Chapter VIII: Part 8

3. When a man has lost someone dear to him, for a considerable period afterwards he produces a special type of dream, in which the most remarkable compromises are effected between his knowledge that that person is dead and his desire to call him back to life. Sometimes the deceased is dreamt of as being dead, and yet still alive because he does not know that he is dead, as if he would only really die if he did know it; at other times he is half dead and half alive, and each of these conditions has its distinguishing marks. We must not call these dreams merely nonsensical, for to come to life again is no more inadmissible in dreams than in fairy tales, in which it is quite a common fate. As far as I have been able to analyse such dreams, it appeared that they were capable of a reasonable explanation, but that the pious wish to recall the departed is apt to manifest itself in the strangest ways. I will submit a dream of this sort to you, which certainly sounds strange and absurd enough, and the analysis of which will demonstrate many points already indicated in our theoretical discussions. The dreamer was a man who had lost his father some years previously:—

_My father was dead but had been exhumed and looked ill. He went on living, and I did all I could to prevent his noticing it._ Then the dream goes on to other matters, apparently very remote.

That the father was dead we know to be a fact; but the exhumation had not taken place in reality: indeed, the question of real fact has nothing to do with anything that follows. But the dreamer went on to say that after he returned from his father’s funeral one of his teeth began to ache. He wanted to treat it according to the Jewish precept: “If thy tooth offend thee, pluck it out,” and accordingly went to the dentist. The latter, however, said that that was not the way to treat a tooth; one must have patience with it. “I will put something in it,” he said, “to kill the nerve, and you must come back in three days’ time, when I will take it out again.” “This ‘taking out,’” said the dreamer suddenly, “is the exhuming.”

Now was he right? True, the parallel is not exact, for it was not the tooth which was taken out, but only a dead part of it. As a result of experience, however, we can well credit the dream-work with inaccuracies of this sort. We must suppose that the dreamer had, by a process of condensation, combined the dead father with the tooth, which was dead and which he yet retained. No wonder then that an absurdity was the result in the manifest dream, for obviously not all that was said about the tooth could apply to the father. What then are we to regard as the _tertium comparationis_ between the father and the tooth,—what common factor makes the comparison possible?

Such a factor must have existed, for the dreamer went on to observe that he knew the saying that if one dreams of losing a tooth it means that one is about to lose a member of his family.

We know that this popular interpretation is incorrect or at least correct only in a very distorted sense. We shall therefore be the more surprised actually to discover the subject thus touched upon behind the other elements of the dream-content.

Without being pressed further, the dreamer then began to talk of his father’s illness and death, and of the relations which had existed between father and son. The illness had been a long one, and the care and treatment of the invalid had cost the son a large sum of money. Yet it never seemed too much to him, nor did his patience ever fail or the wish occur to him that the end should come. He prided himself on his true Jewish filial piety and on his strict observance of the Jewish law. Does not a certain contradiction strike us here in the thoughts relating to the dream? He had identified the tooth with the father. He wanted to treat the former according to the Jewish law which commanded that a tooth which causes pain and annoyance should be plucked out. His father he also wanted to treat according to the precepts of the law, but here the command was that he must pay no heed to expense and annoyance, must take the whole burden upon himself, and not allow any hostile intention to arise against the cause of the trouble. Would not the agreement between the two situations be much more convincing if he had really gradually come to have the same feelings towards his sick father as he had towards his diseased tooth, that is to say, if he had wished for death to put a speedy end to his father’s superfluous, painful and costly existence?

I have no doubt that this was, in reality, his attitude towards his father during the protracted illness and that his boastful assertions of filial piety were designed to divert his mind from any recollections of the sort. Under conditions such as these it is no uncommon thing for the death-wish against the father to be roused, and to mask itself with some ostensibly compassionate reflection, such as: “It would be a blessed release for him.” But I want you particularly to notice that here in the latent thoughts themselves a barrier has been broken down. The first part of the thoughts was, we may be sure, only temporarily unconscious, that is, during the actual process of the dream-work; the hostile feelings towards the father, on the other hand, had probably been permanently so, possibly dating from childhood and having at times, during the father’s illness, crept as it were timidly and in a disguised form into consciousness. We can maintain this with even greater certainty of other latent thoughts which have unmistakably contributed to the content of the dream. There are, it is true, no indications in it of hostile feelings towards the father; but when we enquire into the origin of such hostility in the life of the child we remember that fear of the father arises from the fact that in the earliest years of life it is he who opposes the sexual activity of the boy, as he is usually compelled to do again, after puberty, from motives of social expediency. This was the relation in which our dreamer stood to his father; his affection for him had been tinged with a good deal of respect and dread, the source of which was early sexual intimidation.

