VI The Art of Dream Interpretation(2)
梦解析的艺术（2）
As striking illustration of this kind of wish-fulfilling dream is the following:
I am witnessing an experiment. A man has been changed into stone. Then a sculptress has chiseled the stone into a figure. Suddenly the sculpture becomes alive and walks toward the sculptress in great rage. I am looking on with horror and see how he kills the sculptress. He then turns against me, and I think if I succeed in getting him into the living room where my parents are, I’ll be saved. I wrestle with him and do succeed in getting him into the living room. My parents sit there with a few of their friends. But they hardly look up when they see me fighting for my life. I think: Well, I could have known long ago that they do not care. I smile triumphantly.
Here the dream ends. We must know something about the person of the dreamer to understand the dream. He is a young doctor of twenty-four, living a routine existence, completely under the domination of his mother, who runs the whole family. He does not think or feel spontaneously, goes to the hospital dutifully, is well liked because of his unassuming behavior, but he feels tired, depressed, and sees not much point in living. He is the obedient son, who stays at home, does what mother expects and has hardly any life of his own. His mother encourages him to go out with girls, but she finds fault with each one in whom he shows a little interest. Once in a while, when mother is more demanding than usual, he gets angry at her; she shows him how much he has hurt her, how ungrateful he is, and thus such outbursts of anger result in an orgy of remorse and intensified submission to her. The day before he had this dream, he had waited for a subway train. He watched three men about his age chatting on the platform. They were obviously clerks coming home from the store. They talked about the boss; one spoke of his chances for a salary raise because the boss liked him so much, another about the fact that the other day the boss had talked with him about politics. The whole conversation was that of routinized, empty little men whose life was absorbed by the triviality of the store and its boss. Our dreamer watching these men suddenly was shocked. It occurred to him: “That’s me; that’s my life! I am not any better than these three clerks; I am just as dead!” The dream occurred the following night.
Knowing the general psychic situation of the dreamer and the immediate precipitating cause of the dream, it is not difficult to understand the dream. He realizes that he has been turned into stone; he does not feel anything nor have any thought that is his own. He feels dead. He then recognizes that a woman is chiseling the stone into a sculpture. Quite obviously this symbol refers to his mother and what she has done to him. He recognizes the extent to which she has made him into a lifeless figure, but one which she could possess entirely. While in waking life he had sometimes complained about her demands, he had not been aware of the extent to which he had been molded by her. So far the dream contains an insight far truer and clearer than what he knew in waking life: an insight about his own situation and the role of his mother in his life. Then the situation changes. The dreamer appears in two roles (as often happens in dreams). He is the onlooker who observes what goes on, but he is also the statue that has come to life and in violent rage killed the sculptress. Here he experiences a rage against his mother which had been completely repressed. Neither he nor anyone else would have thought him capable of such rage, or that his mother could be the target. In the dream he experiences his rage not as his own but as that of the statue brought to life. “He,” the onlooker, is terrified of the enraged man who then turns against him.
This splitting of one person into two, which occurs so plainly in the dream, is an experience all of us have more or less distinctly. The dreamer is afraid of his own rage; in fact this rage is so alien to his conscious thinking that he experiences the enraged man as a different person. Yet the enraged man is “he,” the forgotten, furious “he,” who comes to life in the dream. The dreamer, the observer, the man he is in his daily life, feels threatened by this rage and is afraid—afraid of himself. He wrestles with himself and he hopes that by bringing the conflict, the “enemy,” to his parents, he will be saved. This idea is expressive of the wishes that govern his life.
If you have to make a decision, if you cannot cope with difficulties, run to your parents, run to any authority; they will tell you what to do, they will save you—even though the price is continuous dependence and unhappiness. In deciding to get the attacker into the living room he follows an old, always-used device. But once he sees his parents, he has an entirely new and startling insight: his parents—and particularly his mother, from whom he had expected help, protection, advice, on whose wisdom and love everything seemed to depend—these same parents don’t even look up; they do not care and cannot help. He is alone and must take care of his life by himself; all his hopes in the past were an illusion, which is now suddenly shattered. But this very insight, which is in a sense bitter and disappointing, makes him feel as if he had won; he smiles triumphantly because he has seen something of the truth and taken a first step into freedom.
