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The Interpretation of Dreams Chapter 5 - D. Typical Dreams (1) THE EMBARRASSMENT-DREAM OF NAKEDNESS Psychology
V. THE MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS (continued)
D. Typical Dreams -
(2) DREAMS OF THE DEATH OF BELOVED PERSONS
Another series of dreams which may be called typical are those whose content is that a beloved relative, a parent, brother, sister, child, or the like, has died. We must at once distinguish two classes of such dreams: those in which the dreamer remains unmoved, and those in which he feels profoundly grieved by the death of the beloved person, even expressing this grief by shedding tears in his sleep.
We may ignore the dreams of the first group; they have no claim to be reckoned
as typical. If they are analysed, it is found that they signify something that
is not contained in them, that they are intended to mask another wish of some
kind. This is the case in the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her
sister lying on a bier (chapter IV). The dream does not mean that she desires
the death of her little nephew; as we have learned, it merely conceals the wish
to see a certain beloved person again after a long separation- the same person
whom she had seen after as long an interval at the funeral of another nephew.
This wish, which is the real content of the dream, gives no cause for sorrow,
and for that reason no sorrow is felt in the dream. We see here that the feeling
contained in the dream does not belong to the manifest, but to the latent
dream-content, and that the affective content has remained free from the
distortion which has befallen the conceptual content.
It is otherwise with those dreams in which the death of a beloved relative is
imagined, and in which a painful affect is felt. These signify, as their content
tells us, the wish that the person in question might die; and since I may here
expect that the feelings of all my readers and of all who have had such dreams
will lead them to reject my explanation, I must endeavour to rest my proof on
the broadest possible basis.
We have already cited a dream from which we could see that the wishes
represented as fulfilled in dreams are not always current wishes. They may also
be bygone, discarded, buried and repressed wishes, which we must nevertheless
credit with a sort of continued existence, merely on account of their
reappearance in a dream. They are not dead, like persons who have died, in the
sense that we know death, but are rather like the shades in the Odyssey which
awaken to a certain degree of life so soon as they have drunk blood. The dream
of the dead child in the box (chapter IV) contained a wish that had been present
fifteen years earlier, and which had at that time been frankly admitted as real.
Further- and this, perhaps, is not unimportant from the standpoint of the theory
of dreams- a recollection from the dreamer's earliest childhood was at the root
of this wish also. When the dreamer was a little child- but exactly when cannot
be definitely determined- she heard that her mother, during the pregnancy of
which she was the outcome, had fallen into a profound emotional depression, and
had passionately wished for the death of the child in her womb. Having herself
grown up and become pregnant, she was only following the example of her mother.
If anyone dreams that his father or mother, his brother or sister, has died, and
his dream expresses grief, I should never adduce this as proof that he wishes
any of them dead now. The theory of dreams does not go as far as to require
this; it is satisfied with concluding that the dreamer has wished them dead at
some time or other during his childhood. I fear, however, that this limitation
will not go far to appease my critics; probably they will just as energetically
deny the possibility that they ever had such thoughts, as they protest that they
do not harbour them now. I must, therefore, reconstruct a portion of the
submerged infantile psychology on the basis of the evidence of the present. *
* Cf. also "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy," Collected Papers, III;
and "On the Sexual Theories of Children," Ibid., II.
Let us first of all consider the relation of children to their brothers and
sisters. I do not know why we presuppose that it must be a loving one, since
examples of enmity among adult brothers and sisters are frequent in everyone's
experience, and since we are so often able to verify the fact that this
estrangement originated during childhood, or has always existed. Moreover, many
adults who today are devoted to their brothers and sisters, and support them in
adversity, lived with them in almost continuous enmity during their childhood.
The elder child ill- treated the younger, slandered him, and robbed him of his
toys; the younger was consumed with helpless fury against the elder, envied and
feared him, or his earliest impulse toward liberty and his first revolt against
injustice were directed against his oppressor. The parents say that the children
do not agree, and cannot find the reason for it. It is not difficult to see that
the character even of a well-behaved child is not the character we should wish
to find in an adult. A child is absolutely egoistical; he feels his wants
acutely, and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially against his
competitors, other children, and first of all against his brothers and sisters.
And yet we do not on that account call a child wicked- we call him naughty; he
is not responsible for his misdeeds, either in our own judgment or in the eyes
of the law. And this is as it should be; for we may expect that within the very
period of life which we reckon as childhood, altruistic impulses and morality
will awake in the little egoist, and that, in the words of Meynert, a secondary
ego will overlay and inhibit the primary ego. Morality, of course, does not
develop simultaneously in all its departments, and furthermore, the duration of
the amoral period of childhood differs in different individuals. Where this
morality fails to develop we are prone to speak of degeneration; but here the
case is obviously one of arrested development. Where the primary character is
already overlaid by the later development it may be at least partially uncovered
again by an attack of hysteria. The correspondence between the so-called
hysterical character and that of a naughty child is positively striking. The
obsessional neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a super-morality, which
develops as a strong reinforcement against the primary character that is
threatening to revive.
Many persons, then, who now love their brothers and sisters, and who would feel
bereaved by their death, harbour in their unconscious hostile wishes, survivals
from an earlier period, wishes which are able to realize themselves in dreams.
