If, in conversation with my patients, I emphasise the frequency of the Oedipus dream -the dream of having sexual intercourse with one's mother -- I elicit the answer: `I cannot remember such a dream.' Immediately afterwards, however, there arises the recollection of another, an unrecognisable, indifferent dream, which the patient has dreamed repeatedly, and which on analysis proves to be a dream with this very content -- that is, yet another Oedipus dream. I can assure the reader that disguised dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer's mother are far more frequent than undisguised dreams to the same effect.35
There are dreams of landscapes and localities in which emphasis is always laid upon the assurance: `I have been here before.' But this `déja vu' has a special significance in dreams. In this case the locality is always the genitals of the mother; of no other place can it be asserted with such certainty that one `has been here before.' I was once puzzled by the account of a dream given by a patient afflicted with obsessional neurosis. He dreamed that he called at a house where he had been twice before. But this very patient had long ago told me of an episode of his sixth year. At that time he shared his mother's bed, and had abused the occasion by inserting his finger into his mother's genitals while she was asleep.
A large number of dreams, which are frequently full of anxiety, and often have for content the traversing of narrow spaces, or staying long in the water, are based upon fantasies concerning the intra-uterine life, the sojourn in the mother's womb, and the act of birth. I here insert the dream of a young man who, in his fantasy, has even profited by the intra-uterine opportunity of spying upon an act of coition between his parents.
` He is in a deep shaft, in which there is a window, as in the Semmering tunnel. Through this he sees at first an empty landscape, and then he composes a picture in it, which is there all at once and fills up the empty space. The picture represents a field which is being deeply tilled by an implement, and the wholesome air, the associated idea of hard work, and the bluish-black clods of earth make a pleasant impression on him. He then goes on and sees a work on education lying open . . . and is surprised that so much attention is devoted in it to the sexual feelings (of children), which makes him think of me.'
Here is a pretty water-dream of a female patient, which was turned to special account in the course of treatment.At her usual holiday resort on the -- Lake, she flings herself into the dark water at a place where the pale moon is reflected in the water.
Dreams of this sort are parturition dreams; their interpretation is effected by reversing the fact recorded in the manifest dream-content; thus, instead of `flinging oneself into the water', read `coming out of the water' -- that is, `being born'.36 The place from which one is born may be recognised if one thinks of the humorous sense of the French `la lune'. The pale moon thus becomes the white `bottom', which the child soon guesses to be the place from which it came. Now what can be the meaning of the patient's wishing to be born at a holiday resort? I asked the dreamer this, and she replied without hesitation: `Hasn't the treatment made me as though I were born again?' Thus the dream becomes an invitation to continue the treatment at this summer resort -- that is, to visit her there; perhaps it also contains a very bashful allusion to the wish to become a mother herself.37
Another dream of parturition, with its interpretation, I take from a paper by E. Jones. ` She stood at the seashore watching a small boy, who seemed to be hers, wading into the water. This he did till the water covered him and she could only see his head bobbing up and down near the surface. The scene then changed to the crowded hall of an hotel. Her husband left her, and she ``entered into conversation with'' a stranger.
`The second half of the dream was discovered in the analysis to represent flight from her husband, and the entering into intimate relations with a third person, behind whom was plainly indicated Mr X.'s brother, mentioned in a former dream. The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth-fantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly represented, by way of distortion, as the entry of the child into water; among many other instances, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head in the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening which she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going into the water induced a reverie in which she saw herself taking him out of the water, carrying him into the nursery, washing and dressing him, and installing him in her household.
`The second half of the dream, therefore, represents thoughts concerning the elopement, which belonged to the first half of the underlying latent content; the first half of the dream corresponded with the second half of the latent content, the birth fantasy. Besides this inversion in the order, further inversions took place in each half of the dream. In the first half the child entered the water, and then his head bobbed; in the underlying dreamthoughts the quickening occurred first, and then the child left the water (a double inversion). In the second half her husband left her; in the dream-thoughts she left her husband.'
Another parturition dream is related by Abraham -- the dream of a young woman expecting her first confinement: From one point of the floor of the room a subterranean channel leads directly into the water (path of parturition--amniotic fluid). She lifts up a trap in the door, and there immediately appears a creature dressed in brownish für, which almost resembles a seal. This creature changes into the dreamer's younger brother, to whom her relation has always been maternal in character.