This dream contains a mixture of motivations. There are profound insights into himself and his parents which go beyond anything he has known so far. He sees his own frozenness and deadness, sees the way his mother has molded him according to her own wishes, and he recognizes finally how little they care and how little they are able to help. So far the dream is one of those dreams whose contents are not wish-fulfillment but insight. But there is also an element of wish-fulfillment. His rage, repressed in waking life, comes to the fore, and he sees himself as overpowering and killing his mother. The wish for revenge is fulfilled in the dream.
This analysis of the wish does not seem to be different from previous illustrations of the fulfillment of irrational desires in a dream. But in spite of the apparent similarity, there is a significant difference. If we recall the dream of the white charger, for instance, the wish fulfilled was the childish grandiosity of the dreamer. Its wish does not lie in the direction of growth and self-fulfillment but is only the satisfaction of his irrational self, which recoils from the tests of reality. Or the man who dreamed of his friendly talk with Hitler only satisfied his most irrational wish, that of submission even to a hated authority.
The rage against the sculptress, experienced in the dream we are now discussing, is of a different kind. The dreamer’s rage against his mother is, in a sense, irrational. It is the result of his own inability to be independent, of his capitulation before her and the ensuing unhappiness. But there is another aspect to it. His mother is a domineering woman whose influence on this boy started at a time when he could not have withstood her very well. Here, as always in the relation between children and parents, the parents are the stronger ones as long as the child is little. By the time he is old enough to give expression to his own will so much damage has been done to that will and self-assertion that he cannot “will” any more. Once the constellation of submission-domination is established, rage necessarily follows. If the rage were permitted to be felt consciously, it could be the basis for a healthy rebellion; it would lead to a reorientation in terms of asserting himself and eventually of reaching freedom and maturity. Once this aim is reached, the rage will disappear and make place for an understanding, if not friendly, attitude toward the mother. Thus, while this rage is in itself a symptom of lacking self-assertion, it is a necessary step in the healthy development and is not irrational. In the case of this dreamer, however, the rage was repressed; fear of mother and dependence on her guidance and authority made the dreamer unaware of it, and the rage lived a secret existence far below the surface where the dreamer could never reach it. In his dream, moved by the frightening and enlightening vision of his own deadness, he and his rage both come to life. This rage is a necessary transitory stage in his process of growth and therefore fundamentally different from those desires dealt with in the previous dreams, the fulfillment of which leads backward, not forward.
The dreamer of the following dream is a man who was suffering from an intense feeling of guilt; he still, at the age of forty, reproached himself as having been responsible for his father’s death twenty years before. He had gone on a trip and during his absence his father had died of a heart attack. He felt then, and still feels, that he was responsible, inasmuch as his father perhaps became excited and hence died, while if he, the son, had been there he could have averted any kind of excitement.
This dreamer is always afraid that by some fault of his another person is sick or some other damage is done. He has a vast number of private rituals whose function it is to atone for his “sins” and to avert the evil consequences of his doings. He rarely permits himself any pleasure, and enjoyment is possible only when he has managed to classify pleasure under “duty.” He works excessively hard; he has only occasional and superficial sexual affairs with women, which usually end with the depressing fear that he has hurt the girl and that she now hates him. After a considerable amount of analytic work he had the following dream:
A crime has been committed. I do not remember what the crime was, and I do not think I knew in the dream, either. I walk in the street and, although I am sure I have not committed any crime, I know that if a detective came up and accused me of murder I would not be able to defend myself. I walk faster and faster toward the river. Suddenly when I am close to the river I see in the distance a hill on which there is a beautiful city. Light radiates from the hill I see people dancing in the streets, I feel that if I can only cross the river everything will be all right.
（这段可以两个人搭配走）
Analyst：“What a surprise This is the first time you have been convinced that you did not commit a crime and that you are only afraid you could not defend yourself against the accusation. Did anything good happen yesterday?”
Patient：“Nothing of importance, except that I got some satisfaction in establishing the fact that an oversight which had occurred in the office was definitely due to somebody else’s mistake and not to mine, as I had feared they might think.”
Analyst：“I can see that that is rather satisfactory—but perhaps you’ll tell me what the oversight was.”
