(d) Typical Dreams

In general we are not in a position to interpret the dream of another person if he is unwilling to furnish us with the unconscious thoughts which lie behind the dream content, and for this reason the practical applicability of our method of dream interpretation is seriously curtailed.¹ But there are a certain number of dreams—in contrast with the usual freedom displayed by the individual in fashioning his dream world with characteristic peculiarity, and thereby making it unintelligible—which almost every one has dreamed in the same manner, and of which we are accustomed to assume that they have the same significance in the case of every dreamer. A peculiar interest belongs to these typical dreams for the reason that they probably all come from the same sources with every person, that they are thus particularly suited to give us information upon the sources of dreams.

Typical dreams are worthy of the most exhaustive investigation. I shall, however, only give a somewhat detailed consideration to examples of this species, and for this purpose I shall first select the so-called embarrassment dream of nakedness, and the dream of the death of dear relatives.

The dream of being naked or scantily clad in the presence of strangers occurs with the further addition that one is not at all ashamed of it, &c. But the dream of nakedness is worthy of our interest only when shame and embarrassment are felt in it, when one wishes to flee or to hide, and when one feels the strange inhibition that it is impossible to move from the spot and that one is incapable of altering the disagreeable situation. It is only in this connection that the dream is typical; the nucleus of its content may otherwise be brought into all kinds of relations or may be replaced by individual amplifications. It is essentially a question of a disagreeable sensation of the nature of shame, the wish to be able to hide one’s nakedness, chiefly by means of locomotion, without being able to accomplish this. I believe that the great majority of my readers will at some time have found themselves in this situation in a dream.

Usually the nature and manner of the experience is indistinct. It is usually reported, “I was in my shirt,” but this is rarely a clear image; in most cases the lack of clothing is so indeterminate that it is designated in the report of the dream by a set of alternatives: “I was in my chemise or in my petticoat.” As a rule the deficiency in the toilet is not serious enough to justify the feeling of shame attached to it. For a person who has served in the army, nakedness is often replaced by a mode of adjustment that is contrary to regulations. “I am on the street without my sabre and I see officers coming,” or “I am without my necktie,” or “I am wearing checkered civilian’s trousers,” &c.

The persons before whom one is ashamed are almost always strangers with faces that have been left undetermined. It never occurs in the typical dream that one is reproved or even noticed on account of the dress which causes the embarrassment to one’s self. Quite on the contrary, the people have an air of indifference, or, as I had opportunity to observe in a particularly clear dream, they look stiffly solemn. This is worth thinking about.

The shamed embarrassment of the dreamer and the indifference of the spectators form a contradiction which often occurs in the dream. It would better accord with the feelings of the dreamer if the strangers looked at him in astonishment and laughed at him, or if they grew indignant. I think, however, that the latter unpleasant feature has been obviated by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, while the embarrassment, being retained on some account or other, has been left standing, and thus the two parts fail to agree. We have interesting evidence to show that the dream, whose appearance has been partially disfigured by the tendency to wish-fulfilment, has not been properly understood. For it has become the basis of a fairy tale familiar to us all in Andersen’s version,² and it has recently received poetic treatment by L. Fulda in the Talisman. In Andersen’s fairy tale we are told of two impostors who weave a costly garment for the Emperor, which, however, shall be visible only to the good and true. The Emperor goes forth clad in this invisible garment, and, the fabric serving as a sort of touchstone, all the people are frightened into acting as though they did not notice the nakedness of the Emperor.

But such is the situation in our dream. It does not require great boldness to assume that the unintelligible dream content has suggested the invention of a state of undress in which the situation that is being remembered becomes significant. This situation has then been deprived of its original meaning, and placed at the service of other purposes. But we shall see that such misunderstanding of the dream content often occurs on account of the conscious activity of the second psychic system, and is to be recognised as a factor in the ultimate formation of the dream; furthermore, that in the development of the obsessions and phobias similar misunderstandings, likewise within the same psychic personality, play a leading part. The source from which in our dream the material for this transformation is taken can also be explained. The impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact that the latent dream content is occupied with forbidden wishes which have become the victims of repression. The connection in which such dreams appear during my analysis of neurotics leaves no room for doubting that the dream is based upon a recollection from earliest childhood. Only in our childhood was there a time when we were seen by our relatives as well as by strange nurses, servant girls, and visitors, in scanty clothing, and at that time we were not ashamed of our nakedness.³

It may be observed in the case of children who are a little older that being undressed has a kind of intoxicating effect upon them, instead of making them ashamed. They laugh, jump about, and strike their bodies; the mother, or whoever is present, forbids them to do this, and says: “Fie, that is shameful—you mustn’t do that.” Children often show exhibitional cravings; it is hardly possible to go through a village in our part of the country without meeting a two or three-year-old tot who lifts up his or her shirt before the traveller, perhaps in his honour. One of my patients has reserved in his conscious memory a scene from the eighth year of his life in which he had just undressed previous to going to bed, and was about to dance into the room of his little sister in his undershirt when the servant prevented his doing it. In the childhood history of neurotics, denudation in the presence of children of the opposite sex plays a great part; in paranoia the desire to be observed while dressing and undressing may be directly traced to these experiences; among those remaining perverted there is a class which has accentuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the exhibitionists.

