eading Freud clear version in English

THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA lO3 symptoms of his later illness, must be regarded as the aetiology of his neurosis for which we have been looking. These infantile experiences are once more sexual in content, but they are of a far more uniform kind than the scenes at puberty that had been discovered earlier. lt is now no longer a question of sexual topics having been aroused by some sense impression or other, but of sexual experiences affecting the subjecr s own body-of sexual intercourse (in the wider sense). You wiIi admit that the importance of such scenes needs no further proof; to this may now be added that, in every instance, you will be able to discover in the details of the scenes the determining factors which you may have found lacking in the other scenes-the scenes which occurred later and were reproduced earlier. I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Ni/i {source of the Nile} in neuropathology * * *. * * * Doubts about the genuineness of the infantile sexual scenes can, however, be deprived of their force here and now by more than one argument. In the first place, the behaviour of patients while they are reproducing these infantile experiences is in every respect incom- patible with the assumption that the scenes are anything else than a reality which is being felt with distress and reproduced with the greatest reluctance. Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them. While they are recalling these infantile experiences to consciousness, they suffer under the most violent sensations, of which they are ashamed and which they try to conceal; and, even after they have gone through them once more in such a convincing manner, they still attempt to withhold belief from them, by emphasizing the fact that, unlike what happens in the case of other forgotten material, they have no feeling of remembering the scenes. * * * There are * * * a whole number of * * * things that vouch for the reality of infantile sexual scenes. In the first place there is the uniformity, which they exhibit in certain details, which is a necessary consequence if the preconditions of these experiences are always of the same kind, but which would otherwise lead us to believe that there were secret understandings between the various patients. In the second place, pa- tients sometimes describe as harmless events whose significance they obviously do not understand, since they would be bound otherwise to be horrified by them. Or again, they mention details, without laying

104 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST any stress on them, which only someone of experience in Me can un- derstand and appreciate as subtle traits of reality. Events of this sort strengthen our impression that the patients must really have experienced what they reproduce under the compulsion of analysis as scenes from their childhood. But another and stronger proof of this is furnished by the relationship of the infantile scenes to the conte nt of the whole of the rest of the ca se history. It is exactly like putting together a child' s picture-puzzle: after many attempts, we become absolutely certain in the end which piece belongs in the empty gap; for only that one piece fills out the picture and at the same time allows its irregular edges to be fitted into the edges of the other pieces in such a manner as to leave no free space and to entail no overlapping. In the same way, the contents ofthe infantile scenes turn out to be indispensable supplements to the associative and logical framework of the neurosis, whose insertion makes its course of development for the first time evi- dent, or even, as we might often say, self-evident. * * * Sexual experiences in childhood consisting in stimulation of the gen- itals, coitus-like acts, and so on, must therefore be recognized, in the last analysis, as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms. This statement is certain to be met from different directions by two mutually contradictory objeetions. Some people will say that sexual abuses of this kind, whether practised upon children or between them, happen too seldom for it to be possible to regard them as the determinant of such a common neurosis as hysteria. Others will perhaps argue that, on the contrary, such experiences are very frequent-much too frequent for us to be able to attribute an aetiological significance to the fact of their occurrence. They will further maintain that it is easy, by making a few enquiries, to find people who remember scenes of sexual seduction and sexual abuse in their childhood years, and yet who have never been hysterical. Finally we shall be told, as a weighty argument, that in the lower strata of the population hysteria is certainly no more common than in the highest ones, whereas everything goes to show that the injunction for the sexual safeguarding of childhood is far more frequently transgressed in the case of the children of the proletariat. Let us begin our defence with the easier part of the task. It seems to me certain that our children are far more often exposed to sexual assaults than the few precautions taken by parents in this connection would lead us to expect. When I first made enquiries about wh at was known on the subjeet, I learnt from colleagues that there are several publications by paediatricians which stigmatize the frequency of sexual praetices by nurses and nursery maids, carried out even on infants in arms; and in the last few weeks I have come across a discussion of 'Coitus in Child- hood' by Dr. Stekel (1895) in Vienna. I have not had time to colleet

THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA 105 other published evidence; but even it if were only scanty, it is to be expected that increased attention to the subject will very soon confirm the great frequency of sexual experiences and sexual activity in childhood. Lastly, the findings of my analysis are in a position tö speak for themselves. In all eighteen cases (cases of pure hysteria and of hysteria combined with obsessions, and comprising six men and twelve women) I have, as I have said, come to learn of sexual experiences of this kind in childhood. I can divide my cases into three groups, according to the origin of the sexual stimulation. In the first group it is a question of assaults-of single, or at any rate isolated, instances of abuse, mostly practised on female children, by adults who were strangers, and who, incidentally, knew how to avoid inflicting gross, mechanical injury. In these assaults there was no question of the child's consent, and the first effect of the experience was preponderantly one of fright. The second group consists of the much more numerous cases in which some adult looking after the child-a nursery maid or governess or tutor, or, un- happily all too often, a close relative-has initiated the child into sexual intercourse and has maintained a regular love relationship with it-a love relationship, moreover, with its mental side developed-which has often lasted for years. The third group, finally, contains child-relation- ships proper-sexual relations between two children of different sexes, mostly a brother and sister, which are often prolonged beyond puberty and which have the most far-reaching consequences for the pair. In most of my ca ses I found that two or more of these aetiologies were in operation together; in a few instances the accumulation of sexual ex- periences coming from different quarters was truly amazing. Y ou will easily understand this peculiar feature of my observations, however, when you consider that the patients I was treating were all ca ses of severe neurotic illness which threatened to make life impossible. * It is true that if infantile sexual activity were an almost universal occurrence the demonstration of its presence in every case would carry no weight. But, to begin with, to assert such a thing would certainly be a gross exaggeration; and secondly, the aetiological pretensions of the infantile scenes rest not only on the regularity of their appearance in the anamneses of hysterics, but, above all, on the evidence of there being associative and logical ties between those scenes and the hysterical symptoms-evidence which, if you were given the complete history of a case, would be as clear as daylight to you. What can the other factors be which the 'specific aetiology' of hysteria still needs in order actually to produce the neurosis? * * * To-day I need only indicate the point of contact at which the two parts of the topic-the specific and the auxiliary aetiology-fit into one another. No doubt a considerable quantity of factors will have to be taken into ac-

106 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANAL YST count. There will be the subject's inheritedand personal constitution, the inherent importance of the infantile sexual experiences, and, above all, their number: abrief relationship with a strange boy, who afterwards becomes indifferent, will leave a less powerful effect on a girl than intimate sexual relations of several years' standing with her own brother . In the aetiology of the neuro ses quantitative preconditions are as im- portant as qualitative ones: there are threshold-values which have to be crossed before the illness can become manifest. Moreover, I do not myself regard this aetiological se ries as complete; nor does it solve the riddle of why hysteria is not more common among the lower classes. (You will remember, by the way, what a surprisingly large incidence of hysteria was reported by Charcot among working-class men). * * * * * * * We have heard and have acknowledged that there are numerous people who have a very clear recollection of infantile sexual experiences and who nevertheless do not suffer from hysteria. This objection has no weight; but it provides an occasion for making a valuable comment. According to our understanding of the neurosis, people of this kind ought not to be hysterical at all, or at any rate, not hysterical as a result of the scenes which they consciously remember. With our patients, those memo ries are never conscious; but we eure them of their hysteria by transforming their unconscious memories of the infantile scenes into conscious ones. There was nothing that we could have done or needed to do about the fact that they have had such experiences. From this you will perceive that the matter is not merely one of the existence of the sexual experiences, but that a psychological precondition enters in as well. The scenes must be present as unconscious memories; only so long as, and in so far as, they are unconscious are they able to create and maintain hysterical symptoms. But what decides whether those experi- ences produce conscious or unconscious memories-whether that is conditioned by the content of the experiences, or by the time at which they occur, or by later inffuences-that is a fresh problem, which we shall prudently avoid. Let me merely remind you that, as its first con- clusion, analysis has arrived at the proposition that hysterical symptoms are derivatives of memories which are operating unconsciously. Gur view then is that infantile sexual experiences are the fundamental precondition for hysteria, are, as it were, the disposition for it and that it is they which create the hysterical symptoms, but that they do not do so immediately, but remain without effect to begin with and only exercise a pathogenic action later, when they have been aroused after puberty in the form of unconscious memories. * * * In this way we obtain an indication that a certain infantile state of the psychical functions, as weil as of the sexual system, is required in order that a sexual experience occurring during this period shall later

THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA 107 on, in the form of a memory, produce a pathogenic effect. I do not venture as yet, however, to make any more precise statement on the nature of this psychical infantilism or on its chronologicallimits. * * III Gentlemen, the problem, the approaches to which I have just for- mulated, concerns the mechanism of the formation of hysterical symp- toms. We find ourselves obliged, however, to describe the causation of those symptoms without taking that mechanism into account, and this involves an inevitable loss of completeness and clarity in our discussion. Let us go back to the part played by the infantile sexual scenes. I am afraid that I may have misled you into over-estimating their power to form symptoms. Let me, therefore, once more stress the fact that every ca se ofhysteria exhibits symptoms which are determined, not by infantile but by later, often by recent, experiences. Other symptoms, it is true, go back to the very earliest experiences and belong, so to speak, to the most ancient nobility. Among these latter are above all to be found the numerous and diverse sensations and paraesthesias of the genital organs and other parts of the body, these sensations and paraesthesias being phenomena which simply correspond to the sensory content of the in- fantile scenes, reproduced in a hallucinatory fashion, often painfully intensified. Another set of exceedingly common hysterical phenomena-painful need to urinate, the sensation accompanying defaecation, intestinal dis- turbances, choking and vomiting, indigestion and disgust at food-were also shown in my analyses (and with surprising regularity) to be deriv- atives of the same childhood experiences and were explained without difficulty by certain invariable peculiarities of those experiences. For the idea of these infantile sexual scenes is very repellent to the feelings of a sexually normal individual; they include all the abu ses known to de- bauched and impotent persons, among whom the buccal cavity and the rectum are misused for sexual purposes. For physicians, astonishment at this soon gives way to a complete understanding. People who have no hesitation in satisfying their sexual desires upon children cannot be expected to jib a finer shades in the methods of obtaining that satisfaction; and the sexual impotence which is inherent in children inevitably forces them into the same substitutive actions as those to which adults descend if they become impotent. All the singular conditions under which the ill-matched pair cOnduct their love-relations--on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is yet armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfactinn of his moods, and on the other

108 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary will, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose performance of the sexual activities assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs--all these grotesque and yet tragic incongruities reveal themselves as stamped upon the later development of the indi- vidual and ofhis neurosis, in countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail. Where the relation is between two children, the character of the sexual scenes is none the less of the same repulsive sort, since every such relationship between children postulates a previous seduction of one of them by an adult. The psychical con- sequences of these child-relations are quite extraordinarily far-reaching; the two individuals remain linked by an invisible bond throughout the whole of their lives. Sometimes it is the accidental circumstances of these infantile sexual scenes which in later years acquire a determining power over the symp- toms of the neurosis. Thus, in one of my ca ses the circumstance that the child was required to stimulate the genitals of a grown-up woman with his foot was enough to fixate his neurotic attention for years on to his legs and to their function, and finally to produce a hysterical para- plegia. In another case, a woman patient suffering from anxiety attacks which tended to come on at certain hours of the day could not be calmed unless a particular one of her many sisters stayed by her side all the time. Why this was so would have remained ariddIe if analysis had not shown that the man who had committed the assaults on her used to enquire at every visit whether this sister, who he was afraid might in- terrupt him, was at home. It may happen that the determining power of the infantile scenes is so much concealed that, in a superficial analysis, it is bound to be overlooked. In such instances we imagine that we have found the ex- planation of some particular symptom in the content of one of the later scenes--until, in the course of our work, we come upon the same content in one of the infantile scenes, so that in the end we are obliged to recognize that, after all, the later scene only owes its power of deter- mining symptoms to its agreement with the earlier one. I do not wish because of this to represent the later scene as being unimportant; if it was my task to put before you the rules that govern the formation of hysterical symptoms, I should have to include as one of them that the idea which is selected for the production of a symptom is one which has been called up by a combination of several factors and which has been aroused from various directions simultaneously. I have elsewhere tried to express this in the formula: hysterical symptoms are oveT- determined. * * * There is one fact above all which leads us astray in the psy- chological understanding of hysterical phenomena, and which seems to warn us against measuring psychical acts in hysterics and in normal

THE AETIOLOGY OF HYSTERIA 109 people with the same yardstick. That fact is the descrepancy between psychically exciting stimuli and psychical reactions which we come upon in hysterical subjects. * * * The main part of the phenomenon-of the abnormal, exaggerated, hysterical reaction to psychical stimuli- admits of another explanation, an explanation which is supported by countless examples from the analyses of patients. And this is as follows: The reaction of hysterics is only apparently exaggerated; it is bound to appear exaggerated to us because we only know a small part of the motives from which it arises. In reality, this reaction is proportionate to the exciting stimulus; thus it is normal and psychologically understandable. We see this at once when the analysis has added to the manifest motives, of which the patient is conscious, those other motives, which have been operative without his knowing about them, so that he could not tell us of them. * * * * * * It is not the latest slight- which, in itself, is minimal-that produces the fit of crying, the outburst of despair or the attempt at suicide, in disregard of the axiom that an effect must be proportionate to its cause; the small slight of the present moment has aroused and set working the memories of very many, more intense, earlier slights, behind all of which there lies in addition the memory of a serious slight in childhood which has never been overcome. Or again, let us take the instance of a young girl who blames herself most frightfully for having allowed a boy to stroke her hand in secret, and who from that time on has been overtaken by a neurosis. Y ou can, of course, answer the puzzle by pronouncing her an abnormal, eccentrically disposed and over-sensitive person; but you will think differently when analysis shows you that the touching of her hand reminded her of another, similar touching, which had happened very early in her childhood and which formed part of a less innocent whole, so that her self-reproaches were actually reproaches about that old occasion. * * * To this psychology, which has yet to be created to meet our needs- to this future psychology of the neuroses-I must also refer you when, in conclusion, I tell you something which will at first make you afraid that it may disturb our dawning comprehension of the aetiology of hysteria. For I must affirm that the aetiological role of infantile sexual experience is not confined to hysteria but holds good equally for the remarkable neurosis of obsessions, and perhaps also, indeed, for the various forms of chronic paranoia and other functional psychoses. I express myself on this with less definiteness, because I have as yet an- alysed far fewer cases of obsessional neurosis than of hysteria; and as regards paranoia, I have at my disposal only a single full analysis and a few fragmentary ones. But what I discovered in these cases seemed to be reliable and filled me with confident expectations for other cases. Y ou will per ha ps remember that already, at an earlier date, I recom-

110 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST mended that hysteria and obsessions should be grouped together under the name of 'neuroses of defence', even before I had come to know of their common infantile aetiology. I must now add that-although this need not be expected to happen in general-every one of my ca ses of obsessions revealed a substratum of hysterical symptoms, mostly sen- sations and pains, which went back precisely to the earliest childhood experiences. What, then, determines whether the infantile sexual scenes which have remained unconscious willlater on, when the other patho- genie factors are super-added, give rise to hysterical or to obsessional neurosis or even to paranoia? This increase in our knowledge seems, as you see, to prejudice the aetiological value of these scenes, since it removes the specificity of the aetiological relation. I am not yet in a position, Gentlemen, to give a reliable answer to this question. The number of cases I have analysed is not large enough nor have the determining factors in them been sufficiently various. So far, I have observed that obsessions can be regularly shown by analysis to be disguised and transformed self-reproaches about acts of sexual aggression in childhood, and are therefore more often met with in men than in women, and that men develop obsessions more often than hysteria. From this I might conclude that the character of the infantile scenes-whether they were experienced with pleasure or only passively- has a determining influence on the choice of the later neurosis; but I do not want to underestimate the significance of the age at which these childhood actions occur, and other factors as well. Onlya discussion of further analyses can throw light on these points. But when it becomes clear which are the decisive factors in the choice between the possible forms of the neuro-psychoses of defence, the question of wh at the mech- anism is in virtue of which that particular form takes shape will once again be a purely psychological problem. I have now come to the end of what I have to say to-day. Prepared as I am to meet with contradiction and disbelief, I should like to say one thing more in support of my position. Whatever you may think about the conclusions I have come to, I must ask you not to regard them as the fruit of idle speculation. They are based on a laborious individual examination of patients which has in most cases taken up a hundred or more hours of work. What is even more important to me than the value you put on my results is the attention you give to the procedure I have employed. This procedure is new and difficult to handle, but it is nevertheless irreplaceable for scientific and therapeutic purposes. Y ou will realize, I am sure, that one cannot properly deny the findings which follow from this modification of Breuer's procedure so long as one puts it aside and uses only the customary method of questioning patients. To do so would be like trying to refute the findings ofhistological technique by relying upon macroscopic examination. The new method of research gives wide access to a new element in the

LEITERS TO FLIESS 111 psychical field of events, namely, to processes of thought which have remained unconscious-which, to use Breuer's expression, are 'inad- missible to consciousness'. Thus it inspires us with the hope of a new and better understanding of all functional psychical disturbances. I can- not believe that psychiatry will long hold back from making use of this new pathway to knowledge. Letters to Fliess On September 21, 1897, after returning from his summer holiday in the country, Freud reported to Fliess, in one of the most signiflcant commu- nications he ever se nt to his intimate friend, that he could no longer sustain the \"seduction theory\" of the neuroses on which he had founded his hopes for farne. He did not give it up wholly-on December 12 of the same year he told Fliess that his confidence in the theory had considerably increased- but with the passage of time, his decision announced in the letter excerpted here became final. He was deeply disappointed, but rallied quickly and drew great profit from his \"mistake\": if the tales his women patients had told hirn about being seduced or raped by a parent or brother were not true, this did not mean that they had simply lied to hirn. It must mean that they were reporting on their fantasies. By taking such mental activity seriously, and (as he put it in his \"Autobiographical Study\") after he had \"pulIed myself together,\" he could \"draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality.\" Freud could now leap forward to the psychoanalytic theory of the mind. The way to the Oedipus complex layopen. (see above, p. 21). Freud's abandonment of the \"seduction theory\" has been vigorously de- bated, but it would seem that the reasons he offered for his change of mind are cogent enough. It is important to insist that Freud never denied that child abuse was an appalling reality. The case of Katharina (see above, pp. 78-86) and others left no doubt in his mind on that score. \"Seduction du ring childhood,\" he noted in his \"Autobiographical Study,\" retained a certain share, though a humbler one, in the aetiology of neuroses\" (see above, p. 21). These were extraordinarily difficult and exciting times for Freud. His father had died on October 23, 1896, and the event had let loose in hirn forces of which he had been only dimly aware-or not aware at all. His self-analysis, the unsparing examination of his dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and other \"minor\" events, the deepest, wholly unprecedented self-examination on which he had informally started somewhat earlier, now became a principal preoccupation, and he dredged up significant memo ries of his earliest days. His mother could confirm and elaborate on at least so me of them. Thus, on October 3 and 4, 1897, not long after the shock of abandoning his \"seduction theory,\" he reported to Fliess some of the fas- cinating material he had recovered. In later letters, the rush of self-discovery went on. Much of what he wrote Fliess in 1897 would find a place in his

112 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST Interpretation of Dreams. And what Freud thought most exciting about this work of self-scrutiny was that his discoveries characterized not just his own private history: everyone, it seemed, had been a little Oedipus . . . . I will confide in you at once the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no langer believe in my neurotica [theory ofthe neuroses]. This is probably not intelligible with- out an explanation; after all, you yourself found what I could tell you credible. So I will begin historically from the question of the origin of my reasons for disbelief. The continual disappointments in my attempts at bringing my analysis to areal conclusion, the running-away of people who had for a time seemed most in my grasp, the absence of the complete successes on which I had reckoned, the possibility of explaining the partial suceesses in other ways, on ordinary lines,-this was the first group. Then eame surprise at the fact that in every ca se the father, not excluding my own, had to be blamed as a pervert-the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in which the same determinant is invariably established, though such a widespread extent of perversity towards children is, after all, not very probable. (The perversity would have to be immeasurably more frequent than the hysteria, since the illness only arises where there has been an accumulation of events and where a factor that weakens defence has supervened.) Then, thirdly, the certain discovery that there are no indications of reality in the uncon- seious, so that one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect. (Thus, the possibility remained open that sexual phantasy invariably seizes upon the theme of the parents.) Fourthly, the reflection that in the most deep-going psyehosis the unconscious memory does not break through, so that the secret of the childhood experiences is not betrayed even in the most eonfused delirium. If in this way we see that the unconscious never overeomes the resistanee of the conseious, then, too, we lose our expectation that in treatment the opposite will happen, to the extent of the unconscious being completely tamed by the conscious. I was influenced so far by this that I was prepared to give up two things: the complete resolution of a neurosis and the certain knowledge of its aetiology in childhood. I have no idea now where I have got to, since I have not achieved a theoretical understanding of repression and its interplay of forces. lt seems to have beeome onee again arguable that it is only later experienees that give the impetus to phantasies, which then hark back to childhood; and with this the factor of a hereditary disposition regains a sphere of influence from which I had made it my task to expel it-in the interest of throwing a flood of light on neurosis. If I were depressed, confused, or exhausted, doubts of this kind would

LETfERS TO FLIESS 113 no doubt have to be interpreted as signs of weakness. Since I am in an opposite state, I must recognize them as the result of honest and forcible intellectual work and must be pro ud that after going so deep I am still capable of such criticism. Can it be that this doubt merely represents an episode in advance towards further knowledge? lt is remarkable, too, that there has been an absence of any feeling of shame, for which, after all, there might be occasion. Certainly I shall not tell it in Dan or speak of it in Askelon, in the land of the Philistines. But in your eyes and my own I have more of the feeling of a victory than of a defeat-and, after all, that is not right. ... [October 3] Very little is still happening to me extemally, but internally something most interesting. For the last four days my self- analysis, which I consider indispensable for throwing light upon the whole problem, has proceeded in dreams and has presented me with the most valuable inferences and clues. At some points I have a feeling of being at the end, and so far, too, I have always known where the dream of the next night would take things up. To describe it in writing is more difficult than anything else, and also it would be far too diffuse. I can only say shortly that deT Alte [my father] played no active part in my case, but that no doubt I drew an inference by analogy from myself on to hirn; that the 'prime originator' [of my troubles] was a woman, ugly, elderly, but clever, who told me a great deal about God Almighty and Hell and who gave me a high opinion of my own capacities; that later (between the ages of two and two-and-a-half) my libido was stirred up towards matTem, namely on the occasion of a journey with her from Leipzig to Vienna, during which we must have spent the night together and I must have had an opportunity of seeing her nudam1-you drew the conclusion from this long aga for your own son, as aremark of yours revealed to me-; that I greeted my brother (who was a year my junior and died after a few months) with ill-wishes and genuine childish jeal- ousy, and that his death left the germ of self-reproaches in me. I have also long known the companion in my evil deeds between the ages of one and two. lt was my nephew, a year older than myself, who is now living in Manchester and who visited us in Vienna when I was fourteen. The two of us seem occasionally to have behaved in a cruel fashion to my niece, who was a year younger. This nephew and this younger brother have determined what is neurotic, but also what is intense, in all my friendships. Y ou yourself have seen my travel-anxiety in full swing. I have not yet found out anything about the scenes which underlie the whole business. If they come to light and if I succeed in resolving my own hysteria, I shall be grateful to the memory of the old woman who provided me at such an early age with the means for living and L [F,.··~ seems in fact to have been four years old at the time of this joumey. J

114 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANAL YST going on living. As you see, my old liking for her is breaking through again. I can give you no idea of the intellectual beauty of the work. ... Oetober 4 .... To-day's dream has produced what follows, under the strangest disguises. She was my teacher in sexual matters and scolded me for being clumsy and not being able to do anything. (This is always how neurotic im- potence comes about; it is thus that fear of incapacity at school obtains its sexual substratum. ) At the same time I saw the skull of a small animal and in the dream I thought 'Pig!' But in the analysis I associated it with your wish two years ago that I might find a skull on the Lido to enlighten me, as Coethe on ce did. But I failed to find one. So I was a little fool. The whole dream was full of the most mortifying allusions to my present powerlessness as a therapist. Perhaps this is where an inclination to believe that hysteria is incurable has its start. Besides this, she washed me in reddish water, in which she had previously washed herself. (The interpretation is not difficult; I find nothing like this in the chain of my memories, so I regard it as a genuine ancient discovery.) And she made me carry off 'zehners' (ten kreuzer pieces) and give them to her. There is a long chain from these first sjlver zehners to the heap of paper ten- florin notes which I saw in the dream as Martha's housekeeping money. The dream can be summed up a 'bad treatment'. Just as the old woman got money from me for her bad treatment of me, so to-day I get money for my bad treatment of my patients. A special part was played by Frau Qu., whose remark you reported to me: I ought not to take anything from her as she was the wife of a colleague. (Of course he made it a condition that I should.) A severe critic might say of all this that it was retrogressively phantasied and not progressively determined. Expenmenta crucis [crucial experi- ments] would have to decide against hirn. The reddish water seems to be one such already. Where do aB patients get the frightful perverse details which are often as remote from their experience as from their knowledge? {October 15, 1897} ... My self-analysis is in faet the most essential thing I have at present and it promises to become of the greatest value to me if it reaches its end. In the middle of it, it suddenly ceased for three days and I had the feeling of being tied up inside which patients complain of so much, and I was really inconsolable ... It is an uncanny fact that my practice still aBows me a great deal of time. The whole thing is all the more valuable for my purposes since I have succeeded in finding a few real points of reference for the story. I asked my mother whether she still recollected the nurse. 'Of course', she said, 'an elderly person, very clever. She was always taking you to church: when you came back afterwards you used to preach sermons and tell us

LEITERS TO FLIESS 115 all about God Almighty. During my confinement when Anna was born,' (she is two and a half years my junior) 'it was discovered that she was a thief, and all the shiny new kreuzers and zehners and all the toys that had been given to you were found in her possession. Your brother Philipp [see below) hirnself went for the policeman and she was given ten months in prison.' Now just see how this confirms the conclusions of my dream- interpretation. I have found a simple explanation of my own possible mistake. I wrote to you that she led me into stealing zehners and giving them to her. The dream really meant that she stole them herself. For the dream-picture was a memory of my taking money from the mother of a doctor-that is, wrongfully. The correct interpretation is: I = she, and the mother of a doctor equals my mother. So far was I from knowing that she was a thief that I made a wrong interpretation. I also made enquiries about the doctor we had in Freiberg, because a dream showed a great deal of resentment against hirn. In the analysis of the figure in the dream behind which he was concealed I thought also of a Professor von K., who was my history master at schoo!. He did not seem to fit in at all, as my relations with hirn were indifferent or, rather, agreeable. My mother then told me that the doctor in my child- hood had only one eye, and of all my schoolmasters Professor K. too was the only one with that same defect. The evidential value of these coincidences might be invalidated by the objection that on some occasion in my later childhood I had heard that the nurse was a thief, and that I had then apparently forgotten it till it finally emerged in the dream. I think myself that that is so. But I have another unexceptionable and amusing piece of evidence. I said to myself that if the old woman disappeared so suddenly, it must be possible to point to the impression this made on me. Where is that impression, then? A scene then occurred to me which, for the last 29 years, has occasionally emerged in my conscious memory without my understand- ing it. My mother was nowhere to be found: I was screaming my head off. My brother Philipp, twenty years older than me, was holding open a cupboard [Kasten] for me, and, when I found that my mother was not inside it either, I began crying still more, till, looking slim and beautiful, she came in by the door. What can this mean? Why was my brother opening the cupboard, though he knew that my mother was not in it, so that this could not pacify me? And then suddenly I understood. I had asked hirn to do it. When I missed my mother, I had been afraid she had vanished from me just as the old woman had a short time before. Now I must have heard that the old woman had been locked up and consequently I must have thought that my mother had been too-or rather had been 'boxed up' ['eingekastelt'); for my brother Philipp, who is 63 now, is fond to this very day of talking in this punning fashion. The fact that it was to hirn in particular that I turned proves that I knew quite well of his share in the nurse's disappearance. Since then I have got much further, but have not yet reached any

116 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST real stopping-point. Communicating what is unfinished is so diffuse and laborious that I hope you will excuse me from it and content yourself with a knowledge of the portions that are established with certainty. If the analysis contains what I expect from it, I will work it over system- atically and put it before you afterwards. So far I have found nothing completely new, only complications, to which I am ordinarily accus- tomed. lt is not quite easy. To be completely honest with oneself is good practice. One single thought of general value has been revealed to me. I have found, in my own ca se too, falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it as a universal event of early childhood, even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical. (Similarly with the romance of parentage in paranoia-her- oes, founders of religions.) If that is so, we can understand the riveting power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections raised by reason against its presupposition of destiny; and we can understand why the later 'dramas of destiny' were bound to fail so miserably. Our feelings rise against any arbitrary, individual compulsion [of fate], such as is presupposed in [Crillparzer's] Die Mnfrau, etc. But the Creek legend seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he feels its existence within hirnself. Each member of the audience was once, in germ and in phantasy, just such an Oedipus, and each one recoils in horror from the dream-fulfilment here transplanted into reality, with the whole quota of repression wh ich separates his infantile state from his present one. A fleeting idea has passed through my head of whether the same thing may not lie at the bottom of Harnlet as well. I am not thinking of Shakespeare's conscious intention, but I believe rather that here some real event instigated the poet to his representation, in that the uncon- scious in hirn understood the unconscious in his hero. How can Hamlet the hysteric justify his wards 'Thus conscience does make cowards of us all', how can he explain his hesitation in avenging his father by the murder of his uncle-he, the same man who sends his courtiers to their death without a sc rupIe and who is positively precipitate in killing Laertes? How better could he justify hirnself than by the torment he suffers from the obscure memory that he hirnself had meditated the same deed against his father from passion far his mother, and-'use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?' His con- science is his unconscious sense of guilt. And is not his sexual alienation in his conversation with Ophelia typically hysterical? and his rejection of the instinct which seeks to beget children? and, finally, his transferring the deed from his own father to Ophelia's? And does he not in the end, in the same remarkable way as my hysterical patients, bring down pun- ishment on hirnself by suffering the same fate as his father of being poisoned by the same rival?

Screen Memories This paper of 1899, a charming but pointed set of disguised reminiscences, is evidence and part of the self-exploration that occupied Freud day and night in those years and that was indispensable to his work on The Inter- pretation of Dreams. Just how much autobiography is concealed in the stories attributed to third persons remains a matter of some dispute. * * * We are so much accustomed to this lack of memory of the impressions of childhood that we are apt to overlook the problem underlying it and are inclined to explain it as a self-evident consequence of the rudimentary character of the mental activities of children. Actually, however, a nor- maHy developed child of three or four already exhibits an enormous amount of highly organized mental functioning in the comparisons and inferences which he makes and in the expression of his feelings; and there is no obvious reason why amnesia should overtake these psychical acts, which carry no less weight than those of a later age. * * * I have no intention at present of discussing the subject as a whole, and I shall therefore content myself with emphasizing the few points which will enable me to introduce the notion of what I have termed 'screen memories'. The age to which the content of the earliest memories of childhood is usually referred back is the period between the ages of two and four. * * • There are some, however, whose memory reaches back further- even to the time before the completion of their first year; and, on the other hand, there are some whose earIiest recoIIections go back only to their sixth, seventh, or even eighth yeaL * * • Quite special interest attaches to the question of what is the usual content of these earliest memories of childhood. The psychology of adults would necessarily lead us to expect that those experiences would be selected as worth remembering which had aroused some powerful emo- tion or which, owing to their consequences, had been recognized as important soon after their occurrence. And some indeed of the obser- vations coIIected by the Henris appear to fulfil this expectation. They report that the most frequent content of the first memories of childhood are on the one hand occasions of fear, shame, physical pain, etc., and on the other hand important events such as iIlnesses, deaths, fires, births of brothers and sisters, etc. We might therefore be inclined to assurne that the principle goveming the choice of memories is the same in the case of children as in that of adults. It is inteHigible-though the fact deserves to be explicitly rnentioned-that the memories retained frorn childhood should necessarily show evidence of the difference between wh at attracts the interest of a child and of an adult. * * * * * *

118 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANAL YST Further investigation of these iI;ldifferent childhood memories has taught me that they can originate in other ways as well and that an unsuspected wealth of meaning lies concealed behind their apparent innocence. But on this point 1 shall not content myself with a mere assertion but shall give a detailed report of one particular instance wh ich seems to me the most instructive out of a considerable number of similar ones. Its value is certainly increased by the fact that it relates to someone who is not at all or only very slightly neurotic. The subject of this observation is a man of university education, aged thirty-eight. 1 Though his own profession lies in a very different field, he has taken an interest in psychological questions ever since 1 was able to relieve hirn of a slight phobia by means of psycho-analysis. Last year he drew my attention to his childhood memories, which had already played some part in his analysis. After studying the investigation made by V. and C. Henri, he gave me the following summarized account of his own experience. 'I have at my disposal a fair number of early memories of childhood which 1 can date with great certainty. For at the age of three lIeft the sm all place where 1 was born and moved to a large town; and all these memories of mine relate to my birthplace and therefore date from my second and third years. They are mostly short scenes, but they are very weIl preserved and furnished with every detail of sense-perception, in complete contrast to my memories of adult years, which are entirely lacking in the visual element. From my third year onwards my recol- lections grow scantier and less clear; there are gaps in them which must cover more than a year; and it is not, 1 believe, until my sixth or seventh year that the stream of my memories becomes continuous. My memo ries up to the time of my leaving my first pI ace of residence fall into three groups. The first group consists of scenes which my parents have re- peatedly since described to me. As regards these, 1 feel uncertain whether 1 have had the mnemic image from the beginning or whether 1 only construed it after hearing one of these descriptions. 1 may remark, how- ever, that there are also events of which 1 have no mnemic image in spite of their having been frequently retaiIed by my parents. 1 attach more importance to the second group. It comprises scenes which have not (so far as 1 know) been described to me and some of which, indeed, could not have been described to me, as 1 have not met the other participants in them (my nurse and playmates) since their occurrence. 1 shall come to the third group presently. As regards the content of these scenes and their consequent claim to being recollected, 1 should like to say that 1 am not entirely at sea. 1 cannot maintain, indeed, that what 1 have retained are memories of the most important events of the period, 1. [There can be no doubt that what follows is publication in May 1899, Freud was in fact just autobiographica1 material only thinly disguised. forty·three years old. J ... At the date at which this paper was sent in for

SCREEN MEMORIES 119 or what I should to-day judge to be the most important. I have no knowledge of the birth of a sister, who is two and a half years younger than I am; my departure, my first sight of the railway and the long carriage-drive before it-none of these has left a trace in my memory. On theother hand, I can remember two small occurrences during the railway-joumey; these, as you will recollect, ca me up in the analysis of my phobia. But what should have made most impression on me was an injury to my face which caused a considerable loss of blood and for which I had to have some stitches put in by a surgeon. I can still fee! the scar resulting from this accident, but I know of no recollection which points to it, either directly or indirectly. It is true that I may perhaps have been under two years old at the time. 'It follows from this that I fee! no surprise at the pictures and scenes of these first two groups. No doubt they are displaced memo ries from which the essential e!ement has for the most part been omitted. But in a few of them it is at least hin ted at, and in others it is easy for me to complete them by following certain pointers. By doing so I can establish asound connection between the separate fragments of memories and arrive at a clear understanding of what the childish interest was that recommended these particular occurrences to my memory. This does not apply, however, to the content of the third group, which I have not so far discussed. There I am met by material-one rather long scene and several smaller pictures-with which I can make no headway at all. The scene appears to me fairly indifferent and I cannot understand why it should have become fixed in my memory. Let me describe it to you. I see a rectangular, rather steeply sloping piece of meadow-land, green and thickly grown; in the green there are a great number of yellow flowers-evidently common dande!ions. At the top end of the meadow there is a cottage and in front of the cottage door two women are standing chatting busily, a peasant-woman with a handkerchief on her head and a children's nurse. Three children are playing in the grass. One of them is myse!f (between the age of two and three); the fwo others are my boy cousin, who is a year older than me, and his sister, who is almost exactly the same age as I am. We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The little girl has the best bunch; and, as though by mutual agreement, we-the two boys-fall on her and snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her a big piece of black bread. Hardly have we seen this than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage and ask to be given so me bread too. And we are in fact given some; the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious-and at that point the scene breaks off. 'Now what is there in this occurrence to justify the expenditure of memory which it has occasioned me? I have racked my brains in vain over it. Does the emphasis lie in our disagreeable behaviour to the little

120 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANAL YST girl? Did the yellow colour of the dandelions-a flower which 1 am, of course, far from admiring to-day-so greatly please me? Or, as a result of my careering round the grass, did the bread taste so much nicer than usual that it made an unforgettable impression on me? Nor can 1 find any connection between this scene and the interest which (as 1 was able to discover without any difficulty) bound together the other scenes from my childhood. Altogether, there seems to me something not quite right about this scene. The yellow of the flowers is a disporportionately prom- inent element in the situation as a whole, and the nice taste of the bread seems to me exaggerated in an almost haiiucinatory fashion. I cannot help being reminded of some pictures that 1 once saw in a burlesque exhibition. Certain portions of these pictures, and of course the most inappropriate ones, instead of being painted, were built up in three dimensions-for instance, the ladies' bustles. Weil, can you point out any way of finding an explanation or interpretation of this redundant memory of my childhood?' 1 thought it advisable to ask hirn since when he had been occupied with this recollection: whether he was of opinion that it had recurred to his memory periodically since his childhood, or whether it had perhaps emerged at some later time on some occasion that could be recalled. This question was all that it was necessary for me to contribute to the solution of the problem; the rest was found by my collaborator hirnself, who was no novice at jobs of this kind. 'I have not yet considered that point,' he replied. 'Now that you have raised the question, it seems to me almost a certainty that this childhood memory never occurred to me at all in my earlier years. But I can also recall the occasion which led to my recovering this and many other recollections of my earliest childhood. When I was seventeen and at my secondary school, I retumed for the first time to my birthplace for the holidays, to stay with a family who had been our friends ever since that remote date. I know quite weil what a wealth of impressions over- whelmed me at that time. But I see now that I shall have to tell you a whole big piece of my history: it belongs here, and you have brought it upon yourself by yom question. So listen. I was the child of people who were originally well-to-do and who, I fancy, lived comfortably enough in that little corner of the provinces. When 1 was about three, the branch of industry in which my father was concerned met with a catastrophe. He lost all his means and we were forced to leave the place and move to a large town. Lang and difficult years followed, of which, as it seems to me, nothing was worth remembering. I never feit really comfortable in the town. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our horne, in which (as one of my memories from those days teils me) I used to run off from my father, almost before I had learnt to walk. Those holidays, when I was seventeen, were my first holidays in the country, and, as I have said, I stayed with a family with whom we were friends and who had risen greatly in the world since our

SCREEN MEMORIES 121 move. I could compare the comfort reigning there with our own style of living at horne in the town. But it is no use evading the subject any Ion ger: I must admit that there was something else that excited me powerfully. I was seventeen, and in the family where I was staying there was a daughter of fifteen, with whom I immediately fell in love. It was my first calf-Iove and sufficiently intense, but I kept it completely secret. After a few days the girl went off to her school (from which she too was horne for the holidays) and it was this separation after such a short acquaintance that brought my longings to a really high pitch. I passed many hours in solitary walks through the lovely woods that I had found once more and spent my time building castles in the air. These, strangely enough, were not concerned with the future but sought to improve the past. If only the smash had not occurred! If only I had stopped at horne and grown up in the country and grown as strong as the young men in the house, the brothers of my love! And then if only I had followed my father's profession and if I had finally married her-for I should have known her intimately all those years! I had not the slightest doubt, of course, that in the circumstances created by my imagination I should have loved her just as passionately as I really seemed to then. A strange thing. For when I see her now from time to time-she happens to have married someone here-she is quite exceptionally indifferent to me. Yet I can remember quite weIl for what a long time afterwards I was affected by the yellow colour of the dress she was wearing when we first met, whenever I saw the same colour anywhere else.' That sounds very much like your parenthetical remark to the effect that you are no Ion ger fond of the common dandelion. Do you not suspect that there may be a connection between the yellow of the girl's dress and the ultra-dear yellow of the flowers in your childhood scene? 'Possibly. But it was not the same yellow. The dress was more of a yellowish brown, more like the colour of wallflowers. However, I can at least let you have an intermediate idea which may serve your purpose. At a later date, while I was in the Alps, I saw how certain flowers which have light colouring in the lowlands take on darker shades at high altitudes. Unless I am greatly mistaken, there is frequently to be found in mountainous regions a flower which is very similar to the dan deli on but which is dark yellow and would exactly agree in colour with the dress of the girl I was so fond of. But I have not finished yet. I now come to a second occasion which stirred up in me the impressions of my childhood and wh ich dates from a time not far distant from the first. I was seventeen when I revisited my birthplace. Three years later during my holidays I visited my unde and met on ce again the children who had been my first playmates, the same two cousins, the boy a year older than I am and the girl of the same age as myself, who appear in the childhood scene with the dandelions. This family had left my birthplace at the same time as we did and had become prosperous in a far-distant city.'

122 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST And did you once more fall in love-with YOUf cousin this time- and indulge in a new set of phantasies? 'No, this time things turned out differently. By then I was at the University and I was a slave to my books. I had nothing left over for my cousin. So far as I know I had no similar phantasies on that occasion. But I believe that my father and my uncle h<id concocted a plan by which I was to exchange the abstruse subject of my studies for one of more practical value, settle down, after my studies were completed, in the place where my uncle lived, and marry my cousin. No doubt when they saw how absorbed I was in my own intentions the plan was dropped; but I fancy I must certainly have been aware of its existence. It was not untillater, when I was a newly-fledged man of science and hard pressed by the exigencies of life and when I had to wait so long before finding a post here, that I must sometimes have reflected that my father had meant weil in planning this marriage for me, to make good the loss in which the original catastrophe had involved my whole existence.' Then I am inclined to believe that the childhood scene we are con- sidering emerged at this time, when you were struggling for YOUf daily bread-provided, that is, that you can confirm my idea that it was dUfing this same period that you first made the acquaintance of the Alps. 'Yes, that is so: mountaineering was the one en joyment that I allowed myself at that time. But I still cannot grasp YOUf point.' I am coming to it at once. The element on which you put most stress in YOUf childhood scene was the fact of the country-made bread tasting so delicious. It seems clear that this idea, which amounted alm ost to a hallucination, corresponded to yOUf phantasy of the comfortable life you would have led if you had stayed at horne and married this girl [in the yellow dressJ-or, in symbolic language, of how sweet the bread would have tasted for which you had to struggle so hard in YOUf later years. The yellow of the flowers, too, points to the same girl. But there are also elements in the childhood scene which can only be related to the second phantasy--of being married to YOUf cousin. Throwing away the flowers in exchange for bread strikes me as not a bad disguise for the scheme YOUf father had for you: you were to give up YOUf unpractical ideals and take on a 'bread-and-butter' occupation, were you not? 'It seems then that I amalgamated the two sets of phantasies of how my life could have been more comfortable-the \"yellow\" and the \"country-made bread\" from the one and the throwing-away of the flowers and the actual people concerned from the other.' Yes. Y ou projected the two phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory of them. The element about the alpine flowers is as it were a stamp giving the date of manufactUfe. I can aSSUfe you that people often construct such things unconsciously-almost like works of fiction. 'But if that is so, there was no childhood memory, but only a phantasy

SCREEN MEMORIES 123 put back into childhood. A feeling tells me, though, that the scene is genuine. How does that fit in?' There is in general no guarantee of the data produced by our memory. But I am ready to agree with you that the ~cene is genuine. If so, you selected it from innumerable others of a similar or another kind because, on account of its content (which in itself was indifferent) it was well adapted to represent the two phantasies, which were important enough to you. Recollection of this kind, whose value lies in the fact that it represents in the memory impressions and thoughts of a later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links, mayappropriately be called a 'screen memory'. In any ca se you will cease to feel any surprise that this scene should so often recur to your mind. It can no longer be regarded as an innocent one since, as we have discovered, it is calculated to illustrate the most momentous turning-points in your life, the influ- ence of the two most powerful motive forces--hunger and love. 2 'Yes, it represented hunger well enough. But what about love?\" In the yellow of the flowers, I mean. But I cannot deny that in this childhood scene of yours love is represented far less prominently than I should have expected from my previous experience. 'No. You are mistaken. This essence of it is its representation of love. Now I understand for the first time. Think for amoment! Taking flowers away from a girl means to deflower her. What a contrast between the boldness of this phantasy and my bashfulness on the first occasion and my indifference on the second.' I can assure you that youthful bashfulness habitually has as its com- plement bold phantasies of that sort. 'But in that case the phantasy that has transformed itself into these childhood memories would not be a conscious one that I can remember, but an unconscious one?' Unconscious thoughts which are a prolongation of conscious ones. Y ou think to yourself 'If I had married so-and-so', and behind the thought there is an impulse to form a picture of what the 'being married' really iso 'I can go on with it now myself. The most seductive part of the whole subject for a young scapegrace is the picture of the marriage night. (What does he care about what comes afterwards?) But that picture cannot venture out into the light of day: the dominating mood of diffidence and of respect towards the girl keeps it suppressed. So it remains un- conscious--' And slips away into a childhood memory. You are quite right. It is 2. {This thought borrows from Schillers poem same years. Indeed, he had quoted it in his letter \"Die Weltweisen.\" The idea, wh ich is an early of February 12, 1884, to his fiancee Martha Ber- version of Freud's first theory of the drives-sexual nays (see Peter Gay, Freud, p. 46.)} and self-preservative--recurs in his writings for

124 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST precisely the coarsely sensual element in the phantasy which explains why it does not develop into a conscious phantasy but must be content to find its way allusively and under a flowery disguise into a childhood scene. 'But why precisely, into a childhood scene, I should like to know?' For the sake of its innocence, perhaps. Can you imagine a greater contrast to these designs for gross sexual aggression than childish pranks? However, there are more general grounds that have a decisive influence in bringing about the slipping away of repressed thoughts and wishes into childhood memo ries: for you will filld the same thing invariably happening in hysterical patients. It seems, moreover, as though the recollection of the remote past is in itself facilitated by some pleasurable motive: forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. 3 'If that is so, I have lost all faith in the genuineness of the dandelion scene. This is how I look at it: On the two occasions in question, and with the support of very comprehensible realistic motives, the thought occurred to me: \"If you had married this or that girl, your life would have become much pleasanter.\" The sensual current in my mind took hold of the thought which is contained in the protasis and repeated it in images of a kind capable of giving that same sensual current satis- faction. This second version of the thought remained unconscious on account of its incompatibility with the dominant sexual disposition; but this very fact of its remaining unconscious enabled it to persist in my mind long after changes in the real situation had quite got rid of the conscious version. In accordance, as you say, with a generallaw, the dause that had remained unconscious sought to transform itself into a childhood scene which, on account of its innocence, would be able to become conscious. With this end in view it had to undergo a fresh transformation, or rather two fresh transformations. One of these re- moved the objectionable element from the protasis by expressing it fig- uratively; the second forced the apodosis into a shape capable of visual representation-using for the purpose the intermediary ideas of \"bread\" and \"bread-and-butler occupations\". I see that by producing a phantasy like this I was providing, as it were, a fulfilment of the two suppressed wishes-for deflowering a girl and for material comfort. But now that I have given such a complete account of the motives that led to my producing the dandelion phantasy, I cannot help conduding that what I am dealing with is something that never happened at all but has been unjustifiably smuggled in among my childhood memories. ' I see that I must take up the defence of its genuineness. You are going too far. Y ou have accepted my assertion that every suppressed phantasy of this kind tends to slip away into a childhood scene. But suppose now that this cannot occur unless there is a memory-trace the content of which offers the phantasy a point of contact-comes, as it were, half 3. ['Some day, perhaps, it will be a joy to remember even these things.' Virgil, Aeneid, I, 203.1

SCREEN MEMO RIES 125 way to meet it. Once a point of contact of this kind has been found- in the present instance it was the deflowering, the taking away of the flowers-the remaining content of the phantasy is remodelled with the help of every legitimate intermediate idea-take the bread as an ex- ample-till it can find further points of contact with the content of the childhood scene. It is very possible that in the course of this process the childhood scene itself also undergoes changes; I regard it as certain that falsifications of memory may be brought about in this way too. In your case the childhood scene seems only to have had so me of its lines engraved more deeply: think of the over-emphasis on the yellow and the exaggerated niceness of the bread. But the raw material was utilizable. If that had not been so, it would not have been possible for this particular memory, rather than any others, to make its way forward into con- sciousness. No such scene would have occurred to you as a childhood memory, or perhaps some other one would have-for you know how easily our ingenuity can build connecting bridges from any one point to any other. And apart from your own subjective feeling which I am not inclined to under-estimate, there is another thing that speaks in favour of the genuineness of your dandelion memory. It contains ele- ments which have not been solved by wh at you have told me and which do not in fact fit in with the sense required by the phantasy. For instance, your boy cousin helping you to rob the Iittle girl of her flowers-can you make any sense of the idea of being helped in deflowering someone? or of the peasant-woman and the nurse in front of the cottage? 'Not that I can see.' So the phantasy does not coincide completely with the childhood scene. It is only based on it at certain points. That argues in favour of the childhood memory being genuine. '00 you think an interpretation like this of an apparently innocent childhood memory is often applicable? Very often, in my experience. Shall we amuse ourselves by seeing whether the two examples given by the Henris can be interpreted as screen memories concealing subsequent experiences and wishes? I mean the memory of a table laid for a meal with a basin of ice on it, which was supposed to have some connection with the death of the subjecl's grandmother, and the other memory, of a child breaking off a branch from a tree while he was on a walk and of his being helped to do it by someone. He reflected for a little and then answered: 'I can make nothing of the first one. It is most probably a case of displacement at work; but the intermediate steps are beyond guessing. As for the second case, I should be prepared to give an interpretation, if only the person concerned had not been a Frenchman.' I cannot follow you there. What difference would that make? 'A great deal of difference, since what provides the intermediate step between a screen memory and what it conceals is likely to be a verbal

126 MAKING OF A PSYCHOANALYST expression. In Cerman \"to puB one out\" is a very common vulgar term for masturbation. The scene would then be putting back into early childhood a seduction to masturbation-someone was helping hirn to do it-which in fact occurred at a later period. But even so, it does not fit, for in the childhood scene there were a number of other people present.' Whereas his seduction to masturbate must have occurred in solitude and secrecy. It is just that contrast that inclines me to accept your view: it serves once again to make the scene innocent. Da you know what it means when in a dream we see 'a lot of srrangers', as happens so often in dreams of nakedness in which we feel so terribly embarrassed? Nothing more nor less than secrecy, which there again is expressed by its opposite. However, our interpretation remains a jest, since we have no idea whether a Frenchman would recognize an allusion to masturbation in the words casser une branche d'un arbre or in some suitably emended phrase. This analysis, which I have reproduced as accurately as possible, will, I hope, have to some extent clarified the concept of a 'screen memory' as one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to the relation existing between that content and some other, that has been suppressed. * * • Our earliest childhood memo ries will always be a subject of special interest because the problem mentioned at the beginning of this paper (of how it comes about that the impressions which are of most signifi- cance for our whole future usuaBy leave no mnemic images behind) leads us to reflect upon the origin of conscious memo ries in general. • • * * * • It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at aB {rom our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us Dur earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood mem- ories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were {ormed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as weIl as in the selection of the memories themselves.

PART TWO: THE CLASSIC THEORY



The Interpretation of Dreams Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, published in November 1899 but dated 1900 by the publisher (and by Freud, too, in his references to it), is still, after all these decades, an astonishing performance. The author's pride in it remained undimmed. As he put it three decades after its publication, in 1931, prefacing the third, revised, English edition: \"Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime.\" The book is so rich as to be virtually unclassifiable. It is partly open and partly concealed autobiography, partly an account of what it meant to be a Jew in Habsburg Austria-Hungary, partly an analysis of the considerable literature on dreaming from antiquity to the nineteenth century, but also, and mainly, the working out of a theory of dreams and (in the difficult, famous last chapter, the seventh) a more general theory of mind. In one way or another, Freud had been working on the book since about 1892, when he began to take particular account of dreams. The most celebrated of the dreams he uses in the book (reprinted beIow), the so-called \"Irrna dream,\" was dreamt in mid-July 1895, years before Freud had precise!y determined what to do with the material he was amassing. The preface to the second edition, just below, shows how inti- mately entangled this work was with Freud's deepest feelings. In short, The Interpretation of Dreams is impossible really to excerpt. The reader should permit the whole book to work on hirn. Preface io the Second Edition If within ten years of the publication of this book (wh ich is very far from being an easy one to read) a second edition is called for, this is not due to the interest taken in it by the professional circles to whom my original preface was addressed. My psychiatrie colleagues see m to have taken no trouble to overcome the initial bewilderment created by my new ap- proach to dreams. The professional philosophers have become accus- tomed to polishing off the problems of dream-life (which they treat as a mere appendix to conscious states) in a few sentences-and usually in the same ones; and they have evidently failed to notice that we have something here from which a number of inferences can be drawn that are bound to transform our psychological theories. The attitude adopted by reviewers in the scientific periodicals could only lead one to suppose that my work was doomed to be sunk into complete silence; while the small group of gallant supporters, who practise medical psycho-analysis under my guidance and who follow my example in interpreting dreams and make use of their interpretations in treating neurotics, would never have exhausted the first edition of the book. Thus it is that I fee! indebted to a wider circle of educated and curious-minded readers, whose interest

130 THE CLASSIC THEORY has led me to take up on ce more after nine years this difIicuIt, but in many respects fundamental, work. I am glad to say that I have found little to change in it. Here and there I have inserted some new material, added some fresh points of detail derived from my increased experience, and at so me few points recast my statements. But the essence of what I have written about dreams and their interpretation, as weIl as about the psychological theorems to be deduced from them-all this remains unaItered: subjectively at all events, it has stood the test of time. Anyone who is acquainted with my other writings (on the aetiology and mechanism of the psycho-neuroses) will know that I have never put forward inconclusive opinions as though they were established facts, and that I have always sought to modify my statements so that they may keep in step with my advancing knowledge. In the sphere of dream-life I have been able to leave my original assertions unchanged. During the long years in which I have been working at the problems of the neuroses I have often been in doubt and sometimes been shaken in my convictions. At such times it has always been the Interpretation of Dreams that has given me back my certainty. It is thus a sure instinct which has led my many scientific opponents to refuse to follow me more especially in my researches upon dreams. An equal durability and power to withstand any far-reaching altera- tions during the process of revision has been shown by the material of the book, consisting as it does of dreams of my own which have for the most part been overtaken or made valueless by the march of events and by which I illustrated the rules of dream-interpretation. For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally-a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father's death-that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life. Having discovered that this was so, I feit unable to obliterate the traces of the experience. To my readers, however, it will be a matter of indifference upon what particular material they learn to appreciate the importance of dreams and how to interpret them. Wherever I have found it impossible to incorporate some essential addition into the original context, I have indicated its more recent date by enclosing it in square brackets. BERCHTESGADEN, Summer 1908 PREAMBLE During the summer of 1895 I had been giving psycho-analytic treat- ment 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 physician and particularly in a psychotherapist. While the physician's personal interest

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 131 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 ca se 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.-One day I had a visit from a junior colleague, one of my oldest friends, who had been staying with my patient, Irma, and her family at their country resort. I asked hirn how he had found her and he answered: 'She's better, but not quite well.' I was conscious that my friend Otto' s words, or the tone in which he spoke them, annoyed me. I fancied I detected a reproof in them, such as to the effect that I had promised the patient too much; and, whether rightly or wrongly, I attributed the supposed fact of Otto's siding against me to the int1uence of my patient's relatives, who, as it seemed to me, had never looked with favour on the treatment. However, my disagreeable impression was not clear to me and I gave no outward sign of it. The same evening I wrote out Irma's ca se history, with the idea of giving it to Dr. M. (a common friend who was at that time the leading figure in our circle) in order to justify mys elf. That night (or more probably the next morning) I had the following dream, which I noted down immediately after waking. 1 DREAM OF JULY 23RD-24TH, 1895 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 fQund a big white patch; at another place I saw extensive whitish grey scabs upon some remarkable curly structures which were evidently modelIed on the turbinal bones of the nose.-I at once cailed in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination and confirmed it. ... Dr. M. looked quite different from usual; he was very pale, he walked with a limp and his chin was clean-shaven . ... My friend Otto was now standing beside her as weil, 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 1. [Footnote added 1914:1 This is the first dream which I submitted to a detailed interpretation.

132 THE CLASSIC THEORY portion of the skin on the left shoulder was in{tltrated. (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 the infection. Not long before, when she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injection of apreparation of propyl, propyls ... propionic acid ... trimethylamin (and I saw before me the formula for this printed in heavy type). . . . Injections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly . ... And probably the syringe had not been clean. This dream has one advantage over many others. lt was immediately clear wh at events of the previous day provided its starting-point. My preamble makes that plain. The news which Otto had given me ofIrma's condition and the case history which I had been engaged in writing till far into the night continued to occupy my mental activity even after I was asleep. Nevertheless, no one who had only read the preamble and the content of the dream itself could have the slightest notion of what the dream meant. I myself had no notion. I was astonished at the symptoms of which Irma complained to me in the dream, since they were not the same as those for which I had treated her. I smiled at the senseless idea of an injection of propionic acid and at Dr. M. 's consoling reflections. Towards its end the dream seemed to me to be more obscUfe and compressed than it was at the beginning. In order to discover the meaning of all this it was necessary to undertake a detailed analysis. ANALYSIS The hall-numerous guests, whom we were receiving. We were spend- ing that summer at Bellevue, a house standing by itself on one of the hills adjoining the Kahlenberg. 2 The house had formerly been designed as a place of entertainment and its reception-rooms were in consequence unusually lofty and hall-like. lt was at Bellevue that I had the dream, a few days before my wife's birthday. On the previous day my wife had told me that she expected that a number of friends, including Irma, ,would be coming out to visit us on her birthday. My dream was thus anticipating this occasion: it was my wife's birthday and a number of guests, including Irma, were being reeeived by us in the large hall at Bellevue. I reproached Irma for not having accepted my solution; I said: 'If you still get pains, it's your own fault.' I might have said this to her in waking life, and I may aetually have done so. lt was my view at that time (though I have sinee reeognized it as a wrong one) that my task was fulfilled when I had informed a patient of the hidden meaning of his symptoms: I eonsidered that I was not responsible for wh ether he aeeepted the solution or not-though this was what sueeess depended on. I owe it to 2. [A hili which is a favourite re$Ort in the immediate neighborhood of Vienna.)

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 133 this mistake, which I have now fortunately corrected, that my Me was made easier at a time when, in spite of all my inevitable ignorance, I was expected to produce therapeutic successes.-I noticed, however, that the words which I spoke to Irma in the dream showed that I was specially anxious not to be responsible for the pains which she still had. If they were her fault they could not be mine. Could it be that the purpose of the dream lay in this direction? Irma's complaint: pains in her throat and abdomen and stomaeh; it was choking her. Pains in the stornach were among my patient's symp- toms but were not very prominent; she complained more of feelings of nausea and disgust. Pains in the throat and abdomen and constriction of the throat played scarcely any part in her illness. I wondered why I decided upon this choice of symptoms in the dream but could not think of an explanation at the moment. She looked pale and puffy. My patient always had a rosy complexion. I began to suspect that someone else was being substituted for her. I was alarmed at the idea that I had missed an organic illness. This, as may weil be believed, is a perpetual source of anxiety to a special ist whose practice is alm ost limited to neurotic patients and who is in the habit of attributing to hysteria a great number of symptoms which other physicians treat as organic. On the other hand, a faint doubt crept into my mind-from where, I could not tell-that my alarm was not entirely genuine. If Irma's pains had an organic basis, once again I could not be held responsible for curing them; my treatment only set out to get rid of hysterical pains. It occurred to me, in fact, that I was actually wishing that there had been a wrong diagnosis; for, if so, the blame for my lack of success would also have been got rid of. I took her to the window to look down her throat. She showed some recalcitrance, like women with false teeth. I thought to myself that really there was no need for her to do that. I had never had any occasion to examine Irma's oral cavity. What happened in the dream reminded me of an examination I had carried out some time before of a governess: at a first glance she had seemed a picture of youthful beauty, but when it came to opening her mouth she had taken measures to conceal her plates. This led to recollections of other medical examinations and of little secrets revealed in the course of them-to the satisfaction of neither party. 'There was really no need for her to da that' was no doubt intended in the first place as a compliment to lrma; but I suspected that it had another meaning besides. (If one carries out an analysis attentively, one gets a feeling of whether or not one has exhausted all the background thoughts that are to be expected.) The way in which Irma stood by the window suddenly reminded me of another experience. Irma had an intimate woman friend of whom I had a very high opinion. When I visited this lady one evening I had found her by a window in the situation reproduced in the dream, and her physician, the same Or. M., had pronounced that she had a diphtheritic membrane. The figure of Or.

134 THE CLASSIC THEORY M. and the membrane reappear later in the dream. It now occurred to me that for the last few months I had had every reason to suppose that this other lady was also a hysteric. Indeed, Irma herself had betrayed the fact to me. What did I know of her condition? One thing precisely: that, like my Irma of the dream, she suffered from hysterical choking. So in the dream I had replaced my patient by her friend. I now recollected that I had often played with the idea that she too might ask me to relieve her of her symptoms. I myself, however, had thought this unlikely, since she was of a very reserved nature. She was recalcitrant, as was shown in the dream. Another reason was that there was no need for her to do it: she had so far shown herself strong enough to master her condition without outside help. There still remained a few features that I could not attach either to Irma or to her friend: pale; pu{fy; false teeth. The false teeth took me to the govemess whom I have already mentioned; I now felt inclined to be satisfied with bad teeth. I then thought of someone else to whom these features might be alluding. She again was not one of my patients, nor should I have liked to have her as a patient, since I had noticed that she was bashful in my presence and I could not think she would make an amenable patient. She was usually pale, and once, while she had been in specially good health, she had looked puffy.3 Thus I had been comparing my patient Irma with two other people who would also have been recalcitrant to treatment. What could the reason have been for my having exchanged her in the dream for her friend? Perhaps it was that I should have liked to exchange her: either I feIt more sympathetic towards her friend or had a higher opinion of her intelligence. For Irma seemed to me foolish because she had not ac- cepted my solution. Her friend would have been wiser, that is to say she would have yielded sooner. She would then have opened her mouth properly, and have told me more than Irma. 4 What I saw in her throat: a white patch and turbinal bones with scabs on them. The white patch reminded me of diphtheritis and so of Irma's friend, but also of a serious illness of my eldest daughter's almost two years earlier and of the fright I had had in those anxious days. The scabs on the turbinal bones recalled a worry about my own state of health. I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time to reduce so me trou- blesome nasal swellings, and I had heard a few days earlier that one of my women patients who had followed my example had developed an extensive necrosis of the nasal mucous membrane. I,had been the first 3. The still-unexplained complaints about pains the standard of the good and amenable patient. in th. abdomen could also be traced back to this 4. I had a feeling that the interpretation of this third figure. The person in question was, of course, part of the dream was not carried far enough to my own wife; the pains in the abdomen reminded male it possible to follow the whole of its concealed me of one of the occasions on which I had noticed meaning. If I bad pursued my comparison between her bashfulness. I was forced to admit to myself the three women, it would bave taken me far that I was not treating either Irma or my wife very afield.-There is at least one spot in every dream kindly in this dream; but it should be observed by at which it is unplumbable--a navel, as it were, way of excuse that I was mearuring them both by that is its point of contact with the unknown.

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 135 to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885,5 and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me. The misuse of that drug had hastened the death of a dear friend of mine. This had been before 1895 [the date of the dreamJ. I at onee ealled in Dr. M., and he repeated the examination. This simply corresponded to the position occupied by M. in our circle. But the 'at onee' was sufficiently striking to require a special explanation. It reminded me of a tragic event in my practice. 1 had on one occasion produced a severe toxic state in a woman patient by repeatedly prescribing what was at that time regarded as a harmless remedy (sulphonal), and had hurriedly turned for assistance and support to my experienced senior colleague. There was a subsidiary detail which confirmed the idea that 1 had this incident in mind. My patiept-who succumbed to the po i- son-had the same name as my eldest daughter. It had never occurred to me before, but it struck me now almost like an act of retribution on the part of destiny. It was as though the replacement of one person by another was to be continued in another sense: this Mathilde for that Mathilde, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It seemed as if 1 had been collecting all the occasions which 1 could bring up against myself as evidence of lack of medical conscientiousness. Dr. M. was pale, had a clean-shaven eh in and walked with a limp. This was true to the extent that his unhealthy appearance often caused his friends anxiety. The two other features could only apply to someone else. 1 thought of my eIder brother, who lives abroad, who is clean- shaven and whom, if 1 remembered right, the M. of the dream closely resembled. We had had news a few days earlier that he was walking with a limp owing to an arthritic affection of his hip. There must, 1 reflected, have been some reason for my fusing into one the two figures in the dream. 1 then remembered that 1 had a similar reason for being in an ill-humour with each of them: they had both rejected a certain suggestion 1 had recently laid before them. My friend Qtto was now standing beside the patient and my friend Leopold was examining her and indieated that there was a dull area low down on the left. My friend Leopold was also a physician and a relative of Otto's. Since they both specialized in the same branch of medicine, it was their fate to be in competition with each other, and comparisons were constantly being drawn between them. Both of them acted as my assistants for years while 1 was still in charge of the neurological out- patients' department of a children's hospital. Scenes such as the one represented in the dream used often to occur there. While 1 was dis- cussing the diagnosis of a case with Otto, Leopold would be examining the child once more and would make an unexpected contribution to our decision. The difference between their characters was like that be- 5. [Thi, is amisprint ... for '1884', the date of Freud', first paper on cocaine.]

136 THE CLASSIC THEORY 6 tween the bailiff Bräsig and his friend Karl: one was distinguished für his quiekness, while the other was slow but sure. If in the dream I was eontrasting Otto with the prudent Leopold, I was evidently doing so to the advantage of the latter. The eomparison was similar to the one between my disobedient patient Irma and the friend whom I regarded as wiser than she was. I now pereeived another of the lines along whieh the ehain of thought in the dream branehed off: from the siek ehild to the ehildren's hospital.-The dull area low down on the left seemed to me to agree in every detail with one partieular ease in whieh Leopold had struck me by his thoroughness. I also had a vague notion of some- thing in the nature of a metastatie affeetion; but this mayaiso have been a referenee to the patient whom I should have liked to have in the plaee ofIrma. So far as I had been able to judge, she had produeed an imitation of a tubereulosis. A portion of the skin on the left shoulder was in{iltrated. I saw at onee that this was the rheumatism in my own shoulder, whieh I invariably notiee if I sit up late into the night. Moreover the wording in the dream was most ambiguous: '1 noticed this, just as he did . .. .' I notieed it in my own body, that iso I was struck, too, by the unusual phrasing: 'a portion of the skin was infiltrated'. We are in the habit of speaking of 'a left upper posterior infiltration', and this would refer to the lung and so onee more to tubereulosis. In spite of her dress. This was in any ease only an interpolation. We naturally used to examine the ehildren in the hospital undressed: and this would be a contrast to the manner in whieh adult female patients have to be examined. I remembered that it was said of a eelebrated clinieian that he never made a physieal examination ofhis patients exeept through their clothes. Further than this I eould not see. Frankly, I had no desire to penetrate more deeply at this point. Dr. M. said: 'It's an infection, but no matter. Dysentery will supervene and the toxin will be eliminated.' At first this struck me as ridieulous. But nevertheless, like all the rest, it had to be earefully analysed. When I eame to look at it more closely it seemed to have some sort of meaning all the same. What I diseovered in the patient was a loeal diphtheritis. I remembered from the time of my daughter's illness a diseussion on diphtheritis and diphtheria, the latter being the general infeetion that arises from the loeal diphtheritis. Leopold indieated the presenee of a general infeetion of this kind from the existenee of a duB area, whieh might thus be regarded as a metastatie foeus. I seemed to think, it is true, that metastases like this do not in fact oeeur with diphtheria: it made me think rather of pyaemia. No matter. This was intended as a eonsolation. It seemed to fit into 6. [The !wo chief figures in the once popular English translation, An Old Stor)' of my Farming novel, Ut mine Stromtid, written in MeckJenburg Da)'s (London, 1878).1 dialect. by Fritz ·Reuter (1862-64.) There is an

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 137 the context as follows. The content of the preceding part of the dream had been that my patient's pains were due to a severe orgariic aJfection. I had a feeling that I was only trying in that way to shift the blame from myself. Psychological treatment could not be held responsible for the persistence of diphtheritic pains. Nevertheless I had a sense of awk- wardness at having invented such a severe illness for Irma simply in order to clear myself. It looked so cmel. Thus I was in need of an assurance that all would be weIl in the end, and it seemed to me that to have put the consolation into the mouth precisely of Dr. M. had not been a bad choice. But here I was taking up a superior attitude towards the dream, and this itself required explanation. And why was the consolation so nonsensical? Dysentery. There seemed to be some remote theoretical notion that morbid matter can be eliminated through the bowels. Could it be that I was trying to make Fun of Dr. M.'s fertility in producing far-fetched explanations and making unexpected pathological connections? Some- thing else now occurred to me in relation to dysentery. A few months earlier I had taken on the case of a young man with remarkable difficulties associated with defaecating, who had been treated by other physicians as a ca se of 'anaemia accompanied by malnutrition'. I had recognized it as a hysteria, but had been unwilling to try him with my psycho- therapeutic treatment and had se nt him on a sea voyage. Some days before, I had had adespairing letter from him from Egypt, saying that he had had a fresh attack there which a doctor had declared was dys- entery. I suspected that the diagnosis was an error on the part of an ignorant practitioner who had allowed himse!f to be taken in by the hysteria. But I could not help reproaching myse!f for having put my patient in a situation in which he might have contracted so me organic trouble on top ofhis hysterical intestinal disorder. Moreover, 'dysentery' sounds not unlike 'diphtheria'-a word of ill omen which did not occur in the dream. 7 Yes, I thought to myse!f, I must have been making Fun of Dr. M. with the consoling prognosis 'Dysentery will supervene, etc.': for it came back to me that, years before, he himself had told an amusing story of a similar kind about another doctor. Dr. M. had been called in by him for consultation over a patient who was seriously ill, and had feIt obliged to point out, in view of the very optimistic view taken by his colleague, that he had found albumen in the patient's urine. The other, however, was not in the least put out: 'No matter', he had said, 'the albumen will soon be e!iminated!'-I could no longer fee! any doubt, therefore, that this part of the dream was expressing derision at physicians who are ignorant of hysteria. And, as though to confirm this, a further idea crossed my mind: 'Does Dr. M. realize that the symptoms in his patient 7. [The Genuan words 'Dysenterie' and 'Dyphtherie' are more ahke than the Enghsh ones.]

138 THE CLASSIC THEORY (Irma's friend) which give grounds for fearing tuberculosis also have a hysterical basis? Has he spotted this hysteria? or has he been taken in by it?' But wh at could be my motive for treating this friend of mine so badly? That was a very simple matter. Dr. M. was just as little in agreement with my 'solution' as Irma herself. So I had already revenged myself in this dream on two people: on Irma with the words 'If you still get pains, it's your own fault', and on Dr. M. by the wording of the nonsensical consolation that I put into his mouth. We were directly aware of the origin of the infection. This direct knowledge in the dream was remarkable. Only just before we had had no knowledge of it, for the infection was only revealed by Leopold. When she was feeling unwell, my friend Otto had given her an injec- tion. Otto had in fact told me that during his short stay with Irma's family he had been called in to a neighbouring hotel to give an injection to someone who had suddenly felt unwell. These injections reminded me once more of my unfortunate friend who had poisoned hirnself with cocaine. I had advised hirn to use the drug internally [i.e. orally] only, while morphia was being withdrawn; but he had at once given hirnself cocaine injections. Apreparation of propyl ... propyls ... propionic acid. How could I have come to think of this? During the previous evening, before I wrote out the case history and had the dream, my wife had opened a bottle ofliqueur, on which the word 'Ananas'8 appeared and which was a gift from our friend Otto: for he has ahabit of making presents on every possible occasion. lt was to be hoped, I thought to myself, that some day he would find a wife to eure hirn of the habit. This liqueur gave off such a strong sm eIl of fusel oil that I refused to touch it. My wife suggested our giving the bottle to the servants, but I-with even greater prudence-vetoed the suggestion, adding in a philanthropie spirit that there was no need for them to be poisoned either. The smell of fusel oil (amyl ... ) evidently stirred up in my mind a recollection of the whole series-propyl, methyl, and so on-and this accounted for the propyl preparation in the dream. It is true that I carried out a substitution in the process: I dreamt of propyl after having smelt amyl. But substitutions of this kind are perhaps legitimate in organic chemistry. Trimethylamin. I saw the chemical formula of this substance in my dream, which bears witness to a great effort on the part of my memory. Moreover, the formula was printed in heavy type, as though there had been adesire to lay emphasis on some part of the context as being of quite special importance. What was it, then, to which my attention was to be directed in this way by trimethylamin? It was to a conversation with another friend who had for many years been familiar with all my 8. I must add that the sound of the word 'Ananas' bears aremarkable resemblance to that of my patient Irma's family name

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 139 writings during the period of their gestation, just as I had been with his. 9 He had at that time confided some ideas to me on the subject of the chemistry of the sexual processes, and had mentioned among other things that he believed that one of the products of sexual metabolism was trimethylamin. Thus this substance led me to sexuality, the factor to which I attributed the greatest importance in the origin of the nervous disorders which it was my aim to cure. My patient Irma was a young widow; if Iwanted to find an excuse for the failure of my treatment in her case, wh at I could best appeal to would no doubt be this fact of her widowhood, which her friends would be so glad to see changed. And how strangely, I thought to myself, a dream like this is put together! The other woman, whom I had as a patient in the dream instead of Irma, was also a young widow. I began to guess why the formula for trimethylamin had been so prominent in the dream. So many important subjects converged upon that one word. Trimethylamin was an allusion not only to the immensely powerful factor of sexuality, but also to a person whose agreement I recalled with satisfaction whenever I felt isolated in my opinions. Surely this friend who played so large a part in my life must appear again elsewhere in these trains of thought. Yes. For he had a special knowledge of the consequences of affections of the nose and its accessory cavities; and he had drawn scientific attention to some very remarkable connec- tions between the turbinal bon es and the female organs of sex. (Cf. the three curly structures in Irma' s throat.) I had had Irma examined by hirn to see whether her gastric pains might be of nasalorigin. But he suffered hirnself from suppurative rhinitis, which caused me anxiety; and no doubt there was an allusion to this in the pyaemia which vaguely came into my mind in connection with the metastases in the dream. Iniections of that sort ought not to be made so thoughtlessly. Here an accusation of thoughtlessness was being made directly against my friend Otto. I seemed to remember thinking something of the same kind that aftemoon when his words and looks had appeared to show that he was siding against me. It had been some such notion as: 'How easily his thoughts are influenced! How thoughtlessly he jumps to conclusionsl'- Apart from this, this sentence in the dream reminded me once more of my dead friend who had so hastily resorted to cocaine injections. As I have said, I had never contemplated the drug being given by injection. I noticed too that in accusing Otto of thoughtlessness in handling chem- ical substances I was once more touching upon the story of the unfor- tunate Mathilde, which gave grounds for the same accusation against 9. {This, as the editors correctly point out, was nase of one of Freud's patients, he had left a piece Wilhe1m Fliess. In fact, Fliess played a far larger of game in her nose and nearly killed her. One part in the making of this dream than either Freud, motive for this famous dream was the exculpation or his editors, acknowledge. Shortly before Freud not just of himself. but of Fliess. (For details, see dreamt this dream, Fliess had been involved in an Peter Gay, Freud, pp. 83-87.)} appalling piece of malpractice: operating on the

140 THE CLASSIC THEORY myself. Here I was evidently collecting instances of my conseientious- ness, but also of the reverse. And probably the syringe had not been clean. This was yet another accusation against Otto, but derived from a different source. I had happened the day before to meet the son of an old lady of eighty-two, to whom I had to give an injection of morphia twice a day. At the moment she was in the country and he told me that she was suffering from phlebitis. I had at once thought it must be an infiltration eaused by a dirty syringe. I was proud of the faet that in two years I had not eaused a single infiltration; I took constant pains to be sure that the syringe was clean. In short, I was conseientious. The phlebitis brought me back on ce more to my wife, who had suffered from thrombosis during one of her pregnancies; and now three similar situations eame to my recollection involving my wife, Irma and the dead Mathilde. The identity of these situations had evidently enabled me to substitute the three figures for one another in the dream. 1 I have now completed the interpretation of the dream. While I was carrying it out I had some difficulty in keeping at bay all the ideas whieh were bound to be provoked by a comparison between the eontent of the dream and the concealed thoughts lying behind it. And in the meantime the 'meaning' of the dream was borne in upon me. I beeame aware of an intention which was carried into effect by the dream and whieh must have been my motive for dreaming it. The dream fulfilled certain wishes which were started in me by the events ofthe previous evening (the news given me by Otto and my writing out of the ca se history). The conclusion of the dream, that is to say, was that I was not responsible for the persis- tence of Irma' s pains, but that Otto was. Otto had in fact annoyed me by his remarks about Irma's incomplete eure, and the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to hirn. The dream acquitted me of the responsibility for Irma's condition by showing that it was due to other factors--it produced a whole se ries of reasons. The dream repre- sen ted a partieular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus its content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish. Thus mueh leapt to the eyes. But many of the details of the dream also became intelligible to me from the point of view of wish-fulfilment. Not only did I revenge myself on Otto for being too hasty in taking sides against me by representing hirn as being too hasty in his medical treat- ment (in giving the injection); but I also revenged myself on hirn for giving me the bad liqueur whieh had an aroma of fusel oi!. And in the dream I found an expression which uni ted the two reproaches: the injection was of apreparation of propy!. This did not satisfy me and I l. [Footnote added 1909:j Though it will be like Karl Abraham and Carl G. Jung, noted, he understood that I have not reported everything that had silently passed over all the sexual elements in occurred to me during the process of interpreta- this dream interpretation.} tion. {As some of Freud's most alert early readers,

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS 141 pursued rny revenge further by contrasting hirn with his more trustworthy cornpetitor. I seerned to be saying: 'I like hirn better than you.' But Otto was not the only person to suffer frorn the vials of rny wrath. 1 took revenge as well on rny disobedient patient by exchanging her for one who was wiser and less recalcitrant. Nor did 1 allow Dr. M. to escape the consequences of his contradiction but showed hirn by means of a clear allusion that he was an ignorarnus on the subject. ('Dysenter)' will supervene, etc. ') Indeed 1 seerned to be appealing frorn hirn to sorneone else with greater knowledge (to rny friend who had told rne of trime- thylamin) just as 1 had turned frorn Irrna to her friend and frorn Otto to Leopold. 'Take these people away! Give rne three others of rny choice instead! Then 1 shall be free of these undeserved reproaches!' The groundlessness of the reproaches was proved for rne in the drearn in the most elaborate fashion. I was not to bIarne for Irrna's pains, since she herself was to bIarne for thern by refusing to accept rny solution. I was not concerned with Irrna's pains, since they were of an organic nature and quite incurable by psychological treatment. Irrna's pains could be satisfactorily explained by her widowhood (cf. the trimethylamin) which I had no means of altering. Irrna's pains had been caused by Otto giving her an incautious injection of an unsuitable drug-a thing I should never have done. Irrna's pains were the result of an injection with a dirty needle, like rny old lady's phlebitis-whereas I never did any harrn with rny injections. 1 noticed, it is true, that these explanations of Irrna's pains (which agreed in exculpating rne) were not entirely consistent with one another, and indeed that they were rnutually exclusive. The whole plea-for the drearn was nothing else-rerninded one vividly of the defence put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neigh- bours with having given hirn back a borrowed kettle in a darnaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back un- darnaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle frorn his neighbour at all. So rnuch the better: if only a single one of these three lines of defence were to be accepted as valid, the man would have to be acquitted. Certain other thernes played a part in the drearn, which were not so obviously connected with rny exculpation frorn Irrna's illness: rny daugh- ter's illness and that of rny patient who bore the same name, the injurious effect of cocaine, the disorder of rny patient who was travelling in Egypt, rny concern about rny wife's health and about that of rny brother and of Dr. M., rny own physical ailrnents, rny anxiety about rny absent friend who suffered frorn suppurative rhinitis. But when I carne to consider all of these, they could all be collected into a single group of ideas and labelIed, as it were, 'concern about rny own and other people's health-professional conscientiousness'. I called to rnind the obscure disagreeable impression I had had when Otto brought rne the news of Irrna's condition. This group of thoughts that played a part in the drearn enabled rne retrospectively to put this transient impression into words.

142 THE CLASSIC THEORY It was as though he had said to me: 'Y ou don't take YOUT medical duties seriously enough. You're not conscientious; you don't carry out what you've undertaken.' Thereupon, this group of thoughts seemed to have put itself at my disposal, so that I could produce evidence of how highly conscientious I was, of how deeply I was concemed about the health of my relations, my friends and my patients. It was a noteworthy fact that this material also included some disagreeable memories, which sup- ported my friend Otto's accusation rather than my own vindication. The material was, as one might say, impartial; but nevertheless there was an unmistakable connection between this more extensive group of thoughts which underlay the dream and the narrower subject of the dream which gave rise to the wish to be innocent of Irma's illness. I will not pretend that I have completely uncovered the meaning of this dream or that its interpretation is without a gap. I could spend much more time over it, derive further information from it and discuss fresh problems raised by it. I myselfknow the points from which further trains of thought could be followed. But considerations which arise in the ca se of every dream of my own restrain me from pursuing my interpretative work. If anyone should feel tempted to express a hasty condemnation of my reticence, I would advise hirn to make the experiment of being franker than I am. For the moment I am satisfied with the achievement of this one piece of fresh knowledge. If we adopt the method of inter- preting dreams which I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a frag- mentary activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish. Z On Dreams Aware that his Interpretation of Dreams was both very substantial and (in parts) very difficult, Freud, though exhausted by his labor on that book, rather unwillingly undertook to condense his theory of dreams into an accessible popularization. Freud was always his best expounder and advocate: as reported before, he wrote articles for encyclopedias and compendia on mental illness. The lectures he delivered at Clark U niversity in 1909, pub- lished the following year as Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, or the more extensive series of lectures published from 1916 on as Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, would enjoy worIdwide circulation and have lasting appeal. \"On Dreams\" works admirably as alueid aeeount of Freudian dream 2. [In a letter to F1iess on june 12, 1900 ... , In This Hause, on july 2'1th, 1895 Freud describes a later visit to Bellevue, the hauses the Secre! of Dreams was Revealed where he had this dream. '00 you suppose,' he to Dr. Sigm. Freud writes, 'that some day • marble table! will be placed on the hause, inscribed with these words?- At the moment there seems Iittle prospect of it.']

ON DREAMS 143 theory, but it was not until 1911 that it appeared as an independent brochure: the original, slightly shorter, version of 1901 appeared as part of Löwenfeld and Kurella's Grenz{ragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens. During the epoch which may be described as pre-scientific, men had no difficulty in finding an explanation of dreams. When they remem- bered a dream after waking up, they regarded it as either a favourable or a hostile manifestation by higher powers, daemonic and divine. When modes of thought belonging to natural science began to flourish, all this ingenious mythology was transformed into psychology, and to-day only a sm all minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer's own mind. Since the rejection of the mythological hypothesis, however, dreams have stood in need of explanation. The conditions of their origin, their relation to waking mental life, their dependence upon stimuli which force their way upon perception during the state of sleep, the many peculiarities of their content which are repugnant to waking thought, the inconsistency between their ideational images and the affects at- taching to them, and lastly their transitory character, the manner in which waking thought pushes them on one side as something alien to it, and mutilates or extinguishes them in memory-all of these and other problems besides have been awaiting clarification for many hundreds of years, and till now no satisfactory solution of them has been advanced. But what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams, a question which bears a double sense. It enquires in the first pi ace as to the psychical significance of dreaming, as to the relation of dreams to other mental processes, and as to any biological function that they may have; in the second pi ace it seeks to discover whether dreams can be interpreted, whether the content of individual dreams has a 'meaning', such as we are accustomed to find in other psychical structures. * II One day I discovered to my great astonishment that the view of dreams which came nearest to the truth was not the medical but the popular one, half involved though it still was in superstition. For I had been led to fresh conclusions on the subject of dreams by applying to them a new method of psychological investigation which had done excellent service in the solution of phobias, obsessions and delusions, etc. Since then,

144 THE CLASSIC THEORY under the name of 'psycho-analysis', it has found acceptance by a whole school of research workers. * * * This procedure is easily described, although instruction and practice would be necessary before it could be put into effect. If we make use of it on someone else, let us say on a patient with a phobia, we require hirn to direct his attention on to the idea in question, not, however, to reflect upon it as he has done so often already, but to take notice of whatever occurs to his mind without any exception and report it to the physician. lf he should then assert that his attention is unable to grasp anything at all, we dismiss this with an energetic as- surance that a complete absence of any ideational subject-matter is quite impossible. And in fact very soon numerous ideas will occur to hirn and will lead on to others; but they will invariably be prefaced by a judgement on the part of the self-observer to the effect that they are senseless or unimportant, that they are irrelevant, and that they occurred to hirn by chance and without any connection with the topic under consideration. We perceive at on ce that it was this critical attitude which prevented the subject from reporting any of these ideas, and which indeed had previously prevented them from becoming conscious. lf we can induce hirn to abandon his criticism of the ideas that occur to hirn, and to continue pursuing the trains of thought which will emerge so long as he keeps his attention turned upon them, we find ourselves in pos- session of a quantity of psychical material, which we soon find is clearly connected with the pathological idea which was our starting-point; this material will soon reveal connections between the pathological idea and other ideas, and will eventually enable us to replace the pathological idea by a new one which fits into the nexus of thought in an intelligible fashion. * * * If we make use of this procedure upon ourselves, we can best assist the investigation by at on ce writing down what are at first unintelligible associations. I will now show what results follow if I apply this method of inves- tigation to dreams. Any example of a dream should in fact be equally appropriate for the purpose; but for partieular reasons I will choose some dream of my own, one which seems obscure and meaningless as I remember it, and one which has the advantage of brevity. A dream which I actually had last night will perhaps meet these requirements. Its content, as I noted it down immediately after waking up, was as folIows: 'Company at table or table d'hOte ... spinach was being eaten ... Frau E. 1. was sitting beside me; she was tuming her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her hand unresponsively. She then said: \"But you've always had such

ON DREAMS 145 beautiful eyes.\" . . . I then had an indistinct picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles . ... ' This was the whole of the dream, or at least all that I could remember of it. It seemed to me obscure and meaningless, but above all surprising. Frau E. L. is a person with whom I have hardly at any time been on friendly terms, nor, so far as I know, have lever wished to have any closer relations with her. I have not seen her for a long time, and her name has not, I believe, been mentioned during the '!ast few days. The dream-process was not accompanied by affects of any kind. Reflecting over this dream brought me no nearer to understanding it. I determined, however, to set down without any premeditation or crit- icism the associations which presented themselves to my self-observation. As I have found, it is advisable for this purpose to divide a dream into its elements and to find the associations attaching to each of these fragments separately. Company at table or table d'hOte. This at on ce reminded me of an episode which occurred late yesterday evening. I came away from a small party in the company of a friend who offered to take a cab and drive me horne in it. 'I prefer taking a cab with a taxi meter,' he said, 'it occupies one's mind so agreeably; one always has something to look at.' When we had taken our places in the cab and the driver had set the dial, so that the first charge of sixty hellers becarne visible, I carried the joke further. 'We've only just got in,' I said, 'and already we owe hirn sixty hellers. A cab with a taximeter always reminds rne of a table d'höte. It makes me avaricious and selfish, because it keeps on rerninding rne of what I owe. My debt seems to be growing too fast, and I'm afraid of getting the worst of the bargain; and in just the same way at a table d'höte I can't avoid feeling in a comic way that I'rn getting too little, and must keep an eye on my own interests.' I went on to quote, sornewhat discursively: Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein, Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden.] And now a second association to 'table d'höte'. A few weeks ago, while we were at table in a hotel at a mountain resort in the Tyrol, I was very much annoyed because I thought my wife was not being sufficiently reserved towards some people sitting near us whose acquaintance I had no desire at all to make. I asked her to concern herself more with rne than with these strangers. This was again as though I were getting the 1. [These lines are from one of the Ha~player's 'poor' in the finaneial sense and 'schuldig' might songs in Goethe's Wilhe/m Meister. In the original mean 'in debt.' So in the present eontext the last the words are addressed to the Heavenly Powers li ne eould be rendered: 'You make the poor man and may be translated literaUy: 'You lead us into fall into debt.' {When Freud quotes these lines life, you make the poor creature guilty.' But the onee again a eouple of pages later, he might be words 'Annen' and 'schuldig' are both capable of (as Freud's editors rightly observe) addressing them hearing another meaning. 'Annen' might mean to parents.l]

146 THE CLASSIC THEORY warst of the bargain at the table d'hOte. I was struck too by the contrast between my wife's behaviour at table and that of Frau E. L. in the dream, who 'turned her whole attention to me'. To proceed. I now saw that the events in the dream were a repro- duction of a small episode of a precisely similar kind which occurred between my wife and me at the time at which I was secretly courting her. The caress which she gave me under the table-cloth was her reply to a pressing love'letter. In the dream, however, my wife was replaced by a comparative stranger-E. L. Frau E. L. is the daughter of a man to whom I was once in debt. I could not help noticing that this revealed an unsuspected connection between parts of the content of the dream and my associations. If one follows the train of association starting out from one element of a dream's content, one is soon brought back to another of its elements. My as- sociations to the dream were bringing to light connections which were not visible in the dream itself. If a person expects one to keep an eye on his interests without any advantage to oneself, his artlessness is apt to provoke the scornful ques- tion: 'Do you suppose I'm going to do this or that for the sake of your beaux yeux [beautiful eyes]?' That being so, Frau E. L. 's speech in the dream, 'You've always had such beautiful eyes', can only have meant: 'People have always done everything for you for love; you have always had everything without paying fOT it.' The truth is, of course, just the contrary: I have always paid dearly for whatever advantage I have had from other people. The fact that my friend took me horne yesterday in a cab without my paying for it must, after all, have made an impression on me. Incidentally, the friend whose guests we were yesterday has often put me in his debt. Only recently I allowed an opportunity of repaying hirn to slip by. He has had only one present from me-an antique bowl, round which there are eyes painted: what is known as an 'occhiale', to avert the evil eye. Moreover he is an eye surgeon. The same evening I asked hirn after a woman patient, whom I had sent on to hirn for a consultation to fit her with spectacles. As I now perceived, almost all the elements of the dream's content had been brought into the new context. For the sake of consistency, however, the further question might be asked of why spinaeh, of all things, was being served in the dream. The answer was that spinach reminded me of an episode which occurred not long ago at our family table, when one of the children-and precisely the one who really deserves to be admired for his beautiful eyes-refused to eat any spinach. I myself behaved in just the same way when I was a child; for a long time I detested spinach, till eventually my taste changed and promoted that vegetable into one of my favourite foods. My own early life and my child's were thus brought together by the mention of this dish. 'You ought to be glad to have spinach, , the little gourmet' s mother explained;

ON DREAMS 147 'there are children who would be only too pleased to have spinaeh. ' Thus I was reminded of the duties of parents to their children. Goethe's words Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein, Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden. gained a fresh meaning in this connection. I will pause here to survey the results I had so far reached in my dream-analysis. By following the associations which arose from the sep- arate elements of the dream divorced from their context, I arrived at a number of thoughts and recollections, which I could not fai! to recognize as important products of my mentalIife. This material revealed by the analysis of the dream was intimately connected with the dream' s content, yet the connection was of such a kind that I could never have inferred the fresh material from that content. The dream was unemotional, disconnected and unintelligible; but while I was producing the thoughts behind the dream, I was aware of intense and well-founded affective impulses; the thoughts themselves fell at once into logical chains, in which certain central ideas made their appearance more than once. Thus, the contrast between 'selfish' and 'unselfish', and the elements 'being in debt' and 'without paying for it' were central ideas of this kind, not represented in the dream itself. I might draw eloser together the threads in the material revealed by the analysis, and I might then show that they converge upon a single nodal point, but considerations of a personal and not of a scientific nature prevent my doing so in public. I should be obliged to betray many things wh ich had better remain my secret, for on my way to discovering the solution of the dream all kinds of things were revealed which I was unwilling to admit even to myself. Why then, it will be asked, have I not chosen some other dream, whose analysis is better suited for reporting, so that I could produce more convincing evidence of the meaning and connectedness of the material uncovered by analysis? The answer is thaf every dream with which I might try to deal would lead to things equally hard to report and would im pose an equal discretion upon me. Nor should I avoid this difficulty by bringing up someone else's dream for analysis, unless circumstances enabled me to drop all disguise without damage to the person who had confided in me. At the point which I have now reached, I am led to regard the dream as a sort of substitute for the thought-processes, full of meaning and emotion, at which I arrived after the completion of the analysis. * * * Two other things are already eleaL The content of the dream is very much shorter than the thoughts for which I regard it as a substitute; and analysis has revealed that the instigator of the dream was an unimportant event of the evening before I dreamt it. I should, of course, not draw such far-reaching conelusions if only a single dream-analysis was at my disposal. If experience shows me, how-

148 THE CLASSIC THEORY ever, that by uncritically pursuing the associations arising from any dream I can arrive at a similar train of thoughts, among the elements of which the constituents of the dream re-appear and which are inter- connected in a rational and intelligible manner, then it will be safe to disregard the slight possibility that the connections observed in a first experiment might be due to chance. I think I am justified, therefore, in adopting a terminology which will crystallize our new discovery. In order to contrast the dream as it is retained in my memory with the relevant material discovered by analysing it, I shall speak of the former as the 'manifest content of the dream' and the latter-without, in the first instance, making any further distinction-as the 'latent content of the dream.' I am now faced by two new problems which have not hitherto been formulated. (1) What is the psychical process which has transformed the latent content of the dream into the manifest one which is known to me from my memory? (2) What are the motive or motives which have necessitated this transformation? I shall describe the process which transforms the latent into the manifest content of dreams as the 'dream- work'. The counterpart to this activity--one which brings about a trans- formation in the opposite direction-is already known to us as the work of analysis. * * * Since I attribute all the contradictory and incorrect views upon dream-life which appear in the literature of the subject to ignorance of the latent content of dreams as revealed by analysis, I shall be at the greatest pains henceforward to avoid confusing the manifest dream with the latent dream-thoughts. III The transformation of the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream-content deserves all our attention, since it is the first instance known to us of psychical material being changed over from one mode of expression to another, from a mode of expression which is immediately intelligible to us to another which we can only co me to understand with the help of guidance and elfort, though it too must be recognized as a function of our mental activity. Dreams can be divided into three categories in respect of the relation between their latent and manifest content. In the first place, we may distinguish those dreams which make sense and are at the same time intelligible, which, that is to say, can be inserted without further difficulty into the context of our mentallife. We have numbers of such dreams. * * * A second group is formed by those dreams which, though they are connected in themselves and have a clear sense, nevertheless have a bewildering effect, because we cannot see how to fit that sense into our mentallife. Such would be the case if we were to dream, for instance, that a relative of whom we were fond had died of the plague, when we had no reason for expecting, fearing or assuming any such thing; we should ask in astonishment: 'How did I get hold of such an ideal' The

ON DREAMS l49 third group, finally, contains those dreams which are without either sense or intelligibility, which see m disconnected, confused and mean- ingless. The preponderant majority of the products of our dreaming exhibit these characteristics, which are the basis of the low opinion in which dreams are held and of the medical theory. that they are the outcome of a restricted mental activity. The most evident signs of in- coherence are seldom absent, especially in dream-compositions of any considerable length and complexity. The contrast between the manifest and latent content of dreams is clearly of significance only for dreams of the second and more partic- ularly of the third category .. lt is there that we are faced by riddles wh ich only disappear after we have replaced the manifest dream by the latent thoughts behind it; and it was on a specimen of the last category-a confused and uninteIIigible dream-that the analysis which I have just recorded was carried out. Contrary to our expectation, however, we came up against motives which prevented us from becoming fuHy ac- quainted with the latent dream-thoughts. Arepetition of similar expe- riences may lead us to suspect that there is an intima te and regular relation between the unintelligible and confused nature of dreams and the difficulty of reporting the thoughts behind them. Before enquiring into the nature of this relation, we may with advantage turn our attention to the more easily intelligible dreams of the first category, in which the manifest and latent content coincide, and there appears to be a conse- quent saving in dream-work. Moreover, an examination of these dreams offers advantages from another standpoint. For children's dreams are of that kind-significant and not puzzling. Here, incidentally, we have a further argument against tracing the origin of dreams to dissociated cerebral activity during sleep. For why should areduction in psychical functioning of this kind be a characteristic of the state of sleep in the ca se of adults but not in that of children? On the other hand, we shall be fully justified in expecting that an explanation of psychical processes in children, in whom they may well be greatly simplified, may turn out to be an indispensable prelude to the investigation of the psychology of adults. I will therefore record a few instances of dreams which I have collected from children. A little girl nineteen months old had been kept without food aII day because she had had an attack of vomiting in the morning; her nurse declared that she had been upset by eating strawberries. During the night after this day of starvation she was heard saying her own name in her sleep and adding: 'Stwawbewwies, wild stwawbewwies, omblet, puddenl' She was thus dreaming of eating a meal, and she laid special stress in her menu on the particular delicacy of which, as she had reason to expect, she would only be aIIowed scanty quantities in the near future.-A little boy of twenty-two months had a similar dream of a feast which he had been denied. The day before, he had been obliged to present his uncle with a gift of a basket of fresh cherries, of which

150 THE CLASSIC THEORY he hirnself, of course, had only been allowed to taste a single sampie. He awoke with this cheerful news: 'Hennann eaten all the chewwies!'- * * * The common element in all these children's dreams is obvious. All of them fulfiIled wishes wh ich were active during the day but had re- mained unfulfilled. The dreams were simple and undisguised wish- fulfilments. * * * Even when the content of children's dreams becomes complicated and subtle, there is never any difficulty in recognizing them as wish- fulfilments. An eight-year-old boy had a dream that he was driving in a chariot with AchilIes and that Diomede was the charioteer. It was shown that the day before he had been deep in a book of legends about the Creek heroes; and it was easy to see that he had taken the heroes as his models and was sorry not to be living in their days. This small coIlection throws a direct light on a further characteristic of children' s dreams: their connection with daytime life. The wishes which are fulfiIled in them are carried over from daytime and as a rule from the day before, and in waking life they have been accompanied by intense emotion. Nothing unimportant or indifferent, or nothing which would strike a child as such, finds its way into the content of their dreams. Numerous examples of dreams of this infantile type can be found occurring in adults as weIl, though, as I have said, they are usually brief in content. Thus a number of people regularly respond to a stimulus of thirst during the night with dreams of drinking, which thus endeavour to get rid of the stimulus and enable sleep to continue. * * * Under unusual or extreme conditions dreams of this infantile character are particularly common. Thus the leader of a polar expedition has recorded that the members of his expedition, while they were wintering in the ice-field and living on a monotonous diet and short rations, regularly dreamt like children of large meals, of mountains of tobacco, and of being back at horne. It by no means rarely happens that in the course of a comparatively long, complicated and on the whole confused dream one particularly clear portion stands out, which contains an unmistakable wish-fulfil- ment, but which is bound up with some other, uninteIligible material. But in the case of adults, anyone with some experience in analysing their dreams will find to his surprise that even those dreams which have an appearance of being transparently clear are seldom as simple as those of children, and that behind the obvious wish-fulfilment some other meaning may lie concealed. It would indeed be a simple and satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams if the work of analysis were to enable us to trace even the meaningless and confused dreams of adults back to the infantile type of

ON DREAMS 151 fulfilment of an intensely felt wish of the previous day. There can be no doubt, however, that appearances do not speak in favour of such an expectation. Dreams are usually full of the most indifferent and strangest material, and there is no sign in their content of the fulfilment of any wish. But before taking leave of infantile dreams with their undisguised wish-fulfilments, I must not omit to mention one principal feature of dreams, which has long been evident and which emerges particularly dearly precisely in this group. Every one of these dreams can be replaced by an optative dause: 'Oh, if only the trip on the lake had lasted longerl'-'If only I were already washed and dressed!'-'If only I could have kept the cherries instead of giving them to Undei\" But dreams give us more than such optative dauses. They show us the wish as already fulfilled;they represent its fulfilment as real and present; and the material employed in dream-representation consists principally, though not exdusively, of situations and of sensory images, mostly of a visual character. Thus, even in this infantile group, a species of trans- formation, which deserves to be described as dream-work, is not com- pletely absent: a thought expressed in the optative has been replaced by a representation in the present tense. IV * * * * * * Another achievement of the dream-work, tending as it does to produce incoherent dreams, is even more striking. If in any particular instance we compare the number of ideational elements or the space taken up in writing them down in the case of the dream and of the dream-thoughts to which the analysis leads us and of which traces are to be found in the dream itself, we shall be left in no doubt that the dream-work has carried out a work of compression or condensation on a large scale. lt is impossible at first to form any judgement of the degree of this condensation; but the deeper we plunge into a dream-analysis the more impressive it seems. From every element in a dream's content associative threads branch out in two or more directions; every situation in a dream seems to be put together out of two or more impressions or experiences. For instance, I once had a dream of a sort of swimming- pool, in which the bathers were scattering in all directions; at one point on the edge of the pool someone was standing and bending towards one of the people bathing, as though to help her out of the water. The situation was put together from a memory of an experience I had had at puberty and from two paintings, one of which I had seen shortly before the dream. One was a picture from Schwind's series illustrating the legend of Melusine, which showed the water-nymphs surprised in their pool (cf. the scattering bathers in the dream); the other was a picture

152 THE CLASSIC THEORY of the Deluge by an ltalian Master; while the little experience remem- bered from my puberty was of having seen the instructor at a swimming- school helping a lady out of the water who had stopped in until after the time set aside for men bathers.-In the case of the example which I chose for interpretation, an analysis of the situation led me to a smaII series of recollections each of which contributed something to the content of the dream. In the first place, there was the episode from the time of my engagement of which I have already spoken. The pressure upon my hand under the table, which was apart of that episode, provided the dream with the detail 'under the table'-a detail which I had to add as an afterthought to my memory of the dream. In the episode itself there was of course no question of 'tuming to me'; the analysis showed that this element was the fulfilment of a wish by presenting the opposite of an actual event, and that it related to my wife's behaviour at the table d'hote. But behind this recent recoIIection there lay concealed an exactly similar and far more important scene from the time of our engagement, which estranged us for a whole day. The intimate laying of a hand on my knee belonged to a quite different context and was concemed with quite other people. This element in the dream was in turn the starting- point of two separate sets of memories--and so on. The material in the dream-thoughts which is packed together for the purpose of constructing a dream-situation must of course in itself be adaptable for that purpose. There must be one or more common elements in all the components. The dream-work then proceeds just as Francis Galton did in constructing his family photographs. It superimposes, as it were, the different components upon one another. The common element in them then stands out clearly in the composite picture, while contradictory details more or less wipe one another out. This method of production also explains to some extent the varying degrees of char- acteristic vagueness shown by so many elements in the content of dreams. Basing itself on this discovery, dream-interpretation has laid down the following rule: in analysing a dream, if an uncertainty can be resolved into an 'either--or', we must replace it for purposes of interpretation by an 'and', and take each of the apparent alternatives as an independent starting-point for aseries of associations. If a common element of this kind between the dream-thoughts is not present, the dream-work sets about creating one, so that it may be possible for the thoughts to be given a common representation in the dream. The most convenient way of bringing together two dream-thoughts which, to start with, have nothing in common, is to alter the verbal form of one of them, and thus bring it half-way to meet the other, which may be similarly clothed in a new form of words. A parallel process is involved in hammering out a rhyme, where a similar sound has to be sought for in the same way as a common element is in our present case. A large part of the dream-work consists in the creation of intermediate thoughts of this kind which are often highly ingenious, though they