Part 3 (1/2)

In this manner I could follow the intricate trains of thought still farther, and could fully elucidate that part of the dream which is lacking in the a.n.a.lysis; but I must refrain, because the personal sacrifice which this would involve is too great. I shall take up only one of the threads, which will serve to lead us directly to one of the dream-thoughts that lie at the bottom of the medley. The stranger with the long face and pointed beard, who wants to prevent me from putting on the overcoat, has the features of a tradesman of Spalato, of whom my wife bought a great deal of Turkish cloth. His name was Popovic, a suspicious name, which even gave the humorist Stettenheim a pretext for a suggestive remark: 'He told me his name, and blus.h.i.+ngly shook my hand.'11 For the rest, I find the same misuse of names as above in the case of Pelagie, Knodl, Brucke, Fleischl. No one will deny that such playing with names is a childish trick; if I indulge in it the practice amounts to an act of retribution, for my own name has often enough been the subject of such feeble attempts at wit. Goethe once remarked how sensitive a man is in respect to his name, which he feels that he fills even as he fills his skin; Herder having written the following lines on his name: Der du von Gottern abstammst, von Gothen oder vom Kote So seid ihr Gotterbilder auch zu Staub.

Thou who art born of the G.o.ds, of the Goths, or of the mud.

Thus are thy G.o.d-like images even dust.

I realise that this digression on the misuse of names was intended merely to justify this complaint. But here let us stop . . . The purchase at Spalato reminds me of another purchase at Cattaro, where I was too cautious, and missed the opportunity of making an excellent bargain. (Missing an opportunity at the breast of the wet-nurse; see above.) One of the dream-thoughts occasioned by the sensation of hunger really amounts to this: We should let nothing escape; we should take what we can get, even if we do a little wrong; we should never let an opportunity go by; life is so short, and death inevitable. Because this is meant even s.e.xually, and because desire is unwilling to check itself before the thought of doing wrong, this philosophy of carpe diem has reason to fear the censors.h.i.+p, and must conceal itself behind a dream. And so all sorts of counter-thoughts find expression, with recollections of the time when spiritual nourishment alone was sufficient for the dreamer, with hindrances of every kind and even threats of disgusting s.e.xual punishments.

II. A second dream requires a longer preliminary statement: I had driven to the Western Station in order to start on a holiday trip to the Aussee, but I went on to the platform in time for the Ischl train, which leaves earlier. There I saw Count Thun, who was again going to see the Emperor at Ischl. In spite of the rain he arrived in an open carriage, came straight through the entrance-gate for the local trains, and with a curt gesture and not a word of explanation he waved back the gatekeeper, who did not know him and wanted to take his ticket. After he had left in the Ischl train, I was asked to leave the platform and return to the waiting-room; but after some difficulty I obtained permission to remain. I pa.s.sed the time noting how many people bribed the officials to secure a compartment; I fully intended to make a complaint -- that is, to demand the same privilege. Meanwhile I sang something to myself, which I afterwards recognised as the aria from The Marriage of Figaro: If my lord Count would tread a measure, tread a measure, Let him but say his pleasure, And I will play the tune.