This age of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to our later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but a composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual. It is for this reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked and are not ashamed until the moment arrives when the sense of shame and of fear are aroused; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin. Into this Paradise the dream can take us back every night; we have already ventured the conjecture that the impressions from earliest childhood (from the prehistoric period until about the end of the fourth year) in themselves, and independently of everything else, crave reproduction, perhaps without further reference to their content, and that the repetition of them is the fulfilment of a wish. Dreams of nakedness, then, are exhibition dreams.⁴

One’s own person, which is seen not as that of a child, but as belonging to the present, and the idea of scanty clothing, which became buried beneath so many later négligée recollections or because of the censor, turns out to be obscure—these two things constitute the nucleus of the exhibition dream. Next come the persons before whom one is ashamed. I know of no example where the actual spectators at those infantile exhibitions reappear in the dream. For the dream is hardly ever a simple recollection. Strangely enough, those persons who are the objects of our sexual interest during childhood are omitted from all the reproductions of the dream, of hysteria, and of the compulsion neurosis; paranoia alone puts the spectators back into their places, and is fanatically convinced of their presence, although they remain invisible. What the dream substitutes for these, the “many strange people,” who take no notice of the spectacle which is presented, is exactly the wish-opposite of that single, intimate person for whom the exposure was intended. “Many strange people,” moreover, are often found in the dream in any other favourable connection; as a wish-opposite they always signify “a secret.”⁵ It may be seen how the restoration of the old condition of affairs, as it occurs in paranoia, is subject to this antithesis. One is no longer alone. One is certainly being watched, but the spectators are “many strange, curiously indeterminate people.”

Furthermore, repression has a place in the exhibition dream. For the disagreeable sensation of the dream is the reaction of the second psychic instance to the fact that the exhibition scene which has been rejected by it has in spite of this succeeded in securing representation. The only way to avoid this sensation would be not to revive the scene.

Later on we shall again deal with the sensation of being inhibited. It serves the dream excellently in representing the conflict of the will, the negation. According to our unconscious purpose exhibition is to be continued; according to the demands of the censor, it is to be stopped.

The relation of our typical dreams to fairy tales and to other poetic material is neither a sporadic nor an accidental one. Occasionally the keen insight of a poet has analytically recognised the transforming process—of which the poet is usually the tool—and has followed it backwards, that is to say, traced it to the dream. A friend has called my attention to the following passage in G. Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich: “I do not wish, dear Lee, that you should ever come to realise from experience the peculiar piquant truth contained in the situation of Odysseus, when he appears before Nausikaa and her playmates, naked and covered with mud! Would you like to know what it means? Let us consider the incident closely. If you are ever separated from your home, and from everything that is dear to you, and wander about in a strange country, when you have seen and experienced much, when you have cares and sorrows, and are, perhaps, even miserable and forlorn, you will some night inevitably dream that you are approaching your home; you will see it shining and beaming in the most beautiful colours; charming, delicate and lovely figures will come to meet you; and you will suddenly discover that you are going about in rags, naked and covered with dust. A nameless feeling of shame and fear seizes you, you try to cover yourself and to hide, and you awaken bathed in sweat. As long as men exist, this will be the dream of the care-laden, fortune-battered man, and thus Homer has taken his situation from the profoundest depths of the eternal character of humanity.”

This profound and eternal character of humanity, upon the touching of which in his listeners the poet usually calculates, is made up of the stirrings of the spirit which are rooted in childhood, in the period which later becomes prehistoric. Suppressed and forbidden wishes of childhood break forth under cover of those wishes of the homeless man which are unobjectionable and capable of becoming conscious, and for that reason the dream which is made objective in the legend of Nausikaa regularly assumes the form of a dream of anxiety.

My own dream, mentioned on p. 201, of hurrying up the stairs, which is soon afterward changed into that of being glued to the steps, is likewise an exhibition dream, because it shows the essential components of such a dream. It must thus permit of being referred to childish experiences, and the possession of these ought to tell us how far the behaviour of the servant girl towards me—her reproach that I had soiled the carpet—helped her to secure the position which she occupies in the dream. I am now able to furnish the desired explanation. One learns in psychoanalysis to interpret temporal proximity by objective connection; two thoughts, apparently without connection, which immediately follow one another, belong to a unity which can be inferred; just as an a and a t, which I write down together, should be pronounced as one syllable, at. The same is true of the relation of dreams to one another. The dream just cited, of the stairs, has been taken from a series of dreams, whose other members I am familiar with on account of having interpreted them. The dream which is included in this series must belong to the same connection. Now the other dreams of the series are based upon the recollection of a nurse to whom I was entrusted from some time in the period when I was suckling to the age of two and a half years, and of whom a hazy recollection has remained in my consciousness. According to information which I have recently obtained from my mother, she was old and ugly, but very intelligent and thorough; according to inferences which I may draw from my dreams, she did not always give me the kindest treatment, and said hard words to me when I showed insufficient aptitude for education in cleanliness. Thus by attempting to continue this educational work the servant girl develops a claim to be treated by me, in the dream, as an incarnation of the prehistoric old woman. It is to be assumed that the child bestowed his love upon this governess in spite of her bad treatment of him.⁶

Another series of dreams which might be called typical are those which have the content that a dear relative, parent, brother, or sister, child or the like, has died. Two classes of these dreams must immediately be distinguished—those in which the dreamer remains unaffected by sorrow while dreaming, and those in which he feels profound grief on account of the death, in which he even expresses this grief during sleep by fervid tears.