It is, however, quite especially interesting to observe the behaviour of little
children up to their third and fourth year towards their younger brothers or
sisters. So far the child has been the only one; now he is informed that the
stork has brought a new baby. The child inspects the new arrival, and expresses
his opinion with decision: "The stork had better take it back again!" *
* Hans, whose phobia was the subject of the analysis in the above- mentioned
publication, cried out at the age of three and a half, while feverish, shortly
after the birth of a sister: "But I don't want to have a little sister." In his
neurosis, eighteen months later, he frankly confessed the wish that his mother
should drop the child into the bath while bathing it, in order that it might
die. With all this, Hans was a good-natured, affectionate child, who soon became
fond of his sister, and took her under his special protection.
I seriously declare it as my opinion that a child is able to estimate the
disadvantages which he has to expect on account of a new-comer. A connection of
mine, who now gets on very well with a sister, who is four years her junior,
responded to the news of this sister's arrival with the reservation: "But I
shan't give her my red cap, anyhow." If the child should come to realize only at
a later stage that its happiness may be prejudiced by a younger brother or
sister, its enmity will be aroused at this period. I know of a case where a
girl, not three years of age, tried to strangle an infant in its cradle, because
she suspected that its continued presence boded her no good. Children at this
time of life are capable of a jealousy that is perfectly evident and extremely
intense. Again, perhaps the little brother or sister really soon disappears, and
the child once more draws to himself the whole affection of the household; then
a new child is sent by the stork; is it not natural that the favourite should
conceive the wish that the new rival may meet the same fate as the earlier one,
in order that he may be as happy as he was before the birth of the first child,
and during the interval after his death? * Of course, this attitude of the child
towards the younger brother or sister is, under normal circumstances, a mere
function of the difference of age. After a certain interval the maternal
instincts of the older girl will be awakened towards the helpless new-born
infant.
* Such cases of death in the experience of children may soon be forgotten in the
family, but psycho-analytical investigation shows that they are very significant
for a later neurosis.
Feelings of hostility towards brothers and sisters must occur far more
frequently in children than is observed by their obtuse elders. *
* Since the above was written, a great many observations relating to the
originally hostile attitude of children toward their brothers and sisters, and
toward one of their parents, have been recorded in the literature of
psycho-analysis. One writer, Spitteler, gives the following peculiarly sincere
and ingenious description of this typical childish attitude as he experienced it
in his earliest childhood: "Moreover, there was now a second Adolf. A little
creature whom they declared was my brother, but I could not understand what he
could be for, or why they should pretend he was a being like myself. I was
sufficient unto myself: what did I want with a brother? And he was not only
useless, he was also even troublesome. When I plagued my grandmother, he too
wanted to plague her; when I was wheeled about in the baby- carriage he sat
opposite me, and took up half the room, so that we could not help kicking one
another."
In the case of my own children, who followed one another rapidly, I missed the
opportunity of making such observations, I am now retrieving it, thanks to my
little nephew, whose undisputed domination was disturbed after fifteen months by
the arrival of a feminine rival. I hear, it is true, that the young man behaves
very chivalrously toward his little sister, that he kisses her hand and strokes
her; but in spite of this I have convinced myself that even before the
completion of his second year he is using his new command of language to
criticize this person, who, to him, after all, seems superfluous. Whenever the
conversation turns upon her he chimes in, and cries angrily: "Too (l)ittle, too
(l)ittle!" During the last few months, since the child has outgrown this
disparagement, owing to her splendid development, he has found another reason
for his insistence that she does not deserve so much attention. He reminds us,
on every suitable pretext: "She hasn't any teeth." * We all of us recollect the
case of the eldest daughter of another sister of mine. The child, who was then
six years of age, spent a full half-hour in going from one aunt to another with
the question: "Lucie can't understand that yet, can she?" Lucie was her rival-
two and a half years younger.
* The three-and-a-half-year-old Hans embodied his devastating criticism of his
little sister in these identical words (loc. cit.). He assumed that she was
unable to speak on account of her lack of teeth.
I have never failed to come across this dream of the death of brothers or
sisters, denoting an intense hostility, e.g., I have met it in all my female
patients. I have met with only one exception, which could easily be interpreted
into a confirmation of the rule. Once, in the course of a sitting, when I was
explaining this state of affairs to a female patient, since it seemed to have
some bearing on the symptoms under consideration that day, she answered, to my
astonishment, that she had never had such dreams. But another dream occurred to
her, which presumably had nothing to do with the case- a dream which she had
first dreamed at the age of four, when she was the youngest child, and had since
then dreamed repeatedly. "A number of children, all her brothers and sisters
with her boy and girl cousins, were romping about in a meadow. Suddenly they all
grew wings, flew up, and were gone." She had no idea of the significance of this
dream; but we can hardly fail to recognize it as a dream of the death of all the
brothers and sisters, in its original form, and but little influenced by the
censorship. I will venture to add the following analysis of it: on the death of
one out of this large number of children- in this case the children of two
brothers were brought up together as brothers and sisters- would not our
dreamer, at that time not yet four years of age, have asked some wise, grown-up
person: "What becomes of children when they are dead?" The answer would probably
have been: "They grow wings and become angels." After this explanation. all the
brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings, like angels and-
this is the important point- they fly away. Our little angel-maker is left
alone: just think, the only one out of such a crowd! That the children romp
about a meadow, from which they fly away, points almost certainly to
butterflies- it is as though the child had been influenced by the same
association of ideas which led the ancients to imagine Psyche, the soul, with
the wings of a butterfly.
