THE AFFECTS IN DREAMS

A shrewd remark of Stricker's called our attention to the fact that the expressions of
affects in dreams cannot be disposed of in the contemptuous fashion in which we are
wont to shake off the dream-content after we have waked. `If I am afraid of robbers in my
dreams, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real'; and the same
thing is true if I rejoice in my dream. According to the testimony of our feelings, an affect
experienced in a dream is in no way inferior to one of like intensity experienced in
waking life, and the dream presses its claim to be accepted as part of our real psychic
experiences, by virtue of its affective rather than its ideational content. In the waking
state we do not put the one before the other, since we do not know how to evaluate an
affect psychically except in connection with an ideational content. If an affect and an idea
are ill-matched as regards their nature or their intensity, our waking judgment becomes
confused.
The fact that in dreams the ideational content does not always produce the affective result
which in our waking thoughts we should expect as its necessary consequence has always
been a cause of astonishment. Strümpell declared that ideas in dreams are stripped of
their psychic values. But there is no lack of instances in which the reverse is true; when
an intensive manifestation of affect appears in a content which seems to offer no occasion
for it. In my dream I may be in a horrible, dangerous, or disgusting situation, and yet I
may feel no fear or aversion; on the other hand, I am sometimes terrified by harmless
things, and sometimes delighted by childish things.
This enigma disappears more suddenly and more completely than perhaps any other
dream-problem if we pass from the manifest to the latent content. We shall then no longer
have to explain it, for it will no longer exist. Analysis tells us that the ideational contents
have undergone displacements and substitutions, while the affects have remained
unchanged. No wonder, then, that the ideational content which has been altered by
dream-distortion no longer fits the affect which has remained intact; and no cause for
wonder when analysis has put the correct content into its original place.1
In a psychic complex which has been subjected to the influence of the resisting
censorship, the affects are the unyielding constituent, which alone can guide us to the
correct completion. This state of affairs is revealed in the psychoneuroses even more
distinctly than in dreams. Here the affect is always in the right, at least as regards its
quality; its intensity may, of course, be increased by displacement of the neurotic
attention. When the hysterical patient wonders that he should be so afraid of a trifle, or
when the sufferer from obsessions is astonished that he should reproach himself so
bitterly for a mere nothing, they are both in error, inasmuch as they regard the conceptual
content -- the trifle, the mere nothing -- as the essential thing, and they defend themselves
in vain, because they make this conceptual content the starting-point of their thoughtwork.
Psychoanalysis, however, puts them on the right path, inasmuch as it recognises
that, on the contrary, it is the affect that is justified, and looks for the concept which
pertains to it, and which has been repressed by a substitution. All that we need assume is
that the liberation of affect and the conceptual content do not constitute the indissoluble
organic unity as which we are wont to regard them, but that the two parts may be welded
together, so that analysis will separate them. Dream-interpretation shows that this is
actually the case.
I will first of all give an example in which analysis explains the apparent absence of
affect in a conceptual content which ought to compel a liberation of affect.
Dream 1. The dreamer sees three lions in a desert, one of which is laughing, but she is
not afraid of them. Then, however, she must have fled from them, for she is trying to
climb a tree. But she finds that her cousin, the French teacher, is already up in the tree,
etc.
The analysis yields the following material: The indifferent occasion of dream was a
sentence in the dreamer's English exercise: `The lion's greatest adornment is his mane.'
Her father used to wear a beard which encircled his face like a mane. The name of her
English teacher is Miss Lyons. An acquaintance of hers had sent her the ballads of Loewe
(Loewe = lion). These, then, are the three lions; why should she be afraid of them? She
has read a story in which a negro who has incited his fellows to revolt is hunted with
bloodhounds, and climbs a tree to save himself. Then follow fragmentary recollections in
the merriest mood, such as the following directions for catching lions (from Die
Fliegende Blätter): `Take a desert and put it through a sieve; the lions will be left behind.'
Also a very amusing, but not very proper anecdote about an official who is asked why he
does not take greater pains to win the favour of his chief, and who replies that he has
been trying to creep into favour, but that his immediate superior was already up there.
The whole matter becomes intelligible as soon as one learns that on the dream-day the
lady had received a visit from her husband's superior. He was very polite to her, and
kissed her hand, and she was not at all afraid of him, although he is a `big bug' (Grosses
Tier = big animal) and plays the part of a `social lion' in the capital of her country. This
lion is, therefore, like the lion in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who is unmasked as Snug
the joiner; and of such stuff are all the dream-lions of which one is not afraid.
Dream 2. As my second example, I will cite the dream of the girl who saw her sister's
little son lying as a corpse in his coffin, but who, it may be added, was conscious of no
pain or sorrow. Why she was unmoved we know from the analysis. The dream only
disguised her wish to see once more the man she loved; the affect had to be attuned to the
wish, and not to its disguisement. There was thus no occasion for sorrow.
In a number of dreams the affect does at least remain connected with the conceptual
content which has replaced the content really belonging to it. In others, the dissolution of
the complex is carried farther. The affect is entirely separated from the idea belonging to
it, and finds itself accommodated elsewhere in the dream, where it fits into the new
arrangement of the dream-elements. We have seen that the same thing happens to acts of
judgment in dreams. If an important inference occurs in the dream-thoughts, there is one
in the dream also; but the inference in the dream may be displaced to entirely different
material. Not infrequently this displacement is effected in accordance with the principal
of antithesis.
I will illustrate the latter possibility by the following dream, which I have subjected to the
most exhaustive analysis.
Dream 3. A castle by the sea; afterwards it lies not directly on the coast, but on a narrow
canal leading to the sea. A certain Herr P. is the governor of the castle. I stand with him
in a large salon with three windows, in front of which rise the projections of a wall, like
battlements of a fortress. I belong to the garrison, perhaps as a volunteer naval officer.