Rank has shown from a number of dreams that parturition-dreams employ the same symbols as micturition-dreams. The erotic stimulus expresses itself in these dreams as an urethral stimulus. The stratification of meaning in these dreams corresponds with a change in the significance of the symbol since childhood.
We may here turn back to the interrupted theme (see p. 37) of the part played by organic, sleep-disturbing stimuli in dream-formation. Dreams which have come into existence under these influences not only reveal quite frankly the wish-fulfilling tendency, and the character of convenience-dreams, but they very often display a quite transparent symbolism as well, since waking not infrequently follows a stimulus whose satisfaction in symbolic disguise has already been vainly attempted in the dream. This is true of emission dreams as well as those evoked by the need to urinate or defecate. The peculiar character of emission dreams permits us directly to unmask certain sexual symbols already recognised as typical, but nevertheless violently disputed, and it also convinces us that many an apparently innocent dream-situation is merely the symbolic prelude to a crudely sexual scene. This, however, finds direct representation, as a rule, only in the comparatively infrequent emission dreams, while it often enough turns into an anxietydream, which likewise leads to waking.
The symbolism of dreams due to urethral stimulus is especially obvious, and has always been divined. Hippocrates had already advanced the theory that a disturbance of the bladder was indicated if one dreamt of fountains and springs (Havelock Ellis). Scherner, who has studied the manifold symbolism of the urethral stimulus, agrees that `the powerful urethral stimulus always turns into the stimulation of the sexual sphere and its symbolic imagery . . . The dream due to urethral stimulus is often at the same time the representative of the sexual dream.'
O. Rank, whose conclusions (in his paper on Die Symbolschichtung im Wecktraum) I have here followed, argues very plausibly that a large number of `dreams due to urethral stimulus' are really caused by sexual stimuli, which at first seek to gratify themselves by way of regression to the infantile form of urethral erotism. Those cases are especially instructive in which the urethral stimulus thus produced leads to waking and the emptying of the bladder, whereupon, in spite of this relief, the dream is continued, and expresses its need in undisguisedly erotic images.38
In a quite analogous manner dreams due to intestinal stimulus disclose the pertinent symbolism, and thus confirm the relation, which is also amply verified by ethnopsychology, of gold and feces.39 `Thus, for example, a woman, at a time when she is under the care of a physician on account of an intestinal disorder, dreams of a digger for hidden treasure who is burying a treasure in the vicinity of a little wooden shed which looks like a rural privy. A second part of the dream has as its content how she wipes the posterior of her child, a little girl, who has soiled herself.'
Dreams of `rescue' are connected with parturition dreams. To rescue, especially to rescue from the water, is, when dreamed by a woman, equivalent to giving birth; this sense is, however, modified when the dreamer is a man.40
Robbers, burglars, and ghosts, of which we are afraid before going to bed, and which sometimes even disturb our sleep, originate in one and the same childish reminiscence. They are the nightly visitors who have waked the child in order to set it on the chamber, so that it may not wet the bed, or have lifted the coverlet in order to see clearly how the child is holding its hands while sleeping. I have been able to induce an exact recollection of the nocturnal visitor in the analysis of some of these anxiety-dreams. The robbers were always the father; the ghosts more probably corresponded to female persons in white nightgowns.
1 Cf. the works of Bleuler and his Zurich disciples, Maeder, Abraham, and others, and of the non-medical authors (Kleinpaul and others) to whom they refer. But the most pertinent things that have been said on the subject will be found in the work of O. Rank and H. Sachs, Die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse für die Geisteswissenschaft, 1913, chap. i; also E. Jones, Die Theorie der Symbolik Intern. Zeitschr. für Psychoanalyse, v. 1919.
2 This conception would seem to find an extraordinary confirmation in a theory advanced by Hans Sperber (Über den Einfluss sexueller momente auf Entstehung und Entwicklung der Sprache, in Imago, i, 1912). Sperber believes that primitive words denoted sexual things exclusively, and subsequently lost their sexual significance and were applied to other things and activities, which were compared with the sexual.