Perhaps some readers will now object that the inimical impulses of children
toward their brothers and sisters may perhaps be admitted, but how does the
childish character arrive at such heights of wickedness as to desire the death
of a rival or a stronger playmate, as though all misdeeds could be atoned for
only by death? Those who speak in this fashion forget that the child's idea of
being dead has little but the word in common with our own. The child knows
nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror
of the infinite Nothing, the thought of which the adult, as all the myths of the
hereafter testify, finds so intolerable. The fear of death is alien to the
child; and so he plays with the horrid word, and threatens another child: "If
you do that again, you will die, just like Francis died"; at which the poor
mother shudders, unable perhaps to forget that the greater proportion of mortals
do not survive beyond the years of childhood. Even at the age of eight, a child
returning from a visit to a natural history museum may say to her mother:
"Mamma, I do love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and
set you up here in the room, so that I can always, always see you!" So different
from our own is the childish conception of being dead. *
* To my astonishment, I was told that a highly intelligent boy of ten, after the
sudden death of his father, said: "I understand that father is dead, but I can't
see why he does not come home to supper." Further material relating to this
subject will be found in the section "Kinderseele," edited by Frau Dr. von
HugHellmuth, in Imago Vol. i-v, 1912-18.
Being dead means, for the child, who has been spared the sight of the suffering
that precedes death, much the same as being gone, and ceasing to annoy the
survivors. The child does not distinguish the means by which this absence is
brought about, whether by distance, or estrangement, or death. * If, during the
child's prehistoric years, a nurse has been dismissed, and if his mother dies a
little while later, the two experiences, as we discover by analysis, form links
of a chain in his memory. The fact that the child does not very intensely miss
those who are absent has been realized, to her sorrow, by many a mother, when
she has returned home from an absence of several weeks, and has been told, upon
inquiry: "The children have not asked for their mother once." But if she really
departs to "that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,"
the children seem at first to have forgotten her, and only subsequently do they
begin to remember their dead mother.
* The observation of a father trained in psycho-analysis was able to detect the
very moment when his very intelligent little daughter, age four, realized the
difference between being away and being dead. The child was being troublesome at
table, and noted that one of the waitresses in the pension was looking at her
with an expression of annoyance. "Josephine ought to be dead," she thereupon
remarked to her father. "But why dead?" asked the father, soothingly. "Wouldn't
it be enough if she went away?" "No," replied the child, "then she would come
back again." To the uncurbed self-love (narcissism) of the child, every
inconvenience constitutes the crime of lese majeste, and, as in the Draconian
code, the child's feelings prescribe for all such crimes the one invariable
punishment.
While, therefore, the child has its motives for desiring the absence of another
child, it is lacking in all those restraints which would prevent it from
clothing this wish in the form of a death-wish; and the psychic reaction to
dreams of a death-wish proves that, in spite of all the differences of content,
the wish in the case of the child is after all identical with the corresponding
wish in an adult.
If, then, the death-wish of a child in respect of his brothers and sisters is
explained by his childish egoism, which makes him regard his brothers and
sisters as rivals, how are we to account for the same wish in respect of his
parents, who bestow their love on him, and satisfy his needs, and whose
preservation he ought to desire for these very egoistical reasons?
Towards a solution of this difficulty we may be guided by our knowledge that the
very great majority of dreams of the death of a parent refer to the parent of
the same sex as the dreamer, so that a man generally dreams of the death of his
father, and a woman of the death of her mother. I do not claim that this happens
constantly; but that it happens in a great majority of cases is so evident that
it requires explanation by some factor of general significance. * Broadly
speaking, it is as though a sexual preference made itself felt at an early age,
as though the boy regarded his father, and the girl her mother, as a rival in
love- by whose removal he or she could but profit.
* The situation is frequently disguised by the intervention of a tendency to
punishment, which, in the form of a moral reaction, threatens the loss of the
beloved parent.
Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader again consider the
actual relations between parents and children. We must distinguish between the
traditional standard of conduct, the filial piety expected in this relation, and
what daily observation shows us to be the fact. More than one occasion for
enmity lies hidden amidst the relations of parents and children; conditions are
present in the greatest abundance under which wishes which cannot pass the
censorship are bound to arise. Let us first consider the relation between father
and son. In my opinion the sanctity with which we have endorsed the injunctions
of the Decalogue dulls our perception of the reality. Perhaps we hardly dare
permit ourselves to perceive 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, filial piety towards parents is wont to recede before other interests.
The obscure legends which have been handed down to us from the primeval ages of
human society in mythology and folklore give a deplorable idea of the despotic
power of the father, and the ruthlessness with which it was exercised. Kronos
devours his children, as the wild boar devours the litter of the sow; Zeus
emasculates his father * and takes his place as ruler. The more tyrannically the
father ruled in the ancient family, the more surely must the son, as his
appointed successor, have assumed the position of an enemy, and the greater must
have been his impatience to attain to supremacy through the death of his father.
Even in our own middle-class families the father commonly fosters the growth of
the germ of hatred which is naturally inherent in the paternal relation, by
refusing to allow the son to be a free agent or by denying him the means of
becoming so. A physician often has occasion to remark that a son's grief at the
loss of his father cannot quench his gratification that he has at last obtained
his freedom. Fathers, as a rule, cling desperately to as much of the sadly
antiquated potestas patris familias *(2) as still survives in our modern
society, and the poet who, like Ibsen, puts the immemorial strife between father
and son in the foreground of his drama is sure of his effect. The causes of
conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter grows up and finds
herself watched by her mother when she longs for real sexual freedom, while the
mother is reminded by the budding beauty of her daughter that for her the time
has come to renounce sexual claims.