(Possibly another person would not have recognised the tune.) The whole evening I was in a high-spirited, pugnacious mood: I chaffed the waiter and the cab-driver, I hope without hurting their feelings; and now all kinds of bold and revolutionary thought came into my mind, such as would fit themselves to the words of Figaro, and to memories of Beaumarchais' comedy, of which I had seen a performance at the Comedie Francaise. The speech about the great men who have taken the trouble to be born; the seigneurial right which Count Almaviva wishes to exercise with regard to Susanne; the jokes which our malicious Opposition journalists make on the name of Count Thun (German, thun = do); calling him Graf Nichtsthun, Count Do-Nothing. I really do not envy him; he now has a difficult audience with the Emperor before him, and it is I who am the real Count Do-Nothing, for I am going off for a holiday. I make all sorts of amusing plans for the vacation. Now a gentleman arrives whom I know as a Government representative at the medical examinations, and who has won the flattering nickname of 'the Governmental bedfellow' (literally, 'by-sleeper') by his activities in this capacity. By insisting on his official status he secured half a first-cla.s.s compartment, and I heard one guard say to another: 'Where are we going to put the gentleman with the firstcla.s.s half-compartment?' A pretty sort of favouritism! I am paying for a whole first-cla.s.s compartment. I did actually get a whole compartment to myself, but not in a through carriage, so there was no lavatory at my disposal during the night. My complaints to the guard were fruitless; I revenged myself by suggesting that at least a hole be made in the floor of this compartment, to serve the possible needs of pa.s.sengers. At a quarter to three in the morning I wake, with an urgent desire to urinate, from the following dream: A crowd, a students' meeting . . . A certain Count (Thun or Taaffe) is making a speech. Being asked to say something about the Germans, he declares, with a contemptuous gesture, that their favourite flower is coltsfoot, and he then puts into his b.u.t.tonhole something like a torn leaf, really the crumpled skeleton of a leaf. I jump up, and I jump up,12 but I am surprised at my implied att.i.tude. Then, more indistinctly: It seems as though this were the vestibule (Aula); the exits are thronged, and one must escape. I make my way through a suite of handsomely appointed rooms, evidently ministerial apartments; with furniture of a colour between brown and violet, and at last I come to a corridor in which a housekeeper, a fat, elderly woman, is seated. I try to avoid speaking to her, but she apparently thinks I have a right to pa.s.s this way, because she asks whether she shall accompany me with the lamp. I indicate with a gesture, or tell her, that she is to remain standing on the stairs, and it seems to me that I am very clever, for after all I am evading detection. Now I am downstairs, and I find a narrow, steeply rising path, which I follow.

Again indistinctly: It is as though my second task were to get away from the city, just as my first was to get out of the building. I am riding in a one-horse cab, and I tell the driver to take me to a railway station. 'I can't drive with you on the railway line itself,' I say, when he reproaches me as though I had tired him out. Here it seems as though I had already made a journey in his cab which is usually made by rail. The stations are crowded; I am wondering whether to go to Krems or to Znaim, but I reflect that the Court will be there, and I decide in favour of Graz or some such place. Now I am seated in the railway carriage, which is rather like a tram, and I have in my b.u.t.tonhole a peculiar long braided thing, on which are violet-brown violets of stiff material, which makes a great impression on people. Here the scene breaks off.

I am once more in front of the railway station, but I am in the company of an elderly gentleman. I think out a scheme for remaining unrecognised, but I see this plan already being carried out. Thinking and experiencing are here, as it were, the same thing. He pretends to be blind, at least in one eye, and I hold before him a male gla.s.s urinal (which we have to buy in the city, or have bought). I am thus a sick-nurse, and have to give him the urinal because he is blind. If the conductor sees us in this position, he must pa.s.s us by without drawing attention to us. At the same time the position of the elderly man, and his urinating organ, is plastically perceived. Then I wake with a desire to urinate.