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 else than what they contain, that they are intended to cover up some other wish. Thus it is with the dream of the aunt who sees the only son of her sister lying on a bier before her (p 129). This does not signify that she wishes the death of her little nephew; it only conceals, as we have learned, a wish to see a beloved person once more after long separation—the same person whom she had seen again after a similar long intermission 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. It may be seen in this case that the emotion which is contained in the dream does not belong to the manifest content of the dream, but to the latent one, and that the emotional content has remained free from the disfigurement which has befallen the presentation content.

It is a different story with the dreams in which the death of a beloved relative is imagined and where sorrowful emotion is felt. These signify, as their content says, the wish that the person in question may die, and as I may here expect that the feelings of all readers and of all persons who have dreamt anything similar will object to my interpretation, I must strive to present my proof on the broadest possible basis.

We have already had one example to show that the wishes represented in the dream as fulfilled are not always actual wishes. They may also be dead, discarded, covered, and repressed wishes, which we must nevertheless credit with a sort of continuous existence on account of their reappearance in the dream. They are not dead like persons who have died in our sense, but they resemble the shades in the Odyssey which awaken a certain kind of life as soon as they have drunk blood. In the dream of the dead child in the box (p. 130) we were concerned with a wish that had been actual fifteen years before, and which had been frankly admitted from that time. It is, perhaps, not unimportant from the point of view of dream theory if I add that a recollection from earliest childhood is at the basis even of this dream. While the dreamer was a little child—it cannot be definitely determined at what time—she had heard that during pregnancy of which she was the fruit her mother had fallen into a profound depression of spirits and had passionately wished for the death of her child before birth. Having grown up herself and become pregnant, she now follows the example of her mother.

If some one dreams with expressions of grief that his father or mother, his brother or sister, has died, I shall not use the dream as a proof that he wishes them dead now. The theory of the dreams does not require so much; it is satisfied with concluding that the dreamer has wished them dead—at some one time in childhood. I fear, however, that this limitation will not contribute much to quiet the objectors; they might just as energetically contest the possibility that they have ever had such thoughts as they are sure that they do not cherish such wishes at present. I must, therefore, reconstruct a part of the submerged infantile psychology on the basis of the testimony which the present still furnishes.⁷

Let us at first 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 brotherly and sisterly enmity among adults force themselves upon every one’s experience, and since we so often know that this estrangement originated even during childhood or has always existed. But many grown-up people, who to-day are tenderly attached to their brothers and sisters and stand by them, have lived with them during childhood in almost uninterrupted hostility. The older child has ill-treated the younger, slandered it, and deprived it of its toys; the younger has been consumed by helpless fury against the elder, has envied it and feared it, or its first impulse toward liberty and first feelings of injustice have been directed against the 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 what we wish to find in a grown-up person. The child is absolutely egotistical; it feels its wants acutely and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially with its competitors, other children, and in the first instance with its brothers and sisters. For doing this we do not call the child wicked—we call it naughty; it is not responsible for its evil deeds either in our judgment or in the eyes of the penal law. And this is justifiably so; for we may expect that within this very period of life which we call childhood, altruistic impulses and morality will come to life in the little egotist, and that, in the words of Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay and restrain the primary one. It is true that morality does not develop simultaneously in all departments, and furthermore, the duration of the unmoral period of childhood is of different length in different individuals. In cases where the development of this morality fails to appear, we are pleased to talk about “degeneration”; they are obviously cases of arrested development. Where the primary character has already been covered up by 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 strikingly evident. A compulsion neurosis, on the other hand, corresponds to a super-morality, imposed upon the primary character that is again asserting itself, as an increased check.

Many persons, then, who love their brothers and sisters, and who would feel bereaved by their decease, have evil wishes towards them from earlier times in their unconscious wishes, which are capable of being realised in the dream. It is particularly interesting to observe little children up to three years old in their attitude towards their brothers and sisters. So far the child has been the only one; he is now informed that the stork has brought a new child. The younger surveys the arrival, and then expresses his opinion decidedly: “The stork had better take it back again.”⁸

I subscribe in all seriousness to the opinion that the child knows enough to calculate the disadvantage it has to expect on account of the new-comer. I know in the case of a lady of my acquaintance who agrees very well with a sister four years younger than herself, that she responded to the news of her younger sister’s arrival with the following words: “But I shan’t give her my red cap, anyway.” If the child comes to this realisation only at a later time, its enmity will be aroused at that point. I know of a case where a girl, not yet three years old, tried to strangle a suckling in the cradle, because its continued presence, she suspected, boded her no good. Children are capable of envy at this time of life in all its intensity and distinctness. Again, perhaps, the little brother or sister has really soon disappeared; the child has again drawn the entire affection of the household to itself, and then a new child is sent by the stork; is it then unnatural for the favourite to wish that the new competitor may have the same fate as the earlier one, in order that he may be treated as well as he was before during the interval? Of course this attitude of the child towards the younger infant is under normal circumstances a simple function of the difference of age. After a certain time the maternal instincts of the girl will be excited towards the helpless new-born child.

Feelings of enmity towards brothers and sisters must occur far more frequently during the age of childhood than is noted by the dull observation of adults.

In case of my own children, who followed one another rapidly, I missed the opportunity to make such observations; I am now retrieving it through my little nephew, whose complete domination was disturbed after fifteen months by the arrival of a female competitor. I hear, it is true, that the young man acts very chivalrously towards his little sister, that he kisses her hand and pets her; but in spite of this I have convinced myself that even before the completion of his second year he is using his new facility in language to criticise this person who seems superfluous to him. 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 unfavourable criticism, owing to its splendid development, he has found another way of justifying his insistence that she does not deserve so much attention. On all suitable occasions he reminds us, “She hasn’t any teeth.”⁹ We have all preserved the recollection of the eldest daughter of another sister of mine—how the child which was at that time six years old sought assurance from one aunt after another for an hour and a half with the question: “Lucy can’t understand that yet, can she?” Lucy was the competitor, two and a half years younger.

