The Interpretation of Dreams

Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Method of Interpreting Dreams: An Analysis of a Specimen Dream
Freud begins by distinguishing from his own interpretive method both the "symbolic" (e.g.
Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dream of fat and lean cows as signifying good and bad
Egyptian harvests), and the "decoding" (in which each dream element is looked up in a list in
which,e.g., "letter" means "trouble" and "funeral" means "betrothal") approaches. He then offers
this famous example of how a dream may be interpreted.
Background: This most-discussed on all Freud's dreams has evoked a vast secondary literature.
It can serve as a microcosm of Freud biographical scholarship.
2
Freud's own prefatory comments
to the specimen dream call attention to the tensions between a male analyst and the woman he
treats, particularly when they have an extra-therapeutic relationship.
Irma's Injection
(hypertext version)
We now know from the complete Fliess correspondence (Masson, 1985) that the "Irma" dream
was not the one originally intended to illustrate the method. Freud analyzed another "big dream,"
sent the analysis to Fliess, and was persuaded by him not to include it,
3
because it was either too
revealing of Freud's personal feelings toward his wife Martha or of his frustrated ambitions.
Freud describes the personal, professional, and family context of the dream as follows:
During the summer of 1895 I had been giving psychoanalytic treatment to a young lady who was
on very friendly terms with me and my family. It will be readily understood that a mixed
relationship such as this may be a source of many disturbed feelings in a psychotherapist. While
the physician's personal interest is greater, his authority is less; any failure would bring a threat
to the old-established friendship with the patient's family. This treatment had ended in a partial
success; the patient was relieved of her hysterical anxiety but did not lose all her somatic
symptoms. At that time I was not yet quite clear in my mind as to the criteria indicating that a
hysterical case history was finally closed, and I proposed a solution to the patient which she
seemed unwilling to accept. While we were thus at variance, we had broken off the treatment for
the summer vacation. ... (SE4, p. 106)
DREAM OF JULY 23RD-24TH, 1895 (cf. German original)
A large hall -- numerous guests, whom we were receiving. -- Among them was Irma. I at once
took her on one side, as though to answer her letter and to reproach her for not having accepted
my 'solution' yet. I said to her: 'If you still get pains, it's really only your fault.' She replied: 'If
you only knew what pains I've got now in my throat and stomach and abdomen -- it's choking
me' -- I was alarmed and looked at her. She looked pale and puffy. I thought to myself that after
all I must be missing some organic trouble. I took her to the window and looked down her throat,
and she showed signs of recalcitrance, like women with artificial dentures. I thought to myself
that there was really no need for her to do that. -- She then opened her mouth properly and on the
right I found a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish gray scabs upon some
remarkable curly structures which were evidently modeled on turbinal bones of the nose. -- I at
once called in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and he was very pale, he walked with a
limp and his chin was clean-shaven.... My friend Otto was now standing beside her as well, and
my friend Leopold was percussing her through her bodice and saying: 'She has a dull area low
down on the left.' He also indicated that a portion of the skin on the left shoulder was infiltrated.
(I noticed this, just as he did, in spite of her dress.) ... M. said: 'There's no doubt it's an infection,
but no matter; dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.' ... We were directly
aware, too, of the origin of her infection. No long before, when she was feeling unwell, my
friend Otto had given her an injection of a preparation of propyl, propyls ... propionic acid ...
trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type) .... Injections of
that sort out not to be made so thoughtlessly .... And probably the syringe had not been clean.
(Freud, 1900, p. 107)
1. The setting: a vacation house, grand reception hall in which Freud's wife's (Martha's) birthday
might be celebrated-i.e., the juxtaposition of the personal/family and the professional (patients
and colleagues) aspects of Freud's life.
2. The initial mood: "reproach", initial mutual criticism between Freud and his female
patient(s), later between Freud and his male colleagues.
3. The manifest cast of characters: Irma, a "hysterical" widow (Anna Hammerschlag, daughter
of Freud's Hebrew teacher); Otto (Dr. Oscar Rie), Freud's friend (tarok partner), medical
assistant, and pediatrician to his children; M. (Dr. Josef Breuer), Freud's elder co-author
ofStudies on Hysteria (1895); Leopold (Dr. Ludwig Rosenberg), pediatrician colleague and
friend of Freud and Rie; and Freud himself.
4. propyl->trimethylamin [(CH
3
)
3
CNH
2
]
Anzieu [noting that Lacan had the idea first] suggests that "the theory -- a triad expanding into
other triads -- matches the formal construction of the dream, where figures mostly appear in sets
of three" (1975/1986, p. 149). So Freud associates to "Widows" (Irma, her friend, Martha), to
"Elders" (Breuer, Fleischl, Emanuel), and to "Equals" (Otto, Leopold, Fliess).
Chapter 3
Chapter 3
A Dream is the Fulfillment of a Wish
This is the manifest thesis sentence of the book, but neither the chapter nor the wish-fulfillment
interpretations adduced throughout the book have proved fully convincing that dreams are
always wish-fulfillments. Freud introduces the chapter with a metaphor of travel:
When, after passing through a narrow defile, we suddenly emerge upon a piece of high ground,
where the path divides and the finest prospects open up on every side, we may pause for a
moment and consider in which direction we shall first turn our steps. Such is the case with us,
now that we have surmounted the first interpretation of a dream. We find ourselves in the full
daylight of a sudden discovery. Dreams are not to be likened to the unregulated sounds that rise
from a musical instrument struck by the blow of some external force instead of by a player's
hand ...
Freud returns to the musical image later (p. 78), noting that, "dreaming has often been compared
with 'the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music wandering over the keys of a piano."
He had suggested to Fliess (8/5/1899) that the travel image would altert the reader to the
importance of the preceding illustrative interpretation ("Irma") for the detailed presentation that
followed.
