Freud - Complete Works (155 page)
¹
The dream-work is thus parodying the
thought that has been presented to it as something ridiculous, by
the method of creating something ridiculous in connection with that
thought. Heine adopted the same line when he wanted to ridicule
some wretched verses written by the King of Bavaria. He did so in
still more wretched ones:
Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet,
Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo
Vor ihm auf die Kniee und bittet und fleht,
‘Halt ein! ich werde sonst toll, o!’
[Sir Ludwig is a magnificent bard
And, as soon as he utters, Apollo
Goes down on his knees and begs him: ‘Hold hard!
Or I’II shortly become a clod-poll oh!’
Lobgesänge auf König Ludwig,
I]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
884
IV
Here is another absurd dream
about a dead father.
I received a communication from the town
council of my birthplace concerning the fees due for
someone’s maintenance in the hospital in the year 1851, which
had been necessitated by an attack he had had in my house. I was
amused by this since, in the first place, I was not yet alive in
1851 and, in the second place, my father, to whom it might have
related, was already dead. I went to him in the next room, where he
was lying on his bed, and told him about it. To my surprise, he
recollected that in 1851 he had once got drunk and had had to be
locked up or detained. It was at a time at which he had been
working for the firm of T----. ‘So you used to drink as
well?’ I asked; ‘did you get married soon after
that?’ I calculated of course, I was born in 1856, which
seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in
question.
We should conclude from the
preceding discussion that the insistence with which this dream
exhibited its absurdities could only be taken as indicating the
presence in the dream-thoughts of a particularly embittered and
passionate polemic. We shall therefore be all the more astonished
to observe that in this dream the polemic was carried on in the
open and that my father was the explicit object of the ridicule.
Openness of this kind seems to contradict our assumptions as
regards the working of the censorship in connection with the
dream-work. The position will become clearer, however, when it is
realized that in this instance my father was merely put forward as
a show figure, and that the dispute was really being carried on
with someone else, who only appeared in the dream in a single
allusion. Whereas normally a dream deals with rebellion against
someone else, behind whom the dreamer’s father is concealed,
the opposite was true here. My father was made into a man of straw,
in order to screen someone else; and the dream was allowed to
handle in this undisguised way a figure who was as a rule treated
as sacred, because at the same time I knew with certainty that it
was not he who was really meant. That this was so was shown by the
exciting cause of the dream. For it occurred after I had heard that
a senior colleague of mine, whose judgement was regarded as beyond
criticism, had given voice to disapproval and surprise at the fact
that the psycho-analytic treatment of one of my patients had
already entered its
fifth year
. The first sentences of the
dream alluded under a transparent disguise to the fact that for
some time this colleague had taken over the duties which my father
could no longer fulfil (’
fees due
’
,
‘
maintenance in the hospital
’), and that, when
our relations began to be less friendly, I became involved in the
same kind of emotional conflict which, when a misunderstanding
arises between a father and son, is inevitably produced owing to
the position occupied by the father and the assistance formerly
given by him. The dream-thoughts protested bitterly against the
reproach that I was
not getting on faster
- a reproach
which, applying first to my treatment of the patient, extended
later to other things. Did he know anyone, I thought, who could get
on more quickly? Was he not aware that, apart from my methods of
treatment, conditions of that kind are altogether incurable and
last a life-time? What were
four or five years
in comparison
with a whole life-time, especially considering that the
patient’s existence had been so very much eased during the
treatment?
The Interpretation Of Dreams
885
A great part of the impression of
absurdity in this dream was brought about by running together
sentences from different parts of the dream-thoughts without any
transition. Thus the sentence ‘
I went to him in the next
room
’, etc., dropped the subject with which the preceding
sentences had been dealing and correctly reproduced the
circumstances in which I informed my father of my having become
engaged to be married without consulting him. This sentence was
therefore reminding me of the admirable unselfishness displayed by
the old man on that occasion, and contrasting it with the behaviour
of someone else - of yet another person. It is to be observed that
the dream was allowed to ridicule my father because in the
dream-thoughts he was held up in unqualified admiration as a model
to other people. It lies in the very nature of every censorship
that of forbidden things it allows those which are
untrue
to
be said rather than those which are
true
. The next sentence,
to the effect that he recollected ‘
having once got drunk
and been locked up for it
’, was no longer concerned with
anything that related to my father in reality. Here the figure for
whom he stood was no less a person than the great Meynert, in whose
footsteps I had trodden with such deep veneration and whose
behaviour towards me, after a short period of favour, had turned to
undisguised hostility. The dream reminded me that he himself had
told me that at one time in his youth he had indulged in the habit
of making himself
intoxicated with chloroform
and that on
account of it he had had to go into a
home
. It also reminded
me of another incident with him shortly before his death. I had
carried on an embittered controversy with him in writing, on the
subject of male hysteria, the existence of which he denied. When I
visited him during his fatal illness and asked after his condition,
he spoke at some length about his state and ended with these words:
‘You know, I was always one of the clearest cases of male
hysteria.’ He was thus admitting, to my satisfaction and
astonishment, what he had for so long obstinately contested. But
the reason why I was able in this scene of the dream to use my
father as a screen for Meynert did not lie in any analogy that I
had discovered between the two figures. The scene was a concise but
entirely adequate representation of a conditional sentence in the
dream-thoughts, which ran in full: ‘If only I had been the
second generation, the son of a professor or Hofrat, I should
certainly have
got on faster
.’ In the dream I made my
father into a Hofrat and professor. -The most blatant and
disturbing absurdity in the dream resides in its treatment of the
date 1851, which seemed to me not to differ from 1856,
just as
though a difference of five years was of no significance
whatever
. But this last was precisely what the dream-thoughts
sought to express.