Patient：“A lady phoned and wanted to see one partner of our firm, Mr. X. I spoke to her and was quite impressed by her lovely voice. I told her to come the next day at four and put a note on Mr. X’s desk. Mr. X’s secretary took the note, but instead of telling him, she had put the note away and entirely forgotten about it. The next day the young lady came and was hurt and distressed when she heard that Mr. X was not in and that the whole matter had been forgotten. I spoke to her and apologized and after a few minutes I induced her to tell me the problem she was going to discuss with Mr. X. All this was yesterday.”
Analyst：“I take it, then, that the secretary remembered that she had neglected the matter and told you or the young lady about it?”
Patient：“Oh, yes, of course; funny that I forgot to tell this; it seemed the most important thing yesterday except—but that is nonsense.”
Analyst：“Let us hear the nonsense. You know from experience that our nonsense is usually the wisest voice in us.”
Patient：“Well, what I was going to say was that I felt strangely happy while I was talking to the lady. Hers was a divorce case and from what I gathered she had been coaxed and browbeaten into an impossible marriage by her ambitious mother. She had stood it for four years and now had decided to put an end to it.”
Analyst：“So, you have visions of freedom, too, have you not? I am interested in a little detail. You see people dancing in the streets as the only detail of the city you recognize. Have you ever seen such a scene?”
Patient：“Wait a minute… that is strange… now I get it. …Yes, when I was fourteen I was with my father on a trip in France; we were in a little town on the Fourteenth of July, saw the celebration, and in the evening watched the people dance in the streets. You know, that was the last time I can remember real happiness.”
Analyst：“Well, so last night you were able to pick up the thread. You could visualize freedom, light, happiness, dancing, as a possibility, as something you had experienced once and could experience again.”
Patient：“Provided I know how to cross the river!”
Analyst：“Yes, that’s where you stand now: for the first time you recognize that you have not really committed the crime, that there is the city in which you are free, and that a river which can be crossed separates you from this better life. No alligators in the river?”
Patient：“No, it was an ordinary river, in fact like the river in our town I was always a little afraid of as a child.”
Analyst：Then there must be a bridge. You certainly have waited a long time to cross the bridge. The problem now is to discover what still hinders you from doing so.”
This is one of those important dreams in which a decisive step away from mental illness is taken. To be sure, the patient is not yet well, but he has experienced the most important thing short of being well, a clear and vivid vision of a life in which he is not the haunted criminal but a free person. He also visualizes that, in order to get there, he must cross a river, an old and universally used symbol of an important decision, of starting a new form of existence—birth or death—of giving up one form of life for another. The vision of the city is a fulfillment of a wish, but this wish is rational; it represents life; it comes from that part of the dreamer which was hidden and alienated from himself. This vision is real, as real as anything his eyes see during the day, except that he still needs the solitude and freedom of sleep existence to be sure of it.
Here is another “crossing the river” dream. The dreamer is an only, spoiled child, a boy. He was pampered by his parents, admired by them as a future genius, everything made easy, and no effort expected—from the breakfast, which his mother brought to his bed in the morning, to the father’s talks with teachers, which always ended in the expression of his conviction of the boy’s wonderful gifts. Both parents were morbidly afraid of danger for him; he was not permitted to swim, to hike, to play in the street. He wanted to rebel sometimes against the embarrassing restrictions, but why complain when he had all these wonderful things: admiration, affectionate caresses, so many toys that he could throw them away, and almost complete protection from all outer dangers. He actually was a gifted boy, but he had never quite succeeded in standing on his own feet. Instead of mastering things, his aim was to win applause and admiration. Thus he became dependent on others and—afraid.
But the very need for praise and the fear engendered when it was not forthcoming made him furious and even cruel. He had entered analytic treatment because of the uneasiness that was constantly produced by his childish grandiosity, dependence, fear and rage. After six months of analytic work he had the following dream:
I am to cross a river. I look for a bridge, but there is none. I am small, perhaps five or six. I cannot swim. [He actually learned how to swim at eighteen.] Then I see a tall, dark man who makes a sign that he can carry me over in his arms. [The river is only about five feet deep.] I am glad for the moment and let him take me. While he holds me and starts walking, I am suddenly seized by panic. I know that if I don’t get away I shall die. We are already in the river, but I muster all my courage and jump from the man’s arms into the water. At first I think I’ll be drowned. But then I start swimming, and soon reach the other shore. The man has disappeared.