* At least in some of the mythological accounts. According to others,
emasculation was inflicted only by Kronos on his father Uranos.
With regard to the mythological significance of this motive, cf. Otto Rank's Der
Mythus von der Geburt des Helden, in No. v of Schriften zur angew. Seelen-kunde
(1909), and Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage (1912), chap. ix, 2.
*(2) Authority of the father.
All these circumstances are obvious to everyone, but they do not help us to
explain dreams of the death of their parents in persons for whom filial piety
has long since come to be unquestionable. We are, however, prepared by the
foregoing discussion to look for the origin of a death-wish in the earliest
years of childhood.
In the case of psychoneurotics, analysis confirms this conjecture beyond all
doubt. For analysis tells us that the sexual wishes of the child- in so far as
they deserve this designation in their nascent state- awaken at a very early
age, and that the earliest affection of the girl-child is lavished on the
father, while the earliest infantile desires of the boy are directed upon the
mother. For the boy the father, and for the girl the mother, becomes an
obnoxious rival, and we have already shown, in the case of brothers and sisters,
how readily in children this feeling leads to the death-wish. As a general rule,
sexual selection soon makes its appearance in the parents; it is a natural
tendency for the father to spoil his little daughters, and for the mother to
take the part of the sons, while both, so long as the glamour of sex does not
prejudice their judgment, are strict in training the children. The child is
perfectly conscious of this partiality, and offers resistance to the parent who
opposes it. To find love in an adult is for the child not merely the
satisfaction of a special need; it means also that the child's will is indulged
in all other respects. Thus the child is obeying its own sexual instinct, and at
the same time reinforcing the stimulus proceeding from the parents, when its
choice between the parents corresponds with their own.
The signs of these infantile tendencies are for the most part over-looked; and
yet some of them may be observed even after the early years of childhood. An
eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, whenever her mother is called away from
the table, takes advantage of her absence to proclaim herself her successor.
"Now I shall be Mamma; Karl, do you want some more vegetables? Have some more,
do," etc. A particularly clever and lively little girl, not yet four years of
age, in whom this trait of child psychology is unusually transparent, says
frankly: "Now mummy can go away; then daddy must marry me, and I will be his
wife." Nor does this wish by any means exclude the possibility that the child
may most tenderly love its mother. 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 has to go back to the nursery, to a person whom he likes far less, the
wish may readily arise that his father might always be absent, so that he might
keep his place beside 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 grandpapa, for example, are always absent;
they never come back.
While such observations of young children readily accommodate themselves to the
interpretation suggested, they do not, it is true, carry the complete conviction
which is forced upon a physician by the psycho-analysis of adult neurotics. The
dreams of neurotic patients are communicated with preliminaries of such a nature
that their interpretation as wish-dreams becomes inevitable. One day I find a
lady depressed 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 me that she has remembered a dream, whose significance, of course, she
does not understand. She dreamed it when she was four years old, and it was
this: A fox or a lynx is walking about 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 weeps bitterly. I have no sooner informed her that this
dream must signify a childish wish 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 furnishes material in explanation of the dream. "Lynx-eye" is an
opprobrious epithet which a street boy once bestowed on her when she was a very
small child; and when she was three years old a brick or tile fell on her
mother's head, so that she bled profusely.
I once had occasion to make a thorough study of a young girl who was passing
through various psychic states. In the state of frenzied confusion with which
her illness began, the patient manifested a quite peculiar aversion for her
mother; she struck her and abused her whenever she approached the bed, while at
the same period she was affectionate and submissive to a much older sister. Then
there followed a lucid but rather apathetic condition, with badly 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 veiled fashion, with the
death of the girl's mother; now she was present at the funeral of an old woman,
now she saw herself and her sister sitting at a table, dressed in mourning; the
meaning of the dreams could not be doubted. During her progressive improvement
hysterical phobias made their appearance, the most distressing of which was the
fear that something had happened to her mother. Wherever she might be at the
time, she had then to hurry home in order to convince herself that her mother
was still alive. Now this case, considered in conjunction with the rest of my
experience. 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 confusion, which I regard as an overthrow of the
second psychic instance by the first instance, at other times suppressed, the
unconscious enmity towards the mother gained the upper hand, and found physical
expression; then, when the patient became calmer, the insurrection was
suppressed, and the domination of the censorship restored, and this enmity had
access only to the realms of dreams, in which it realized 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 defensive phenomenon. 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 an opportunity of obtaining a profound insight into
the unconscious psychic life of a young man for whom an obsessional neurosis
made life almost unendurable, so that he could not go into the streets, because
he was tormented by the fear that he would kill everyone he met. He spent his
days in contriving evidence of an alibi in case he should be accused of any
murder that might have been committed in the city. It goes without saying that
this man was as moral as he was highly cultured. The analysis- which, by the
way, led to a cure- revealed, as the basis of this distressing obsession,
murderous impulses in respect of his rather overstrict father- impulses which,
to his astonishment, had consciously expressed themselves when he was seven
years old, but which, of course, had originated in a much earlier period of his
childhood. After the painful illness and death of his father, when the young man
was in his thirty-first year, the obsessive reproach made its appearance, which
transferred itself to strangers in the form of this phobia. Anyone capable of
wishing to push his own father from a mountain- top into an abyss cannot be
trusted to spare the lives of persons less closely related to him; he therefore
does well to lock himself into his room.