The whole dream seems a sort of fantasy, which takes the dreamer back to the year of revolution, 1848, the memory of which had been revived by the jubilee of 1898, as well as by a little excursion to Wachau, on which I visited Emmersdorf, the refuge of the student leader Fischof,13 to whom several features of the manifest dream-content might refer. The a.s.sociation of ideas then leads me to England, to the house of my brother, who used in jest to twit his wife with the t.i.tle of Tennyson's poem Fifty Years Ago, whereupon the children were used to correct him: Fifteen Years Ago. This fantasy, however, which attaches itself to the thoughts evoked by the sight of Count Thun, is, like the facade of an Italian church, without organic connection with the structure behind it, but unlike such a facade it is full of gaps, and confused, and in many places portions of the interior break through. The first situation of the dream is made up of a number of scenes, into which I am able to dissect it. The arrogant att.i.tude of the Count in the dream is copied from a scene at my school which occurred in my fifteenth year. We had hatched a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant teacher; the leading spirit in this conspiracy was a schoolmate who since that time seems to have taken Henry VIII of England as his model. It fell to me to carry out the coup d'etat, and a discussion of the importance of the Danube (German, Donau) to Austria (Wachau!) was the occasion of an open revolt. One of our fellow-conspirators was our only aristocratic schoolmate -- he was called 'the giraffe' on account of his conspicuous height -- and while he was being reprimanded by the tyrant of the school, the professor of the German language, he stood just as the Count stood in the dream. The explanation of the favourite flower, and the putting into a b.u.t.tonhole of something that must have been a flower (which recalls the orchids which I had given that day to a friend, and also a rose of Jericho) prominently recalls the incident in Shakespeare's historical play which opens the civil wars of the Red and the White Roses; the mention of Henry VIII has paved the way to this reminiscence. Now it is not very far from roses to red and white carnations. (Meanwhile two little rhymes, the one German, the other Spanish, insinuate themselves into the a.n.a.lysis: Rosen, Tulpen, Nelken, alle Blumen welken, and Isabelita, no llores, que se marchitan las flores. The Spanish line occurs in Figaro.) Here in Vienna white carnations have become the badge of the anti-Semites, red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this is the recollection of an anti-Semitic challenge during a railway journey in beautiful Saxony (Anglo-Saxon). The third scene contributing to the formation of the first situation in the dream dates from my early student days. There was a debate in a German students' club about the relation of philosophy to the general sciences. Being a green youth, full of materialistic doctrines, I thrust myself forward in order to defend an extremely one-sided position. Thereupon a sagacious older fellow-student, who has since then shown his capacity for leading men and organising the ma.s.ses, and who, moreover, bears a name belonging to the animal kingdom, rose and gave us a thorough dressing-down; he too, he said, had herded swine in his youth, and had then returned repentant to his father's house. I jumped up (as in the dream), became piggishly rude, and retorted that since I knew he had herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse. (In the dream I am surprised at my German Nationalistic feelings.) There was a great commotion, and an almost general demand that I should retract my words, but I stood my ground. The insulted student was too sensible to take the advice which was offered him, that he should send me a challenge, and let the matter drop.

The remaining elements of this scene of the dream are of more remote origin. What does it mean that the Count should make a scornful reference to coltsfoot? Here I must question my train of a.s.sociations. Coltsfoot (German: Huflattich), Lattice (lettuce), Salathund (the dog that grudges others what he cannot eat himself). Here plenty of opprobrious epithets may be discerned: Gir-affe (German: Affe = monkey, ape), pig, sow, dog; I might even arrive, by way of the name, at donkey, and thereby pour contempt upon an academic professor. Furthermore, I translate coltsfoot (Huflattich) -- I do not know whether I do so correctly --by p.i.s.seen-lit. I get this idea from Zola's Germinal, in which some children are told to bring some dandelion salad with them. The dog --chien -- has a name sounding not unlike the verb for the major function (chien, as p.i.s.ser stands for the minor one). Now we shall soon have the indecent in all its three physical categories, for in the same Germinal, which deals with the future revolution, there is a description of a very peculiar contest, which relates to the production of the gaseous excretions known as flatus.14 And now I cannot but observe how the way to this flatus has been prepared a long while since, beginning with the flowers, and proceeding to the Spanish rhyme of Isabelita, to Ferdinand and Isabella, and, by way of Henry VIII, to English history at the time of the Armada, after the victorious termination of which the English struck a medal with the inscription: Flavit et dissipati sunt, for the storm had scattered the Spanish fleet.15 I had thought of using this phrase, half jestingly, as the t.i.tle of a chapter on 'Therapy', if I should ever succeed in giving a detailed account of my conception and treatment of hysteria.

I cannot give so detailed an interpretation of the second scene of the dream, out of sheer regard for the censors.h.i.+p. For at this point I put myself in the place of a certain eminent gentleman of the revolutionary period, who had an adventure with an eagle (German: Adler) and who is said to have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, incontinentia alvi, etc.; and here I believe that I should not be justified in pa.s.sing the censors.h.i.+p, even though it was an aulic councillor (aula, consiliarius aulicus) who told me the greater part of this history. The suite of rooms in the dream is suggested by his Excellency's private saloon carriage, into which I was able to glance; but it means, as it so often does in dreams, a woman (Frauenzimmer: German Zimmer -- room, is appended to Frauen -woman, in order to imply a slight contempt).16 The personality of the housekeeper is an ungrateful allusion to a witty old lady, which ill repays her for the good times and the many good stories which I have enjoyed in her house. The incident of the lamp goes back to Grillparzer, who notes a charming experience of a similar nature, of which he afterwards made use in Hero and Leander (the waves of the sea and of love -- the Armada and the storm).

