Freud - Complete Works (253 page)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1430

III

THE
SECOND DREAM

   A few weeks after the first dream
the second occurred, and when it had been dealt with the analysis
was broken off. It cannot be made as completely intelligible as the
first, but it afforded a desirable confirmation of an assumption
which had become necessary about the patient’s mental state,
it filled up a gap in her memory, and it made it possible to obtain
a deep insight into the origin of another of her symptoms.

   Dora described the dream as
follows: ‘
I was walking about in a town which I did not
know. I saw streets and squares which were strange to me.
¹
l then came into a house where I lived, went to my room, and
found a letter from Mother lying there. She wrote saying that as I
had left home without my parents’ knowledge she had not
wished to write to me to say that Father was ill. "Now he is
dead, and if you like
²
you can come." I then went
to the station
[
"Bahnhof"
]
and asked about a
hundred times: " Where is the station?" I always got the
answer: "Five minutes." I then saw a thick wood before me
which I went into, and there I asked a man whom I met. He said to
me: "Two and a half hours more."
³
He offered
to accompany me. But I refused and went alone. I saw the station in
front of me and could not reach it. At the same time I had the
usual feeling of anxiety that one has in dreams when one cannot
move forward. Then I was at home. I must have been travelling in
the meantime, but I know nothing about that. I walked into the
porter’s lodge, and enquired for our flat. The maidservant
opened the door to me and replied that Mother and the others were
already at the cemetery
[“
Friedhof"
]
.
’
⁴

  
¹
To this she subsequently made an important
addendum: ‘
I saw a monument in one of the
squares
.’

  
²
To this came the addendum: ‘
There
was a question-mark after this word, thus:
“like?”
.’

  
³
In repeating the dream she said:
‘
Two hours
.’

  
⁴
In
the next session Dora brought me two addenda to this: ‘
I
saw myself particularly distinctly going up the stairs
,’
and ‘
After she had answered I went to my room, but not the
least sadly, and began reading a big book that lay on my
writing-table
.’

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1431

   It was not without some
difficulty that the interpretation of this dream proceeded. In
consequence of the peculiar circumstances in which the analysis was
broken off - circumstances connected with the content of the dream
- the whole of it was not cleared up. And for this reason, too, I
am not equally certain at every point of the order in which my
conclusions were reached. I will begin by mentioning the
subject-matter with which the current analysis was dealing at the
time when the dream intervened. For some time Dora herself had been
raising a number of questions about the connection between some of
her actions and the motives which presumably underlay them. One of
these questions was: ‘Why did I say nothing about the scene
by the lake for some days after it had happened?’ Her second
question was: ‘Why did I then suddenly tell my parents about
it?’ Moreover, her having felt so deeply injured by Herr
K.’s proposal seemed to me in general to need explanation,
especially as I was beginning to realize that Herr K. himself had
not regarded his proposal to Dora as a mere frivolous attempt at
seduction. I looked upon her having told her parents of the episode
as an action which she had taken when she was already under the
influence of a morbid craving for revenge. A normal girl, I am
inclined to think, will deal with a situation of this kind by
herself.

   I shall present the material
produced during the analysis of this dream in the somewhat
haphazard order in which it recurs to my mind.

   She was wandering about alone
in a strange town and saw streets and squares
. Dora assured me
that it was certainly not B--, which I had first hit upon, but a
town in which she had never been. It was natural to suggest that
she might have seen some pictures or photographs and have taken the
dream-pictures from them. After this remark of mine came the
addendum about the monument in one of the squares and immediately
afterwards her recognition of its source. At Christmas she had been
sent an album from a German health-resort, containing views of the
town; and the very day before the dream she had looked this out to
show it to some relatives who were stopping with them. It had been
put in a box for keeping pictures in, and she could not lay her
hands on it at once. She had therefore said to her mother:
‘
Where is the box?
.’¹ One of the pictures
was of a square with a monument in it. The present had been sent to
her by a young engineer, with whom she had once had a passing
acquaintance in the manufacturing town. The young man had accepted
a post in Germany, so as to become sooner self-supporting; and he
took every opportunity of reminding Dora of his existence. It was
easy to guess that he intended to come forward as a suitor one day,
when his position had improved. But that would take time, and it
meant waiting.

  
¹
In the dream she said: ‘
Where is
the station?
’ The resemblance between the two questions
led me to make an inference which I shall go into
presently.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1432

   The wandering about in a strange
town was overdetermined. It led back to one of the exciting causes
from the day before. A young cousin of Dora’s had come to
stay with them for the holidays, and Dora had had to show him round
Vienna. This cause was, it is true, a matter of complete
indifference to her. But her cousin’s visit reminded her of
her own first brief visit to Dresden. On that occasion she had been
a stranger and had wandered about, not failing, of course, to visit
the famous picture gallery. Another cousin of hers, who was with
them and knew Dresden, had wanted to act as a guide and take her
round the gallery.
But she declined and went alone
, and
stopped in front of the pictures that appealed to her. She remained
two hours
in front of the Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent
admiration. When I asked her what had pleased her so much about the
picture she could find no clear answer to make. At last she said:
‘The Madonna.’