According to my already extensive experience, parents play a leading part in the
infantile psychology of all persons who subsequently become psychoneurotics.
Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent
stock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood, and are of such
importance as the material of the subsequent neurosis. But I do not believe that
psychoneurotics are to be sharply distinguished in this respect from other
persons who remain normal- that is, I do not believe that they are capable of
creating something absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far more
probable- and this is confirmed by incidental observations of normal children-
that in their amorous or hostile attitude toward their parents, psychoneurotics
do no more than reveal to us, by magnification, something that occurs less
markedly and intensively in the minds of the majority of children. Antiquity has
furnished us with legendary matter which corroborates this belief, and the
profound and universal validity of the old legends is explicable only by an
equally universal validity of the above-mentioned hypothesis of infantile
psychology.
I am referring to the legend of King Oedipus and the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.
Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and Jocasta, is exposed as a
suckling, because an oracle had informed the father that his son, who was still
unborn, would be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as a king's son at a
foreign court, until, being uncertain of his origin, he, too, consults the
oracle, and is warned 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 in a sudden quarrel strikes
him dead. He comes to Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, who is
barring the way to the city, whereupon he is elected king by the grateful
Thebans, and is rewarded with the hand of Jocasta. He reigns for many years in
peace and honour, and begets two sons and two daughters upon his unknown mother,
until at last a plague breaks out- which causes the Thebians to consult the
oracle anew. Here Sophocles' tragedy begins. The messengers bring the reply that
the plague will stop as soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the
country. But where is he?
Where shall be found,
Faint, and hard to be known, the trace of the ancient guilt?
The action of the play consists simply in the disclosure, approached step by
step and artistically delayed (and comparable to the work of a psycho-analysis)
that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, and that he is the son of the
murdered man and Jocasta. Shocked by the abominable crime which he has
unwittingly committed, Oedipus blinds himself, and departs from his native city.
The prophecy of the oracle has been fulfilled.
The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of fate; its tragic effect depends on the conflict
between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings
threatened with disaster; resignation to the divine will, and the perception of
one's own impotence is the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is supposed
to learn from the tragedy. Modern authors have therefore sought to achieve a
similar tragic effect by expressing the same conflict in stories of their own
invention. But the playgoers have looked on unmoved at the unavailing efforts of
guiltless men to avert the fulfilment of curse or oracle; the modern tragedies
of destiny have failed of their effect.
If the Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less
powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the only possible explanation
is that the effect of the Greek tragedy does not depend upon the conflict
between fate and human will, but upon the peculiar nature of the material by
which this conflict is revealed. There must be a voice within us which is
prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the Oedipus, while we
are able to condemn the situations occurring in Die Ahnfrau or other tragedies
of fate as arbitrary inventions. And there actually is a motive in the story of
King Oedipus which explains the verdict of this inner voice. His fate moves us
only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before
our birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all
destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first
impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers; our dreams convince us that
we were. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta,
is nothing more or less than a wish-fulfilment- the fulfilment of the wish of
our childhood. But we, more fortunate than he, in so far as we have not become
psychoneurotics, have since our childhood succeeded 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 of our childhood has been
fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone
in our minds since childhood. As the poet brings the guilt of Oedipus to light
by his investigation, he forces us to become aware of our own inner selves, in
which the same impulses are still extant, even though they are suppressed. The
antithesis with which the chorus departs:
...Behold, this is Oedipus,
Who unravelled the great riddle, and was first in power,
Whose fortune all the townsmen praised and envied;
See in what dread adversity he sank!
-this admonition touches us and our own pride, we who, since the years of our
childhood, have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation. Like
Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the desires that offend morality, the desires
that nature has forced upon us and after their unveiling we may well prefer to
avert our gaze from the scenes of our childhood. *
* None of the discoveries of psycho-analytical research has evoked such
embittered contradiction, such furious opposition, and also such entertaining
acrobatics of criticism, as this indication of the incestuous impulses of
childhood which survive in the unconscious. An attempt has even been made
recently, in defiance of all experience, to assign only a symbolic significance
to incest. Ferenczi has given an ingenious reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth,
based on a passage in one of Schopenhauer's letters, in Imago, i, (1912). The
Oedipus complex, which was first alluded to here in The Interpretation of
Dreams, has through further study of the subject, acquired an unexpected
significance for the understanding of human history and the evolution of
religion and morality. See Toten and Taboo. -
In the very text of Sophocles' tragedy there is an unmistakable reference to the
fact that the Oedipus legend had its source in dream-material of immemorial
antiquity, the content of which was the painful disturbance of the child's
relations to its parents caused by the first impulses of sexuality. Jocasta
comforts Oedipus- who is not yet enlightened, but is troubled by the
recollection of the oracle- by an allusion to a dream which is often dreamed,
though it cannot, in her opinion, mean anything: -
For many a man hath seen himself in dreams His mother's mate, but he who gives
no heed To suchlike matters bears the easier life. -
The dream of having sexual intercourse with one's mother was as common then as
it is today with many people, who tell it with indignation and astonishment. As
may well be imagined, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the
dream of the death of the father. The Oedipus fable is the reaction of phantasy
to these two typical dreams, and just as such a dream, when occurring to an
adult, is experienced with feelings of aversion, so the content of the fable
must include terror and self- chastisement. The form which it subsequently
assumed was the result of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration of the
material, which sought to make it serve a theological intention. * The attempt
to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail
with this material as with any other.
