The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud
IV. The following is another absurd dream about a dead father:
_I receive a notice from the common council of my native city concerning the costs of a confinement in the hospital in the year 1851, which was necessitated by an attack from which I suffered. I make sport of the matter, for, in the first place, I was not yet alive in the year 1851, and, in the second place, my father, to whom the notice might refer, is already dead. I go to him in the adjoining room, where he is lying on a bed, and tell him about it. To my astonishment he recalls that in that year—1851—he was once drunk and had to be locked up or confined. It was when he was working for the house of T——. “Then you drank, too?” I ask. “You married soon after?” I figure that I was born in 1856, which appears to me as though immediately following._
In view of the preceding discussion, we shall translate the insistence with which this dream exhibits its absurdities as the sure sign of a particularly embittered and passionate controversy in the dream thoughts. With all the more astonishment, however, we note that in this dream the controversy is waged openly, and the father designated as the person against whom the satire is directed. This openness seems to contradict our assumption of a censor as operative in the dream activity. We may say in explanation, however, that here the father is only an interposed person, while the conflict is carried on with another one, who makes his appearance in the dream by means of a single allusion. While the dream usually treats of revolt against other persons, behind which the father is concealed, the reverse is true here; the father serves as the man of straw to represent others, and hence the dream dares thus openly to concern itself with a person who is usually hallowed, because there is present the certain knowledge that he is not in reality intended. We learn of this condition of affairs by considering the occasion of the dream.
Now, it occurred after I had heard that an older colleague, whose judgment is considered infallible, had expressed disapproval and astonishment at the fact that one of my patients was then continuing psychoanalytical work with me for the fifth year. The introductory sentences of the dream point with transparent disguise to the fact that this colleague had for a time taken over the duties which my father could no longer perform (_expenses, fees at the hospital_); and when our friendly relations came to be broken I was thrown into the same conflict of feelings which arises in the case of misunderstanding between father and son in view of the part played by the father and his earlier functions. The dream thoughts now bitterly resent the reproach that I _am not making better progress_, which extends itself from the treatment of this patient to other things. Does this colleague know anyone who can get on faster? Does he not know that conditions of this sort are usually incurable and last for life? What are four or five years in comparison to a whole life, especially when life has been made so much easier for the patient during the treatment?
The impression of absurdity in this dream is brought about largely by the fact that sentences from different divisions of the dream thoughts are strung together without any reconciling transition. Thus the sentence, _I go to him in the adjoining room, &c._, leaves the subject dealt with in the preceding sentences, and faithfully reproduces the circumstances under which I told my father about my marriage engagement. Thus the dream is trying to remind me of the noble disinterestedness which the old man showed at that time, and to put it in contrast with the conduct of another, a new person. I now perceive that the dream is allowed to make sport of my father for the reason that in the dream thought he is held up as an example to another man, in full recognition of his merit. It is in the nature of every censorship that it permits the telling of untruth about forbidden things rather than truth. The next sentence, in which my father remembers having _once been drunk_, and having been _locked up for it_, also contains nothing which is actually true of my father.
The person whom he covers is here a no less important one than the great Meynert, in whose footsteps I followed with such great veneration, and whose attitude towards me was changed into undisguised hostility after a short period of indulgence. The dream recalls to me his own statement that in his youth he was addicted to the _chloroform_ habit, and that for this he had to enter a sanatorium. It recalls also a second experience with him shortly before his death. I carried on an embittered literary controversy with him concerning hysteria in the male, the existence of which he denied, and when I visited him in his last illness and asked him how he felt, he dwelt upon the details of his condition and concluded with the words: “You know, I have always been one of the prettiest cases of masculine hysteria.” Thus, to my satisfaction, and _to my astonishment_, he admitted what he had so long and so stubbornly opposed. But the fact that in this scene I can use my father to cover Meynert is based not upon the analogy which has been found to exist between the two persons, but upon the slight, but quite adequate, representation of a conditional sentence occurring in the dream thoughts, which in full would read as follows: “Of course if I were of the second generation, the son of a professor or of a court-councillor, I should have _progressed more rapidly_.” In the dream I now make a court-councillor and a professor of my father. The most obvious and most annoying absurdity of the dream lies in the treatment of the date 1851, which seems to me to be hardly distinguishable from 1856, as though _a difference of five years would signify nothing whatever_.
