On the other hand, the pretty young woman whom her father introduced into
his home, personified in her thoughts sexual attraction in its most
irresistible form, a symbol of sin and bliss. To this day she has love
affair after love affair with women, every affair followed by a "nervous
breakdown" in which she repents her immorality and experiences terrible
remorse. At every stay in a sanitarium, however, dreams of her stepmother,
representing veiled and symbolized homosexual situations, obsess her
night after night. In one of those dreams she took the place of her father
and married the young woman, after which the hostility of the family,
manifesting itself in various forms, transformed the pleasant fancy into a
painful anxiety dream.
Another patient, tyrannized over by an aunt who had brought her up, would,
whenever an emergency arose and she had to take a decision, dream of the
severe, forbidding aunt and feel so depressed the next day that she could
not accomplish anything and thus postponed the solution of her
difficulties.
In certain cases, a recurring dream may bear a strange likeness to a
splitting of the personality such as we observed in cases of dual
personalities.
The famous Rosegger dream, analysed by Freud and Maeder, should be
reanalysed in the light of the statements made in the previous chapters.
Rosegger went through a hard mental struggle from which he emerged
victorious, but the recurring dream he relates in his book "Waldheimat"
tells us much about the trials of a little tailor who managed to make a
place for himself in the artistic world but for a long while felt out of
place in his new environment.
"I usually enjoy a sound sleep," Rosegger writes, "but many a night I have
no rest. I lead side by side with my life as student and littérateur, the
shadow life of a tailor's apprentice. This I have dragged with me through
long years, like a ghost, without being able to get rid of it.... Whenever
I dreamed, I was the tailor's apprentice, ... working without compensation
in my master's workshop.... I felt I did not belong there any more ... and
regretted the loss of time in which I could have employed myself more
usefully.... How happy I was to wake up after such tedious hours! I
resolved that if this insistent dream should come again, I would throw it
off and shout: 'This is only a make believe. I am in bed and wish to
sleep.' Yet the next time I was again in the tailor's workshop. One night,
at last, the master said to me: 'You have no talent for tailoring. You can
go, you are dismissed.' I was so frightened by this that I awoke."
Freud compares this dream with a similar dream which pestered him for
years and in which he saw himself as a young physician, working in a
laboratory, making analyses and unable as yet to earn a regular living.
This is his interpretation of it:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account