I have never failed in any of my female patients to find this dream of the death of brothers and sisters denoting exaggerated hostility. I have met with only one exception, which could easily be reinterpreted into a confirmation of the rule. Once in the course of a sitting while I was explaining this condition of affairs to a lady, as it seemed to have a bearing upon the symptoms under consideration, she answered, to my astonishment, that she had never had such dreams. However, she thought of another dream which supposedly had nothing to do with the matter—a dream which she had first dreamed at the age of four, when she was the youngest child, and had since dreamed repeatedly. “A great number of children, all of them the dreamer’s brothers and sisters, and male and female cousins, were romping about in a meadow. Suddenly they all got wings, flew up, and were gone.” She had no idea of the significance of the dream; but it will not be difficult for us to recognise it as a dream of the death of all the brothers and sisters, in its original form, and little influenced by the censor. I venture to insert the following interpretation: At the death of one out of a large number of children—in this case the children of two brothers were brought up in common as brothers and sisters—is it not probable that our dreamer, at that time not yet four years old, asked a wise, grown-up person: “What becomes of children when they are dead?” The answer probably was: “They get wings and become angels.” According to this explanation all the brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings like angels and—this is the important thing—they fly away. Our little angel-maker remains alone, think of it, the only one after such a multitude! The feature that the children are romping about on a meadow points with little ambiguity to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the same association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche as having the wings of a butterfly.

Perhaps some one will now object that, although the inimical impulses of children towards their brothers and sisters may well enough be admitted, how does the childish disposition arrive at such a height of wickedness as to wish death to a competitor or stronger playmate, as though all transgressions could be atoned for only by the death-punishment? Whoever talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of “being dead” has little else but the words 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, which the grown-up person, as all the myths concerning the Great Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in his conception. Fear of death is strange to the child; therefore it plays with the horrible word and threatens another child: “If you do that again you will die, as Francis died,” whereat the poor mother shudders, for perhaps she cannot forget that the great majority of mortals do not succeed in living beyond the years of childhood. It is still possible, even for a child eight years old, on returning from a museum of natural history, to say to its mother: “Mamma, I love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can always, always see you!” So little does the childish conception of being dead resemble our own.¹⁰

Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as “being gone,” not disturbing the survivors any more. The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by travelling, estrangement, or death. If, during the prehistoric years of a child, a nurse has been sent away and its mother has died a short while after, the two experiences, as is revealed by analysis, overlap in his memory. The fact that the child does not miss very intensely those who are absent has been realised by many a mother to her sorrow, after she has returned home after a summer journey of several weeks, and has been told upon inquiry: “The children have not asked for their mother a single time.” But if she really goes to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” the children seem at first to have forgotten her, and begin only subsequently to remember the dead mother.

If, then, the child has motives for wishing the absence of another child, every restraint is lacking which would prevent it from clothing this wish in the form that the child may die, and the psychic reaction to the dream of wishing death proves that, in spite of all the differences in content, the wish in the case of the child is somehow or other the same as it is with adults.

If now the death-wish of the child towards its brothers and sisters has been explained by the childish egotism, which causes the child to regard its brothers and sisters as competitors, how may we account for the same wish towards parents, who bestow love on the child and satisfy its wants, and whose preservation it ought to desire from these very egotistical motives?

In the solution of this difficulty we are aided by the experience that dreams of the death of parents predominantly refer to that member of the parental couple which shares the sex of the dreamer, so that the man mostly dreams of the death of his father, the woman of the death of her mother. I cannot claim that this happens regularly, but the predominating occurrence of this dream in the manner indicated is so evident that it must be explained through some factor that is universally operative. To express the matter boldly, it is as though a sexual preference becomes active at an early period, as though the boy regards his father as a rival in love, and as though the girl takes the same attitude toward her mother—a rival by getting rid of whom he or she cannot but profit.

Before rejecting this idea as monstrous, let the reader consider the actual relations between parents and children. What the requirements of culture and piety demand of this relation must be distinguished from what daily observation shows us to be the fact. More than one cause for hostile feeling is concealed within the relations between parents and children; the conditions necessary for the actuation of wishes which cannot exist in the presence of the censor are most abundantly provided. Let us dwell at first upon the relation between father and son. I believe that the sanctity which we have ascribed to the injunction of the decalogue dulls our perception of reality. Perhaps we hardly dare to notice 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, piety towards parents is in the habit of receding before other interests. The obscure reports which have come to us in mythology and legend from the primeval ages of human society give us an unpleasant idea of the power of the father and the ruthlessness with which it was used. Kronos devours his children, as the wild boar devours the brood of the sow; Zeus emasculates his father¹¹ and takes his place as a ruler. The more despotically the father ruled in the ancient family, the more must the son have taken the position of an enemy, and the greater must have been his impatience, as designated successor, to obtain the mastery himself after his father’s death. Even in our own middle-class family the father is accustomed to aid the development of the germ of hatred which naturally belongs to the paternal relation by refusing the son the disposal of his own destiny, or the means necessary for this. A physician often has occasion to notice that the son’s grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction at the liberty which he has at last obtained. Every father frantically holds on to whatever of the sadly antiquated potestas patris still remains in the society of to-day, and every poet who, like Ibsen, puts the ancient strife between father and son in the foreground of his fiction is sure of his effect. The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter grows up and finds a guardian in her mother, while she desires sexual freedom, and when, on the other hand, the mother has been warned by the budding beauty of her daughter that the time has come for her to renounce sexual claims.