Other dreams, notes toward interpretation
The unconscious "No!": cf. Freud's dream (pb. 371-2) of the "examination room" finds him
unable to leave because he can't find his hat (he doesn't allude here to the sexual symbolism of
what caps the head!), and leads to the observation that when the "no" is implied by bodily
immobility, as a "sensation" of movement inhibited, it "represents a conflict of will."
Anxiety is a libidinal impulse which has its origin in the unconscious and is inhibited by the
preconscious. When, therefore, the sensation of inhibition is linked with anxiety in a dream, it
must be a question of an act of volition which was at one time capable of generating libido-that
is, it must be a question of a sexual impulse.

Chapter 5
Chapter 5
The Material and Sources of Dreams
A. Recent and Indifferent Material
The Dream of the Botanical Monograph
Anzieu (1975/1986, p. 278) puts the date of this dream as March 8, 9, or 10, 1898, when Freud
was completing the "first version" of The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud (b. May, 1856) was
therefore 42 years old, the father of six children. Anna, the youngest, who had been conceived
along with this work in 1895, was three.
Freud's dream redundantly and recursively portrays writing, books, and bibliophilism. He
receives a letter in which Fliess "sees himself turning the pages" of the yet-to-be-written
Interpretation of Dreams, envies Fliess his prescience, dreams this "botanical" monograph, writes
the real one.
Words, since they are the nodal points of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to
ambiguity; and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and phobias), no less than dreams, make
unashamed use of the advantages thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and
disguise (pp. 340-1 [pb. 376-7]).
Perhaps Freud's handling of the "Dream of the Botanical Monograph" as tendentiously leads us
into his theory of creativity (and hence of the future), as the "Irma" dream evokes his theories of
the past (cf. D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel).
Freud's many associations to the dream are explicated in Grinstein (1980), Ch. 2. The dream also
receives a paricularly full discussion in Chapter 12 ("Freud's 'Botanical Monograph': A Specimen
Dream Analysis") of Foulkes (1978).
The dream makes highly condensed (and therefore richly overdetermined) use of "the language
of flowers," as a means of alluding to ambivalent male-female relations:
I had written a monograph on a certain plant. The book lay before me and I was at the moment
turning over a folded coloured plate. Bound up in each copy there was a dried specimen of the
plant, as thought it had been taken from a herbarium. (p. 169)
Manifest elements, lines of association (SE 4, p. 191): (a) bookstore monograph: Cyclamen --
Martha's favorite flower -- giving [& forgetting] flowers -- Frau L.
(b) botanical monograph: Freud's Coca monograph-father's glaucoma operation-
Koller/Konigstein/Freud [& Fliess] -- Festschrift -- Brcke -- Konigstein -- Gartner --
"blooming" wife -- Flora
(c) favorite flower/favorite food-artichokes pulling to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf-
herbarium-bookworms-hobbies-bibliophilia
It had once amused my father to hand over a book with colored plates (an account of a journey
through Persia) for me and my eldest sister to destroy. Not easy to justify from the educational
point of view! I had been five years old at the time, and the picture of the two of us blissfully
pulling the book to pieces (leaf by leaf, like an artichoke, I found myself saying) was almost the
only plastic memory that I retained from that period of my life. Then, when I became a student, I
had developed a passion for collecting and owning books, which was analogous to my likeing for
learing out of monographs: a favorite hobby. (The idea of 'favorite' had already appeared in
connection with cyclamens and artichokes.) I had become a book-worm. I had always, from the
time I first began to think about myself, referred this first passion of mine back to the childhood
memory I have mentioned. Or rather, I had recognized that the childhood scene was a 'screen
memory' for my later bibliophile propensities.*
"... Moreover I can assure my readers that the ultimate meaning of the dream, which I have not
disclosed, is intimately related to the subject of the childhood scene."
"Innocent" dreams
The "intelligent and cultivated young woman" who dreamed of arriving too late at the
market.
The same woman's dream of her husband asking about having the piano tuned.
A young man's dream about putting on his overcoat.
The young lady's dream of difficulty putting a candle into a candlestick.
Her dream of overfilling a trunk with books.
B. Infantile Material as a Source of Dreams
Rome series
Freud was fascinated by the history of Rome as a schoolboy, when he identified himself with the
Carthaginian general Hannibal who attempted to cross the Alps to conquer it. during the period
of composing The Interpretation of Dreams he had several dreams expressing his "infantile" wish
the visit Rome, and hinting at the unconscious reasons he found it so hard to do so. The "Rome
Series" includes four dreams reported by Freud as a set:
1. I dreamt that I was looking out of a railway-carriage window at the Tiber and the Pont Sant'
Angelo. The train began to move off, and it occurred to me that I had not so much as set foot in
the city. The view that I had seen in my dream was taken from a well-known engraving which I
had caught sight of for a moment the day before in the sitting-room of one of my patients [?].
Another time someone led me to the top of a hill and showed me Rome half-shrouded in mist; it
was so far away that I was surprised at my view of it being so clear. There was more in the
content of the dream than I feel prepared to detail; but the theme of 'the promised land seen from
afar' was obvious in it. The town which I saw in this way for the first time, shrouded in mist,
was-L_beck, and the prototype of the hill was-at Gleichenberg. In a third dream I had at last got
to Rome, as the dream itself informed me; but I was disappointed to discover that the scenery
was far from being of an urban character. There was a narrow stream of dark water; on one side
of it were black cliffs and on the other meadows with big white flowers. I noticed a Herr
Zucker (whom I knew slightly) and determined to ask him the way to the city. I was clearly
making a vain attempt to see in my dream a city which I had never seen in my waking life.
Breaking up the landscape in the dream into its elements, I found that the white flowers took me
to Ravenna, which I have visited and which, for a time at least, superceded Rome as the capital
of Italy (SE4, p. 194).