We fear the arrival of enemy warships, for we are in a state of war. Herr P. intends to
leave the castle; he gives me instructions as to what must be done if what we fear should
come to pass. His sick wife and his children are in the threatened castle. As soon as the
bombardment begins, the large hall is to be cleared. He breathes heavily, and tries to get
away; I detain him, and ask him how I am to send him news in case of need. He says
something further, and immediately afterwards he sinks to the floor dead. I have
probably taxed him unnecessarily with my questions. After his death, which makes no
further impression upon me, I consider whether the widow is to remain in the castle,
whether I should give notice of the death to the higher command, whether I should take
over the control of the castle as the next in command. I now stand at the window, and
scrutinise the ships as they pass by; they are cargo steamers, and they rush by over the
dark water; several with more than one funnel, others with bulging decks (these are very
like the railway stations in the preliminary dream, which has not been related). Then my
brother is standing beside me, and we both look out of the window on to the canal. At the
sight of one ship we are alarmed, and call out: `Here comes the warship!' It turns out,
however, that they are only the ships which I have already seen, returning. Now comes a
small ship, comically truncated, so that it ends amidships; on the deck one sees curious
things like cups or little boxes. We call out as with one voice: `That is the breakfast ship.'
The rapid motion of the ships, the deep blue of the water, the brown smoke of the funnels
-- all these together produce an intense and gloomy impression.
The localities in this dream are compiled from several journeys to the Adriatic
(Miramare, Duino, Venice, Aquileia). A short but enjoyable Easter trip to Aquileia with
my brother, a few weeks before the dream, was still fresh in my memory; also the naval
war between America and Spain, and associated with this my anxiety as to the fate of my
relatives in America, play a part in the dream. Manifestations of affect appear at two
places in this dream. In one place an affect that would be expected is lacking: it is
expressly emphasised that the death of the governor makes no impression upon me; at
another point, when I see the warships, I am frightened, and experience all the sensations
of fright in my sleep. The distribution of affects in this well-constructed dream has been
effected in such a way that any obvious contradiction is avoided. For there is no reason
why I should be frightened at the governor's death, and it is fitting that, as the commander
of the castle, I should be alarmed by the sight of the warship. Now analysis shows that
Herr P. is nothing but a substitute for my own ego (in the dream I am his substitute). I am
the governor who suddenly dies. The dream-thoughts deal with the future of my family
after my premature death. No other disagreeable thought is to be found among the dream
thoughts. The alarm which goes with the sight of the warship must be transferred from it
to this disagreeable thought. Inversely, the analysis shows that the region of the dream
thoughts from which the warship comes is laden with most cheerful reminiscences. In
Venice, a year before the dream, one magically beautiful day, we stood at the windows of
our room on the Riva Schiavoni and looked out over the blue lagoon, on which there was
more traffic to be seen than usual. Some English ships were expected; they were to be
given a festive reception; and suddenly my wife cried, happy as a child: `Here comes the
English warship!' In the dream I am frightened by the very same words; once more we
see that speeches in dreams have their origin in speeches in real life. I shall presently
show that even the element `English' in this speech has not been lost for the dream-work.
Here, then, between the dream-thoughts and the dream-content, I turn joy into fright, and
I need only point to the fact that by means of this transformation I give expression to part
of the latent dream-content. The example shows, however, that the dream-work is at
liberty to detach the occasion of an affect from its connections in the dream-thoughts, and
to insert it at any other place it chooses in the dream-content.
I will take the opportunity which is here incidentally offered of subjecting to a closer
analysis the `breakfast ship', whose appearance in the dream so absurdly concludes a
situation that has been rationally adhered to. If I look more closely at this dream-object, I
am impressed after the event by the fact that it was black, and that by reason of its
truncation at its widest beam it achieved, at the truncated end, a considerable resemblance
to an object which had aroused our interest in the museums of the Etruscan cities. This
object was a rectangular cup of black clay, with two handles, upon which stood things
like coffee-cups or tea-cups, very similar to our modern service for the breakfast table.
Upon inquiry we learned that this was the toilet set of an Etruscan lady, with little boxes
for rouge and powder; and we told one another jestingly that it would not be a bad idea to
take a thing like that home to the lady of the house. The dream-object, therefore, signifies
a `black toilet' (toilette = dress), or mourning, and refers directly to a death. The other end
of the dream-object reminds us of the `boat' (German, Nachen, from the Greek root,
vexus, as a philological friend informs me), upon which corpses were laid in prehistoric
times, and were left to be buried by the sea. This is associated with the return of the ships
in the dream.
`Silently on his rescued boat the old man drifts into harbour.'
It is the return voyage after the shipwreck (German: Schiff-bruck = ship-breaking); the
breakfast ship looks as though it were broken off amidships. But whence comes the name
`breakfast' ship? This is where `English' comes in, which we have left over from the
warships. Breakfast, a breaking of the fast. Breaking again belongs to shipwreck (Schiffbruch),
and fasting is associated with the black (mourning).
But the only thing about this breakfast ship which has been newly created by the dream is
its name. The thing existed in reality, and recalls to me one of the merriest moments of
my last journey. As we distrusted the fare in Aquileia, we took some food with us from
Goerz, and bought a bottle of the excellent Istrian wine in Aquileia; and while the little
mail-steamer slowly travelled through the canale delle Mee and into the lonely expanse
of lagoon in the direction of Grado, we had breakfast on deck in the highest spirits -- we
were the only passengers -- and it tasted to us as few breakfasts have ever tasted. This,
then, was the `breakfast ship', and it is behind this very recollection of the gayest joie de
vivre that the dream hides the saddest thoughts of an unknown and mysterious future.
The detachment of affects from the groups of ideas which have occasioned their
liberation is the most striking thing that happens to them in dream-formation, but it is
neither the only nor even the most essential change which they undergo on the way from
the dream-thoughts to the manifest dream. If the affects in the dream-thoughts are
compared with those in the dream, one thing at once becomes clear. Wherever there is an
affect in the dream, it is to be found also in the dream-thoughts; the converse, however, is
not true. In general, a dream is less rich in affects than the psychic material from which it
is elaborated. When I have reconstructed the dream-thoughts, I see that the most intense
psychic impulses are constantly striving in them for self-assertion, usually in conflict
with others which are sharply opposed to them. Now, if I turn back to the dream, I often
find it colourless and devoid of any very intensive affective tone. Not only the content,
but also the affective tone of my thoughts is often reduced by the dream-work to the level
of the indifferent. I might say that a suppression of the affects has been accomplished by
the dream-work. Take, for example, the dream of the botanical monograph. It
corresponds to a passionate plea for my freedom to act as I am acting, to arrange my life
as seems right to me, and to me alone. The dream which results from this sounds
indifferent; I have written a monograph; it is lying before me; it is provided with coloured
plates, and dried plants are to be found in each copy. It is like the peace of a deserted
battlefield; no trace is left of the tumult of battle.