Four or five years
was the length of time
during which I enjoyed the support of the colleague whom I
mentioned earlier in this analysis; but it was also the length of
time during which I made my
fiancée
wait for our
marriage; and it was also, by a chance coincidence which was
eagerly exploited by the dream-thoughts, the length of time during
which I made my patient of longest standing wait for a complete
recovery. ‘
What are five years?
’ asked the
dream-thoughts; ‘
that’s no time at all, so far as I
am concerned; it doesn’t count
. I have time enough in
front of me. And just as I succeeded in the end in
that
,
though you would not believe it, so I shall achieve
this
,
too.’ Apart from this, however, the number 51 by itself,
without the number of the century, was determined in another, and
indeed, in an opposite sense; and this, too, is why it appeared in
the dream several times. 51 is the age which seems to be a
particularly dangerous one to men; I have known colleagues who have
died suddenly at that age, and amongst them one who, after long
delays, had been appointed to a professorship only a few days
before his death.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
886
V
Here is yet another absurd dream
which plays about with numbers.
One of my acquaintances, Herr
M., had been attacked in an essay with an unjustifiable degree of
violence, as we all thought - by no less a person than Goethe. Herr
M. was naturally crushed by the attack. He complained of it
bitterly to some company at table; his veneration for Goethe had
not been affected, however, by this personal experience. I tried to
throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me
improbable. Goethe died in 1832. Since his attack on Herr M. must
naturally have been made earlier than that, Herr M. must have been
quite a young man at the time. It seemed to be a plausible notion
that he was eighteen. I was not quite sure, however, what year we
were actually in, so that my whole calculation melted into
obscurity. Incidentally, the attack was contained in Goethe’s
well-known essay on ‘Nature’
.
We shall quickly find means of
justifying the nonsense in this dream. Herr M., whom I had got to
know among some
company at table
, had not long before asked
me to examine his brother, who was showing signs of
general
paralysis
. The suspicion was correct; on the occasion of this
visit an awkward episode occurred, for in the course of his
conversation the patient for no accountable reason gave his brother
away by talking of his
youthful follies
. I had asked the
patient the year of his birth and made him do several small sums so
as to test the weakness of his memory - though, incidentally, he
was still able to meet the tests quite well. I could already see
that I myself behaved like a paralytic in the dream. (
I was not
quite sure what year we were in
.) Another part of the material
of the dream was derived from another recent source. The editor of
a medical journal, with whom I was on friendly terms, had printed a
highly unfavourable, a ‘
crushing
’ criticism of
my Berlin friend Fl.’s last book. The criticism had been
written by a very
youthful
reviewer who possessed small
judgement. I thought I had a right to intervene and took the editor
to task over it. He expressed lively regret at having published the
criticism but would not undertake to offer any redress. I therefore
severed my connection with the journal, but in my letter of
resignation expressed a hope that
our personal relations would
not be affected by the event
. The third source of the dream was
an account I had just heard from a woman patient of her
brother’s mental illness, and of how he had broken out in a
frenzy with cries of ‘
Nature! Nature!
’ The
doctors believed that his exclamation came from his having read
Goethe’s striking essay on that subject and that it showed he
had been overworking at his studies in natural philosophy. I myself
preferred to think of the sexual sense in which the word is used
even by the less educated people here. This idea of mine was at
least not disproved by the fact that the unfortunate young man
subsequently mutilated his own genitals.
He was eighteen
at
the time of his outbreak.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
887
I may add that my friend’s
book which had been so severely criticized (‘one wonders
whether it is the author or oneself who is crazy’, another
reviewer had said) dealt with the
chronological data
of life
and showed that the length of Goethe’s life was a multiple of
a number that has a significance in biology. So it is easy to see
that in the dream I was putting myself in my friend’s place.
(
I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data
.)
But I behaved like a paralytic, and the dream was a mass of
absurdities. Thus the dream-thoughts were saying ironically:
‘
Naturally
, it’s
he
who is the crazy
fool, and it’s
you
who are the men of genius and know
better. Surely it can’t by any chance be the reverse?’
There were plenty of examples of this
reversal
in the dream.
For instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd,
whereas it is still easy for quite a young man to attack Goethe,
who is immortal. And again, I calculated from the year of
Goethe’s
death
, whereas I had made the paralytic
calculate from the year of his
birth
.