We can now explain the further phrases in the dream from the onanism complex. “_He looked ill_” was an allusion to another remark of the dentist’s—that it did not look well for a tooth to be missing just there—but it also refers at the same time to the “looking ill” by which the young man, during the period of puberty, betrays, or fears lest he might betray, his excessive sexual activity. It was with a lightening of his own heart that in the manifest dream the dreamer transferred the look of illness from himself to his father, an inversion with which you are familiar as a device of the dream-work. “_He went on living_” accords both with the wish to recall the father to life and the promise of the dentist to save the tooth. The phrase “_I did everything I could to prevent his noticing_” is extremely subtly designed to lead us to complete it with the words “that he was dead.” The only completion of them that really makes sense, however, is again to be traced to the onanism complex, where it is a matter of course that the young man should do all he can to conceal his sexual life from his father. Finally, I would remind you that the so-called “toothache dreams” always refer to onanism, and the punishment for it that is feared.

You see how this incomprehensible dream is built up by a piece of remarkable and misleading condensation, by omitting from it all the thoughts that belong to the core of the latent train of thought, and by the creation of ambiguous substitute-formations to represent those thoughts which were deepest and most remote in time.

4. We have already tried repeatedly to get to the bottom of those prosaic and banal dreams which have nothing absurd or strange in them, but which suggest the question: Why should we dream about such trivialities at all? I will therefore quote a fresh example of this sort in the shape of three dreams connected with one another and dreamt by a young lady in the course of a single night.

(_a_) _She was going through the hall in her house and struck her head on a low-hanging chandelier with such force as to draw blood._ This episode did not remind her of anything that had actually happened; her remarks led in quite another direction: “You know how terribly my hair is coming out. Well, yesterday my mother said to me: ‘My dear child, if it goes on like this, your head will soon be as bald as your buttocks.’” We see here that the head stands for the other end of the body. No further assistance is required to understand the symbolism of the chandelier: all objects capable of elongation are symbols of the male organ. The real subject of the dream then is a bleeding at the lower end of the body, caused by contact with the penis. This might still have other meanings; the dreamer’s further associations show that the dream has to do with the belief that menstruation results from sexual intercourse with a man, a notion about sexual matters which is by no means uncommon amongst immature girls.

(_b_) _The dreamer saw in a vineyard a deep hole which she knew had been caused by the uprooting of a tree._ Her remark on this point was that “the tree was _missing_,” meaning that she did not see the tree in the dream; but the same phrase serves to express another thought, which leaves us in no doubt as to the symbolic interpretation. The dream refers to another infantile notion on the subject of sex, to the belief that girls originally had the same genital organ as boys and that the later conformation of this organ has been brought about by castration (uprooting the tree).

(_c_) _The dreamer was standing in front of her writing-table drawer which she knows so well that, if anyone touched it, she would immediately be aware of it._ The writing-table drawer, like all drawers, chests and boxes, is a symbol of the female genital. She knew that when sexual intercourse (or, as she thought, any contact at all) has taken place the genital shows certain indications of the fact, and she had long had a fear of being convicted of this. I think that in all three dreams the main emphasis lies on the idea of _knowing_. She had in mind the time of childish investigations into sexual matters, of the results of which she had been very proud at the time.

5. Here is another example of symbolism. But this time I must preface it with a short account of the mental situation in which the dream occurred. A man and a woman who were in love had spent a night together; he described her nature as maternal, she was one of those women whose desire to have a child comes out irresistibly during caresses. The conditions of their meeting, however, made it necessary to take precautions to prevent the semen from entering the womb. On waking the next morning, the woman related the following dream:—

_An officer with a red cap was pursuing her in the street. She fled from him and ran up the staircase, with him after her. Breathless, she reached her rooms and slammed and locked the door behind her. The man remained outside and, peeping through the keyhole in the door, she saw him sitting on a bench outside, weeping._

In the pursuit by the officer with the red cap and the breathless climbing of the stairs you will recognize the representation of the sexual act. That the dreamer shuts her pursuer out may serve as an example of the device of inversion so frequently employed in dreams, for in reality it was the man who withdrew before the completion of the sexual act. In the same way, she has projected her own feeling of grief on to her partner, for it is he, who weeps in the dream, his tears at the same time alluding to the seminal fluid.

You will certainly have heard it said at some time or other that psycho-analysis maintains that all dreams have a sexual meaning. You are now in a position yourselves to form an opinion as to the falseness of this reproach. You have learnt of wish-fulfilment dreams, dealing with the gratification of the most obvious needs—hunger, thirst, and the longing for liberty—comfort-dreams and impatience-dreams, as well as those which are frankly avaricious and egoistical. You may, however, certainly bear it in mind that, according to the results of psycho-analysis, dreams in which a marked degree of distortion is present _mainly_ (but here again not exclusively) give expression to sexual desires.