But things may turn out quite differently; vivid expressions of affect may enter into the
dream itself; but we will first of all consider the unquestioned fact that so many dreams
appear indifferent, whereas it is never possible to go deeply into the dream-thoughts
without deep emotion.
The complete theoretical explanation of this suppression of affects during the dreamwork
cannot be given here; it would require a most careful investigation of the theory of
the affects and of the mechanism of repression. Here I can put forward only two
suggestions. I am forced -- for other reasons -- to conceive the liberation of affects as a
centrifugal process directed towards the interior of the body, analogous to the processes
of motor and secretory innervation. Just as in the sleeping state the emission of motor
impulses towards the outer world seems to be suspended, so the centrifugal awakening of
affects by unconscious thinking during sleep may be rendered more difficult. The
affective impulses which occur during the course of the dream-thoughts may thus in
themselves be feeble, so that those that find their way into the dream are no stronger.
According to this line of thought, the `suppression of the affects' would not be a
consequence of the dream-work at all, but a consequence of the state of sleep. This may
be so, but it cannot possibly be all the truth. We must remember that all the more
complex dreams have revealed themselves as the result of a compromise between
conflicting psychic forces. On the one hand, the wish-forming thoughts have to oppose
the contradiction of a censorship; on the other hand, as we have often seen, even in
unconscious thinking, every train of thought is harnessed to its contradictory counterpart.
Since all these trains of thought are capable of arousing affects, we shall, broadly
speaking, hardly go astray if we conceive the suppression of affects as the result of the
inhibition which the contrasts impose upon one another, and the censorship upon the
urges which it has suppressed. The inhibition of affects would accordingly be the second
consequence of the dream-censorship, just as dream-distortion was the first consequence.
I will here insert an example of a dream in which the indifferent emotional tone of the
dream-content may be explained by the antagonism of the dream-thoughts. I must relate
the following short dream, which every reader will read with disgust.
Dream 4. Rising ground, and on it something like an open-air latrine; a very long bench,
at the end of which is a wide aperture. The whole of the back edge is thickly covered with
little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A thicket behind the bench.
I urinate upon the bench, a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of
excrement come off easily and fall into the opening. Nevertheless, it seems as though
something remained at the end.
Why did I experience no disgust in this dream?
Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and gratifying thoughts have cooperated
in the formation of this dream. Upon analysing it, I immediately think of the
Augean stables which were cleansed by Hercules. I am this Hercules. The rising ground
and the thicket belong to Aussee, where my children are now staying I have discovered
the infantile etiology of the neuroses, and have thus guarded my own children from
falling ill. The bench (omitting the aperture, of course) is the faithful copy of a piece of
furniture of which an affectionate female patient has made me a present. This reminds me
how my patients honour me. Even the museum of human excrement is susceptible of a
gratifying interpretation. However much it disgusts me, it is a souvenir of the beautiful
land of Italy, where in the small cities, as everyone knows, the privies are not equipped in
any other way. The stream of urine that washes everything clean is an unmistakable
allusion to greatness. It is in this manner that Gulliver extinguishes the great fire in
Lilliput; to be sure, he thereby incurs the displeasure of the tiniest of queens. In this way,
too, Gargantua. the superman of Master Rabelais, takes vengeance upon the Parisians,
straddling Notre-Dame and training his stream of urine upon the city. Only yesterday I
was turning over the leaves of Garnier's illustrations to Rabelais before I went to bed.
And, strangely enough, here is another proof that I am the superman! The platform of
Notre-Dame was my favourite nook in Paris; every free afternoon I used to go up into the
towers of the cathedral and there clamber about between the monsters and gargoyles. The
circumstance that all the excrement vanishes so rapidly before the stream of urine
corresponds to the motto: Afflavit et dissipati sunt, which I shall some day make the title
of a chapter on the therapeutics of hysteria.
And now as to the affective occasion of the dream. It had been a hot summer afternoon;
in the evening, I had given my lecture on the connection between hysteria and the
perversions, and everything which I had to say displeased me thoroughly, and seemed
utterly valueless. I was tired; I took not the least pleasure in my difficult work, and
longed to get away from this rummaging in human filth; first to see my children, and then
to revisit the beauties of Italy. In this mood I went from the lecture-hall to a café to get
some little refreshment in the open air, for my appetite had forsaken me. But a member of
my audience went with me; he begged for permission to sit with me while I drank my
coffee and gulped down my roll, and began to say flattering things to me. He told me
how much he had learned from me, that he now saw everything through different eyes,
that I had cleansed the Augean stables of error and prejudice, which encumbered the
theory of the neuroses -- in short, that I was a very great man. My mood was ill-suited to
his hymn of praise; I struggled with my disgust, and went home earlier in order to get rid
of him; and before I went to sleep I turned over the leaves of Rabelais, and read a short
story by C. F. Meyer entitled Die Leiden eines Knaben (The Sorrows of a Boy).
The dream had originated from this material, and Meyer's novel had supplied the
recollections of scenes of childhood.2
The day's mood of annoyance and disgust is continued in the dream, inasmuch as it is
permitted to furnish nearly all the material for the dream-content. But during the night the
opposite mood of vigorous, even immoderate self-assertion awakened and dissipated the
earlier mood. The dream had to assume such a form as would accommodate both the
expressions of self-depreciation and exaggerated self-glorification in the same material.
This compromise-formation resulted in an ambiguous dream-content, but, owing to the
mutual inhibition of the opposites, in an indifferent emotional tone.