DANGER
Rome is to be avoided for "reasons of health," led to the downfall of Hannibal and the murder of
Winckelmann. This is a medical representation of fear for his family [the tearful parting from his
children], a fear which is associated by Freud with the consequences of his attaining fame and
recognition.
ANTI-SEMITISM
Hannibal and Rome have been associated in Freud's "youthful mind" with "the conflict between
the tenacity of Jewry ['To Karlsbad, if my constitution can stand it.'] and the organization of the
Catholic church" (pb. 229).
Thus the wish to go to Rome had become in my dream-life a cloak and symbol for a number of
other passionate wishes (pb. 229).
Freud repeatedly refers to Fliess's knowing his secret feelings about Rome (Masson, 1985, pp.
285ff.). From Freud's later use of Rank's work on the Oedipal significance of Rome (pb. 433-
434) we get the explicitly Oedipal associations to Rome ('who first shall kiss his [the]
mother'osculum matri tulerit). Freud seems to have been of two minds about that tenacity, as he
distances himself from religion in his youth. He developes a conception of himself as a young
man who is not afraid to have the highest aspirations for himself. But he is afraid, as a look at his
dreams during the period of his candicacy for a professorship makes clear: afraid he'll die
without intellectual issue, that he'll come to nothing.
FATHER-RIVALRY ["Martial Ideals"]
Hannibal and Hamilcar/Hasdrubal, Massna/Mannasseh, Freud and his father's hat, John and
Sigmund.
MOTHER-LUST
"...who first shall kiss his mother."
Grinstein's suggestion that Freud avoids the disasters visiting Winckelmann, Hannibal, and
Massna by identifying with his father's passivity (G, p. 89) is helpful, but the secondary gain
from this move is facilitation of the general Oedipal insight which in turn frees both his
theoretical and actual travels.
Freud's associations to L_beck and Gleichenberg tie the second dream to his honeymoon with
Martha and his relationship to Minna's fiance, Ignaz Schonberg, respectively.
Freud is finally able to visit Rome only after his book is done and, I believe, after his
professorship. He has turned back enroute once after learning of being passed over, writes to
Fliess after they have cease to correspond about personal matters that he has made it at last-
through the intercession of a female patient.
Grinstein devotes a chapter (1980, pp. 69-91) to these dreams.
Three Fates
I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing in it; one of them
was the hostess of the inn and was twisting someting about in her hand, as though she was
making Knodel [dumpling]. She answered that I must wait until she was ready. (These were not
definite spoken words.) I felt impatient and went off with a sense of injury. I put on an overcoat.
But the first I tried on was too long for me. I took it off, rather surprised to find it was trimmed
with fur. A second one that I put on had a long strip with a Turkish design let into it. A stranger
with a long face and a short pointed beard came up and tried to prevent my putting it on, saying
it was his. I showed him then that it was embroidered all over with a Turkish pattern. He asked
'What have the Turkish (desings, stripes ...) to do with you?' But we then became quite friendly
with each other. (SE 4, p. 204)
Count Thun
A crowd of people, a meeting of students.-A count (Thun or Taaffe) was speaking. He was
challenged to say something about the Germans, and declared with a contemptuous gesture that
their favourite flower was colt's foot, and put some sort of dilapidated leaf-or rather the crumpled
skeleton of a leaf-into his buttonhole. I fired up-so I fired up, though I was surprised at my taking
such an attitude.
(Then, less distinctly:) It was as though I was in the Aula, the entrances were cordoned off and
we had to escape. I made my way through a series of beautifully furnished rooms, evidently
ministerial or public apartments, with furniture upholstered in a colour between brown and
violet; at last I came to a corridor, in which a housekeeper was sitting, an elderly stout woman. I
avoided speaking to her, but she evidently thought I had a right to pass, for she asked whether
she should accompany me with the lamp. I indicated to her, by word or gesture, that she was to
stop on the staircase; and I felt I was being very cunning in thus avoiding inspection at the exit. I
got downstairs and found a narrow and steep ascending path, along which I went.
(Becoming indistinct again)...It was as though the second problem was to get out of the town,
just as the first one had been to get out of the house. I was driving in a cab and ordered the driver
to drive me to a station. 'I can't drive with you along the railway-line itself,' I said, after he had
raised some objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if I had already driven with him
for some of the distance one normally travels by train. The stations were cordoned off. I
wondered whether to go to Krems or Znaim, but reflected that the Court would be in residence
there, so I decided in favour of Graz, or some such place. I was now sitting in the compartment,
which was like a carriage on the Stadtbahn [the suburban railway]; and in my buttonhole I had a
peculiar plated, long-shaped object and beside it some violet-brown violets made of a stiff
material. This greatly struck people. (At this point the scene broke off.)
Once more I was in front of the station, but this time in the company of an elderly gentleman. I
thought of a plan for remaining unrecognized; and then saw that this plan had already put into
effect. It was as though thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing. He appeared to
be blind, at all events with one eye, and I handed him a male glass urinal (which we had to buy
or had bought in town). So I was a sick-nurse and had to give him the urinal because he was
blind. If the ticket-collector were to see us like that, he would be certain to let us get away
without noticing us. Here the man's attitude and his macturating penis appeared in plastic form.
(This was the point at which I awoke, feeling a need to micturate.) (pb. 243-244)
C. The Somatic Sources of Dreams
Riding on a Horse
Freud takes up the question how depth of sleep and bodily stimuli interact to affect dream
content. He notes that
since I am an excellent sleeper and obstinately refuse to let anything disturb my sleep, it very
rarely happens that external causes of excitation find their way into my dreams; whereas
psychcal motives obviously cause me to dream very easily. In fact I have noted only a single
dream in which an objective and painful stimulus is recognizable (SE 4, p. 229).
He then reports and discusses the long and remarkably detailed dream of riding a grey horse (pp.
