Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of ViennaFreud, Sigmund
Science
Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis : $b a course of twenty-eight lectures delivered at the University of Vienna
Freud, Sigmund
Psychoanalysis
July 18th, 1910. Towards morning I had the following dream: _I was
bicycling down a street in Tübingen, when a brown dachshund came rushing
after me and caught hold of one of my heels. I rode a little further and
then dismounted, sat down on a step and began to beat the creature off,
for it had set its teeth fast in my heel._ (The dog’s biting me and the
whole scene roused no unpleasant sensations.) _Two elderly ladies were
sitting opposite, watching me with grinning faces. Then I woke up and,
as has frequently happened before, with the transition to waking
consciousness the whole dream was clear to me._
In this instance symbolism cannot help us much, but the dreamer goes on
to tell us: “I recently fell in love with a girl, just from seeing her
in the street; but I had no means of introduction to her. I should have
liked best to make her acquaintance through her dachshund, for I am a
great animal-lover myself and was attracted by seeing that she was one
too.” He adds that several times he had separated fighting dogs very
skilfully, often to the amazement of the onlookers. Now we learn that
the girl who had taken his fancy was always seen walking with this
particular dog. She, however, has been eliminated from the manifest
dream; only the dog associated with her has remained. Possibly the
elderly ladies who grinned at him represented her, but the rest of what
he tells us does not clear up this point. The fact that he was riding a
bicycle in the dream was a direct repetition of the situation as he
remembered it, for he had not met the girl with the dog except when he
was bicycling.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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