According to the theory of wish-fulfilment, this dream would not have been possible had
not the opposed, and indeed suppressed, yet pleasure-emphasised megalomaniac train of
thought been added to the thoughts of disgust. For nothing painful is intended to be
represented in dreams; the painful elements of our daily thoughts are able to force their
way into our dreams only if at the same time they are able to disguise a wish-fulfilment.
The dream-work is able to dispose of the affects of the dream-thoughts in yet another
way than by admitting them or reducing them to zero. It can transform them into their
opposites. We are acquainted with the rule that for the purposes of interpretation every
element of the dream may represent its opposite, as well as itself. One can never tell
beforehand which is to be posited; only the context can decide this point. A suspicion of
this state of affairs has evidently found its way into the popular consciousness; the dreambooks,
in their interpretations, often proceed according to the principle of contraries. This
transformation into the contrary is made possible by the intimate associative ties which in
our thoughts connect the idea of a thing with that of its opposite. Like every other
displacement, this serves the purposes of the censorship, but it is often the work of wishfulfilment,
for wish-fulfilment consists in nothing more than the substitution of an
unwelcome thing by its opposite. Just as concrete images may be transformed into their
contraries in our dreams, so also may the affects of the dream-thoughts, and it is probable
that this inversion of affects is usually brought about by the dream-censorship. The
suppression and inversion of affects is useful even in social life, as is shown by the
familiar analogy of the dream-censorship and, above all, hypocrisy. If I am conversing
with a person to whom I must show consideration while I should like to address him as
an enemy, it is almost more important that I should conceal the expression of my affect
from him than that I should modify the verbal expression of my thoughts. If I address him
in courteous terms, but accompany them by looks or gestures of hatred and disdain, the
effect which I produce upon him is not very different from what it would have been had I
cast my unmitigated contempt into his face. Above all, then, the censorship bids me
suppress my affects, and if I am a master of the art of dissimulation I can hypocritically
display the opposite affect -- smiling where I should like to be angry, and pretending
affection where I should like to destroy.
We have already had an excellent example of such an inversion of affect in the service of
the dream-censorship. In the dream `of my uncle's beard' I feel great affection for my
friend R. while (and because) the dream-thoughts berate him as a simpleton. From this
example of the inversion of affects we derived our first proof of the existence of the
censorship. Even here it is not necessary to assume that the dream-work creates a
counter-affect of this kind that is altogether new; it usually finds it lying ready in the
material of the dream-thoughts, and merely intensifies it with the psychic force of the
defence-motives until it is able to predominate in the dream-formation. In the dream of
my uncle, the affectionate counter-affect probably has its origin in an infantile source (as
the continuation of the dream would suggest), for owing to the peculiar nature of my
earliest childhood experiences the relation of uncle and nephew has become the source of
all my friendships and hatred (cf. analysis on p. 279).
An excellent example of such a reversal of affect is found in a dream recorded by
Ferenczi.3
An elderly gentleman was awakened at night by his wife, who was frightened because he
laughed so loudly and uncontrollably in his sleep. The man afterwards related that he had
had the following dream: I lay in my bed, a gentleman known to me came in, I wanted to
turn on the light, but I could not; I attempted to do so repeatedly, but in vain. Thereupon
my wife got out of bed, in order to help me, but she, too, was unable to manage it; being
ashamed of her néligé in the presence of the gentleman, she finally gave it up and went
back to her bed; all this was so comical that I had to laugh terribly. My wife said: `What
are you laughing at, what are you laughing at?' but I continued to laugh until I woke.
The following day the man was extremely depressed, and suffered from headache: `From
too much laughter, which shook me up,' he thought.
Analytically considered, the dream looks less comical. In the latent dream-thoughts the
`gentleman known' to him who came into the room is the image of death as the `great
unknown', which was awakened in his mind on the previous day. The old gentleman, who
suffers from arteriosclerosis, had good reason to think of death on the day before the
dream. The uncontrollable laughter takes the place of weeping and sobbing at the idea
that he has to die. It is the light of life that he is no longer able to turn on. This mournful
thought may have associated itself with a failure to effect sexual intercourse, which he
had attempted shortly before this, and in which the assistance of his wife en négligé was
of no avail; he realised that he was already on the decline. The dream-work knew how to
transform the sad idea of impotence and death into a comic scene, and the sobbing into
laughter.
There is one class of dreams which has a special claim to be called `hypocritical', and
which severely tests the theory of wishfulfilment. My attention was called to them when
Frau Dr M. Hilferding proposed for discussion by the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna a
dream recorded by Rosegger, which is here reprinted:
In Waldheimat, vol. xi, Rosegger writes as follows in his story, Fremd gemacht (p. 303):
I usually enjoy healthful sleep, yet I have gone without repose on many a night; in
addition to my modest existence as a student and literary man, I have for long years
dragged out the shadow of a veritable tailor's life -- like a ghost from which I could not
become divorced.
It is not true that I have occupied myself very often or very intensely with thoughts of my
past during the day. A stormer of heaven and earth who has escaped from the hide of the
Philistine has other things to think about. And as a gay young fellow, I hardly gave a
thought to my nocturnal dreams; only later, when I had formed the habit of thinking
about everything, or when the Philistine within me began to assert itself a little, did it
strike me that -- when I dreamed at all -- I was always a journeyman tailor, and that in
that capacity I had already worked in my master's shop for a long time without any pay.
As I sat there beside him, and sewed and pressed, I was perfectly well aware that I no
longer belonged there, and that as a burgess of the town I had other things to attend to;
but I was always on a holiday, or away in the country, and so I sat beside my master and
helped him. I often felt far from comfortable about it, and regretted the waste of time
which I might have employed for better and more useful purposes. If anything was not
quite correct in measure and cut I had to put up with a scolding from my master. Of
wages there was never a question. Often, as I sat with bent back in the dark workshop, I
decided to give notice and make myself scarce. Once I actually did so, but the master
took no notice of me, and next time I was sitting beside him again and sewing.
How happy I was when I woke up after such weary hours! And I then resolved that, if
this intrusive dream should ever occur again, I would energetically throw it off, and
would cry aloud: `It is only a delusion, I am lying in bed, and I want to sleep' . . . And the
next night I would be sitting in the tailor's shop again.