229-232).
My friend P. liked to ride the high horse over me ever since he had taken over one of my women
patients [Anna von Leiden?, or perhaps the old injectee of Freud's staricase dream?] on whom I
had pulled off [?] some remarkable feats. ... But in fact, like the horse in the anecdote of the
Sunday horseman, this patient had taken me anywhere that she felt inclined. Thus the horse
acquired the symbolic meaning of a woman patient. (It was highly intelligent in the dream). 'I
felt quite at home up there' referred to the position I had occupied in this patient's house before I
was replaced by P. Not long before, one of my few patrons among the leading physicians of the
city [Breuer?] had remarked to me..., 'You struck me as being firmly in the saddle there.'
In discussing this dream Freud refers to an early memory of quarreling with his nephew John:
In the course of further interpretation I saw that the dream-work had succeeded in finding a path
from the wishful situation of riding to some scenes of quarreling from my very early childhood
which must have occurred between me and a nephew of mine, a year my senior, who was at
present living in England. [Cf. p. 424f.]
Finally, the dream is associated to the significant theme of Italian travel, since "the street on the
dream was composed of impressions of Verona and Siena" (p. 231).
A still deeper interpretation led to sexual dream thoughts, and I recalled the meaning which
references to Italy seem to have had in the dreams of a woman patient who had never visited that
lovely country:' gen Italien-'Genitalien'; and this was connected, too, with the house in which I
had preceded my friend P. as physician, as well as with the situation of my boil (Freud, 1900,
231-232).
Undressed on the Stairs
I was very incompletely dressed and was going upstairs from a flat on the ground floor to a
higher storey. I was going up three steps at a time and was delighted at my agility. Suddenly I
saw a maid-servant coming down the stairs -- coming towards me, that is. I felt ashamed and
tried to hurry, and at this point the feeling of being inhibited set in: I was glued to the steps and
unable to budge from the spot. (SE 4, p. 238)
Is Freud's dream (pb. 272-273) of ascending the stairs (of the old lady he's to inject with
morphine, cf. Irma), toward the grumpy servant lying in wait for his spitting, a preface to the
discussion of nakedness in the next section in some interesting way? He refers to the
indeterminate level of undress in dreams like this one, then elaborates in the next section that
such sensations betray an infantile antecedent-in Freud's case his relations with his nurse in
Freiberg (pb. 280-281).
Associations:
Previous evening's ascent (consulting to living
rooms) without collar, tie, and cuffs;
Reassurance (& concern) as to functioning of heart;
Contrast between rapid ascent and immobility;
Staircase of female patient (injectee);
Maidservant and concierge of patient (older, ugly),
reproach re spitting, dirtying carpet;
Heart trouble and pharyngitis consequent on smoking;
Freud's own Freiberg nurse.
Freud restates his mother's description of the nurse [in response to his self-analysis-prompted
inquiry] as "old and ugly, but very sharp and efficient," and concludes that "it is reasonable to
suppose that the child loved the old woman who taught him these lessons, in spite of her rough
treatment of him" (pb. 281).
The contrasting version of this dream sent to Fliess (31 May, 1897) suggests that shame and
sexual arousal, approaching and being approached, are exchanged.
Freud returns to the themes of these pages-without specifically mentioning this dream-at the end
of Ch. 6.H. (pb. 525).
D. Typical Dreams
Freud's opening assertion that we can't interpret someone's dream unless they'll provide
associations is partly contradicted by a 1925 footnote noting the usefulness of standard symbols,
discussed in Ch 6.E.
Embarrassing dreams of being naked
Its essence [in its typical form] lies in a distressing feeling in the nature of shame and in the fact
that one wishes to hide one's nakedness, as a rule by locomotion, but finds one is unable to do so.
I believe the great majority of my readers will have found themselves in this situation in dreams
(pb. 275).
& childish (cf. Adamic) shamelessness, the (somewhat later) almost intoxicating effect of getting
undressed, The Emporer's New Clothes (SE 4, 243-4, "the imposter is the dream and the
Emporer is the dreamer himself").
One of my patients has a conscious memory of a scene in his eighth year, when at bedtime he
wanted to dance into the next room where his little sister slept, dressed in his nightshirt, but was
prevented by his nurse (pb. 277-278).
Dreams of the death of persons of whom the dreamer is fond
Note that the emotional content, or lack thereof, is the key to whether we take the manifest image
to be less, or more, displaced. Freud anticipates at this point rebellious feelings in "all my readers
and any others who have experienced similar dreams":
...the wishes which are represented in dreams as fulfilled are not always present-day wishes.
They may also be wishes of the past which have been abandoned, overlaid and repressed, and to
which we have to attribute some kind of continued existence only because of their emergence in
a dream. They are not dead in our sense of the word but only like the shades of the Odyssey,
which awoke to some sort of life as soon as they had tasted blood. (SE 4, 249 [pb. 282]: cf.
VII.B: Regression re memories "eager for revival," pb. 585)
Immediately following this powerful and disturbing phrase Freud refers back to the mother's
dream of the death of her 15-year-old daughter (reported p. 152 [pb. 187]), whom she had
wished away during pregnancy, and this in turn reminds the dreamer of hearing as a child that
she had been the occasion for her mother's depression during pregnancy.
Hostile feelings toward brothers and sisters must be far more frequent in childhood than the
unseeing eye of the adult observer can perceive. (SE 4, 252)
The following 20 pages summarize Freud's views on intra-family tensions, including his
prototypical discussions of Oedipus and Hamlet. Freud quotes more fully (pb. 296) the last
chorus from Oedipus Rex, in which the tragic/ambivalent sense of his own egigram-"Who
resolved the dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise"-is apparent.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6
The Dream-Work
A. The work of condensation
Each manifest dream element is shown by interpretation to be a condensed, metaphorical
expression of several unconscious dream thoughts. Freud assumes that by condensing several
meanings into one image the dream-work is able to overcome censorship, as if several physical
force vectors were added.