_One of my acquaintances, Mr. M., has been attacked in an essay by no less a person than Goethe, with justifiable vehemence, we all think. Mr. M. has, of course, been crushed by this attack. He complains of it bitterly at a dinner party; but he says that his veneration for Goethe has not suffered from this personal experience. I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations, which seem improbable to me. Goethe died in 1832; since his attack upon M. must of course have taken place earlier, Mr. M. was at the time a very young man. It seems plausible to me that he was 18 years old. But I do not know exactly what year it is at present, and so the whole calculation lapses into obscurity. The attack, moreover, is contained in Goethe’s well-known essay entitled “Nature.”_
We shall soon find means to justify the nonsense of this dream. Mr. M., with whom I became acquainted _at a dinner-party_, had recently requested me to examine his brother, who showed signs of _paralytic insanity_. The conjecture was right; the painful thing about this visit was that the patient exposed his brother by alluding to his youthful pranks when there was no occasion in the conversation for his doing so. I had asked the patient to tell me the year of his birth, and had got him to make several small calculations in order to bring out the weakness of his memory—all of which tests he passed fairly well. I see now that I am acting like a paralytic in the dream (_I do not know exactly what year it is at present_). Other subject-matter in the dream is drawn from another recent source. The editor of a medical journal, a friend of mine, had accepted for his paper a very unfavourable, a “_crushing_,” criticism of the last book of my friend Fl. of Berlin, the author of which was a very _youthful_ reviewer, who was not very competent to pass judgment. I thought I had a right to interfere, and called the editor to account; he keenly regretted the acceptance of the criticism, but would not promise redress.
Thereupon I broke off relations with the journal, and in my letter of resignation expressed the hope that _our personal relations would not suffer from the incident_. The third source of this dream is an account given by a female patient—it was fresh in my memory at the time—of the mental disease of her brother who had fallen into a frenzy, crying “Nature, Nature.” The physicians in attendance thought that the cry was derived from a reading of Goethe’s beautiful _essay_, and that it pointed to overwork in the patient in the study of natural philosophy. I thought rather of the sexual sense in which even less cultured people with us use the word “Nature,” and the fact that the unfortunate man later mutilated his genitals seemed to show that I was not far wrong. Eighteen years was the age of this patient at the time when the attack of frenzy occurred.
If I add further that the book of my friend so severely criticised (“It is a question whether the author is crazy or we are” had been the opinion of another critic) treats of the _temporal relations of life_ and refers the duration of Goethe’s life to the multiple of a number significant from the point of view of biology, it will readily be admitted that I am putting myself in the place of my friend in the dream. (_I try to find some explanation of the chronological relations._) But I behave like a paralytic, and the dream revels in absurdity. This means, then, as the dream thoughts say ironically. “Of course he is the fool, the lunatic, and you are the man of genius who knows better. Perhaps, however, it is the other way around?” Now, this other way around is explicitly represented in the dream, in that Goethe has attacked the young man, which is absurd, while it is perfectly possible even to-day for a young fellow to attack the immortal Goethe, and in that I figure from the year of Goethe’s death, while I caused the paralytic to calculate from the year of his birth.
But I have already promised to show that every dream is the result of egotistical motives. Accordingly, I must account for the fact that in this dream I make my friend’s cause my own and put myself in his place. My rational conviction in waking thought is not adequate to do this. Now, the story of the eighteen-year-old patient and of the various interpretations of his cry, “Nature,” alludes to my having brought myself into opposition to most physicians by claiming sexual etiology for the psychoneuroses. I may say to myself: “The same kind of criticism your friend met with you will meet with too, and have already met with to some extent,” and now I may replace the “he” in the dream thoughts by “we.” “Yes, you are right; we two are the fools.” That _mea res agitur_, is clearly shown by the mention of the short, incomparably beautiful essay of Goethe, for it was a public reading of this essay which induced me to study the natural science while I was still undecided in the graduating class of the Gymnasium. VI. I am also bound to show of another dream in which my ego does not occur that it is egotistic. On page 228 I mentioned a short dream in which Professor M. says: “My son, the myopic ...”; and I stated that this was only a preliminary dream to another one, in which I play a part. Here is the main dream, omitted above, which challenges us to explain its absurd and unintelligible word-formation.
_On account of some happenings or other in the city of Rome it is necessary for the children to flee, and this they do. The scene is then laid before a gate, a two-winged gate in antique style (the Porta Romana in Siena, as I know while I am still dreaming). I am sitting on the edge of a well, and am very sad; I almost weep. A feminine person—nurse, nun—brings out the two boys and hands them over to their father, who is not myself. The elder of the two is distinctly my eldest son, and I do not see the face of the other; the woman who brings the boy asks him for a parting kiss. She is distinguished by a red nose. The boy denies her the kiss, but says to her, extending his hand to her in parting, “Auf Geseres,” and to both of us (or to one of us) “Auf Ungeseres.” I have the idea, that the latter indicates an advantage._ This dream is built upon a tangle of thoughts induced by a play I saw at the theatre, called _Das neue Ghetto_ (“The New Ghetto.”) The Jewish question, anxiety about the future of my children who cannot be given a native country of their own, anxiety about bringing them up so that they may have the right of native citizens—all these features may easily be recognised in the accompanying dream thoughts.
