But such is the situation in our dream. It does not require great
boldness to assume that the unintelligible dream content has suggested
the invention of a state of undress in which the situation that is being
remembered becomes significant. This situation has then been deprived of
its original meaning, and placed at the service of other purposes. But
we shall see that such misunderstanding of the dream content often
occurs on account of the conscious activity of the second psychic
system, and is to be recognised as a factor in the ultimate formation of
the dream; furthermore, that in the development of the obsessions and
phobias similar misunderstandings, likewise within the same psychic
personality, play a leading part. The source from which in our dream the
material for this transformation is taken can also be explained. The
impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the
moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact that the latent
dream content is occupied with forbidden wishes which have become the
victims of repression. The connection in which such dreams appear during
my analysis of neurotics leaves no room for doubting that the dream is
based upon a recollection from earliest childhood. Only in our childhood
was there a time when we were seen by our relatives as well as by
strange nurses, servant girls, and visitors, in scanty clothing, and at
that time we were not ashamed of our nakedness.[BT]
It may be observed in the case of children who are a little older that
being undressed has a kind of intoxicating effect upon them, instead of
making them ashamed. They laugh, jump about, and strike their bodies;
the mother, or whoever is present, forbids them to do this, and says:
“Fie, that is shameful—you mustn’t do that.” Children often show
exhibitional cravings; it is hardly possible to go through a village in
our part of the country without meeting a two or three-year-old tot who
lifts up his or her shirt before the traveller, perhaps in his honour.
One of my patients has reserved in his conscious memory a scene from the
eighth year of his life in which he had just undressed previous to going
to bed, and was about to dance into the room of his little sister in his
undershirt when the servant prevented his doing it. In the childhood
history of neurotics, denudation in the presence of children of the
opposite sex plays a great part; in paranoia the desire to be observed
while dressing and undressing may be directly traced to these
experiences; among those remaining perverted there is a class which has
accentuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the
exhibitionists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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