6. I have a special motive in giving many instances of the use of symbols in dreams. In our first lecture I complained of the difficulty of demonstrating my statements in such a way as to carry conviction with regard to the findings of psycho-analysis, and since then you have doubtless agreed with me. Now the separate propositions of psycho-analysis are nevertheless so intimately related that conviction on a single point easily leads to acceptance of the greater part of the whole theory. It might be said of psycho-analysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. If you accept the explanation of errors as satisfactory, you cannot logically stop short of belief in all the rest. Now dream-symbolism provides another, equally good, approach to such acceptance. I will recount to you a dream, which has already been published, of a woman of the poorer classes, whose husband was a watchman and of whom we may be sure that she had never heard of dream-symbolism and psycho-analysis. You can then judge for yourselves whether the interpretation arrived at with the help of sexual symbols can justly be called arbitrary or forced.

“_... Then someone broke into the house and in terror she cried for a watchman. But the watchman, accompanied by two tramps, had gone into a church, which had several steps leading up to it. Behind the church there was a mountain and, up above, a thick wood. The watchman wore a helmet, gorget and cloak, and had a full brown beard. The two tramps, who had gone along peaceably with him, had aprons twisted round their hips like sacks. A path led from the church to the mountain and was overgrown on both sides with grass and bushes which grew denser and denser, and at the top of the mountain there was a regular wood._”

You will recognize without any trouble the symbols here employed: the male organ is represented by the trinity of _three_ persons appearing, whilst the female sexual organs are symbolized by a landscape with a chapel, a mountain and a wood, and once more you have the act of going up steps as symbolic of the sexual act. The part of the body called in the dream “a mountain” is similarly termed in anatomy the mons veneris.

7. I will tell you another dream which is to be explained in the light of symbolism, a dream, moreover, which is noteworthy and convincing from the fact that the dreamer himself translated all the symbols, though he brought no previous theoretical knowledge to the interpretation. This is a very unusual circumstance and we have no accurate idea of the conditions which give rise to it.

_He was walking with his father in a place which must have been the Prater,[41] for they saw the Rotunda with a little building in front of it, to which was made fast a captive balloon which looked rather slack. His father asked him what it was all for; the son wondered at his asking, but explained it nevertheless. Then they came to a court-yard, where a large sheet of metal lay spread out. His father wanted to break off a big piece, but looked round first in case anyone should notice him. He said to his son that all the same he need only tell the overseer and then he could take it straightaway. Some steps led down from this court to a shaft, the sides of which were upholstered with some soft stuff, something like a leather armchair. At the bottom of this shift was a rather long platform and, beyond it, another shaft._

The following is the dreamer’s own interpretation:—“The Rotunda stands for my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it for the penis, which I have had to complain of for being limp.” A more detailed translation would then run thus: the rotunda stands for the buttocks (regularly included by children amongst the genitals), the smaller structure in front is the scrotum. In the dream, his father asks him what all this is, i.e. what are the purpose and function of the genitals. To invert this situation so that the son asks the questions is an obvious idea, and, since these questions were never asked in reality, we must construe the dream-thoughts as a wish or take them in a conditional sense: “If I had asked my father to explain....” The sequel to this thought we shall find presently.

The court-yard where the sheet-metal lay is not in the first place to be explained symbolically, but is a reference to the father’s place of business. From motives of discretion I have substituted “sheet-metal” for the actual material dealt with by him, but otherwise I have made no alteration in the words of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had been much scandalized by the extremely questionable practices upon which the high profits largely depended. Hence the sequel to the dream-thought mentioned above would run: “(If I had asked him), he would have deceived me as he deceives his customers.” The dreamer himself gives a second explanation for the pulling off the piece of metal which serves to represent commercial dishonesty: it means, he says, the practice of masturbation. Not only is this an explanation with which we have long been familiar, but it is well in accordance with this interpretation that the secret practice of masturbation should be expressed by the opposite idea (“_We may do it openly_”). So the fact that this practice is imputed to the father, as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream, is exactly what we should expect. The dreamer immediately interpreted the shaft, on account of the soft upholstering of the walls, as the vagina, and I, on my own account, offer the remark that going-down as well as going-up stands for sexual intercourse.

The details of the long platform at the bottom of the first shaft, and beyond that the second shaft, were explained by the dreamer himself from his own history. He had practised intercourse for some time and then given it up on account of inhibitions, but hoped to be able to resume it by the help of the treatment.

8. I quote the two following dreams, dreamt by a foreigner with marked polygamous tendencies, because they may serve to illustrate the statement that the dreamer’s own person is present in every dream, even when it is disguised in the manifest content. The trunks in the dreams are female symbols.