B. The work of displacement
Each manifest dream element is a represents each of of its associated unconscious/repressed
dream thoughts in an indirect, displaced (metonymic) fashion. If the dream thought were directly
or clearly represented, it would arouse resistence, even in the sleep-weakened ego. Each
displaced link is too weak to arouse censorship, but when several of these are condensed into the
same image they are strong enough to find expression in the dream. Hence:
Metaphor : Metonymy :: Condensation : Displacement
C. The means of representation in dreams
In order to be expressed in a dream, unconscious thoughts must be represented as sensory
images. These are primarily visual.
D. Considerations of representability
Freud's sets up an argument about the pictorial and the verbal interplay in the dream-work.
A dream-thought is unusable as long as it is expressed in an abstract form; but when once it has
been transformed into pictorial language, contrasts and identifications of the kind which the
dream-work requires, and which it creates if they are not already present, can be established
more easily than before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the material
underlying the dream. This is so because in every language concrete terms, in consequence of the
history of their development, are richer in associations than conceptual ones (p. 340).
Words, since they are the nodal points of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to
ambiguity; and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and phobias), no less than dreams, make
unashamed use of the advantages thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and
disguise (pp. 340-1).
The image formed as the result of such representation "jumps to the eyes."
E. Representation by symbols in dreams-some further typical dreams
The only plausibly universal dream-symbols are those linked to inevitable human expreiences:
birth, hunger, sexual arousal, rage. Other symbols, such as stair-cases, may be widely shared
among those who have grown up in cultures where, e.g., the stairway connects the more public
space of the household (living room, jitchen) with the more private (bath room, bed rooms).
F. Some examples-calculations and speeches in dreams
"Non Vixit"
Perhaps the best documented of Freud's childhood personality traits, on the evidence of The
Interpretation of Dreams, was his jealous rivalry with early perceived competitors for his
parents' love. The richly over-determined character of this material is illustrated in his
interpretation of his "Non Vixet" dream (Freud, 1900, pp. 421-425). This dream has been
explicated by Grinstein (1980, pp. 282-316), who concludes that the dream connects the key
theme of sibling rivalry in early childhood to Freud's depression as a middle-aged man, after
Jacob's death. Of Freud's stance towards the ghostly images in the dream, Grinstein suggests:
The delight which Freud felt in the dream at being able to control the revenants and make them
disappear appears to indicate his anxiety that these figures might indeed come back and punish
him for his aggressive thoughts (p. 316).
Brcke's lab [cutting the mustard]
Fleischl [Cocaine]
Paneth [Joseph the Interpreter; debating Brentano]
John [Caesar & Brutus]
Julius [infantile hunger and fratricidal rage]
Freud, then, alludes by means of the dream of his father's bill to his own preoccupation with the
etiology and treatment of the anxiety neuroses (railway phobia), his Oedipal guilt
(parricide/incest), jealousy (via "Non vixit"), and his ambivalent homoeroticism (fear of his
feelings toward other males -- the murder of Julius, the rape of his mother, and the pagan rage at
Jacob.
It should be recalled that the Freud of the middle '90s was an explicitly epigenetic theorist. This
is nowhere more clear than in the Fliess letters for 1896 [cf. esp. 30 May 96], in which Freud
plots the critical ages for various traumatic events against the resultant neuroses. He is here, it
seems to me, developing a cognitive-maturational theory which underlies his subsequent clinical
work (Freud, 1905 [Dora], 1909 [RatMan]), and which remains important in his later
metapsychological papers (Freud, 1915a, 1915b, 1917). Freud's later excitement about tracing
his patient "E"'s critical childhood events back to the first 24 months of life shows that the
"abandonment" of the seduction theory three years previously had not lessoned his interest in the
anamnesis (Davis, 1990). More importantly, the material concerning "E." ties the theorizing of
the period immediately following The Interpretation of Dreams to that of the etiological papers.
Freud's ambivalent emotions concerning both Jacob's death and E.'s childhood material, and the
transferential dynamics of each, help to explain the realignment of thinking which made possible
a coherent psychoanalytic theory.
G. Absurd dreams-intellectual activity in dreams
The Dead Father's Bill
Freud's 1899 dream of being billed for hospital expenses someone has incurred in 1851 in his
birthplace (Freud, 1900, SE 5, 435-438) is the fourth of six "Absurd Dreams" presented. These
dreams form a set with strongly overlapping associations (see Grinstein, 1980). Freud himself
draws attention to the most striking similarity among the dreams, the fact that they deal "by
chance, as it may seem at first sight" with deceased fathers of the dreamer (p. 426). Freud
suggests that he will be offering "two or three" such dreams, and when he reaches the fourth
example he notes, "Here is another dream about a dead father" (p. 435). Like other topical
collections of dreams presented by Freud, these examples of absurdity constitute a set of related
wishes and ambivalent unconscious thoughts; in this case having to do with filial relations,
paternal death, and railway travel.
The first of the dreams is that of a male patient whose father has died six years earlier, in which
the dreamer sees his father lying in bed gravely injured following a train accident and is aware of
the absurdity of this since the father is in fact already dead. The second dream, which Freud
suggests is "almost exactly similar" (1900, p. 427), concerns his own father and contains a
thought of Jacob's having-after his death-"played a political part among the Magyars and brought
them together politically" (p. 427). Freud sees an indistinct picture of someone standing on
chairs addressing the Reichstag, states that he remembered in the dream "how like Garibaldi
[Jacob] had looked on his death-bed, and felt glad that that promise had come true" (p. 428). The
third dream is really a reference to a fragment of the "Count Thun" dream Freud has discussed
previously, in which a cab driver protests that he cannot drive Freud along a railway line (p.