All these conditions are notorious and open to everyone’s inspection. But they do not serve to explain dreams of the death of parents found in the case of persons to whom piety towards their parents has long since come to be inviolable. We are furthermore prepared by the preceding discussion to find that the death-wish towards parents is to be explained by reference to earliest childhood.

This conjecture is reaffirmed with a certainty that makes doubt impossible in its application to psychoneurotics through the analyses that have been undertaken with them. It is here found that the sexual wishes of the child—in so far as they deserve this designation in their embryonic state—awaken at a very early period, and that the first inclinations of the girl are directed towards the father, and the first childish cravings of the boy towards the mother. The father thus becomes an annoying competitor for the boy, as the mother does for the girl, and we have already shown in the case of brothers and sisters how little it takes for this feeling to lead the child to the death-wish. Sexual selection, as a rule, early becomes evident in the parents; it is a natural tendency for the father to indulge the little daughter, and for the mother to take the part of the sons, while both work earnestly for the education of the little ones when the magic of sex does not prejudice their judgment. The child is very well aware of any partiality, and resists that member of the parental couple who discourages it. To find love in a grown-up person is for the child not only the satisfaction of a particular craving, but also means that the child’s will is to be yielded to in other respects. Thus the child obeys its own sexual impulse, and at the same time re-enforces the feeling which proceeds from the parents, if it makes a selection among the parents that corresponds to theirs.

Most of the signs of these infantile inclinations are usually overlooked; some of them may be observed even after the first years of childhood. An eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance, when her mother is called from the table, takes advantage of the opportunity to proclaim herself her successor. “Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,” &c. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, with whom this bit of child psychology is unusually transparent, says outright: “Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.” Nor does this wish by any means exclude from child life the possibility that the child may love his mother affectionately. 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 must go back to the nursery to a person whom he likes far less, the wish may be easily actuated that his father may always be absent, in order that he may keep his place next to 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 grandpa, for example, are always absent; they never return.

Although observations upon little children lend themselves, without being forced, to the proposed interpretation, they do not carry the full conviction which psychoanalyses of adult neurotics obtrude upon the physician. The dreams in question are here cited with introductions of such a nature that their interpretation as wish-dreams becomes unavoidable. One day I find a lady sad 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 that she remembers a dream, whose significance, of course, she does not know. She dreamed it four years before, and it is as follows: A fox or a lynx is taking a walk on 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 cries bitterly. No sooner had I informed her that this dream must signify a wish from her childhood 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 furnished some material for explaining the dream. “Lynx-eye” is an opprobrious epithet which a street boy once bestowed on her when she was a very small child; when she was three years old a brick had fallen on her mother’s head so that she bled severely.

I once had opportunity to make a thorough study of a young girl who underwent several psychic states. In the state of frenzied excitement with which the illness started, the patient showed a very strong aversion to her mother; she struck and scolded her as soon as she approached the bed, while at the same time she remained loving and obedient to a much older sister. Then there followed a clear but somewhat apathetic state with very much 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 abstruse manner with the death of the mother; now she was present at the funeral of an old woman, now she saw her sisters sitting at the table dressed in mourning; the meaning of the dreams could not be doubted. During the further progress of the convalescence hysterical phobias appeared; the most torturing of these was the idea that something happened to her mother. She was always having to hurry home from wherever she happened to be in order to convince herself that her mother was still alive. Now this case, in view of my other experiences, 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 excitement which I conceive as the overpowering of the second psychic instance, the unconscious enmity towards the mother became potent as a motor impulse; then, after calmness set in, following the suppression of the tumult, and after the domination of the censor had been restored, this feeling of enmity had access only to the province of dreams in order to realise 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 manifestation of defence. 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 opportunity to get a profound insight into the unconscious psychic life of a young man for whom a compulsion-neurosis made life almost unendurable, so that he could not go on the street, because he was harassed by the obsession that he would kill every one he met. He spent his days in arranging evidence for an alibi in case he should be charged with any murder that might have occurred in the city. It is superfluous to remark that this man was as moral as he was highly cultured. The analysis—which, moreover, led to a cure—discovered murderous impulses toward the young man’s somewhat over-strict father as the basis of these disagreeable ideas of compulsion—impulses which, to his great surprise, had received conscious expression when he was seven years old, but which, of course, had originated in much earlier years of childhood. After the painful illness and death of the father, the obsessive reproach transferred to strangers in the form of the afore-mentioned phobia, appeared when the young man was thirty-one years old. Anyone capable of wishing to push his own father from a mountain-top into an abyss is certainly not to be trusted to spare the lives of those who are not so closely bound to him; he does well to lock himself into his room.

According to my experience, which is now large, parents play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all later neurotics, and falling in love with one member of the parental couple and hatred of the other help to make up that fateful sum of material furnished by the psychic impulses, which has been formed during the infantile period, and which is of such great importance for the symptoms appearing in the later neurosis. But I do not think that psychoneurotics are here sharply distinguished from normal human beings, in that they are capable of creating something absolutely new and peculiar to themselves. It is far more probable, as is shown also by occasional observation upon normal children, that in their loving or hostile wishes towards their parents psychoneurotics only show in exaggerated form feelings which are present less distinctly and less intensely in the minds of most children. Antiquity has furnished us with legendary material to confirm this fact, and the deep and universal effectiveness of these legends can only be explained by granting a similar universal applicability to the above-mentioned assumption in infantile psychology.