(_a_) _The dreamer was going on a journey and his luggage was being taken to the station on a carriage. There were a number of trunks piled one on the top of the other, and amongst them two large black boxes like those of a commercial traveller. He said consolingly to someone: “You see those are only going as far as the station.”_

He does, as a matter of fact, travel with a great deal of luggage, and he also brings many stories about women to the treatment. The two black trunks stand for two dark women who at the moment are playing the principal part in his life. One of them wanted to follow him to Vienna, but on my advice he had telegraphed to put her off.

(_b_) A scene at a customs house:—_A fellow-traveller opened his trunk and said nonchalantly, smoking a cigarette: “There is nothing to declare in that.” The customs official seemed to believe him, but felt in the trunk again and found a strictly prohibited article. The traveller then said in a resigned way: “Well, it can’t be helped.”_ The dreamer himself is the traveller and I am the official. He is generally very straightforward with me, but had made up his mind to conceal from me a relation which he had recently formed with a lady, for he assumed quite correctly that I knew her. He displaces on to a stranger the embarrassing situation of being detected, so that he himself does not seem to come into the dream at all.

9. Here we have an example of a symbol which I have not yet mentioned:—

_The dreamer met his sister with two friends who were themselves sisters. He shook hands with these two, but not with his sister._

There was no real episode connected with this in his mind. Instead, his thoughts went back to a time when his observations led him to wonder why a girl’s breasts are so late in developing. The two sisters, therefore, stand for the breasts; he would have liked to grasp them with his hand, if only it had not been his sister.

10. Here is an example of death symbolism in dreams:—_The dreamer was crossing a very high, steep, iron bridge, with two people whose names he knew, but forgot on waking. Suddenly both of them had vanished and he saw a ghostly man in a cap and an overall. He asked him whether he were the telegraph messenger.... “No.” Or the coachman?... “No.” He then went on_, and in the dream, had a feeling of great dread; on waking, he followed it up with the phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and that he fell into the abyss.

When stress is laid upon the fact that people in a dream are unknown to the dreamer, or that he has forgotten their names, they are, as a rule, persons with whom he is intimately connected. The dreamer was one of a family of three children; if he had ever wished for the death of the other two, it would be only just that he should be visited with the fear of death. With reference to the telegraph messenger, he remarked that they always bring bad news. From his uniform, the man in the dream might have been a lamp-lighter, who also puts out the lights, as the spirit of death extinguishes the torch of life. With the coachman he associated Uhland’s poem of the voyage of King Karl, and recalled a dangerous sail on a lake with two companions, when he played the part of the king in the poem. The iron bridge suggested to him a recent accident, also the stupid saying: “Life is a suspension bridge.”

11. The following may be regarded as another example of a death-dream:—

_An unknown gentleman was leaving a black-edged visiting card on the dreamer._

12. I give another dream which will interest you from several points of view; it is to be traced partly, however, to a neurotic condition in the dreamer:—

_He was in a train which stopped in the open country. He thought there was going to be an accident and that he must make his escape, so he went through all the compartments, killing everyone he met,—driver, guard, and so on._

This dream recalls a story told him by a friend. On a certain Italian line, an insane man was being conveyed in a small compartment, but by some mistake a passenger was allowed to get in with him. The madman murdered the other traveller. Thus the dreamer identified himself with this insane man, his reason being that he was at times tormented by an obsession that he must make away with “everyone who shared his knowledge.” Then he himself found a better motivation for the dream. The day before, he had seen at the theatre a girl he had meant to marry but had given up because she gave him cause for jealousy. Knowing the intensity which jealousy could assume in him, he would really have been mad to want to marry her. That is to say, he thought her so unreliable that his jealousy would have led him to murder everyone who got in his way. The going through a number of rooms, or, as here, compartments, we have already learnt to know as a symbol of marriage (the expression of monogamy according to the rule of opposites).

With reference to the train’s stopping in the open country and the fear of an accident, he told the following story:—

Once when such a sudden halt occurred on the line outside a station, a young lady who was in the carriage said that perhaps there was going to be a collision, and that the best thing to do was to raise the legs high. This phrase “raise the legs” had associations with many walks and excursions into the country, which he had shared with the girl mentioned above in the happy early days of their love. Here was a new argument for the contention that he would be mad to marry her now; nevertheless, my knowledge of the situation led me to regard it as certain that there existed in him all the same the desire to fall a victim to this form of madness.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE
ARCHAIC AND INFANTILE FEATURES IN DREAMS

Let us start afresh from our conclusion that, under the influence of the censorship, the dream-work translates the latent dream-thoughts into another form. These thoughts are of the same nature as the familiar, conscious thoughts of waking life; the new form in which they are expressed is, owing to many peculiar characteristics, incomprehensible to us. We have said that it goes back to phases in our intellectual development which we have long outgrown—to hieroglyphic writing, to symbolic-connections, possibly to conditions which existed before the language of thought was evolved. On this account we called the form of expression employed by the dream-work _archaic_ or _regressive_.