The preceding day the dreamer had been at a party, and it had suddenly dawned upon him that all his interests were directed to the goal of being admired and liked. He had felt—for the first time—how childish he really was and that he had to make a decision. Yes, he could go on being the irresponsible child, or he could accept the painful transition to maturity. He felt he must not kid himself any longer that everything was as it should be and mistake his success in pleasing for real achievement. These thoughts had quite shaken him, and be had fallen asleep.
The dream is not difficult to understand. Crossing the river is the decision he must make to cross from the shore of childhood to that of maturity. But how can he do it if he thinks himself five or six, when he could not swim. The man who offers to carry him stands for many persons: father, teachers, everyone who was ready to carry him—bribed by his charm and promise. So far the dream symbolizes accurately his inner problem and the way he has solved it again and again. But now a new factor enters. He realizes that if he permits himself to be carried again he will be destroyed. This insight is sharp and clear. He feels that he has to make a decision, and he jumps into the water. He is aware that he really can swim (apparently he is no longer five or six in the dream) and that he can reach the other shore without help. This again is wish-fulfillment but, as in the previous dream, it is a vision of his goal as an adult; it is a keen awareness of the fact that his accustomed method of being carried must lead to ruin; furthermore, he knows that he actually can swim if he only has the courage to jump.
Needless to say, as the days went by the vision lost its original clarity. The daytime “noises” suggested that one must not be “extreme,” that all was going well, that there was no reason to give up all friendship, that we all need help and that he certainly deserved it, and so on—these and many other reasons which we manufacture in order to befog a clear but uncomfortable insight. After quite some time, though, he was as wise and courageous during the daytime as he had been in the night—and the dream came true.
These last dreams illustrate an important point, the difference between rational and irrational wishes. We often wish things that are rooted in our weakness and compensate for it; we dream of ourselves as famous, all powerful loved by everybody, etc. But sometimes we dream of wishes which are the anticipation of our most valuable goals. We can see ourselves as dancing or flying; we see the city of light; we experience the happy presence of friends. Even if we are not yet capable in our waking life to experience the joy of the dream, the dream experience shows that we are at least capable of wishing it and seeing it fulfilled in a dream fantasy. Fantasies and dreams are the beginning of many deeds, and nothing would be worse than to discourage or depreciate them. What matters is the kind of fantasy which we have—does it lead us forward or does it hold us back in the chains of unproductiveness?
The following dream is expressive of a profound insight into the dreamer’s problem and is a good illustration of the function of associative material. The dreamer, a thirty-five-year-old man, had suffered since adolescence from a mild but persistent depression. His father had been an easygoing but unloving man. His mother had suffered from severe depressions from the time the boy was eight or nine. He was not allowed to play with other children; if he went out of the house, his mother reproached him for hurting her feelings; only with books and his fantasies in one corner of a room was he safe from reproach. Any expression of enthusiasm was answered by his mother with a shrug of the shoulders and remarks to the effect that there was no particular reason for such happiness and excitement. The dreamer, while refuting his mother’s reproaches with his mind, nevertheless felt that she was right and that her unhappiness was his fault. He also felt that he was ill equipped for life, since some of the essential conditions for successful living had been missing in his childhood. He was always embarrassed lest others find out about the emotional (rather than the material) poverty of his background. One problem that is particularly upsetting to him is that of communication with other people, particularly reaction to attacks or teasing. He is utterly at a loss vis-à-vis such behavior and feels at ease only with a few good friends. This is the dream:
I see a man sitting in a wheel chair. He is beginning a game of chess but without much pleasure. He interrupts the game suddenly and says, “Two figures were removed from my set long ago. But I make up for it by ‘Thessail.’” Then he adds, “A voice (my mother’s) has been piped into me: ‘Life is not worth living.’“
Part of the dream is readily understandable when we know something of the history and the problem of the dreamer. The man in the wheel chair is he. The game of chess is the game of life, particularly that aspect where one is attacked and has to counterattack or use some other strategy. He is not too willing to play this game, since he feels ill equipped for it. “Two figures were removed from my set long ago.” This is the feeling he has also in his waking state: that he was deprived of things in his childhood, and that this is the reason for his helplessness in the battle of life. The two figures which had been removed? The king and the queen, his father and mother, who were not really there except in a negative function, to disappoint, to nag, to tease, to reproach. But he can nevertheless manage to play with the help of “Thessail.” Here we are stuck, and so was the dreamer.