I refer to the legend of King Oedipus and the drama of the same name by Sophocles. Oedipus, the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and of Jocasta, is exposed while a suckling, because an oracle has informed the father that his son, who is still unborn, will be his murderer. He is rescued, and grows up as the king’s son at a foreign court, until, being uncertain about his origin, he also consults the oracle, and is advised 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 strikes him dead in a sudden quarrel. Then he comes to the gates of Thebes, where he solves the riddle of the Sphynx who is barring the way, and he is elected king by the Thebans in gratitude, and is presented with the hand of Jocasta. He reigns in peace and honour for a long time, and begets two sons and two daughters upon his unknown mother, until at last a plague breaks out which causes the Thebans to consult the oracle anew. Here Sophocles’ tragedy begins. The messengers bring the advice that the plague will stop as soon as the murderer of Laius is driven from the country. But where is he hidden?

“Where are they to be found? How shall we trace the perpetrators of so old a crime where no conjecture leads to discovery?”¹²

The action of the play now consists merely in a revelation, which is gradually completed and artfully delayed—resembling the work of a psychoanalysis—of the fact that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, and the son of the dead man and of Jocasta. Oedipus, profoundly shocked at the monstrosities which he has unknowingly committed, blinds himself and leaves his native place. The oracle has been fulfilled.

The Oedipus Tyrannus is a so-called tragedy of fate; its tragic effect is said to be found in the opposition between the powerful will of the gods and the vain resistance of the human beings who are threatened with destruction; resignation to the will of God and confession of one’s own helplessness is the lesson which the deeply-moved spectator is to learn from the tragedy. Consequently modern authors have tried to obtain a similar tragic effect by embodying the same opposition in a story of their own invention. But spectators have sat unmoved while a curse or an oracular sentence has been fulfilled on blameless human beings in spite of all their struggles; later tragedies of fate have all remained without effect.

If the Oedipus Tyrannus is capable of moving modern men no less than it moved the contemporary Greeks, the explanation of this fact cannot lie merely in the assumption that the effect of the Greek tragedy is based upon the opposition between fate and human will, but is to be sought in the peculiar nature of the material by which the opposition is shown. There must be a voice within us which is prepared to recognise the compelling power of fate in Oedipus, while we justly condemn the situations occurring in Die Ahnfrau or in other tragedies of later date as arbitrary inventions. And there must be a factor corresponding to this inner voice in the story of King Oedipus. His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. Perhaps we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first hatred and violent washes towards our fathers; our dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realised wish of our childhood. But more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, unless we have become psychoneurotics, 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 has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have suffered within us. By his analysis, showing us the guilt of Oedipus, the poet urges us to recognise our own inner self, in which these impulses, even if suppressed, are still present. The comparison with which the chorus leaves us—

“... Behold! this Oedipus, who unravelled the famous riddle and who was a man of eminent virtue; a man who trusted neither to popularity nor to the fortune of his citizens; see how great a storm of adversity hath at last overtaken him” (Act v. sc. 4).

This warning applies to ourselves and to our pride, to us, who have grown so wise and so powerful in our own estimation since the years of our childhood. Like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of the wishes that offend morality, wishes which nature has forced upon us, and after the revelation of which we want to avert every glance from the scenes of our childhood.

In the very text of Sophocles’ tragedy there is an unmistakable reference to the fact that the Oedipus legend originates in an extremely old dream material, which consists of the painful disturbance of the relation towards one’s parents by means of the first impulses of sexuality. Jocasta comforts Oedipus—who is not yet enlightened, but who has become worried on account of the oracle—by mentioning to him the dream which is dreamt by so many people, though she attaches no significance to it—

“For it hath already been the lot of many men in dreams to think themselves partners of their mother’s bed. But he passes most easily through life to whom these circumstances are trifles” (Act iv. sc. 3).

The dream of having sexual intercourse with one’s mother occurred at that time, as it does to-day, to many people, who tell it with indignation and astonishment. As may be understood, it is the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the death of the father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these two typical dreams, and just as the dream when occurring to an adult is experienced with feelings of resistance, so the legend must contain terror and self-chastisement. The appearance which it further assumes is the result of an uncomprehending secondary elaboration which tries to make it serve theological purposes (cf. the dream material of exhibitionism, p. 206). The attempt to reconcile divine omnipotence with human responsibility must, of course, fail with this material as with every other.¹³

I must not leave the typical dream of the death of dear relatives without somewhat further elucidating the subject of their significance for the theory of the dream in general. These dreams show us a realisation of the very unusual case where the dream thought, which has been created by the repressed wish, completely escapes the censor, and is transferred to the dream without alteration. There must be present peculiar conditions making possible such an outcome. I find circumstances favourable to these dreams in the two following factors: First, there is no wish which we believe further from us; we believe such a wish “would never occur to us in a dream”; the dream censor is therefore not prepared for this monstrosity, just as the legislation of Solon was incapable of establishing a punishment for patricide. Secondly, the repressed and unsuspected wish is in just this case particularly often met by a fragment of the day’s experience in the shape of a concern about the life of the beloved person. This concern cannot be registered in the dream by any other means than by taking advantage of the wish that has the same content; but it is possible for the wish to mask itself behind the concern which has been awakened during the day. If one is inclined to think all this a more simple process, and that one merely continues during the night and in dreams what one has been concerned with during the day, the dream of the death of beloved persons is removed from all connection with dream explanation, and an easily reducible problem is uselessly retained.