From this you may draw the inference that a more profound study of the dream-work must lead to valuable conclusions about the initial stages of our intellectual development, of which at present little is known. I hope it will be so, but so far this task has not been attempted. The era to which the dream-work takes us back is “primitive” in a twofold sense: in the first place, it means the early days of the _individual_—his childhood—and, secondly, in so far as each individual repeats in some abbreviated fashion during childhood the whole course of the development of the human race, the reference is _phylogenetic_. I believe it not impossible that we may be able to discriminate between that part of the latent mental processes which belongs to the early days of the individual and that which has its roots in the infancy of the race. It seems to me, for instance, that symbolism, a mode of expression which has never been individually acquired, may claim to be regarded as a racial heritage.

This, however, is not the only archaic feature in dreams. You are all familiar from actual experience with the peculiar _amnesia of childhood_ to which we are subject. I mean that the first years of life, up to the age of five, six, or eight, have not left the same traces in memory as our later experiences. True, we come across individuals who can boast of continuous recollection from early infancy to the present time, but it is incomparably more common for the opposite, a blank in memory, to be found. In my opinion, this has not aroused sufficient surprise. At two years old the child can speak well and soon shows his capacity for adapting himself to complicated mental situations, and, moreover, says things which he himself has forgotten when they are repeated to him years later. And yet memory is more efficient in early years, being less overburdened than it is later. Again, there is no reason to regard the function of memory as an especially high or difficult form of mental activity; on the contrary, excellent memory may be found in people who are yet on a very low plane intellectually.

But I must draw your attention to a second peculiarity, based upon the first—namely, that from the oblivion in which the first years of childhood are shrouded certain clearly retained recollections emerge, mostly in the form of plastic images, for the retention of which there seems no adequate ground. Memory deals with the mass of impressions received in later life by a process of selection, retaining what is important and omitting what is not; but with the recollections retained from childhood this is not so. They do not necessarily reflect important experiences in childhood, not even such as must have seemed important from the child’s standpoint, but are often so banal and meaningless in themselves that we can only ask ourselves in amazement why just this particular detail has escaped oblivion. I have tried, with the help of analysis, to attack the problem of childhood amnesia and of the fragments of recollection which break through it, and have come to the conclusion that, whatever may appear to the contrary, the child no less than the adult only retains in memory what is important; but that what is important is represented (by the processes of condensation and, more especially, of displacement, already familiar to you) in the memory by something apparently trivial. For this reason I have called these childhood recollections _screen-memories_; a thorough analysis can evolve from them all that has been forgotten.

It is a regular task in psycho-analytic treatment to fill in the blank in infantile memories, and, in so far as the treatment is successful to any extent at all (very frequently, therefore) we are enabled to bring to light the content of those early years long buried in oblivion. These impressions have never really been forgotten, but were only inaccessible and latent, having become part of the unconscious. But sometimes it happens that they emerge spontaneously from the unconscious, and it is in connection with dreams that this happens. It is clear that the dream-life knows the way back to these latent, infantile experiences. Many good illustrations of this are to be found in psycho-analytical literature, and I myself have been able to furnish a contribution of the sort. I once dreamt in a particular connection of someone who had evidently done me a service and whom I saw plainly. He was a one-eyed man, short, fat and high-shouldered; from the context I gathered that he was a doctor. Fortunately I was able to ask my mother, who was still living, what was the personal appearance of the doctor who attended us at the place where I was born and which I left at the age of three; she told me that he had only one eye and was short, fat and high-shouldered; I learnt also of the accident which was the occasion of this doctor’s being called in and which I had forgotten. This command of the forgotten material of the earliest years of childhood is thus a further ‘archaic’ feature of dreams.

This knowledge has a bearing on another of the problems which up to the present have proved insoluble. You will remember the astonishment caused by our discovery that dreams have their origin in actively evil or in excessive sexual desires, which have made both the dream-censorship and dream-distortion necessary. Supposing now that we have interpreted a dream of this sort, and the circumstances are specially favourable in that the dreamer does not quarrel with the interpretation itself, he does nevertheless invariably ask how any such wish could come into his mind, since it seems quite foreign to him and he is conscious of desiring the exact opposite. We need have no hesitation in pointing out to him the origin of the wish he repudiates: these evil impulses may be traced to the past, often indeed to a past which is not so very far away. It may be demonstrated that he once knew and was conscious of them, even if this is no longer so. A woman who had a dream meaning that she wished to see her only daughter (then seventeen years old) lying dead found, with our help, that at one time she actually had cherished this death-wish. The child was the offspring of an unhappy marriage, which ended in the speedy separation of husband and wife. Once when the child was as yet unborn the mother, in an access of rage after a violent scene with her husband, beat her body with her clenched fists in order to kill the baby in her womb. How many mothers who to-day love their children tenderly, perhaps with excessive tenderness, yet conceived them unwillingly and wished that the life within them might not develop further; and have indeed turned this wish into various actions, fortunately of a harmless kind. The later death-wish against beloved persons, which appears so puzzling, thus dates from the early days of the relationship to them.