3 For example, a ship sailing on the sea may appear in the urinary dreams of Hungarian dreamers, despite the fact that the term of `to ship', for `to urinate', is foreign to this language (Ferenczi). In the dreams of the French and the other romance peoples `room' serves as a symbolic representation for woman', although these peoples have nothing analogous to the German Frauenzimmer. Many symbols are as old as language itself, while others are continually being coined (e.g. the aeroplane, the Zeppelin).
4 [In the USA the father is represented in dreams as `the President', and even more often as `the Governor' -- a title which is frequently applied to the parent in everyday life. -trans.]
5 `A patient living in a boarding-house dreams that he meets one of the servants, and asks her what her number is; to his surprise she answers: 14. He has in fact entered into relations with the girl in question, and has often had her in his bedroom. She feared, as may be imagined, that the landlady suspected her, and had proposed, on the day before the dream, that they should meet in one of the unoccupied rooms. In reality this room had the number 14, while in the dream the woman bore this number. A clearer proof of the identification of woman and room could hardly be imagined.' (Ernest Jones, Intern. Zeitschr. f. Psychoanalyse, ii, 1914) (cf. Artemidorus, The Symbolism of Dreams [German version by F. S. Krauss, Vienna, 1881, p. 110]: `Thus, for example, the bedroom signifies the wife, supposing one to be in the house.')
6 cf. `the cloaca theory' in Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.7 I may here repeat what I have said in another place (Die Zukünftigen Chancen der psychoanalytischen Therapie, Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, No. 1 and 2, 1910, and Ges. Schriften, Bd. vi): `Some time ago I learned that a psychologist who is unfamiliar with our work remarked to one of my friends that we were surely overestimating the secret sexual significance of dreams. He stated that his most frequent dream was that of climbing a flight of stairs, and that there was surely nothing sexual behind this. Our attention having been called to this objection, we directed our investigations to the occurrence in dreams of flights of stairs, ladders, and steps, and we soon ascertained that stairs (or anything analogous to them) represent a definite symbol of coitus. The basis for this comparison is not difficult to find; with rhythmical intervals and increasing breathlessness one reaches a height, and may then come down again in a few rapid jumps. Thus the rhythm of coitus is reproduced in climbing stairs. Let us not forget to consider the colloquial usage. This tells us that `mounting' is, without further addition, used as a substitutive designation for the sexual act. In French, the step of a staircase is called la marche; un vieux marcheur corresponds exactly to the German, ein alter Steiger.'
8 cf. in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, ii, 675, the drawing of a nineteen-year-old manic patient: a man with a snake as a neck-tie, which is turning towards a girl. Also the story Der Schamhaftige (Anthropophyteia, vi, 334): A woman entered a bathroom, and there came face to face with a man who hardly had time to put on his shirt. He was greatly embarrassed, but at once covered his throat with the front of his shirt, and said: `Please excuse me, I have no necktie.'
9 cf. Pfister's works on cryptography and picture-puzzles.10 In spite of all the differences between Scherner's conception of dream-symbolism and the one developed here, I must still insist that Scherner should be recognised as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams, and that the experience of psychoanalysis has brought his book (published in 1861) into posthumous repute.
11 From Nachträge zur Traumdeutung in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, Nos. 5 and 6,
1911.
12 cf. Kirchgraber for a similar example (Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, iii, 1912, p. 95). Stekel reported a dream in which the hat with an obliquely-standing feather in the middle symbolised the (impotent) man.
14 or chapel = vagina.
15 symbol of coitus.
16 mons Veneris.
17 crines pubis.
18 Demons in cloaks and hoods are, according to the explanation of a specialist, of a phallic character.
19 The two halves of the scrotum.
20 Alfred Robitsek in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, ii, 1911, p. 340.
21 The World of Dreams, London, 1911, p. 168.
22 [This Hebrew word is well known in German-speaking countries, even among Gentiles, and signifies an unlucky, awkward person. - trans.]
23 Über Fehlreaktionen bei der Korsakoffschen Psychose, Arch. f. Psychiatrie, Bd. lxxii. 1924.
24 The extraction of a tooth by another is usually to be interpreted as castration (cf. haircutting; Stekel). One must distinguish between dreams due to dental stimulus and dreams referring to the dentist, such as have been recorded, for example, by Coriat (Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, iii, 440).
