Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for BeginnersFreud, Sigmund
Science
Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners
Freud, Sigmund
Dreams; Psychoanalysis
Without an analysis, and merely by means of an assumption, I took the
liberty of interpreting a little occurrence in the case of a friend, who
had been my colleague through the eight classes of the Gymnasium. He
once heard a lecture of mine delivered to a small assemblage, on the
novel subject of the dream as the fulfillment of a wish. He went home,
dreamt _that he had lost all his suits_--he was a lawyer--and then
complained to me about it. I took refuge in the evasion: "One can't win
all one's suits," but I thought to myself: "If for eight years I sat as
Primus on the first bench, while he moved around somewhere in the middle
of the class, may he not naturally have had a wish from his boyhood days
that I, too, might for once completely disgrace myself?"
In the same way another dream of a more gloomy character was offered me
by a female patient as a contradiction to my theory of the wish-dream.
The patient, a young girl, began as follows: "You remember that my
sister has now only one boy, Charles: she lost the elder one, Otto,
while I was still at her house. Otto was my favorite; it was I who
really brought him up. I like the other little fellow, too, but of
course not nearly as much as the dead one. Now I dreamt last night that
_I saw Charles lying dead before me. He was lying in his little coffin,
his hands folded: there were candles all about, and, in short, it was
just like the time of little Otto's death, which shocked me so
profoundly_. Now tell me, what does this mean? You know me: am I really
bad enough to wish my sister to lose the only child she has left? Or
does the dream mean that I wish Charles to be dead rather than Otto,
whom I like so much better?"
I assured her that this interpretation was impossible. After some
reflection I was able to give her the interpretation of the dream, which
I subsequently made her confirm.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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