   There could be no doubt that
these associations really belonged to the material concerned in
forming the dream. They included portions which reappeared in the
dream unchanged (‘she declined and went alone’ and
‘two hours’). I may remark at once
that ‘pictures’ was a nodal point in the network
of her dream-thoughts (the pictures in the album, the pictures at
Dresden). I should also like to single out, with a view to
subsequent investigation, the theme of the ‘Madonna’,
of the virgin mother. But what was most evident was that in this
first part of the dream she was identifying herself with a young
man. This young man was wandering about in a strange place, he was
striving to reach a goal, but he was being kept back, he needed
patience and must wait. If in all this she had been thinking of the
engineer, it would have been appropriate for the goal to have been
the possession of a woman, of herself. But instead of this it was -
a station. Nevertheless, the relation of the question in the dream
to the question which had been put in real life allows us to
substitute ‘
box
’ for ‘station’. A
box and a woman: the notions begin to agree better.

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1433

  
She asked quite a hundred
times. 
. . . This led to another exciting cause
of the dream, and this time to one that was less indifferent. On
the previous evening they had had company, and afterwards her
father had asked her to fetch him the brandy: he could not get to
sleep unless he had taken some brandy. She had asked her mother for
the key of the sideboard; but the latter had been deep in
conversation, and had not answered her, until Dora had exclaimed
with the exaggeration of impatience: ‘I’ve asked you
a hundred times
already where the key is.’ As a matter
of fact, she had of course only repeated the question about
five
times
.¹

   ‘Where is the
key?
’ seems to me to be the masculine counterpart to
the question ‘Where is the
box?
'² They are
therefore questions referring to - the genitals.

   Dora went on to say that during
this same family gathering some one had toasted her father and had
expressed the hope that he might continue to enjoy the best of
health for many years to come, etc. At this a strange quiver passed
over her father’s tired face, and she had understood what
thoughts he was having to keep down. Poor sick man! who could tell
what span of life was still to be his?

   This brings us to the
contents
of the letter
in the dream. Her father was dead, and she had
left home by her own choice. In connection with this letter I at
once reminded Dora of the farewell letter which she had written to
her parents or had at least composed for their benefit. This letter
had been intended to give her father a fright, so that he should
give up Frau K.; or at any rate to take revenge on him if he could
not be induced to do that. We are here concerned with the subject
of her death and of her father’s death. (Cf.
‘cemetery’ later on in the dream.) Shall we be going
astray if we suppose that the situation which formed the
façade of the dream was a phantasy of revenge directed
against her father?  The feelings of pity for him which she
remembered from the day before would be quite in keeping with this.
According to the phantasy she had left home and gone among
strangers, and her father’s heart had broken with grief and
with longing for her. Thus she would be revenged. She understood
very clearly what it was that her father needed when he could not
get to sleep without a drink of brandy.³ We will make a note
of Dora’s
craving for revenge
as a new element to be
taken into account in any subsequent synthesis of her
dream-thoughts.

  
¹
In the dream the number five occurs in the
mention of the period of ‘five minutes’. In my book on
the interpretation of dreams I have given several examples of the
way in which numbers occurring in the dream-thoughts are treated by
dreams. We frequently find them torn out of their true context and
inserted into a new one.

  
²
See the first dream,
p. 1403
.

  
³
There can be no doubt that sexual
satisfaction is the best soporific, just as sleeplessness is almost
always the consequence of lack of satisfaction. Her father could
not sleep because he was debarred from sexual intercourse with the
woman he loved. (Compare in this connection the phrase discussed
just below: ‘I get nothing out of my wife.’)

Fragment Of An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria

1434

   But the contents of the letter
must be capable of further determination. What was the source of
the words ‘if you like’? It was at this point that the
addendum of there having been a question-mark after the word
‘like’ occurred to Dora, and she then recognized these
words as a quotation out of the letter from Frau K. which had
contained the invitation to L--, the place by the lake. In that
letter there had been a question-mark placed, in a most unusual
fashion, in the very middle of a sentence, after the intercalated
words ‘if you would like to come’.

   So here we were back again at the
scene by the lake and at the problems connected with it. I asked
Dora to describe the scene to me in detail. At first she produced
little that was new. Herr K.’s exordium had been somewhat
serious; but she had not let him finish what he had to say. No
sooner had she grasped the purport of his words than she had
slapped him in the face and hurried away. I enquired what his
actual words had been. Dora could only remember one of his pleas:
‘You know I get nothing out of my wife.’¹ In order
to avoid meeting him again she had wanted to get back to L-- on
foot, by walking round the lake, and
she had asked a man whom
she met how far it was
. On his replying that it was
‘
Two and a half hours
’, she had given up her
intention and had after all gone back to the boat, which left soon
afterwards. Herr K. had been there too and had come up to her and
begged her to forgive him and not to mention the incident. But she
had made no reply. - Yes. The
wood
in the dream had been
just like the wood by the shore of the lake, the wood in which the
scene she had just described once more had taken place. But she had
seen precisely the same thick wood the day before, in a picture at
the Secessionist exhibition. In the background of the picture there
were
nymphs
.²

  
¹
These words will enable us to solve one of
our problems.

  
²
Here for the third time we come upon
‘picture’ (views of towns, the Dresden gallery), but in
a much more significant connection. Because of what appears in the
picture (the wood, the nymphs), the ‘
Bild
’
[‘picture’] is turned into a
‘
Weibsbild
’ [literally, ‘picture of a
woman’- a somewhat derogatory expression for
‘woman’].