（两个人搭配走）
Patient：“I see the word clearly before me. But I haven’t the slightest idea what it means.”
Analyst：“You apparently knew in your dream what it meant; it is, after all, your dream and the word is your coinage. Let us try some free association. What comes to mind when you think of the word?”
Patient：“The first thing that occurs to me is Thessaly, a part of Greece. Yes, I remember that I was quite impressed as a kid with Thessaly. I don’t know whether this is actually so or not, but I think of Thessaly as a part of Greece with a warm, even climate, where shepherds live peacefully and happily. I always preferred it to Sparta and Athens. Sparta I abhorred because of its militaristic spirit—Athens I didn’t like because the Athenians seemed to me hyper-cultivated snobs. Yes, I felt drawn to the shepherds in Thessaly.”
Analyst：“The word you dream of is ‘Thessail’ rather than Thessaly. Why did you change it?”
Patient：“Funny, what I think of now is a flail, the instrument the peasants use for threshing. But they can also use it as a weapon if they have nothing else.”
Analyst：“That is very interesting. Thessail, then, is composed of Thessaly and flail. In a curious way Thessaly, or rather what it means to you, is closely related to the flail. Shepherds and peasants: the simple, idyllic life. Let us come back and see what you say in the dream. You play chess and know two figures have been removed from your set, but you can make up with ‘Thessail.’”
Patient：“The thought is pretty clear to me now. In the game of life I feel handicapped because of the frustrations of my childhood. I do not quite have the weapons [the chess figures that have reference to a battle] others have, but if I could withdraw into a simple, idyllic life, I could even fight with a flail as a substitute for the weapons I lack—the chess figures.”
Analyst：“But this is not the end of the dream. After you have interrupted your chess game you say: A voice has been piped into me: ‘Life is not worth living.’”
Patient：“This I understand very well. After all, I play the game of life only because I have to. But I am not really interested. The feeling I have had more or less strongly since my childhood is just what I say in the dream: Life is not worth living.”
Analyst：“Indeed, that is what you always feel. But is there not some important message you send yourself in the dream?”
Patient：“You mean that I say that this theme of depression has been put into me by my mother.”
Analyst：“Yes, that is what I mean. Once you recognize that the depressed judgment about life is not your own but your mother’s voice still exercising its quasi-posthypnotic effect, you have taken one step in the direction of freeing yourself from this mood. That your depressed philosophy is not really yours is an important discovery you made—and it took the state of sleep to make it.”
One type of dream for which we have given no illustration is the nightmare. In Freud’s view, the anxiety dream is no exception to the general rule that the latent content of a dream is the fulfillment of an irrational wish. There is, of course, an obvious objection to this view, which will be raised by anyone who ever had a nightmare: If I go through the terrors of hell in a dream and wake up with an almost unbearable fright, does it make any sense to say that this is a wish-fulfillment?
This objection is not nearly so good as it seems on first glance. For one thing, we know of a pathological state in which people are driven to do the very thing that is destructive to them. The masochistic person has a wish—though an unconscious one—to incur an accident, to be sick, to be humiliated. In the masochistic perversion—where this wish is blended with sex and therefore less dangerous to the person—the masochistic wish is even conscious. Furthermore, we know that suicide can be the result of an overpowering impulse for revenge and destruction, directed against one’s own person rather than against someone else. Yet the person driven to a self-destructive or other painful act may, with the other part of his personality, feel genuine and intense fright. This does not alter the fact that the fright is the outcome of his own self-destructive wishes. But a wish may create anxiety, so Freud observes, not only if it is a masochistic or self-destructive impulse. We may wish something but know that the gratification of the wish will make other people hate us and bring about punishment by society. Naturally, the fulfillment of this wish would produce anxiety.
An illustration of this kind of anxiety dream is offered by the following example:
I have taken an apple from a tree while I am passing an orchard. A big dog comes and jumps at me, I am terribly frightened, and I wake up yelling for help.
All that is necessary for the understanding of the dream is the knowledge that the dreamer had met, the evening before the dream, a married woman to whom he felt greatly attracted. She seemed to be rather encouraging, and he had fallen asleep with fantasies of having an affair with her. We need not be concerned here whether the anxiety he felt in the dream was prompted by his conscience or by the fear of public opinion—the essential fact remains that the anxiety is the result of the gratification of his wish—to eat the stolen apple.
However, although many anxiety dreams can thus be understood as disguised wish-fulfillment, I doubt that this is the case with all or perhaps even most of them. If we assume dreaming to be any kind of mental activity under the condition of sleep, why should we not be as genuinely afraid of danger in our sleep as we are in our waking life?
But, someone may argue, is not all fear conditioned by our cravings? Would we be afraid if we had no “Thirst,” as the Buddhists say; if we were not desiring things? Therefore, may it not be said that, in a general sense, every anxiety in waking and in dream life is the result of desires?
This argument is well taken, and if we were to say that there is no anxiety dream (or no anxiety in waking life) without the presence of desire, including the fundamental desire to live, I do not see that any objection could be made to this statement. But this general principle is not the one Freud meant with his interpretation. It may clarify the issue if we talk once more about the difference between the three kinds of anxiety dreams we have already discussed.
In the masochistic self-destructive nightmare, the wish is in itself painful and self-destructive. In the second type of anxiety dream, as the one with the apple, the wish is not in itself self-destructive, but it is of such a kind that its fulfillment causes anxiety in another part of the mental system. The dream is caused by the wish—which as a by-product generates anxiety. In the third type of anxiety dream, where one is afraid because of a real or imaged threat to life, freedom, etc., the dream is caused by the threat, while the wish to live, to be free, etc., is the all-present impulse that does not produce that specific dream. In other words, in the first and second categories the anxiety is caused by the presence of a wish; in the third category, by the presence of a danger (real or imagined), although not without the presence of the wish to live or any other of the permanent and universal desires. In this third category the anxiety dream is clearly not the fulfillment of the wish but the fear of its frustration.
The following is an anxiety dream not unlike many other nightmares. The dreamer reports:
I am in a greenhouse. Suddenly I see a snake striking at me. My mother stands beside me and smiles maliciously at me. She walks away then without trying to help me. I run to the door only to find that the snake is already there—blocking my way. I wake up horrified.
The dreamer is a forty-five-year-old woman who suffers from severe anxiety. The outstanding feature in her history is the mutual hate between her and her mother. The feeling that her mother hated her was not something imagined. The mother was married to a man she never had liked; she was resentful of the first-born child, the dreamer, whose very existence, so she believed, forced her to continue her marriage. When the dreamer was three, she told her father something which made him suspect that his wife had an affair with another man. While the little girl did not know exactly what she had been observing and saying, intuitively she knew quite well, and the mother’s rage at her was better founded than appeared on the surface. The older the girl became the more she tried to provoke her mother, and the more did her mother try to punish and eventually destroy her. Her life was a constant battle against attack. Had her father helped and supported her, the outcome might have been different. But he was himself afraid of his wife and never overtly supported his daughter. The result of all this and many other circumstances was that the daughter, a very gifted and proud person, withdrew more and more from people, felt defeated by her mother’s “victory” and lived in the hope that “one day” she would be the victor. All this hate and insecurity caused a state of constant anxiety by which she was tortured both waking and sleeping.
The dream is one of the many expressions of it: She associates with the “greenhouse”—the greenhouse was on her parents’ estate. She often went there alone, never with her mother. In the dream it is not her mother who is the danger but the snake. What does this mean? Apparently there is a wish for a mother who will protect her from danger. (In fact, she sometimes had daydreams that her mother would change and help her.) Here, again, she is in danger. But her mother smiles maliciously and walks away. In this malicious smile the mother shows her true colors. At first the attempt is made, as it were, to split the bad mother (the snake) from the good mother—who might help. When the mother looks at her maliciously and does not help, this illusion is destroyed, mother and snake are one and the same, forces threatening destruction. The dreamer then runs to the door, hoping to escape, but it is too late; the way is blocked. She is now shut in with a poisonous snake and a destructive mother. In the dream the patient experiences the same anxiety she is haunted by in the daytime, except more intensely and in clear reference to her mother. Hers is not a realistic fear but a morbid anxiety. The mother is no longer a threat to her; in fact, no one threatens or endangers her. Nevertheless, she is frightened, and in the dream the fright breaks through.