“We sat by the waters of Babylon and wept.” Siena, like Rome, is famous for its beautiful fountains. In the dream I must find a substitute of some kind for Rome (_cf._ p. 163) in localities which are known to me. Near the Porta Romana of Siena we saw a large, brightly illuminated building, which we found to be the Manicomio, the insane asylum. Shortly before the dream I had heard that a co-religionist had been forced to resign a position at a state asylum which he had secured with great effort. Our interest is aroused by the speech: “_Auf Geseres_”—where we might expect, from the situation maintained throughout the dream, “_Auf Wiedersehen_” (_Au revoir_)—and by its quite meaningless opposite, “_Auf Ungeseres_.” According to information I have received from Hebrew scholars, _Geseres_ is a genuine Hebrew word derived from the verb _goiser_, and may best be rendered by “ordained sufferings, fated disaster.” From its use in the Jewish jargon one might think it signified “wailing and lamentation.” _Ungeseres_ is a coinage of my own and first attracts my attention; but for the present it baffles me. The little observation at the end of the dream, that _Ungeseres_ indicates an advantage over _Geseres_ opens the way to the associations and to an explanation. The same relation holds good with caviare; the unsalted kind[EU] is more highly prized than the salted. Caviare to the general, “noble passions”; herein lies concealed a joking allusion to a member of my household, of whom I hope—for she is younger than I—that she will watch over the future of my children; this, too, agrees with the fact that another member of my household, our worthy nurse, is clearly indicated in the nurse (or nun) of the dream. But a connecting link is wanting between the pair, _salted_ and _unsalted_, and _Geseres—ungeseres_. This is to be found in _soured and unsoured_.
In their flight or exodus out of Egypt, the children of Israel did not have time to allow their bread to be leavened, and in memory of the event to this day they eat unsoured bread at Easter time. Here I can also find room for the sudden notion which came to me in this part of the analysis. I remembered how we promenaded about the city of Breslau, which was strange to us, at the end of the Easter holidays, my friend from Berlin and I. A little girl asked me to tell her the way to a certain street; I had to tell her I did not know it, whereupon I remarked to my friend, “I hope that later on in life the little one will show more perspicacity in selecting the persons by whom she allows herself to be guided.” Shortly afterwards a sign caught my eye: “Dr. _Herod_, office hours....” I said to myself: “I hope this colleague does not happen to be a children’s specialist.” Meanwhile my friend had been developing his views on the biological significance of _bilateral_ symmetry, and had begun a sentence as follows: “If we had but one eye in the middle of our foreheads like _Cyclops_....”
This leads us to the speech of the professor in the preliminary dream: “My son, the _myopic_.” And now I have been led to the chief source for _Geseres_. Many years ago, when this son of Professor M., who is to-day an independent thinker, was still sitting on his school-bench, he contracted a disease of the eye, which the doctor declared gave cause for anxiety. He was of the opinion that as long as it remained in one eye it would not matter; if, however, it should extend to the other eye, it would be serious. The disease healed in the one eye without leaving any bad effects; shortly afterwards, however, its symptoms actually appeared in the other eye. The terrified mother of the boy immediately summoned the physician to the seclusion of her country resort. But he took _another view_ of the matter. “_What sort of ‘Geseres’ is this you are making?_” he said to his mother with impatience. “If one side got well, the other side will get well too.” And so it turned out.
Thus my solution of the problem of the absurdity of dreams is that the dream thoughts are never absurd—at least not those belonging to the dreams of sane persons—and that the dream activity produces absurd dreams and dreams with individual absurd elements if criticism, ridicule, and derision in the dream thoughts are to be represented by it in its manner of expression. My next concern is to show that the dream activity is primarily brought about by the co-operation of the three factors which have been mentioned—and of a fourth one which remains to be cited—that it accomplishes nothing short of a transposition of the dream thoughts, observing the three conditions which are prescribed for it, and that the question whether the mind operates in the dream with all its faculties, or only with a portion of them, is deprived of its cogency and is inapplicable to the actual circumstances. But since there are plenty of dreams in which judgments are passed, criticisms made, and facts recognised, in which astonishment at some single element of the dream appears, and arguments and explanations are attempted, I must meet the objections which may be inferred from these occurrences by the citation of selected examples. My answer is as follows: _Everything in the dream which occurs as an apparent exercise of the critical faculty is to be regarded, not as an intellectual accomplishment of the dream activity, but as belonging to the material of the dream thoughts, and it has found its way from them as a finished structure to the manifest dream content_. I may go even further than this. Even the judgments which are passed upon the dream as it is remembered after awakening and the feelings which are aroused by the reproduction of the dream, belong in good part to the latent dream content, and must be fitted into their place in the interpretation of the dream.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.