It is also instructive to trace the relation of these dreams to anxiety dreams. In the dream of the death of dear persons the repressed wish has found a way of avoiding the censor, and the distortion which it causes. In this case the inevitable concomitant manifestation is that disagreeable sensations are felt in the dream. Thus the dream of fear is brought about only when the censor is entirely or partially overpowered, and, on the other hand, the overpowering of the censor is made easier when fear has already been furnished by somatic sources. Thus it becomes obvious for what purpose the censor performs its office and practises dream distortion; it does this in order to prevent the development of fear or other forms of disagreeable emotion.

I have spoken above of the egotism of the infantile mind, and I may now resume this subject in order to suggest that dreams preserve this characteristic—thus showing their connection with infantile life. Every dream is absolutely egotistical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though it may be in a disguised form. The wishes that are realised in dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only a deceptive appearance if interest in another person is thought to have caused the dream. I shall subject to analysis several examples which appear to contradict this assertion.

I. A boy not yet four years old relates the following: He saw a large dish garnished, and upon it a large piece of roast meat, and the meat was all of a sudden—not cut to pieces—but eaten up. He did not see the person who ate it.¹⁴

Who may this strange person be of whose luxurious repast this little fellow dreams? The experiences of the day must give us the explanation of this. For a few days the boy had been living on a diet of milk according to the doctor’s prescription; but on the evening of the day before the dream he had been naughty, and as a punishment he had been deprived of his evening meal. He had already undergone one such hunger-cure, and had acted very bravely. He knew that he would get nothing to eat, but he did not dare to indicate by a word that he was hungry. Education was beginning to have its influence upon him; this is expressed even in the dream which shows the beginnings of dream disfigurement. There is no doubt that he himself is the person whose wishes 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 children do in the dream (cf. the dream about strawberries of my little Anna, p. 110), to sit down to the meal himself. The person remains anonymous.

II. Once I dream that I see on the show-table of a book store a new number in the Book-lovers’ Collection—the collection which I am in the habit of buying (art monographs, monographs on the history of the world, famous art centres, &c.). The new collection is called Famous Orators (or Orations), and the first number bears the name of Doctor Lecher.

In the course of analysis it appears improbable that the fame of Dr. Lecher, the long-winded orator of the German Opposition, should occupy my thoughts while I am dreaming. The fact is that, a few days before, I undertook the psychic cure of some new patients, and was now forced to talk for from ten to twelve hours a day. Thus I myself am the long-winded orator.

III. Upon another occasion I dream that a teacher of my acquaintance at the university says: My son, the Myopic. Then there follows a dialogue consisting of short speeches and replies. A third portion of the dream follows in which I and my sons appear, and as far as the latent dream content is concerned, father, son, and Professor M. are alike only lay figures to represent me and my eldest son. I shall consider this dream again further on because of another peculiarity.

IV. The following dream gives an example of really base egotistical feelings, which are concealed behind affectionate concern:

My friend Otto looks ill, his face is brown and his eyes bulge.

Otto is my family physician, to whom I owe a debt greater than I can ever hope to repay, since he has guarded the health of my children for years. He has treated them successfully when they were taken sick, and besides that he has given them presents on all occasions which gave him any excuse for doing so. He came for a visit on the day of the dream, and my wife noticed that he looked tired and exhausted. Then comes my dream at night, and attributes to him a few of the symptoms of Basedow’s disease. Any one disregarding my rules for dream interpretation would understand this dream to mean that I am concerned about the health of my friend, and that this concern is realised in the dream. It would thus be a contradiction not only of the assertion that the dream is a wish-fulfilment, but also of the assertion that it is accessible only to egotistic impulses. But let the person who interprets the dream in this manner explain to me why I fear that Otto has Basedow’s disease, for which diagnosis his appearance does not give the slightest justification? As opposed to this, my analysis furnishes the following material, taken from an occurrence which happened six years ago. A small party of us, including Professor R., were driving in profound darkness through the forest of N., which is several hours distant from our country home. The coachman, who was not quite sober, threw us and the wagon down a bank, and it was only by a lucky accident that we all escaped unhurt. But we were forced to spend the night at the nearest inn, where the news of our accident awakened great sympathy. A gentleman, who showed unmistakable signs of the morbus Basedowii—nothing but a brownish colour of the skin of the face and bulging eyes, no goitre—placed himself entirely at our disposal and asked what he could do for us. Professor R. answered in his decided way: “Nothing but lend me a night-shirt.” Whereupon our generous friend replied: “I am sorry but I cannot do that,” and went away.

In continuing the analysis, it occurs to me that Basedow is the name not only of a physician, but also of a famous educator. (Now that I am 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 night-shirt)—in case anything should happen to me. By seeing Otto in the dream with the morbid symptoms of our above-mentioned generous benefactor, I apparently mean to say, “If anything happens to me, just as little is to be expected for my children from him as was to be expected then from Baron L., in spite of his well-meaning offers.” The egotistical turn of this dream ought now to be clear.¹⁵

But where is the wish-fulfilment to be found? It is not in the vengeance secured upon my friend Otto, whose fate it seems to be to receive ill-treatment in my dreams, but in the following circumstances: In representing Otto in the dream as Baron L., I have at the same time identified myself with some one else, that is to say, with Professor R., for I have asked something of Otto, just as R. asked something of Baron L. at the time of the occurrence which has been mentioned. And that is the point. For Professor R. has pursued his way independently outside the schools, somewhat as I have done, and has only in later years received the title which he earned long ago. I am therefore again wishing to be a professor! The very phrase “in later years” is the fulfilment of wish, for it signifies that I shall live long enough to pilot my boy through the age of puberty myself.