Is the dream the fulfillment of a wish? To some extent this is true. There is the wish to have the mother as protector and only when the mother, instead of helping, looks maliciously at her does the terror begin. It is her wish for the mother’s love and protection that makes her afraid of the woman. If she did not want the mother any more, she would not be frightened of her either. But more important than these wishes for mother love and protection are others without which her fear of her mother could not have continued to exist: her wish for revenge, her desire to make her father see that his wife is evil, to take him away from her; not because she loves her father so much, nor because of the fixation to an early sexual attachment to him, but because of the deep humiliation by the early defeat and the feeling that only by her mother’s destruction can her pride and self-confidence be restored. Why this early humiliation was and is so ineradicable, why the wish for revenge and triumph is so unconquerable, is another question, too complex to be discussed in this context.
The dreamer has other anxiety dreams from which the one element contained in this dream—the wish that her mother should help—is completely absent. Such dreams are:
I am in a cage with a tiger. No one to help me.
Or:
I am walking on a narrow strip of land on a marsh. It is dark and I can’t see my way. I am utterly lost and feel that I’II slip and drown if I take one more step.
Or:
I am the defendant in a trial; I am accused of murder, and I know that I am innocent. But I can see in the faces of the judge and the jury that they have already made up their minds that I am guilty. The interrogation is only a matter of form. I know that no matter what I say or any witnesses might say (I do not see any witnesses) the case is decided, and there is no point in trying to defend myself.
In all these dreams the essential factor is the feeling of complete helplessness leading to a paralysis of all functions and to panic. Inanimate objects, animals, people—they are merciless; no friend is in sight; no help to be expected. This feeling of complete powerlessness is rooted in the dreamer’s inability to let go of her wish for revenge, to cease the battle with her mother. But it is in itself not the fulfillment of any wish. Here is the wish to live—hence the fear of being exposed to attacks without power to defend herself. Dreams that are particularly interesting and significant are those recurrent dreams which some people report as going on for a period of years, sometimes as far back as they can recall. These dreams usually are expressive of the main theme, of the leitmotif, in a person’s life, often the key to the understanding of his neurosis or of the most important aspect of his personality. Sometimes the dream remains unchanged, sometimes there are more or less subtle changes, which are indicative of the inner progress of the dreamer—or of a deterioration, as the case may be.
A girl of fifteen who grew up under the most inhuman and destructive conditions (father who beat her, alcoholic, violent; mother running away periodically with other men; no food, no clothing, dirt) tried to commit suicide at the age of ten, and after that five times more. She has had the following dream many times as long as she can remember:
I am at the bottom of a pit. I try to climb up and have already reached the top, which I hold with my hands, when someone comes and stamps on my hands. I have to let go and fall back to the bottom of the pit.
The dream hardly needs any explanation; it fully expresses the tragedy of this young girl’s life—what happened to her and how she feels. Were this a dream occurring once, we would be entitled to assume that it is expressive of a fear, which the dreamer feels once in a while, stimulated by specific, trying circumstances. As it is, the regular recurrence of the dream makes us assume that the dream situation is the central theme of the girl’s life, that the dream expresses a conviction so deep and unalterable that we can understand why she has tried to commit suicide again and again.
A recurrent dream in which the theme remains the same but where there is, nevertheless, a considerable amount of change is one of a series which began with the dream:
I am in prison—I cannot get out.
Later on the dream was:
I want to cross the frontier—but I have no passport and am held back at the frontier.
Later still:
I am in Europe—am at a port to take a boat—but there is no boat, and I don’t see how I can leave.
The latest version of this dream was:
I am in a city—in my home—I want to go out. When I open the door I find it difficult—I give it a hard push—it opens and I walk out.
The theme underlying all these dreams is the fear of being shut in, of being imprisoned, incapable of “getting out.” What this fear means in the dreamer’s life is of no importance for us in this context. What the series of dreams shows is that throughout the years the fear remained but became less intense-from being in prison to having difficulty in opening the door. While originally the dreamer feels incapable of escaping, in the last dream he can—with a little extra push open the door and walk out. A considerable development has occurred in the dreamer during these years.