* Cf. the dream-material of exhibitionism, earlier in this chapter.
Another of the great poetic tragedies, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is rooted in the
same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the
two widely separated periods of civilization, and the progress, during the
course of time, of repression in the emotional life of humanity, is manifested
in the differing treatment of the same material. In Oedipus Rex the basic
wish-phantasy of the child is brought to light and realized as it is in dreams;
in Hamlet it remains repressed, and we learn of its existence- as we discover
the relevant facts in a neurosis- only through the inhibitory effects which
proceed from it. In the more modern drama, the curious fact that it is possible
to remain in complete uncertainty as to the character of the hero has proved to
be quite consistent with the over-powering effect of the tragedy. The play is
based upon Hamlet's hesitation in accomplishing the task of revenge assigned to
him; the text does not give the cause or the motive of this hesitation, nor have
the manifold attempts at interpretation succeeded in doing so. According to the
still prevailing conception, a conception for which Goethe was first
responsible. Hamlet represents the type of man whose active energy is paralyzed
by excessive intellectual activity: "Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
thought." According to another conception. the poet has endeavoured to portray a
morbid, irresolute character, on the verge of neurasthenia. The plot of the
drama, however, shows us that Hamlet is by no means intended to appear as a
character wholly incapable of action. On two separate occasions we see him
assert himself: once in a sudden outburst of rage, when he stabs the
eavesdropper behind the arras, and on the other occasion when he deliberately,
and even craftily, with the complete unscrupulousness of a prince of the
Renaissance, sends the two courtiers to the death which was intended for
himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his
father's ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is
the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able to do anything but take
vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father's
place with his mother- the man who shows him in realization the repressed
desires of his own childhood. The loathing which should have driven him to
revenge is thus replaced by self-reproach, by conscientious scruples, which tell
him that he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to
punish. I have here translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious
in the mind of the hero; if anyone wishes to call Hamlet an hysterical subject I
cannot but admit that this is the deduction to be drawn from my interpretation.
The sexual aversion which Hamlet expresses in conversation with Ophelia is
perfectly consistent with this deduction- the same sexual aversion which during
the next few years was increasingly to take possession of the poet's soul, until
it found its supreme utterance in Timon of Athens. It can, of course, be only
the poet's own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet; and in a work
on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes (1896) I find the statement that the drama was
composed immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (1601)- that is to
say, when he was still mourning his loss, and during a revival, as we may fairly
assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father. It is known, too,
that Shakespeare's son, who died in childhood, bore the name of Hamnet
(identical with Hamlet). Just as Hamlet treats of the relation of the son to his
parents, so Macbeth, which was written about the same period, is based upon the
theme of childlessness. Just as all neurotic symptoms, like dreams themselves,
are capable of hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation
before they become perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation
must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind
of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation. I have here
attempted to interpret only the deepest stratum of impulses in the mind of the
creative poet. *
* These indications in the direction of an analytical understanding of Hamlet
were subsequently developed by Dr. Ernest Jones, who defended the above
conception against others which have been put forward in the literature of the
subject (The Problem of Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex, [1911]). The relation of
the material of Hamlet to the myth of the birth of the hero has been
demonstrated by O. Rank. Further attempts at an analysis of Macbeth will be
found in my essay on "Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work,"
Collected Papers, IV., in L. Jeckel's "Shakespeare's Macbeth," in Imago, V.
(1918) and in "The Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: a
Study in Motive" (American Journal of Psycology [1910], vol. xxi).
With regard to typical dreams of the death of relatives, I must add a few words
upon their significance from the point of view of the theory of dreams in
general. These dreams show us the occurrence of a very unusual state of things;
they show us that the dream-thought created by the repressed wish completely
escapes the censorship, and is transferred to the dream without alteration.
Special conditions must obtain in order to make this possible. The following two
factors favour the production of these dreams: first, this is the last wish that
we could credit ourselves with harbouring; we believe such a wish "would never
occur to us even in a dream"; the dream-censorship is therefore unprepared for
this monstrosity, just as the laws of Solon did not foresee the necessity of
establishing a penalty for patricide. Secondly, the repressed and unsuspected
wish is, in this special case, frequently met half-way by a residue from the
day's experience, in the form of some concern for the life of the beloved
person. This anxiety cannot enter into the dream otherwise than by taking
advantage of the corresponding wish; but the wish is able to mask itself behind
the concern which has been aroused during the day. If one is inclined to think
that all this is really a very much simpler process, and to imagine that one
merely continues during the night, and in one's dream, what was begun during the
day, one removes the dreams of the death of those dear to us out of all
connection with the general explanation of dreams, and a problem that may very
well be solved remains a problem needlessly.
It is instructive to trace the relation of these dreams to anxiety-dreams. In
dreams of the death of those dear to us the repressed wish has found a way of
avoiding the censorship- and the distortion for which the censorship is
responsible. An invariable concomitant phenomenon then, is that painful emotions
are felt in the dream. Similarly, an anxiety-dream occurs only when the
censorship is entirely or partially overpowered, and on the other hand, the
overpowering of the censorship is facilitated when the actual sensation of
anxiety is already present from somatic sources. It thus becomes obvious for
what purpose the censorship performs its office and practises dream-distortion;
it does so in order to prevent the development of anxiety or other forms of
painful affect.