So it went on for years, with dismal regularity. Once, when the master and I were
working at Alpelhofer's, at the house of the peasant with whom I began my
apprenticeship, it happened that my master was particularly dissatisfied with my work. `I
should like to know where in the world your thoughts are?' he cried, and looked at me
sullenly. I thought the most sensible thing to do would be to get up and explain to the
master that I was working with him only as a favour, and then take my leave. But I did
not do this. I even submitted when the master engaged an apprentice, and ordered me to
make room for him on the bench. I moved into the corner, and kept on sewing. On the
same day another journeyman was engaged; a bigoted fellow; he was the Bohemian who
had worked for us nineteen years earlier, and then had fallen into the lake on his way
home from the public-house. When he tried to sit down there was no room for him. I
looked at the master inquiringly, and he said to me: `You have no talent for tailoring; you
may go; you're a stranger henceforth.' My fright on that occasion was so overpowering
that I woke.
The grey of morning glimmered through the clear windows of my familiar home. Objects
d'art surrounded me; in the tasteful bookcase stood the eternal Homer, the gigantic
Dante, the incomparable Shakespeare, the glorious Goethe -- all radiant and immortal.
From the adjoining room resounded the clear little voices of the children, who were
waking up prattling to their mother. I felt as though I had rediscovered that idyllically
sweet, peaceful, poetical and spiritualised life in which I have so often and so deeply
been conscious of contemplative human happiness. And yet I was vexed that I had not
given my master notice first, but had been dismissed by him.
And how remarkable this seems to me: since that night, when my master `made a
stranger' of me, I have enjoyed restful sleep; I no longer dream of my tailoring days,
which now lie in the remote past; which in their unpretentious simplicity were really so
cheerful, but which, none the less, have cast a long shadow over the later years of my life.
In this series of dreams of a poet who, in his younger years, had been a journeyman tailor,
it is hard to recognise the domination of the wish-fulfilment. All the delightful things
occurred in his waking life, while the dream seemed to drag along with it the ghost-like
shadow of an unhappy existence which had long been forgotten. Dreams of my own of a
similar character enable me to give some explanation of such dreams. As a young doctor,
I worked for a long time in the Chemical Institute without being able to accomplish
anything in that exacting science, so that in the waking state I never think about this
unfruitful and actually somewhat humiliating period of my student days. On the other
hand, I have a recurring dream to the effect that I am working in the laboratory, making
analyses, and experiments, and so forth: these dreams, like the examination-dreams, are
disagreeable, and they are never very distinct. During the analysis of one of these dreams
my attention was directed to the word `analysis' which gave me the key to an
understanding of them. since then I have become an `analyst'. I make analyses which are
greatly praised -- psychoanalyses, of course. Now I understand: when I feel proud of
these analyses in my waking life, and feel inclined to boast of my achievements, my
dreams hold up to me at night those other, unsuccessful analyses, of which I have no
reason to be proud; they are the punitive dreams of the upstart, like those of the
journeyman tailor who became a celebrated poet. But how is it possible for a dream to
place itself at the service of self-criticism in its conflict with parvenu pride, and to take as
its content a rational warning instead of a prohibited wish-fulfilment? I have already
hinted that the answer to this question presents many difficulties. We may conclude that
the foundation of the dream consisted at first of an arrogant fantasy of ambition; but that
in its stead only its suppression and abasement has reached the dream-content. One must
remember that there are masochistic tendencies in mental life to which such an inversion
might be attributed. I see no objection to regarding such dreams as punishment-dreams,
as distinguished from wish-fulfilling dreams. I should not see in this any limitation of the
theory of dreams hitherto as presented, but merely a verbal concession to the point of
view to which the convergence of contraries seems strange. But a more thorough
investigation of individual dreams of this class allows us to recognise yet another
element. In an indistinct, subordinate portion of one of my laboratory dreams, I was just
at the age which placed me in the most gloomy and most unsuccessful year of my
professional' career; I still had no position, and no idea how I was going to support
myself, when I suddenly found that I had the choice of several women whom I might
marry! I was, therefore, young again and, what is more, she was young again -- the
woman who has shared with me all these difficult years. In this way, one of the wishes
which constantly gnaws at the heart of the ageing man was revealed as the unconscious
dream-instigator. The conflict raging in other psychic strata between vanity and selfcriticism
had certainly determined the dream-content, but the more deeply-rooted wish
for youth had alone made it possible as a dream. One often says to oneself even in the
waking state: `To be sure, things are going well with you today, and once you found life
very hard; but, after all, life was sweet in those days, when you were still so young.'4
Another group of dreams, which I have often myself experienced, and which I have
recognised to be hypocritical, have as their content a reconciliation with persons with
whom one has long ceased to have friendly relations. The analysis constantly discovers
an occasion which might well induce me to cast aside the last remnants of consideration
for these former friends, and to treat them as strangers or enemies. But the dream chooses
to depict the contrary relation.
In considering dreams recorded by a novelist or poet, we may often enough assume that
he has excluded from the record those details which he felt to be disturbing and regarded
as unessential. His dreams thus set us a problem which could be readily solved if we had
an exact reproduction of the dream-content.
O. Rank has called my attention to the fact that in Grimm's fairy-tale of the valiant little
tailor, or Seven at one Stroke, there is related a very similar dream of an upstart. The
tailor, who has become a hero, and has married the king's daughter, dreams one night
while lying beside the princess, his wife, about his trade; having become suspicious, on
the following night she places armed guards where they can listen to what is said by the
dreamer, and arrest him. But the little tailor is warned, and is able to correct his dream.
The complicated processes of removal, diminution, and inversion by which the affects of
the dream-thoughts finally become the affects of the dream may be very well surveyed in
suitable syntheses of completely analysed dreams. I shall here discuss a few examples of
affective manifestations in dreams which will, I think, prove this conclusively in some of
the cases cited.