A father, whose dream when interpreted shows that he wished for the death of his eldest and favourite child, is in the same way obliged to recall that there was a time when this wish was not unknown to him. The man, whose marriage had proved a disappointment, often thought when the child was still an infant that if the little creature who meant nothing to him were to die he would again be free and would make better use of his freedom. A large number of similar impulses of hate are to be traced to a similar source; they are recollections of something belonging to the past, something which was once in consciousness and played its part in mental life. From this you will be inclined to draw the conclusion that such dreams and such wishes would not occur in cases where there have been no changes of this sort in the relations between two persons, that is to say, where the relation has been of the same character from the beginning. I am prepared to grant you this conclusion, only I must warn you that you have to consider, not the literal meaning of the dream, but what it signifies on interpretation. It may be that the manifest dream of the death of some beloved person was only using this as a terrible mask, whilst really meaning something totally different, or it is possible that the beloved person is an illusory substitute for someone else.

This situation will, however, raise in you another and much more serious question. You will say: “Even though this death-wish did at one time actually exist and this is confirmed by recollection, that is still no true explanation; for the desire has long since been overcome and surely at the present time can exist in the unconscious merely as a recollection, of no affective value, and not as a powerful exciting agent. For this later assumption we have no evidence. Why is the wish recollected at all in dreams?” This is a question which you are really justified in asking; the attempt to answer it would take us far afield and would oblige us to define our position with regard to one of the most important points in the theory of dreams. But I must keep within the limits of our discussion and must forbear to follow up this question; so you must be reconciled to leaving it for the present. Let us content ourselves with the actual evidence that this wish, long since subdued, can be proved to have given rise to the dream, and let us continue our enquiry whether other evil wishes also can be traced in the same way to the past.

Let us keep to the death-wishes, which we shall certainly find mostly derived from the unbounded egoism of the dreamer. Wishes of this sort are very often found to be the underlying agents of dreams. Whenever anyone gets in our way in life—and how often must this happen when our relations to one another are so complicated!—a dream is immediately prepared to make away with that person, even if it be father, mother, brother or sister, husband or wife. It appeared to us amazing that such wickedness should be innate in humanity, and certainly we were not inclined to admit without further evidence that this result of our interpretation of dreams was correct. But, when once we had seen that the origin of wishes of this sort must be looked for in the past, we had little difficulty in finding the period in the past of the individual in which there is nothing strange in such egoism and such wishes, even when directed against the nearest and dearest. A child in his earliest years (which later are veiled in oblivion) is just the person who frequently displays such egoism in boldest relief; invariably, unmistakable tendencies of this kind, or, more accurately, surviving traces of them, are plainly visible in him. For a child loves himself first and only later learns to love others and to sacrifice something of his own ego to them. Even the people whom he seems to love from the outset are loved in the first instance because he needs them and cannot do without them—again therefore, from motives of egoism. Only later does the impulse of love detach itself from egoism: it is a literal fact that the child learns how to love through his own egoism.

In this connection it will be instructive to compare a child’s attitude towards his brothers and sisters with his attitude towards his parents. The little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, and often he is quite frank about it. It is unquestionable that in them he sees and hates his rivals, and it is well known how commonly this attitude persists without interruption for many years, till the child reaches maturity and even later. Of course it often gives place to a more tender feeling, or perhaps we should say it is overlaid by this, but the hostile attitude seems very generally to be the earlier. We can most easily observe it in children of two and a half to four years old when a new baby arrives, which generally meets with a very unfriendly reception; remarks such as “I don’t like it. The stork is to take it away again” are very common. Subsequently every opportunity is seized to disparage the new-comer; attempts are even made to injure it and actual attacks upon it are by no means unheard-of. If the difference in age is less, by the time the child’s mental activity is more fully developed the rival is already in existence and he adapts himself to the situation; if on the other hand there is a greater difference between their ages, the new baby may rouse certain kindly feelings from the first, as an object of interest, a sort of living doll; and when there is as much as eight years or more between them, especially if the elder child is a girl, protective, motherly impulses may at once come into play. But, speaking honestly, when we find a wish for the death of a brother or a sister latent in a dream we need seldom be puzzled, for we find its origin in early childhood without much trouble, or indeed, quite often in the later years when they still lived together.

