It was at Venice a year before, one charmingly beautiful day, that we stood at the windows of our room on the Riva Schiavoni and looked upon the blue lagoon, in which more activity could be seen that day than usually. English ships were being expected, they were to be festively received; and suddenly my wife called out, happy as a child: “_There come the English warships!_” In the dream I am frightened at the very same words; we see again that speeches in the dream originate from speeches in life. I shall soon show that even the element “English” in this speech has not been lost for the dream activity. I thus convert joy into fright on the way from the dream thoughts to the dream content, and I need only intimate that by means of this very transformation I give expression to a part of the latent dream content. The example shows, however, that the dream activity is at liberty to detach the occasion for an affect from its context in the dream thoughts, and to insert it at any other place it chooses in the dream content.

I seize the opportunity which is incidentally offered, of subjecting to closer analysis the “breakfast ship,” whose appearance in the dream so nonsensically concludes a situation that has been rationally adhered to. If I take a closer view of this object in the dream, I am now struck by the fact that it was black, and that on account of its being cut off at its greatest breadth it closely resembled, at the end where it was cut off, an object which had aroused our interest in the museums of the Etruscan cities. This object was a rectangular cup of black clay with two handles, upon which stood things like coffee cups, or tea cups, very similar to our modern _breakfast_ table service. Upon inquiring, we learned that this was the toilet set of an Etruscan lady, with little boxes for rouge and powder; and we said jokingly to each other that it would not be a bad idea to take a thing like that home to the lady of the house. The dream object, therefore, signifies “_black toilet_” (German, _toilette_—dress)—mourning—and has direct reference to a death. The other end of the dream object reminds us of the “boat” (German, _Nachen_), from the root νέχυς, as a philological friend has told me, upon which corpses were laid in prehistoric times and were left to be buried by the sea. With this circumstance is connected the reason for the return of the ships in the dream.

“Quietly the old man on his rescued boat drifts into the harbour.”

It is the return voyage after the ship_wreck_ (German, schiff_bruch_; ship-_breaking_, _i.e._ shipwreck), the breakfast-ship looks as though it were _broken_ off in the middle. But whence comes the name “breakfast”-ship? Here is where the “English” comes in, which we have left over from the warships. _Breakfast—a breaking of the fast._ Breaking again belongs to ship-_wreck_ (Schiff_bruch_), and _fasting_ is connected with the mourning dress.

The only thing about this breakfast-ship, which has been newly created by the dream, is its name. The thing has existed in reality, and recalls to me the merriest hours of my last journey. As we distrusted the fare in Aquileja, we took some food with us from Goerz, and bought a bottle of excellent Istrian wine in Aquileja, and while the little mail-steamer slowly travelled through the Canal delle Mee and into the lonely stretch of lagoon towards Grado, we took our breakfast on deck—we were the only passengers—and it tasted to us as few breakfasts have ever tasted. This, then, was the “_breakfast-ship_,” and it is behind this very recollection of great enjoyment that the dream hides the saddest thoughts about an unknown and ominous future.

The detachment of emotions from the groups of ideas which have been responsible for their development is the most striking thing that happens to them in the course of dream formation, but it is neither the only nor even the most essential change which they undergo on the way from the dream thoughts to the manifest dream. If the affects in the dream thoughts are compared with those in the dream, it at once becomes clear that wherever there is an emotion in the dream, this is also to be found in the dream thoughts; the converse, however, is not true. In general, the dream is less rich in affects than the psychic material from which it is elaborated. As soon as I have reconstructed the dream thoughts I see that the most intense psychic impulses are regularly striving in them for self-assertion, usually in conflict with others that are sharply opposed to them. If I turn back to the dream, I often find it colourless and without any of the more intense strains of feeling. Not only the content, but also the affective tone of my thoughts has been brought by the dream activity to the level of the indifferent. I might say that a _suppression of the affects_ has taken place. Take, for example, the dream of the botanical monograph. It answers to a passionate plea for my freedom to act as I am acting and to arrange my life as seems right to me and to me alone. The dream which results from it sounds indifferent; I have written a monograph; it is lying before me; it is fitted with coloured plates, and dried plants are to be found with each copy. It is like the peacefulness of a battlefield; there is no trace left of the tumult of battle.