428). Freud's associations at this point focus on his own train travels and his frustrated plans to
go to Italy, and he suggests that the "purpose" of the dream's introduction of an absurdity about
train travel is to allude-via a pun on "Vorfahren" ("drive up" and "ancestry")-to the value of
progeny.
Freud then generalizes about the role of absurdity in dreams:
A dream is made absurd, then, if a judgment that something 'is absurd' is among the dream-
thoughts-that is to say, if any one of the dreamer's unconscious trains of thought has criticism or
ridicule as its motive. Absurdity is accordingly one of the methods by which the dream-work
represents a contradiction-alongside such other methods as the reversal in the dream-content of
some material relation in the dream-thoughts [p. 326 f.], or the exploitation of the sensation of
motor inhibition [p. 337 f.]. Absurdity in a dream, however, is not to be translated by a simple
'no'; it is intended to reproduce the mood of the dream-thoughts, which combines derision or
laughter with the contradiction. It is only with such an aim in view that the dream-work produces
anything ridiculous. Here once again it is giving a manifest form to a portion of the latent
content. (pp. 434-435)
The fourth dream is then presented with the prefatory comment linking it to the theme of dead
fathers. Freud seems to express in this dream both his ambivalent emotions following Jacob's
death and repressed material from his early Freiberg years (see Schur, 1972, pp. 184-191;
Anzieu, 1975/1986, pp. 521-525).
The reported content of the dream is as follows:
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 in 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 that, of course, I was
born in 1856, which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question.
(Freud, 1900, SE 5, 436).
Freud offers here a dream in which a ghost speaks, a type of dream he cites repeatedly. These
dreams-all concerned with murderous sibling rivalry and/or the father's downfall-share
unconscious contents which make their interpretations mutually relevant and place them at the
center of the self-analytic issues Freud worked through in order to complete The Interpretation
of Dreams. Schur has suggested that this dream may have been presented partly as a substitute
for the 1898 "big dream" Fliess had persuaded Freud not to include, apparently on the basis of its
political and/or marital references (Schur, 1972, p. 189). Indeed, the famous "Irma" dream seems
to have been chosen by Freud as a less-satisfactory substitute for this suppressed and
subsequently lost dream, requiring him to spread his argument among several dream-
interpretations (see Masson, 1985, pp. 10, 315-316, 363).
The manifest content of the dream-Freud's legal respnsibility for something that occurred in the
House of Freud before his birth, his consultation with his father about it, the surprise of learning
that his father had a vice. The firm of "T____" has not been identified, but Jacob Freud hailed
from Tysmenitz, in Galicia
Number play. To this dream of being billed for something his father did before he was born, and
recognizing the absurdity of that as he dreamt it, Freud curiously associates the number five, that
being the difference (obscured by his suspicion it might really be four years) between 1851 and
1856. Freud was neurotically preoccupied with death during these years, as most biographers
have noted, and he was haunted by the belief that he would die by the age of 51. The number is
significant as (a) the year 1851 (the relatively superficial referent), (b) a dangerous age for men,
since he imagines several friends and teachers of his to have died around that age, and (c) the
sum of 23 and 28, the Fliessian bisexual period (see Sulloway, 1979; Harris & Harris, 1984). The
significance of these interlocked death fears and wishes underlies many of Freud's dreams during
this period, and these in turn form the basic data of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud returns to the dream's number-play a few pages later (in discussing "intellectual activity in
dreams") and draws attention to the dream's pseudo-syllogistic character:
I asked: 'Did you get married soon after that?' I calculated that, of course, I was born in 1856,
which seemed to be the year which immediately followed the year in question. All of this was
clothed in the form of a set of logical conclusions. My father had married in 1851, immediately
after his attack; I, of course, was the eldest of the family and had been born in 1856; Q.E.D.
(Freud, 1900, 449-459)
"Q.E.D."? Freud points out that of course each step of this "logical" conclusion can in fact be
explained by latent dream thoughts. Five years is not long, either for "E." to have awaited a cure
or the marriage he has promised himself at conclusion of treatment. Five years was not enough
for Freud to finish his medical studies, and he had to reassure himself that, "Even though you
won't believe it because I've taken my time, I shall get through; I shall bring my medical training
to a conclusion" (1900, 451).
The other train of latent thought Freud ascribes to his dream's play with birth dates concerns
enrollment at university when, Freud recalls, one had to give one's father's first name and, "we
students assumed that the Hofrat drew conclusions from the first name of the father which could
not always be drawn from that of the student himself" (p. 450). Such conclusions of course
included ethnicity and the possible fame of the father, and Freud acknowledges that he has
speculated how much better his academic career would have gone had he been the son of
someone like Meynert. Two of the paternal figures on whom Freud has vented a great deal of his
Oedipal ambivalence, Josef Breuer and Theodor Meynert, are strongly associated to the dream,
and through them a network of links is constructed to themes of "father"-"son" responsibility and
criticism in matters of intoxication, courtship, and professional advancement.
The very silliness of pursuing so many conclusions from sums and differences of dates is also a
determinant of the dream. Freud's mention of this is brief and back-handed: he consoles himself
that although his speculations about the retention and later neurotic expression of traumatic
influences from the very earliest period of a child's life seem absurd (and are even parodied by
patients to whom he has mentioned them), they are really correct (p. 451). To which Schur asks,
"But who used formulas of this kind?" (Schur, 1972, p. 186). Wilhelm Fliess, of course, whose
biorhythmic speculations are thereby questioned even as Freud defends his own psychosexual
ones. The attack that Freud imagines is, he reports at the end of his discussion of the dream, that
My discovery of the unexpected part played by their father in the earliest sexual impulses of
female [sic] patients might well be expected to meet with a similar [critical] reception (1900, p.
452).