There is probably no nursery without violent conflicts between the inhabitants, actuated by rivalry for the love of the parents, competition for possessions shared by them all, even for the actual space in the room they occupy. Such hostility is directed against older as well as younger brothers and sisters. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said: “If there is anyone whom a young English lady hates more than her mother it is her elder sister.” Now there is something in this dictum which jars upon us; it is hard enough to bring ourselves to understand hatred and rivalry between brothers and sisters, but how can feelings of hate force themselves into the relation between mother and daughter, parents and children?

This relationship is no doubt a more favourable one, also from the children’s point of view; and this too is what our expectations require: we find it far more offensive for love to be lacking between parents and children than between brothers and sisters. We have, so to speak, sanctified the former love while allowing the latter to remain profane. Yet everyday observation may show us how frequently the sentiments entertained towards each other by parents and grown-up children fall short of the ideal set up by society, and how much hostility lies smouldering, ready to burst into flame if it were not stifled by considerations of filial or parental duty and by other, tender impulses. The motives for this hostility are well known, and we recognize a tendency for those of the same sex to become alienated, daughter from mother and father from son. The daughter sees in her mother the authority which imposes limits to her will, whose task it is to bring her to that renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in certain cases, too, the mother is still a rival, who objects to being set aside. The same thing is repeated still more blatantly between father and son. To the son the father is the embodiment of the social compulsion to which he so unwillingly submits, the person who stands in the way of his following his own will, of his early sexual pleasures and, when there is family property, of his enjoyment of it. When a throne is involved this impatience for the death of the father may approach tragic intensity. The relation between father and daughter or mother and son would seem less liable to disaster; the latter relation furnishes the purest examples of unchanging tenderness, undisturbed by any egoistic considerations.

Why, you ask, do I speak of things so banal and so well-known to everybody? Because there exists an unmistakable tendency in people’s minds to deny the significance of these things in real life and to pretend that the social ideal is much more frequently realized than it actually is. But it is better that psychology should tell the truth than that it should be left to cynics to do so. This general denial is only applied to real life, it is true; for fiction and drama are free to make use of the motives laid bare when these ideals are rudely disturbed.

There is nothing to wonder at therefore if the dreams of a great number of people bring to light the wish for the removal of their parents, especially of the parent whose sex is the same as the dreamer’s. We may assume that the wish exists in waking life as well, sometimes even in consciousness if it can disguise itself behind another motive, as the dreamer in our third example disguised his real thought by pity for his father’s useless suffering. It is but rarely that hostility reigns alone,—far more often it yields to more tender feelings which finally suppress it, when it has to wait in abeyance till a dream shows it, as it were, in isolation. That which the dream shows in a form magnified by this very isolation resumes its true proportions when our interpretation has assigned to it its proper place in relation to the rest of the dreamer’s life. (H. Sachs.) But we also find this death-wish where there is no basis for it in real life and where the adult would never have to confess to entertaining it in his waking life. The reason for this is that the deepest and most common motive for estrangement, especially between parent and child of the same sex, came into play in the earliest years of childhood.

I refer to that rivalry of affections in which sexual elements are plainly emphasized. The son, when quite a little child, already begins to develop a peculiar tenderness towards his mother, whom he looks upon as his own property, regarding his father in the light of a rival who disputes this sole possession of his; similarly the little daughter sees in her mother someone who disturbs her tender relation to her father and occupies a place which she feels she herself could very well fill. Observation shows us how far back these sentiments date, sentiments which we describe by the term _Oedipus complex_, because in the Oedipus myth the two extreme forms of the wishes arising from the situation of the son—the wish to kill the father and to marry the mother—are realized in an only slightly modified form. I do not assert that the Oedipus complex exhausts all the possible relations which may exist between parents and children; these relations may well be a great deal more complicated. Again, this complex may be more or less strongly developed, or it may even become inverted, but it is a regular and very important factor in the mental life of the child; we are more in danger of underestimating than of overestimating its influence and that of the developments which may follow from it. Moreover, the parents themselves frequently stimulate the children to react with an Oedipus complex, for parents are often guided in their preferences by the difference in sex of their children, so that the father favours the daughter and the mother the son; or else, where conjugal love has grown cold, the child may be taken as a substitute for the love-object which has ceased to attract.