I must forego a detailed a.n.a.lysis of the two remaining portions of the dream; I shall single out only those elements which lead me back to the two scenes of my childhood for the sake of which alone I have selected the dream. The reader will rightly a.s.sume that it is s.e.xual material which necessitates the suppression; but he may not be content with this explanation. There are many things of which one makes no secret to oneself, but which must be treated as secrets in addressing others, and here we are concerned not with the reasons which induce me to conceal the solution, but with the motive of the inner censors.h.i.+p which conceals the real content of the dream even from myself. Concerning this, I will confess that the a.n.a.lysis reveals these three portions of the dream as impertinent boasting, the exuberance of an absurd megalomania, long ago suppressed in my waking life, which, however, dares to show itself, with individual ramifications, even in the manifest dream-content (it seems to me that I am a cunning fellow), making the high-spirited mood of the evening before the dream perfectly intelligible. Boasting of every kind, indeed; thus, the mention of Graz points to the phrase: 'What price Graz?' which one is wont to use when one feels unusually wealthy. Readers who recall Master Rabelais's inimitable description of the life and deeds of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel will be able to enrol even the suggested content of the first portion of the dream among the boasts to which I have alluded. But the following belongs to the two scenes of childhood of which I have spoken: I had bought a new trunk for this journey, the colour of which, a brownish violet, appears in the dream several times (violet-brown violets of a stiff cloth, on an object which is known as a 'girl-catcher' -- the furniture in the ministerial chambers). Children, we know, believe that one attracts people's attention with anything new. Now I have been told of the following incident of my childhood; my recollection of the occurrence itself has been replaced by my recollection of the story. I am told that at the age of two I still used occasionally to wet my bed, and that when I was reproved for doing so I consoled my father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the nearest large town). Hence, the interpolation in the dream, that we had bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it; one must keep one's promises. (One should note, moreover, the a.s.sociation of the male urinal and the woman's trunk, box.) All the megalomania of the child is contained in this promise. The significance of dreams of urinary difficulties in the case of children has already been considered in the interpretation of an earlier dream (cf. the dream on p.73 ff.). The psychoa.n.a.lysis of neurotics has taught us to recognise the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.

Then, when I was seven or eight years of age another domestic incident occurred which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed, I had disregarded the dictates of discretion, and had satisfied my needs in my parents' bedroom, and in their presence. Reprimanding me for this delinquency, my father remarked: 'That boy will never amount to anything.' This must have been a terrible affront to my ambition, for allusions to this scene recur again and again in my dreams, and are constantly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: 'You see, I have amounted to something after all.' This childish scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which the roles are interchanged, of course for the purpose of revenge. The elderly man, obviously my father, for the blindness in one eye signifies his one-sided glaucoma,17 is now urinating before me as I once urinated before him. By means of the glaucoma I remind my father of cocaine, which stood him in good stead during his operation, as though I had thereby fulfilled my promise. Besides, I make sport of him; since he is blind, I must hold the gla.s.s in front of him, and I delight in allusions to my knowledge of the theory of hysteria, of which I am proud.18 If the two childish scenes of urination are, according to my theory, closely a.s.sociated with the desire for greatness, their resuscitation on the journey to the Aussee was further favoured by the accidental circ.u.mstance that my compartment had no lavatory, and that I must be prepared to postpone relief during the journey, as actually happened in the morning when I woke with the sensation of a bodily need. I suppose one might be inclined to credit this sensation with being the actual stimulus of the dream; I should, however, prefer a different explanation, namely, that the dream-thoughts first gave rise to the desire to urinate. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in sleep by any physical need, least of all at the time when I woke on this occasion -- a quarter to four in the morning. I would forestall a further objection by remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to urinate after waking early on other journeys made under more comfortable circ.u.mstances. However, I can leave this point undecided without weakening my argument.