I have spoken in the foregoing sections of the egoism of the child's psyche, and
I now emphasize this peculiarity in order to suggest a connection, for dreams
too have retained this characteristic. All dreams are absolutely egoistical; in
every dream the beloved ego appears, even though in a disguised form. The wishes
that are realized in dreams are invariably the wishes of this ego; it is only a
deceptive appearance if interest in another person is believed to have evoked a
dream. I will now analyse a few examples which appear to contradict this
assertion. -
I.
A boy not yet four years of age relates the following dream: He saw a large
garnished dish, on which was a large joint of roast meat; and the joint was
suddenly- not carved- but eaten up. He did not see the person who ate it. *
* Even the large, over-abundant, immoderate and exaggerated things occurring in
dreams may be a childish characteristic. A child wants nothing more intensely
than to grow big, and to eat as much of everything as grown-ups do; a child is
hard to satisfy; he knows no such word as enough and insatiably demands the
repetition of whatever has pleased him or tasted good to him. He learns to
practise moderation, to be modest and resigned, only through training. As we
know, the neurotic also is inclined to immoderation and excess.
Who can he be, this strange person, of whose luxurious repast the little fellow
dreams? The experience of the day must supply the answer. For some days past the
boy, in accordance with the doctor's orders, had been living on a milk diet; but
on the evening of the dream-day he had been naughty, and, as a punishment, had
been deprived of his supper. He had already undergone one such hunger-cure, and
had borne his deprivation bravely. He knew that he would get nothing, but he did
not even allude to the fact that he was hungry. Training was beginning to
produce its effect; this is demonstrated even by the dream, which reveals the
beginnings of dream-distortion. There is no doubt that he himself is the person
whose desires 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
hungry children do in dreams (cf. my little Anna's dream about strawberries,
chapter III), to sit down to the meal himself. The person remains anonymous.
II.
One night I dream that I see on a bookseller's counter a new volume of one of
those collectors' series, which I am in the habit of buying (monographs on
artistic subjects, history, famous artistic centres, etc.). The new collection
is entitled "Famous Orators" (or Orations), and the first number bears the name
of Dr. Lecher.
On analysis it seems to me improbable that the fame of Dr. Lecher, the
long-winded speaker of the German Opposition, should occupy my thoughts while I
am dreaming. The fact is that a few days ago I undertook the psychological
treatment of some new patients, and am now forced to talk for ten to twelve
hours a day. Thus I myself am a long-winded speaker.
III.
On another occasion I dream that a university lecturer of my acquaintance says
to me: "My son, the myopic." Then follows a dialogue of brief observations and
replies. A third portion of the dream follows, in which I and my sons appear,
and so far as the latent dream-content is concerned, the father, the son, and
Professor M, are merely lay figures, representing myself and my eldest son.
Later on I shall examine this dream again, on account of another peculiarity.
IV.
The following dream gives an example of really base, egoistical feelings, which
conceal themselves behind an affectionate concern:
My friend Otto looks ill; his face is brown and his eyes protrude.
Otto is my family physician, to whom I owe a debt greater than I can ever hope
to repay, since he has watched for years over the health of my children, has
treated them successfully when they have been ill, and, moreover, has given them
presents whenever he could find any excuse for doing so. He paid us a visit on
the day of the dream, and my wife noticed that he looked tired and exhausted. At
night I dream of him, and my dream attributes to him certain of the symptoms of
Basedow's disease. If you were to disregard my rules for dream-interpretation
you would understand this dream to mean that I am concerned about the health of
my friend, and that this concern is realized in the dream. It would thus
constitute a contradiction not only of the assertion that a dream is a
wish-fulfilment, but also of the assertion that it is accessible only to
egoistical impulses. But will those who thus interpret my dream explain why I
should fear that Otto has Basedow's disease, for which diagnosis his appearance
does not afford the slightest justification? My analysis, on the other hand,
furnishes the following material, deriving from an incident which had occurred
six years earlier. We were driving- a small party of us, including Professor R-
in the dark through the forest of N, which lies at a distance of some hours from
where we were staying in the country. The driver, who was not quite sober,
overthrew us and the carriage down a bank, and it was only by good fortune that
we all escaped unhurt. But we were forced to spend the night at the nearest inn,
where the news of our mishap aroused great sympathy. A certain gentleman, who
showed unmistakable symptoms of morbus Basedowii- the brownish colour of the
skin of the face and the protruding eyes, but no goitre- placed himself entirely
at our disposal, and asked what he could do for us. Professor R answered in his
decisive way, "Nothing, except lend me a nightshirt." Whereupon our generous
friend replied: "I am sorry, but I cannot do that," and left us.
In continuing the analysis, it occurs to me that Basedow is the name not only of
a physician but also of a famous pedagogue. (Now that I am wide awake, I do not
feel quite sure of this fact.) My friend Otto is the person whom I have asked to
take charge of the physical education of my children- especially during the age
of puberty (hence the nightshirt) in case anything should happen to me. By
seeing Otto in my dream with the morbid symptoms of our above-mentioned generous
helper, I clearly mean to say: "If anything happens to me, he will do just as
little for my children as Baron L did for us, in spite of his amiable offers."