Hence the dream points to criticism of both Wilhelm Fliess and Jacob Freud, the flawed intimate
friend and the flawed paternal model.
Rebecca
Freud's discussion of the billing dream also alludes to a major piece of his own family's drama:
Jacob's marriage to "Rebecca" in 1852. The dream affirms a marriage for Jacob in 1851, and
assigns Freud's own birth to the year after "the year n question." This mysterious second
marriage of Jacob Freud marriage was recorded in the town records of Freiberg, was witnessed
by Jacob's sons Emmanuel and Philipp, but was never mentioned by Freud himself (see
Gicklhorn, 1969). Like all the female figures in Freud's infancy, Rebecca's significance for him
remains obscure. He apparently never named her in his correspondence and used the name on
only one, highly significant occasion, when he announced to Fliess (on September 21, 1897) that
he no longer believed the seduction theory and suddenly recalled a Yiddish saying:
Rebecca, take off your gown, you are a bride no longer. (Masson, 1985, p. 266)
After summarizing Freud's network of associations connecting this dream to Jacob's apparent
marriage to the mysterious "Rebekka" and to the son's worry about his own death, Schur quoted
Freud's puzzling use of this Yiddish anecdote to illustrate his feelings about having abandoned
the seduction theory and asked:
Why just this joke at this time? Why a joke in which Freud identifies himself with a disgraced
woman? And a joke, the punch-line of which contains the name of this mysterious second wife
of his father? (Schur, 1972, p. 191)
A plausible answer to these related questions is that Freud puzzled in early childhood about
where he fit into his complex and probably quite troubled family-Jacob was barely able to put
food on the table some years, travelled a great deal when Freud was an infant, and apparently left
Freiberg in disgrace in 1859. Freud may have imagined himself somehow the outgrowth of this
mysterious and guilty union between his father and Rebecca. As a child he seems to have sought
enlightenment concerning this and other mysteries in the Bible stories, where Rebecca appears as
the Caananite bride of Isaac, unjustly accused of fornication and destined to beget Jacob. His
self-analysis had confronted Freud again with these infantile emotions. Freud felt a mixture of
love, anger, and embarrassment when he thought of his dead father, and the image of Rebecca
served these multiple purposes (see Balmary, 1979/1982; Krll, 1979/1986; McGrath, 1986;
Schur, 1972). That the mature Freud remained haunted by these questions helps to explain why
his theorizing in the aftermath of the seduction theory focussed on early childhood dynamics.
Self-dissection
Old Brcke must have set me some task; STRANGELY ENOUGH it related to a dissection of
the lower part of my own body, my pelvis and legs, which I saw before me as though in the
dissecting room, but without noticing their absence in myself and also without any trace of any
gruesome feeling.
Anzieu (1975/1986, p. 419) guesses the date of this dream as May, 1899, when Freud was
completing the "second version" of The Interpretation of Dreams.
Elements
The dissection
"old Brcke" (d. 1892)
"STRANGELY ENOUGH" The perspective shift: Freud sees his lower body in front of
him as an observer, does not notice their absence nor any "gruesome feeling"
the eviscerated pelvis:
mixed superior/inferior aspect [what does he actually see?]: "thick flesh-colored
protuberances," reminiscent of haemorrhoids
Louise N. [?]
silver-paper (tin foil): n. Freud's interpretation of someone "pulling off" tin in his dream
as masturbation (pb. 400)
About town
legs present
(tired) cab
door-passage (downstairs at Freud's aptartment building)
Journey through changing landscape
Alpine guide, carrying belongings, then Freud
boggy ground-edge
[feeling of surprise]
sitting people: Red Indians, gypsies, a girl
small wooden house-open window
two boards on window-sill (chasm?)
two sleeping men-children (making the crossing possible)
waking "mental fright" (cf. pb. 373: inhibition of movement linked to anxiety "must be a
question of sexual impulse.")
Associations
publications ~= children
"strangely enough," Louise N.
Haggard's (1856-1925) She (1887), Heart of the World (1896)
Discussion
Note the sexual progression of the dream from (1) self-castration (with the help of a woman), to
(2) confrontation with powerful symbols of female sexual structures, to (3) fearful challenges to
the potentials of his own physical progeny, i.e. those who will "carry on" his identity, provide a
bridge (Brcke) to the next world. The dream suggests that no man can confront the self-
transformation Freud is attempting, with the 'eternal feminine', and survive (remain potent,
produce children), unless perhaps by becoming a woman sustained by a man, an
anxious/stimulating prospect for Freud in the Fliess years.
The "crossing" (pb. 490): cf. (pb. 542-543, in Chap. 6.I [Secondary Revision]) on "threshold
symbolism" (cf. Silberer, 1911): "The 'functional' phenomenon, 'the representation of a state
instead of an object,' was observed by Silberer principally in the two conditions of falling asleep
and waking up. ...[I]n many dreams the last pieces of the manifest content, which are
immediately followed by waking, represent nothing more nor less than an intention to wake or
the process of waking. ... It is by no means inconceivable or improbable that this threshold
symbolism might throw light upon some elements in the middle of the texture of dreams--in
places, for instance, where there is a question of oscillation in the depth of sleep and of an
inclination to break off the dream." The threshold here is bridged by boards (cf. pb. 447 on
doubling of phallic symbols as anti-castration wish).
H. Affects in dreams
A Castle by the Sea
cf. 14 April, 1898, letter to Fliess re trip to Aquilea on the Adriatic with Alexander.
Open-air Closet
Afflavit et dissipati sunt (cf. p. 214)

Chapter 7
Chapter 7
The Psychology of the Dream-Process
Freud, 1900, [SE5] p. 547:
Among the dreams which have been told to me by other people, there is one which has special
claims on our attention at this point [i.e. at the first paragraph of the final chapter]. It was told me
by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is still
unknown to me. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to 're-
dream' it, that is, to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own, so that, by taking it over
in this way, she might express her agreement with it on one particular point.