Dream 5. In the dream about the odd task which the elder Brücke sets me -- that of
preparing my own pelvis -- I am aware in the dream itself of not feeling appropriate
horror. Now this is a wish-fulfilment in more senses than one. The preparation signifies
the self-analyses which I perform, as it were, by publishing my book on dreams, which I
actually found so painful that I postponed the printing of the completed manuscript for
more than a year. The wish now arises that I may disregard this feeling of aversion, and
for that reason I feel no horror (Grauen, which also means `to grow grey') in the dream. I
should much like to escape `Grauen' in the other sense too, for I am already growing
quite grey, and the grey in my hair warns me to delay no longer For we know that at the
end of the dream this thought secures representation: `I shall have to leave my children to
reach the goal of their difficult journey without my help.'
In the two dreams that transfer the expression of satisfaction to the moments immediately
after waking, this satisfaction is in the one case motivated by the expectation that I am
now going to learn what is meant by `I have already dreamed of this', and refers in reality
to the birth of my first child, and in the other case it is motivated by the conviction that
`that which has been announced by a premonitory sign' is now going to happen, and the
satisfaction is that which I felt on the arrival of my second son. Here the same affects that
dominated in the dream-thoughts have remained in the dream, but the process is probably
not quite so simple as this in any dream. If the two analyses are examined a little more
closely it will be seen that this satisfaction, which does not succumb to the censorship,
receives reinforcement from a source which must fear the censorship and whose affect
would certainly have aroused opposition if it had not screened itself by a similar and
readily admitted affect of satisfaction from the permitted source, and had, so to speak,
sneaked in behind it. I am unfortunately unable to show this in the case of the actual
dream, but an example from another situation will make my meaning intelligible. I will
put the following case: Let there be a person near me whom I hate so strongly that I have
a lively impulse to rejoice should anything happen to him. But the moral side of my
nature does not give way to this impulse; I do not dare to express this sinister wish, and
when something does happen to him which he does not deserve I suppress my
satisfaction, and force myself to thoughts and expressions of regret. Everyone will at
some time have found himself in such a position. But now let it happen that the hated
person, through some transgression of his own, draws upon himself a well-deserved
calamity; I shall now be allowed to give free rein to my satisfaction at his being visited
by a just punishment, and I shall be expressing an opinion which coincides with that of
other impartial persons. But I observe that my satisfaction proves to be more intense than
that of others, for it has received reinforcement from another source -- from my hatred,
which was hitherto prevented by the inner censorship from furnishing the affect, but
which, under the altered circumstances, is no longer prevented from doing so. This case
generally occurs in social life when antipathetic persons or the adherents of an unpopular
minority have been guilty of some offence. Their punishment is then usually
commensurate not with the guilt, but with their guilt plus the ill-will against them that has
hitherto not been put into effect. Those who punish them doubtless commit an injustice,
but they are prevented from becoming aware of it by the satisfaction arising from the
release within themselves of a suppression of long standing. In such cases the quality of
the affect is justified, but not its degree; and the selfcriticism that has been appeased in
respect of the first point is only too ready to neglect to scrutinise the second point. Once
you have opened the doors more people enter than it was your original intention to admit.
A striking feature of the neurotic character, namely, that in it causes capable of evoking
affect produce results which are qualitatively justified but quantitatively excessive, is to
be explained on these lines, in so far as it admits of a psychological explanation at all.
But the excess of affect proceeds from unconscious and hitherto suppressed affective
sources which are able to establish an associative connection with the actual occasion,
and for whose liberation of affect the unprotested and permitted source of affects opens
up the desired path. Our attention is thus called to the fact that the relation of mutual
inhibition must not be regarded as the only relation obtaining between the suppressed and
the suppressing psychic institution. The cases in which the two institution bring about a
pathological result by co-operation and mutual reinforcement deserve just as much
attention. These hints regarding the psychic mechanism will contribute to our
understanding of the expressions of affects in dreams. A gratification which makes its
appearance in a dream, and which, of course, may readily be found in its proper place in
the dream-thoughts, may not always be fully explained by means of this reference. As a
rule, it is necessary to search for a second source in the dream-thoughts, upon which the
pressure of the censorship rests, and which, under this pressure, would have yielded not
gratification but the contrary affect, had it not been enabled by the presence of the first
dream-source to free its gratification-affect from repression, and reinforce the
gratification springing from the other source. Hence affects which appear in dreams
appear to be formed by the confluence of several tributaries, and are over-determined in
respect of the material of the dream-thoughts. Sources of affect which are able to furnish
the same affect combine in the dream-work in order to produce it.5
Some insight into these involved relations is gained from the analysis of the admirable
dream in which `non vixit' constitutes the central point (cf. p. 277). In this dream
expressions of affect of different qualities are concentrated at two points in the manifest
content. Hostile and painful impulses (in the dream itself we have the phrase `overcome
by strange emotions') overlap one another at the point where I destroy my antagonistic
friend with a couple of words. At the end of the dream I am greatly pleased, and am quite
ready to believe in a possibility which I recognise as absurd when I am awake, namely,
that there are revenants who can be swept away by a mere wish.
I have not yet mentioned the occasion of this dream. It is an important one, and leads us
far down into the meaning of the dream. From my friend in Berlin (whom I have
designed as Fl.) I had received the news that he was about to undergo an operation, and
that relatives of his living in Vienna would inform me as to his condition. The first few
messages after the operation were not very reassuring, and caused me great anxiety. I
should have liked to go to him myself, but at that time I was afflicted with a painful
complaint which made every movement a torment. I now learn from the dream-thoughts
that I feared for this dear friend's life. I knew that his only sister, with whom I had never
been acquainted, had died young, after a very brief illness. (In the dream Fl. tells me
about his sister, and says: `In three-quarters of an hour she was dead.') I must have
imagined that his own constitution was not much stronger, and that I should soon be
travelling, in spite of my health, in response to far worse news -- and that I should arrive
too late, for which I should eternally reproach myself.6 This reproach, that I should arrive
too late, has become the central point of the dream, but it has been represented in a scene
in which the revered teacher of my student years -- Brücke -- reproaches me for the same
thing with a terrible look from his blue eyes. What brought about this alteration of the
scene will soon become apparent: the dream cannot reproduce the scene itself as I
experienced it. To be sure, it leaves the blue eyes to the other man, but it gives me the
part of the annihilator, an inversion which is obviously the work of the wish-fulfilment.