25 [In German Backen = cheeks and Hinterbacken (lit. `hindcheeks') = buttocks. - trans.]26 According to C. G. Jung, dreams due to dental stimulus in the case of women have the significance of parturition dreams. E. Jones has given valuable confirmation of this. The common element of this interpretation with that represented above may be found in the fact that in both cases (castration--birth) there is a question of removing a part from the whole body.
27 cf. the `biographical' dream on pp. 228-9.28 This passage, dealing with dreams of motion, is repeated on account of the context. cf. p. 165.
29 [A reference to the German slang word vogeln (to copulate) from Vogel (a bird). -trans.]
31 Collected Papers, vol. iii, trans. by Alix and James Strachey, Hogarth Press, London.
32 cf. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.
33 W. Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, 1911.
34 Alf. Adler, Der Psychische Hermaphroditismus im Leben und in der Neurose, in Fortschritte der Medizin, 1910, No. 16, and later papers in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, 1910-11.
35 I have published a typical example of such a disguised Oedipus dream in No. 1 of the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse (see below); another, with a detailed analysis, was published in No. 4 of the same journal by Otto Rank. For other disguised Oedipus dreams in which the eye appears as a symbol, see Rank (Int. Zeitschr. für Ps.A., i, 1913). Papers upon eye dreams and eye symbolism by Eder, Ferenczi, and Reitler will be found in the same issue. The blinding in the Oedipus legend and elsewhere is a substitute for castration. The ancients, by the way, were not unfamiliar with the symbolic interpretation of the undisguised Oedipus dream (see O. Rank, Jahrb. ii, p. 534: `Thus, a dream of Julius Caesar's of sexual relations with his mother has been handed down to us, which the oneiroscopists interpreted as a favourable omen signifying his taking possession of the earth (Mother Earth). Equally well known is the oracle delivered to the Tarquinii, to the effect that that one of them would become the ruler of Rome who should be the first to kiss his mother (osculum matri tulerit), which Brutus conceived as referring to Mother Earth (terram osculo contigit, scilicet quod ea communis mater omnium mortalium esset, Livy, I, lxi).' Cf. here the dream of Hippias in Herodotus, VI, 107: `But Hippias led the barbarians to Marathon after he had had the following dream-vision the previous night. It had seemed to Hippias that he was sleeping with his own mother. He concluded from this dream that he would return home to Athens, and would regain power, and that he would die in his fatherland in his old age.' These myths and interpretations point to a correct psychological insight. I have found that those persons who consider themselves preferred or favoured by their mothers manifest in life that confidence in themselves, and that unshakable optimism, which often seem heroic, and not infrequently compel actual success.
Typical example of a disguised Oedipus dream:A man dreams: He has a secret affair with a woman whom another man wishes to marry. He is concerned lest the other should discover this relation and abandon the marriage; he therefore behaves very affectionately to the man; he nestles up to him and kisses him.
- The facts of the dreamer's life touch the dream-content only at one point. He has a secret affair with a married woman, and an equivocal expression of her husband, with whom he is on friendly terms, aroused in him the suspicion that he might have noticed something of this relationship. There is, however, in reality, yet another factor, the mention of which was avoided in the dream, and which alone gives the key to it. The life of the husband is threatened by an organic malady. His wife is prepared for the possibility of his sudden death, and our dreamer consciously harbours the intention of marrying the young widow after her husband's decease. It is through this objective situation that the dreamer finds himself transferred into the constellation of the Oedipus dream; his wish is to be enabled to kill the man, so that he may win the woman for his wife; his dream gives expression to the wish in a hypocritical distortion. Instead of representing her as already married to the other man, it represents the other man only as wishing to marry her, which indeed corresponds with his own secret intention, and the hostile wishes directed against the man are concealed under demonstrations of affection, which are reminiscences of his childish relations to his father.
37 It was not for a long time that I learned to appreciate the significance of the fantasies and unconscious thoughts relating to life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious dread, felt by so many people, of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death, which represents only the projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience attended by anxiety, and is thus, the source and model of the affect of anxiety.
38 `The same symbolic representations which in the infantile sense constitute the basis of the vesical dream appear in the ``recent'' sense in purely sexual significance: water = urine = semen = amniotic fluid; ship = ``to pump ship'' (urinate = seed-capsule; getting wet = enuresis = coitus = pregnancy; swimming = full bladder = dwelling-place of the unborn; rain = urination = symbol of fertilization; travelling (journeying-alighting) = getting out of bed = having sexual intercourse (honeymoon journey); urinating = sexual ejaculation' (Rankin, I, c.).