I gave only a brief account of the other forms of typical dreams in the first edition of this book, because an insufficient amount of good material was at my disposal. My experience, which has since been increased, now makes it possible for me to divide these dreams into two broad classes—first, those which really have the same meaning every time, and secondly, those which must be subjected to the most widely different interpretations in spite of their identical or similar content. Among the typical dreams of the first sort I shall closely consider the examination dream and the so-called dream of dental irritation.

Every one who has received his degree after having passed the final college examination, complains of the ruthlessness with which he is pursued by the anxiety dream that he will fail, that he must repeat his work, &c. For the holder of the university degree this typical dream is replaced by another, which represents to him that he has to pass the examination for the doctor’s degree, and against which he vainly raises the objection in his sleep that he has already been practising for years—that he is already a university instructor or the head of a law firm. These are the ineradicable memories of the punishments which we suffered when we were children for misdeeds which we had committed—memories which were revived in us on that dies irae, dies illa of the severe examination at the two critical junctures in our studies. The “examination-phobia” of neurotics is also strengthened by this childish fear. After we have ceased to be schoolboys it is no longer our parents and guardians as at first, or our teachers as later on, who see to our punishment; the inexorable chain of causes and effects in life has taken over our further education. Now we dream of examinations for graduation or for the doctor’s degree—and who has not been faint-hearted in these tests, even though he belonged to the righteous?—whenever we fear that an outcome will punish us because we have not done something, or because we have not accomplished something as we should—in short whenever we feel the weight of responsibility.

I owe the actual explanation of examination dreams to a remark made by a well-informed colleague, who once asserted in a scientific discussion that in his experience the examination dream occurs only to persons who have passed the examination, never to those who have gone to pieces on it. The anxiety dream of the examination, which occurs, as is being more and more corroborated, when the dreamer is looking forward to a responsible action on his part the next day and the possibility of disgrace, has therefore probably selected an occasion in the past where the great anxiety has shown itself to have been without justification and has been contradicted by the result. This would be a very striking example of a misconception of the dream content on the part of the waking instance. The objection to the dream, which is conceived as the indignant protest, “But I am already a doctor,” &c., would be in reality a consolation which the dreams offer, and which would therefore be to the following effect: “Do not be afraid of the morrow; think of the fear which you had before the final examination, and yet nothing came of it. You are a doctor this minute,” &c. The fear, however, which we attribute to the dream, originates in the remnants of daily experience.

The tests of this explanation which I was able to make in my own case and in that of others, although they were not sufficiently numerous, have been altogether successful. I failed, for example, in the examination for the doctor’s degree in legal medicine; never once have I been concerned about this matter in my dreams, while I have often enough been examined in botany, zoology, or chemistry, in which subjects I took the examinations with well-founded anxiety, but escaped punishment through the clemency of fortune or of the examiner. In my dreams of college examination, I am regularly examined in history, a subject which I passed brilliantly at the time, but only, I must admit, because my good-natured professor—my one-eyed benefactor in another dream (cf. p. 12)—did not overlook the fact that on the list of questions I had crossed out the second of three questions as an indication that he should not insist on it. One of my patients, who withdrew before the final college examinations and made them up later, but who failed in the officer’s examination and did not become an officer, tells me that he dreams about the former examination often enough, but never about the latter.

The above-mentioned colleague (Dr. Stekel of Vienna) calls attention to the double meaning of the word “Matura” (Matura—examination for college degree: mature, ripe), and claims that he has observed that examination dreams occur very frequently when a sexual test is set for the following day, in which, therefore, the disgrace which is feared might consist in the manifestation of slight potency. A German colleague takes exception to this, as it appears, justly, on the ground that this examination is denominated in Germany the Abiturium and hence lacks this double meaning.

On account of their similar affective impression dreams of missing a train deserve to be placed next to examination dreams. Their explanation also justifies this relationship. They are consolation dreams directed against another feeling of fear perceived in the dream, the fear of dying. “To depart” is one of the most frequent and one of the most easily reached symbols of death. The dream thus says consolingly: “Compose yourself, you are not going to die (to depart),” just as the examination dream calms us by saying “Fear not, nothing will happen to you even this time.” The difficulty in understanding both kinds of dreams is due to the fact that the feeling of anxiety is directly connected with the expression of consolation. Stekel treats fully the symbolisms of death in his recently published book Die Sprache des Traumes.

The meaning of the “dreams of dental irritation,” which I have had to analyse often enough with my patients, escaped me for a long time, because, much to my astonishment, resistances that were altogether too great obstructed their interpretation.

At last overwhelming evidence convinced me that, in the case of men, nothing else than cravings for masturbation from the time of puberty furnishes the motive power for these dreams. I shall analyse two such dreams, one of which is likewise “a dream of flight.” The two dreams are of the same person—a young man with a strong homosexuality, which, however, has been repressed in life.

He is witnessing a performance of Fidelio from the parquette of the opera house; he is sitting next to L., whose personality is congenial to him, and whose friendship he would like to have. He suddenly flies diagonally clear across the parquette; he then puts his hand in his mouth and draws out two of his teeth.

He himself describes the flight by saying it was as if he were “thrown” into the air. As it was a performance of Fidelio he recalls the poet’s words: