The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud
THE FAIR ONE.
According to the standards prevailing in dream criticism, this dream-content would have to be explained in the following manner: At first, when the dreamer is picturing his father’s misfortune, he has forgotten that his father has already been in his grave for years; in the further course of the dream this memory comes to life, and causes him to be surprised at his own dream even while he is still dreaming. Analysis, however, teaches us that it is entirely useless to attempt such explanations. The dreamer had given an artist an order for a bust of his father, which he had inspected two days before the dream. This is the thing which seems to him to have met with an _accident_. The sculptor has never seen the father, and is working from photographs which have been given him. On the very day before the dream the pious son had sent an old servant of the family to the studio in order to see whether he would pass the same judgment upon the marble head, namely, that it had turned out too _narrow from side to side_, from temple to temple. Now follows the mass of recollections which has contributed to the formation of this dream.
The dreamer’s father had a habit, whenever he was harassed by business cares or family difficulties, of pressing his temples with both hands, as though he were trying to compress his head, which seemed to grow too large for him. When our dreamer was four years old he was present when the accidental discharge of a pistol blackened his father’s eyes (_his eyes are so clear_). While alive his father had had a deep wrinkle at the place where the dream shows the injury, whenever he was thoughtful or sad. The fact that in the dream this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to the second occasion of the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph of his little daughter; the plate had fallen from his hand, and when picked up showed a crack that ran like a vertical furrow across the forehead and reached as far as the orbital curve. He could not then get the better of his superstitious forebodings, for, on the day before his mother’s death, a photographic plate with her likeness had cracked as he was handling it. Thus the absurdity of the dream is only the result of an inaccuracy of verbal expression, which does not take the trouble to distinguish the bust and the photograph from the original. We are all accustomed to say of a picture, “Don’t you think father is good?” Of course the appearance of absurdity in this dream might easily have been avoided. If it were permissible to pass judgment after a single experience, one might be tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity is admitted or desired.
II. Here is another very similar example from my own dreams (I lost my father in the year 1896): _After his death my father has been politically active among the Magyars, and has united them into a political body_; to accompany which I see a little indistinct picture: _a crowd of people as in the Reichstag; a person who is standing on one or two benches, others round about him. I remember that he looked very like Garibaldi on his death-bed, and I am glad that this promise has really come true._ This is certainly absurd enough. It was dreamed at the time that the Hungarians got into a lawless condition, through Parliamentary obstruction, and passed through the crisis from which Koloman Szell delivered them. The trivial circumstance that the scene beheld in the dream consists of such little pictures is not without significance for the explanation of this element. The usual visual representation of our thoughts results in pictures which impress us as being life-size; my dream picture, however, is the reproduction of a wood-cut inserted in the text of an illustrated history of Austria, representing Maria Theresa in the Reichstag of Pressburg—the famous scene of “Moriamur pro rege nostro.”[ER] Like Maria Theresa, my father, in the dream, stands surrounded by the multitude; but he is standing on one or two benches, and thus like a judge on the bench. (He has _united_ them—here the intermediary is the phrase, “We shall need no _judge_.”) Those of us who stood around the death-bed of my father actually noticed that he looked much like Garibaldi. He had a _post-mortem_ rise of temperature, his cheeks shone redder and redder ... involuntarily we continue: “And behind him lay in phantom radiance that which subdues us all—the common thing.”
III. In the example which I now cite I can detect the dream activity in the act of purposely manufacturing an absurdity for which there is no occasion at all in the subject-matter. It is taken from the dream that I had as a result of meeting Count Thun before my vacation trip. “_I am riding in a one-horse carriage, and give orders to drive to a railway station. ‘Of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself,’ I say, after the driver made an objection as though I had tired him out; at the same time it seems as though I had already driven with him for a distance which one usually rides on the train._” For this confused and senseless story the analysis gives the following explanation: During the day I had hired a one-horse carriage which was to take me to a remote street in Dornbach. The driver, however, did not know the way, and kept on driving in the manner of those good people until I noticed the fact and showed him the way, not sparing him a few mocking remarks withal. From this driver a train of thought led to the aristocratic personage whom I was destined to meet later.
For the present I shall only remark that what strikes us middle-class plebeians about the aristocracy is that they like to put themselves in the driver’s seat. Does not Count Thun guide the Austrian car of state? The next sentence in the dream, however, refers to my brother, whom I identify with the driver of the one-horse carriage. I had this year refused to take the trip through Italy with him (“of course I cannot ride with you on the railway line itself”), and this refusal was a sort of punishment for his wonted complaint that I usually tired him out on this trip (which gets into the dream unchanged) by making him take hurried trips and see too many nice things in one day. That evening my brother had accompanied me to the railroad station, but shortly before getting there had jumped out, at the state railway division of the Western Station, in order to take a train to Purkersdorf. I remarked to him that he could stay with me a little longer, inasmuch as he did not go to Purkersdorf by the state railway but by the Western Railway. This is how it happens that in the dream I rode in the wagon a distance _which one usually rides on the train_.
The coachman does it At the master’s behest; Everyone has it, In the grave does it rest. (Ancestry.) It was confusing to find half of the second riddle identical with the first. The coachman does it At the master’s behest; Not everyone has it, In the cradle does it rest. (Offspring.) As I had seen Count Thun ride in advance (vorfahren), so high and mighty, and had merged into the Figaro-mood which finds the merit of aristocratic gentlemen in the fact that they have taken the trouble to be born (Nachkommen—to become offspring), the two riddles became intermediary thoughts for the dream-work. As aristocrats can be readily confounded with coachmen, and as coachmen were in our country formerly called brothers-in-law, the work of condensation could employ my brother in the same representation. But the dream thought at work in the background was as follows: _It is nonsense to be proud of one’s ancestry. (Vorfahren.) I would rather be myself an ancestor. (Vorfahr.)_ For the sake of this judgment, “it is nonsense,” we have the nonsense in the dream. We can now also solve the last riddle in this obscure passage of the dream, namely, that I have already driven before (vorher gefahren, vorgefahren) with the coachman.
As a matter of fact we have already met with a convincing example of the significance of an absurd dream. The dream, interpreted without analysis, of the Wagnerian performance lasting until 7.45 in the morning, in which the orchestra is conducted from a tower, &c. (see p. 316) is apparently trying to say: It is a _crazy_ world and an _insane_ society. He who deserves a thing doesn’t get it, and he who doesn’t care for anything has it—and in this she means to compare her fate with that of her cousin. The fact that dreams concerning a dead father were the first to furnish us with examples of absurdity in dreams is by no means an accident. The conditions necessary for the creations of absurd dreams are here grouped together in a typical manner. The authority belonging to the father has at an early age aroused the criticism of the child, and the strict demands he has made have caused the child to pay particularly close attention to every weakness of the father for its own extenuation; but the piety with which the father’s personality is surrounded in our thoughts, especially after his death, increases the censorship which prevents the expressions of this criticism from becoming conscious.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.