39 Freud, Charakter und Analerotik; Rank, Die Symbolschictung, etc.; Dattner, Intern. Zeitschr. f. Psych. i, 1913; Reik, Intern. Zeitschr., iii, 1915.40 For such a dream see Pfister, Ein Fall von psychoanalytischer Seelensorge und Seelenheilung, in Evangelische Freiheit, 1909. Concerning the symbol of `rescuing', see my paper, Die Zukünftigen Chancender psychoanalytischen Therapie, in Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, 1910. Also Beitrage zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens, i. Über einen besonderen Typus der objektwahl beim Manne, in Jahrbuch für Ps.A., Bd. ii, 1910 (Ges. Schriften, Bd. v). Also Rank, Beilege zur Rettungsphantasie in the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, i, 1910, p. 331; Reik, Zur Rettungssymbolic; ibid., p. 299.
F. EXAMPLES -- ARITHMETIC AND SPEECH IN DREAMSBefore I proceed to assign to its proper place the fourth of the factors which control the formation of dreams, I shall cite a few examples from my collection of dreams, partly for the purpose of illustrating the cooperation of the three factors with which we are already acquainted, and partly for the purpose of adducing evidence for certain unsupported assertions which have been made, or of bringing out what necessarily follows from them. It has, of course, been difficult in the foregoing account of the dream-work to demonstrate my conclusions by means of examples. Examples in support of isolated statements are convincing only when considered in the context of an interpretation of a dream as a whole; when they are wrested from their context, they lose their value; on the other hand, a dream-interpretation, even when it is by no means profound, soon becomes so extensive that it obscures the thread of the discussion which it is intended to illustrate. This technical consideration must be my excuse if I now proceed to mix together all sorts of things which have nothing in common except their reference to the text of the foregoing chapter.
We shall first consider a few examples of very peculiar or unusual methods of representation in dreams. A lady dreamed as follows: A servant-girl is standing on a ladder as though to clean the windows, and has with her a chimpanzee and a gorilla cat (later corrected, angora cat). She throws the animals on to the dreamer; the chimpanzee nestles up to her, and this is very disgusting. This dream has accomplished its purpose by a very simple means, namely, by taking a mere figure of speech literally, and representing it in accordance with the literal meaning of its words. `Monkey', like the names of animals in general, is an opprobrious epithet, and the situation of the dream means merely `to hurl invectives'. This same collection will soon furnish us with further examples of the employment of this simple artifice in the dream-work.
Another dream proceeds in a very similar manner: A woman with a child which has a conspicuously deformed cranium; the dreamer has heard that the child acquired this deformity owing to its position in its mother's womb. The doctor says that the cranium might be given a better shape by means of compression, but that this would injure the brain. She thinks that because it is a boy it won't suffer so much from deformity. This dream contains a plastic representation of the abstract concept `childish impressions', with which the dreamer has become familiar in the course of the treatment.
In the following example the dream-work follows rather a different course. The dream contains a recollection of an excursion to the Hilmteich, near Graz: There is a terrible storm outside; a miserable hotel -- the water is dripping from the walls, and the beds are damp. (The latter part of the content was less directly expressed than I give it.) The dream signifies `superfluous'. The abstract idea occurring in the dream-thoughts is first made equivocal by a certain abuse of language; it has perhaps been replaced by `overflowing', or by `fluid' and `super-fluid (-fluous)', and has then been brought to representation by an accumulation of like impressions. Water within, water without, water in the beds in the form of dampness -- everything fluid and `super' fluid. That for the purposes of dreamrepresentation the spelling is much less considered than the sound of words ought not to surprise us when we remember that rhyme exercises a similar privilege.
The fact that language has at its disposal a great number of words which were originally used in a pictorial and concrete sense, but are at present used in a colourless and abstract fashion, has, in certain other cases, made it very easy for the dream to represent its thoughts. The dream has only to restore to these words their full significance, or to follow their change of meaning a little way back. For example, a man dreams that his friend, who is struggling to get out of a very tight place, calls upon him for help. The analysis shows that the tight place is a hole, and that the dreamer symbolically uses these very words to his friend: `Be careful, or you'll get your