My concern for the life of my friend, my self-reproach for not having gone to him, my
shame (he had come to me in Vienna unobtrusively), my desire to consider myself
excused on account of my illness -- all this builds up an emotional tempest which is
distinctly felt in my sleep, and which rages in that region of the dream-thoughts.
But there was another thing in the occasion of the dream which had quite the opposite
effect. With the unfavourable news during the first days of the operation I received also
an injunction to speak to no one about the whole affair, which hurt my feelings, for it
betrayed an unnecessary distrust of my discretion. I know, of course, that this request did
not proceed from my friend, but that it was due to clumsiness or excessive timidity on the
part of the messenger; yet the concealed reproach affected me very disagreeably, because
it was not altogether unjustified. As we know, only reproaches which `have something in
them' have the power to hurt. Years ago, when I was younger than I am now, I knew two
men who were friends, and who honoured me with their friendship; and I quite
superfluously told one of them what the other had said of him. This incident, of course,
had nothing to do with the affairs of my friend Fl., but I have never forgotten the
reproaches to which I had to listen on that occasion. One of the two friends between
whom I made trouble was Professor Fleischl; the other one I will call by his baptismal
name, Josef, a name which was borne also by my friend and antagonist P., who appears
in this dream.
In the dream the element unobtrusively points to the reproach that I cannot keep anything
to myself, and so does the question of Fl. as to how much of his affairs I have told P. But
it is the intervention of that old memory which transposes the reproach for arriving too
late from the present to the time when I was working in Brücke's laboratory; and by
replacing the second person in the annihilation scene of the dream by a Josef, I enable
this scene to represent not only the first reproach -- that I have arrived too late -- but also
that other reproach, more strongly affected by the repression, to the effect that I do not
keep secrets. The work of condensation and displacement in this dream, as well as the
motives for it, are now obvious.
My present trivial annoyance at the injunction not to divulge secrets draws reinforcement
from springs that flow far beneath the surface, and so swells to a stream of hostile
impulses towards persons who are in reality dear to me. The source which furnishes the
reinforcement is to be found in my childhood. I have already said that my warm
friendships as well as my enmities with persons of my own age go back to my childish
relations to my nephew, who was a year older than I. In these he had the upper hand, and
I early learned how to defend myself; we lived together, were inseparable, and loved one
another, but at times, as the statements of older persons testify, we used to squabble and
accuse one another. In a certain sense, all my friends are incarnations of this first figure;
they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned when a young man, and then we
were like Caesar and Brutus. An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been
indispensable to my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not
infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy have
coincided in the same person; but not simultaneously, of course, nor in constant
alternation, as was the case in my early childhood.
How, when such associations exist, a recent occasion of emotion may cast back to the
infantile occasion and substitute this as a cause of affect, I shall not consider now. Such
an investigation would properly belong to the psychology of unconscious thought, or a
psychological explanation of the neuroses. Let us assume, for the purposes of dream interpretation, that a childish recollection presents itself, or is created by the fantasy with,
more or less, the following content: We two children quarrel on account of some object --
just what we shall leave undecided, although the memory, or illusion of memory, has a
very definite object in view -- and each claims that he got there first, and therefore has
the first right to it. We come to blows; Might comes before Right; and, according to the
indications of the dream, I must have known that I was in the wrong (noticing the error
myself); but this time I am the stronger, and take possession of the battlefield; the
defeated combatant hurries to my father, his grandfather, and accuses me, and I defend
myself with the words, which I have heard from my father: `I hit him because he hit me.'
Thus, this recollection, or more probably fantasy, which forces itself upon my attention in
the course of the analysis -- without further evidence I myself do not know how --
becomes a central item of the dream-thoughts, which collects the affective impulses
prevailing in the dream-thoughts, as the bowl of a fountain collects the water that flows
into it. From this point the dream-thoughts flow along the following channels: `It serves
you right that you have had to make way for me; why did you try to push me off? I don't
need you; I'll soon find someone else to play with,' etc. Then the channels are opened
through which these thoughts flow back again into the dream-representation. For such an
`ote-toi que je m'y mette' I once had to reproach my deceased friend Josef. He was next to
me in the line of promotion in Brücke's laboratory, but advancement there was very slow.
Neither of the two assistants budged from his place, and youth became impatient. My
friend, who knew that his days were numbered, and was bound by no intimate relation to
his superior, sometimes gave free expression to his impatience. As this superior was a
man seriously ill, the wish to see him removed by promotion was susceptible of an
obnoxious secondary interpretation. Several years earlier, to be sure, I myself had
cherished, even more intensely, the same wish -- to obtain a post which had fallen vacant;
wherever there are gradations of rank and promotion the way is opened for the
suppression of covetous wishes. Shakespeare's Prince Hal cannot rid himself of the
temptation to see how the crown fits, even at the bedside of his sick father. But, as may
readily be understood, the dream inflicts this inconsiderate wish not upon me, but upon
my friend.7
`As he was ambitious, I slew him.' As he could not expect that the other man would make
way for him, the man himself has been put out of the way. I harbour these thoughts
immediately after attending the unveiling of the memorial to the other man at the
University. Part of the satisfaction which I feel in the dream may therefore be interpreted:
A just punishment; it serves you right.
At the funeral of this friend a young man made the following remark, which seemed
rather out of place: `The preacher talked as though the world could no longer exist
without this one human being.' Here was a stirring of revolt in the heart of a sincere man,
whose grief had been disturbed by exaggeration. But with this speech are connected the
dream-thoughts: `No one is really irreplaceable; how many men have I already escorted
to the grave! But I am still alive; I have survived them all; I claim the field.' Such a
thought, at the moment when I fear that if I make a journey to see him I shall find my
friend no longer among the living, permits only of the further development that I am glad
once more to have survived someone; that it is not I who have died but he; that I am
master of the field, as once I was in the imagined scene of my childhood. This
satisfaction, infantile in origin, at the fact that I am master of the field, covers the greater
part of the affect which appears in the dream. I am glad that I am the survivor; I express
this sentiment with the naive egoism of the husband who says to his wife: `If one of us
dies, I shall move to Paris.' My expectation takes it as a matter of course that I am not the
one to die.