It cannot be said that the world has shown great gratitude to psycho-analytic research for the discovery of the Oedipus complex; on the contrary, the idea has excited the most violent opposition in grown-up people; and those who omitted to join in denying the existence of sentiments so universally reprehended and tabooed have later made up for this by proffering interpretations so wide of the mark as to rob the complex of its value. My own unchanged conviction is that there is nothing in it to deny or to gloss over. We ought to reconcile ourselves to facts in which the Greek myth itself saw the hand of inexorable destiny. Again, it is interesting to find that the Oedipus complex, repudiated in actual life and relegated to fiction, has there come to its own. O. Rank in a careful study of this theme has shown how this very complex has supplied dramatic poetry with an abundance of motives in countless variations, modifications and disguises, in short, subject to just the distortion familiar to us in the work of the dream-censorship. So we may look for the Oedipus complex even in those dreamers who have been fortunate enough to escape conflicts with their parents in later life; and closely connected with this we shall find what is termed the _castration complex_, the reaction to that intimidation in the field of sex or to that restraint of early infantile sexual activity which is ascribed to the father.

What we have already ascertained has guided us to the study of the child’s mental life, and we may now hope to find in a similar way an explanation of the source of the other kind of prohibited wishes in dreams, i.e. the excessive sexual desires. We are impelled therefore to study the development of the sexual life of the child, and here from various sources we learn the following facts. In the first place, it is an untenable fallacy to suppose that the child has no sexual life and to assume that sexuality first makes its appearance at puberty, when the genital organs come to maturity. On the contrary he has from the very beginning a sexual life rich in content, though it differs in many points from that which later is regarded as normal. What in adult life are termed “perversions” depart from the normal in the following respects: (1) in a disregard for the barriers of species (the gulf between man and beast), (2) in the insensibility to barriers imposed by disgust, (3) in the transgression of the incest-barrier (the prohibition against seeking sexual gratification with close blood-relations), (4) in homosexuality and, (5) in the transferring of the part played by the genital organs to other organs and different areas of the body. All these barriers are not in existence from the outset, but are only gradually built up in the course of development and education. The little child is free from them: he does not perceive any immense gulf between man and beast, the arrogance with which man separates himself from the other animals only dawns in him at a later period. He shows at the beginning of life no disgust for excrement, but only learns this feeling slowly under the influence of education; he attaches no particular importance to the difference between the sexes, in fact he thinks that both have the same formation of the genital organs; he directs his earliest sexual desires and his curiosity to those nearest to him or to those who for other reasons are specially beloved—his parents, brothers and sisters or nurses; and finally we see in him a characteristic which manifests itself again later at the height of some love-relationship—namely, he does not look for gratification in the sexual organs only, but discovers that many other parts of the body possess the same sort of sensibility and can yield analogous pleasurable sensations, playing thereby the part of genital organs. The child may be said then to be _polymorphously perverse_, and even if mere traces of all these impulses are found in him, this is due on the one hand to their lesser intensity as compared with that which they assume in later life and, on the other hand, to the fact that education immediately and energetically suppresses all sexual manifestations in the child. This suppression may be said to be embodied in a theory; for grown-up people endeavour to overlook some of these manifestations, and, by misinterpretation, to rob others of their sexual nature, until in the end the whole thing can be altogether denied. It is often the same people who first inveigh against the sexual “naughtiness” of children in the nursery and then sit down to their writing-tables to defend the sexual purity of the same children. When they are left to themselves or when they are seduced children often display perverse sexual activity to a really remarkable extent. Of course grown-up people are right in not taking this too seriously and in regarding it, as they say, as “childish tricks” and “play,” for the child cannot be judged either by a moral or legal code as if he were mature and fully responsible; nevertheless these things do exist, and they have their significance both as evidence of innate constitutional tendencies and inasmuch as they cause and foster later developments: they give us an insight into the child’s sexual life and so into that of humanity as a whole. If then we find all these perverse wishes behind the distortions of our dreams, it only means that dreams in _this respect also_ have regressed completely to the infantile condition.

Amongst these forbidden wishes special prominence must still be given to the incestuous desires, i.e. those directed towards sexual intercourse with parents or brothers and sisters. You know in what abhorrence human society holds, or at least professes to hold, such intercourse, and what emphasis is laid upon the prohibitions of it. The most preposterous attempts have been made to account for this horror of incest: some people have assumed that it is a provision of nature for the preservation of the species, manifesting itself in the mind by these prohibitions because in-breeding would result in racial degeneration; others have asserted that propinquity from early childhood has deflected sexual desire from the persons concerned. In both these cases, however, the avoidance of incest would have been automatically secured and we should be at a loss to understand the necessity for stern prohibitions, which would seem rather to point to a strong desire. Psycho-analytic investigations have shown beyond the possibility of doubt that _an incestuous love-choice_ is in fact the first and the regular one, and that it is only later that any opposition is manifested towards it, the causes of which are not to be sought in the psychology of the individual.