The egoistical flavour of this dream should now be obvious enough. * -
* While Dr. Ernest Jones was delivering a lecture before an American scientific
society, and was speaking of egoism in dreams, a learned lady took exception to
this unscientific generalization. She thought the lecturer was entitled to
pronounce such a verdict only on the dreams of Austrians, but had no right to
include the dreams of Americans. As for herself, she was sure that all her
dreams were strictly altruistic.
In justice to this lady with her national pride it may, however, be remarked
that the dogma: "the dream is wholly egoistic" must not be misunderstood. For
inasmuch as everything that occurs in preconscious inking may appear in dreams
(in the content as well as the latent dream-thoughts) the altruistic feelings
may possibly occur. Similarly, affectionate or amorous feelings for another
person, if they exist in the unconscious, may occur in dreams. The truth of the
assertion is therefore restricted to the fact that among the unconscious stimuli
of dreams one very often finds egoistical tendencies which seem to have been
overcome in the waking state.
But where is the wish-fulfilment to be found in this? Not in the vengeance
wreaked on my friend Otto (who seems to be fated to be badly treated in my
dreams), but in the following circumstance: Inasmuch as in my dream I
represented Otto as Baron L, I likewise identified myself with another person,
namely, with Professor R; for I have asked something of Otto, just as R asked
something of Baron L at the time of the incident I have described. And this is
the point. For Professor R has gone his way independently, outside academic
circles, just as I myself have done, and has only in his later years received
the title which he had earned before. Once more, then, I want to be a professor!
The very phrase in his later years is a wish-fulfilment, for it means that I
shall live long enough to steer my boys through the age of puberty myself.
Of other typical dreams, in which one flies with a feeling of ease or falls in
terror, I know nothing from my own experience, and whatever I have to say about
them I owe to my psychoanalyses. From the information thus obtained one must
conclude that these dreams also reproduce impressions made in childhood- that
is, that they refer to the games involving rapid motion which have such an
extraordinary attraction for children. Where is the uncle who has never made a
child fly by running with it across the room with outstretched arms, or has
never played at falling with it by rocking it on his knee and then suddenly
straightening his leg, or by lifting it above his head and suddenly pretending
to withdraw his supporting hand? At such moments children shout with joy, and
insatiably demand a repetition of the performance, especially if a little fright
and dizziness are involved in the game; in after years they repeat their
sensations in dreams. but in dreams they omit the hands that held them, so that
now they are free to float or fall. We know that all small children have a
fondness for such games as rocking and see-sawing; and if they see gymnastic
performances at the circus their recollection of such games is refreshed. * In
some boys a hysterical attack will consist simply in the reproduction of such
performances, which they accomplish with great dexterity. Not infrequently
sexual sensations are excited by these games of movement, which are quite
neutral in themselves. *(2) To express the matter in a few words: the exciting
games of childhood are repeated in dreams of flying, falling, reeling and the
like, but the voluptuous feelings are now transformed into anxiety. But, as
every mother knows, the excited play of children often enough culminates in
quarrelling and tears.
* Psycho-analytic investigation has enabled us to conclude that in the
predilection shown by children for gymnastic performances, and in the repetition
of these in hysterical attacks, there is, besides the pleasure felt in the
organ, yet another factor at work (often unconscious): namely, a memory-picture
of sexual intercourse observed in human beings or animals.
*(2) A young colleague, who is entirely free from nervousness, tells me, in this
connection: "I know from my own experience that while swinging, and at the
moment at which the downward movement was at its maximum, I used to have a
curious feeling in my genitals, which, although it was not really pleasing to
me, I must describe as a voluptuous feeling." I have often heard from patients
that the first erections with voluptuous sensations which they can remember to
have had in boyhood occurred while they were climbing. It is established with
complete certainty by psycho-analysis that the first sexual sensations often
have their origin in the scufflings and wrestlings of childhood.
I have therefore good reason for rejecting the explanation that it is the state
of our dermal sensations during sleep, the sensation of the movements of the
lungs, etc., that evokes dreams of flying and falling. I see that these very
sensations have been reproduced from the memory to which the dream refers- and
that they are, therefore, dream-content and not dream-sources.
I do not for a moment deny, however, that I am unable to furnish a full
explanation of this series of typical dreams. Precisely here my material leaves
me in the lurch. I must adhere to the general opinion that all the dermal and
kinetic sensations of these typical dreams are awakened as soon as any psychic
motive of whatever kind has need of them, and that they are neglected when there
is no such need of them. The relation to infantile experiences seems to be
confirmed by the indications which I have obtained from the analyses of
psychoneurotics. But I am unable to say what other meanings might, in the course
of the dreamer's life, have become attached to the memory of these sensations-
different, perhaps, in each individual, despite the typical appearance of these
dreams- and I should very much like to be in a position to fill this gap with
careful analyses of good examples. To those who wonder why I complain of a lack
of material, despite the frequency of these dreams of flying, falling,
tooth-drawing, etc., I must explain that I myself have never experienced any
such dreams since I have turned my attention to the subject of
dream-interpretation. The dreams of neurotics which are at my disposal, however,
are not all capable of interpretation, and very often it is impossible to
penetrate to the farthest point of their hidden intention; a certain psychic
force which participated in the building up of the neurosis, and which again
becomes active during its dissolution, opposes interpretation of the final
problem.
The Interpretation of
Dreams Chapter 5 - D. Typical Dreams (4) The Examination-Dream
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