This is a marvelously revealing passage: Freud has argued (in Chapter 6 [SE5 pp. 498-499]),
against the apparent implications of his model, that "secondary revision" must in some sense be
ubiqui-potent in the formation of the dream; and he now presents as the stage-setting for his
"meta"psychology the example of a woman who injects a lectured-about dream into her own in
order to "express her agreement with it on one particular point."
A. The Forgetting of Dreams
B. Regression
What we have described ... as 'regard for representability' might be brought into connection with
the selective attention excercised by the visually recollected scenes touched upon by the dream-
thoughts.
[added 1914] It is further to be remarked that regression plays a no less important part in the
theory of the formation of neurotic symptoms than it does in that of dreams. Three kinds of
regression are thus to be distinguished: (a) topographical regression, in the sense of the
schematic picture of the psy-systems which we have explained above; (b) temporal regression,
in so far as what is in question is a harking back to older psychical structures; and
(c) formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place
of the usual ones. All these three kinds of regression are, however, one at bottom and occur
together as a rule; for what is older in time is more primitive in form and in psychical topography
lies nearer to the perceptual end. [cf, Freud, 1917d: A metapsychological supplement to the
theory of dreams]
Nor [added 1919] can we leave the subject of regression in dreams without setting down in
words a notion by which we have already repeatedly been struck and which will recur with fresh
intensity when we have entered more deeply into the psychology of the psycho-neuroses: namely
that dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer's earliest condition, a
revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods
which were then available to him. Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a
picture of a phylogenetic childhood--a picture of the development of the human race, of which
the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by the chance
circumstances of life. (SE7, 548)
Fascinating last pair of sentences on getting used to the dark of the ucs.: "It may be well...more at
home in it" (588).
The major addition to this array, at the hands of Kris (19__: Psychoanalytic explorations in art)
and Rapaport (1953: Some metapsychological considerations concerning activity and passivity,
IV), has been "Regression in the Service of the Ego."
C. Wish-Fulfillment
Freud again takes up again difficulties with the insistence on wish-fulfillment as involved in all
dreams, divides dream into two groups depending on whether the w-f is open or disguised. The
sources of the wish the dream atempts to fulfill are (1) left over day wishes unsatisfied for
"external reasons," (2) repudiated day wishes, and (3) supressed [unconscious] wishes emerging
only active at night. The first of these is Pcs., the second Pcs. driven into the Ucs., and the third
Ucs. incapable of passing into the Pcs (pb. 589-590). Asking rhetorically whether these three
classes of wish are equally important for dream-formation, Freud offers the generalization that "a
conscious wish can only become a dream-instigator if it succeeds in awakening an unconscious
wish with the same tenor and in obtaining reinforcement from it" (pb. 591). Such unconscious
wishes are indestructible, and always on the alert for possible expression by allying themselves
with [pre-] conscious impulses. These immortal unconscious wishes-Freud compares them to the
Titans weighed down by the mountains hurled on them by the victorious gods of Greek
mythology-are infatile in origin, hence the corollary proposition that "a wish which is
represented in a dream must be an infantile one". The daytime wish as entrepreneur receives the
support of the "unconscious" one as "capitalist." Freud illustrates these epigenetic interactions
with his anxious dream [added as footnote in 1919, and to main text in 1930] of his son returing
from the front with bandaged face and putting something into his mouth. His discussion includes
a summary of his own jaw injury as a child, to which he has alluded via the one-eyed doctor
mentioned in Ch. 1 (SE 4, 17; see Harris & Harris, 1984, Ch 3, "Reconstructing the Anal Origins
of Freud's Creativity").
D. Arousal by Dreams-The Function of Dreams-Anxiety-Dreams
Freud's Mother and the Bird-beaked Figures
Associations:
Maternal grandfather's death,
Philippson's Bible,
Philipp the concierge's son.
The latter Freud credits with teaching him the vulgar term (vgeln) for copulation.
Freud's discussion on the following pages is of boys fighting and of the consequences of pubertal
masturbation.
E. The Primary and Secondary Processes. Repression
Freud reiterates the relationship between contemporary and archaic wishes in dream-formation,
using the concept of "cathexis" (Besetzung).
F. The Unconscious and Consciousness-Reality
Freud suggests replaces the topographic metaphors with "dynamic" ones:
[L]et us say instead that some particular mental grouping has had a cathexis of energy attached to
it or withdrawn from it, so that the structure in question has come under the sway of a particular
agency or been withdrawn from it.
The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us
as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely represented by the data of
consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.
Consciousness is now "only a sense-organ for the perception of psychical qualities" (resembling
the Pcpt.), and the interaction of thought and perception is illustrated by a 14-year-old boy who
has described seeing a dagger on the board as he plays checkers with his uncle.
And the value of dreams for giving us knowlege of the future? There is of course no question of
that. It would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. Nevertheless the
ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our
wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the
dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect
likeness of the past (pb. 660).
Ch 4
Chapter 4 Summary
In Chapter 4, Freud first acknowledges that he must not be so foolish as to generalize
that there is only one kind of dream, the wish-fulfillment dream, for he would be met
with much resistance by his critics. Interpreting dreams as wish-fulfillment theory is not
a new idea, he admits, mentioning those writers who have discussed this type of dream
before him. Besides, he notes, were he to insist that this kind of dream is the only kind,
his theory would be easily refuted. Freud further makes the point that many recurring
dreams are strictly painful dreams and appear to have nothing to do with wish
fulfillment.
The author continues by citing examples of methods and philosophies that show the
equally prevalent existence of the next type of dream: hequotes Eduard von Hartman,
tells about the two ladies who have calculated the preponderance of painful or
distressing dreams, and...