It cannot be denied that great self-control is needed to interpret one's dreams and to report
them. One has to reveal oneself as the sole villain among all the noble souls with whom
one shares the breath of life. Thus, I find it quite comprehensible that revenants should
exist only as long as one wants them, and that they can be obliterated by a wish. It was
for this reason that my friend Josef was punished. But the revenants are the successive
incarnations of the friend of my childhood; I am also gratified at having replaced this
person for myself over and over again, and a substitute will doubtless soon be found even
for the friend whom I am now on the point of losing. No one is irreplaceable.
But what has the dream-censorship been doing in the meantime? Why does it not raise
the most emphatic objection to a train of thoughts characterised by such brutal
selfishness, and transform the satisfaction inherent therein into extreme discomfort? I
think it is because other unobjectionable trains of thought referring to the same persons
result also in satisfaction, and with their affect cover that proceeding from the forbidden
infantile sources. In another stratum of thought I said to myself, at the ceremony of
unveiling the memorial: `I have lost so many dear friends, some through death, some
through the dissolution of friendship; is it not good that substitutes have presented
themselves, that I have gained a friend who means more to me than the others could, and
whom I shall now always retain, at an age when it is not easy to form new friendships?'
The gratification of having found this substitute for my lost friend can be taken over into
the dream without interference, but behind it there sneaks in the hostile feeling of
malicious gratification from the infantile source. Childish affection undoubtedly helps to
reinforce the rational affection of today; but childish hatred also has found its way into
the representation.
But besides this, there is in the dream a distinct reference to another train of thoughts
which may result in gratification. Some time before this, after long waiting, a little
daughter was born to my friend. I knew how he had grieved for the sister whom he had
lost at an early age, and I wrote to him that I felt that he would transfer to this child the
love he had felt for her, that this little girl would at last make him forget his irreparable
loss.
Thus this train also connects up with the intermediary thoughts of the latent dreamcontent,
from which paths radiate in the most contrary directions: `No one is
irreplaceable. See, here are only revenants; all those whom one has lost return.' And now
the bonds of association between the contradictory components of the dream-thoughts are
more tightly drawn by the accidental circumstance that my friend's little daughter bears
the same name as the girl playmate of my own youth, who was just my own age, and the
sister of my oldest friend and antagonist. I heard the name `Pauline' with satisfaction, and
in order to allude to this coincidence I replaced one Josef in the dream by another Josef,
and found it impossible to suppress the identical initials in the name Fleischl and Fl.
From this point a train of thought runs to the naming of my own children. I insisted that
the names should not be chosen according to the fashion of the day, but should be
determined by regard for the memory of those dear to us. The children's names make
them `revenants'. And, finally, is not the procreation of children for all men the only way
of access to immortality?
I shall add only a few observations as to the affects of dreams considered from another
point of view. In the psyche of the sleeper an affective tendency -- what we call a mood --
may be contained as its dominating element, and may induce a corresponding mood in
the dream. This mood may be the result of the experiences and thoughts of the day, or it
may be of somatic origin; in either case it will be accompanied by the corresponding
trains of thought. That this ideational content of the dream-thoughts should at one time
determine the affective tendency primarily, while at another time it is awakened in a
secondary manner by the somatically determined emotional disposition, is indifferent for
the purposes of dream-formation. This is always subject to the restriction that it can
represent only a wish-fulfilment, and that it may lend its psychic energy to the wish
alone. The mood actually present will receive the same treatment as the sensation which
actually emerges during sleep (cf. p. 133), which is either neglected or reinterpreted in
the sense of a wish-fulfilment. Painful moods during sleep become the motive force of
the dream, inasmuch as they awake energetic wishes which the dream has to fulfil. The
material in which they inhere is elaborated until it is serviceable for the expression of the
wish-fulfilment. The more intense and the more dominating the element of the painful
mood in the dream-thoughts, the more surely will the most strongly suppressed wishimpulses
take advantage of the opportunity to secure representation; for thanks to the
actual existence of discomfort, which otherwise they would have to create spontaneously,
they find that the more difficult part of the work necessary to ensure representation has
already been accomplished; and with these observations we touch once more upon the
problem of anxiety-dreams, which will prove to be the boundary-case of dream-activity.
1 If I am not greatly mistaken, the first dream which I was able to elicit from my grandson
(aged 20 months) points to the fact that the dream-work had succeeded in transforming its
material into a wish-fulfilment, while the affect which belonged to it remained unchanged
even in the sleeping state The night before its father was to return to the front the child
cried out, sobbing violently: `Papa, Papa -- Baby.' That may mean: Let Papa and Baby
still be together; while the weeping takes cognisance of the imminent departure. The
child was at the time very well able to express the concept of separation. `Fort' (= away,
replaced by a peculiarly accented, long-drawn out ooooh) had been his first word, and for
many months before this first dream he had played at `away' with all his toys; which went
back to his early self-conquest in allowing his mother to go away.
2 cf. the dream about Count Thun, last scene.
3 Internat. Zeitschr. f. Psychoanalyse, iv, 1916.
4 Ever since psychoanalysis has dissected the personality into an ego and a super-ego
(Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. by James Strachey, Intern.
Psychoanalytic Press, London) it has been easy to recognise in these punishment-dreams
wish-fulfilments of the super-ego.
5 I have since explained the extraordinary effect of pleasure produced by tendency wit on
analogous lines.
6 It is this fancy from the unconscious dream-thoughts which pre-emptorily demands non
vivit instead of non vixit. `You have come too late, he is no longer alive.' The fact that the
manifest situation of the dream aims at the non vivit has been mentioned on p. 277.
7 It will have been obvious that the name Josef plays a great part in my dreams (see the
dream about my uncle). It is particularly easy for me to hide my ego in my dreams behind
persons of this name, since Joseph was the name of the dream-interpreter in the Bible.