Further, since experience in dream-a.n.a.lysis has drawn my attention to the fact that even from dreams the interpretation of which seems at first sight complete, because the dream-sources and the wish-stimuli are easily demonstrable, important trains of thought proceed which reach back into the earliest years of childhood, I had to ask myself whether this characteristic does not even const.i.tute an essential condition of dreaming. If it were permissible to generalise this notion, I should say that every dream is connected through its manifest content with recent experiences, while through its latent content it is connected with the most remote experiences; and I can actually show in the a.n.a.lysis of hysteria that these remote experiences have in a very real sense remained recent right up to the present. But I still find it very difficult to prove this conjecture; I shall have to return to the probable role in dream-formation of the earliest experiences of our childhood in another connection (Chapter Seven).

Of the three peculiarities of the dream-memory considered above, one -- the preference for the unimportant in the dream-content -- has been satisfactorily explained by tracing it back to dream-distortion. We have succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng the existence of the other two peculiarities -- the preferential selection of recent and also of infantile material -- but we have found it impossible to derive them from the motives of the dream. Let us keep in mind these two characteristics, which we still have to explain or evaluate; a place will have to be found for them elsewhere, either in the discussion of the psychology of the sleeping state or in the consideration of the structure of the psychic apparatus -- which we shall undertake later after we have seen that by means of dream-interpretation we are able to glance as through an inspection-hole into the interior of this apparatus.

But here and now I will emphasise another result of the last few dream-a.n.a.lyses. The dream often appears to have several meanings; not only may several wish-fulfilments be combined in it, as our examples show, but one meaning or one wish-fulfilment may conceal another, until in the lowest stratum one comes upon the fulfilment of a wish from the earliest period of childhood; and here again it may be questioned whether the word 'often' at the beginning of this sentence may not more correctly be replaced by 'constantly'.19 1 I long ago learned that the fulfilment of such wishes only called for a little courage, and I then became a zealous pilgrim to Rome.

2 The writer in whose works I found this pa.s.sage was probably Jean Paul Richter.

3 In the first edition of this book I gave here the name 'Hasdrubal', an amazing error, which I explained in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

4 The Jewish descent of the Marshal is somewhat doubtful.

5 [In the original this paragraph contains many plays on the word Hetz (hurry chase, scurry, game, etc.) -- TRANS.]

6 [This word is here used in the psychoa.n.a.lytical sense. -- TRANS.]

7 [a street in Vienna --TRANS.]

8 [Fensterln is the custom, now falling into disuse, found in rural districts of the German Schwarzwald, of lovers who woo their sweethearts at their bedroom windows, to which they ascend by means of a ladder, enjoying such intimacy that the relation practically amounts to a trial marriage. The reputation of the young woman never suffers on account of Fensterln unless she becomes intimate with too many suitors. --TRANS.]

9 Both the affects pertaining to these childish scenes -- astonishment and resignation to the inevitable -- appeared in a dream of slightly earlier date, which first reminded me of this incident of my childhood.

10 I do not bring in the plagiostomi arbitrarily; they recall a painful incident of disgrace before the same teacher.

11 Popo = backside, in German nursery language.

12 This repet.i.tion has crept into the text of the dream, apparently through absentmindedness, and I have left it because a.n.a.lysis shows that it has a meaning.

13 This is an error and not a slip, for I learned later that the Emmersdorf in Wachau is not identical with the refuge of the revolutionist Fischof, a place of the same name.

14 Not in Germinal, but in La Terre -- a mistake of which I became aware only in the a.n.a.lysis. -- Here I would call attention to the ident.i.ty of letters in Huflattich and Flatus.

15 An unsolicited biographer, Dr F. Wittels, reproaches me for having omitted the name of Jehovah from the above motto. The English medal contains the name of the Deity, in Hebrew letters, on the background of a cloud, and placed in such a manner that one may equally well regard it as part of the picture or as part of the inscription.

16 [translator's note]

17 Another interpretation: He is one-eyed like Odin, the father of the G.o.ds -- Odin's consolation. The consolation in the childish scene: I will buy him a new bed.