It may also turn out differently—vivid affective expressions may make their appearance in the dream; but we shall first dwell upon the unquestionable fact that many dreams appear indifferent, while it is never possible to go deeply into the dream thoughts without deep emotion.

A complete theoretical explanation of this suppression of emotions in the course of the dream activity cannot be given here; it would require a most careful investigation of the theory of the emotions and of the mechanism of suppression. I shall find a place here for two thoughts only. I am forced—on other grounds—to conceive the development of affects as a centrifugal process directed towards the interior of the body, analogous to the processes of motor and secretory innervation. Just as in the sleeping condition the omission of motor impulses towards the outside world seems to be suspended, so a centrifugal excitement of emotions through unconscious thought may be made more difficult during sleep. Thus the affective impulses aroused during the discharge of the dream thoughts would themselves be weak excitements, and therefore those getting into the dream would not be stronger. According to this line of argument the “suppression of the affects” would not be a result of the dream activity at all, but a result of the sleeping condition. This may be so, but this cannot possibly be all. We must also remember that all the more complex dreams have shown themselves to be a compromised result from the conflict of psychic forces. On the one hand, the thoughts that constitute the wish must fight the opposition of a censorship; on the other hand, we have often seen how, even in unconscious thinking, each train of thought is harnessed to its contradictory opposite. Since all of these trains of thought are capable of emotion, we shall hardly make a mistake, broadly speaking, if we regard the suppression of emotion as the result of the restraint which the contrasts impose upon one another and which the censor imposes upon the tendencies which it has suppressed. _The restraint of affects would accordingly he the second result of the dream censor as the disfigurement of the dream was the first._

I shall insert an example of a dream in which the indifferent affective tone of the dream content may be explained by a contrast in the dream thoughts. I have the following short dream to relate, which every reader will read with disgust:

IV. _A bit of rising ground, and on it something like a toilet in the open; a very long bench, at the end of which is a large toilet aperture. All of the back edge is thickly covered with little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A shrub behind the bench. I urinate upon the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement easily come off and fall into the opening. It seems as though something remained at the end nevertheless._

Why did I experience no disgust in this dream?

Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and satisfying thoughts have co-operated in the formation of this dream. Upon analysing it I immediately think of the Augean stables cleansed by Hercules. I am this Hercules. The rising ground and the shrub belong to Aussee, where my children are now staying. I have discovered the infantile etiology of the neuroses and have thus guarded my own children from becoming ill. The bench (omitting the aperture, of course) is the faithful copy of a piece of furniture which an affectionate female patient has made me a present of. This recalls how my patients honour me. Even the museum of human excrement is susceptible of less disagreeable interpretation. However much I am disgusted with it, it is a souvenir of the beautiful land of Italy, where in little cities, as everyone knows, water-closets are not equipped in any other way. The stream of urine that washes everything clean is an unmistakable allusion to greatness. It is in this manner that Gulliver extinguishes the great fire in Lilliput; to be sure, he thereby incurs the displeasure of the tiniest of queens. In this way, too, Gargantua, the superman in Master Rabelais, takes vengeance upon the Parisians, straddling Notre Dame and training his stream of urine upon the city. Only yesterday I was turning over the leaves of Garnier’s illustrations of Rabelais before I went to bed. And, strangely enough, this is another proof that I am the superman! The platform of Notre Dame was my favourite nook in Paris; every free afternoon I was accustomed to go up into the towers of the church and climb about among the monsters and devil-masks there. The circumstances that all the excrement vanishes so rapidly before the stream correspond to the motto: _Afflavit et dissipati sunt_, which I shall some day make the title of a chapter on the therapeutics of hysteria.

And now as to the occasion giving rise to the dream. It had been a hot 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.”