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:
“I had as yet no standing and did not know how to make ends meet; but just then it was clear to me that I might have the choice of several women whom I could have married. I was young again in the dream and she was young too, the wife who had shared with me all those years of hardship.
“This betrayed the unconscious dream agent as being one of the insistent gnawing wishes of the aging man. The fight between vanity and self-criticism, waged in other psychic layers, had decided the dream content, but only the deeper rooted wish for youth had made it possible as a dream. Often, awake, we say to ourselves: Everything is all right as it is today and those were hard times, but it was fine at that time. You are still young.”
Maeder, of Zurich, refuses to accept such a simple explanation and offers a more complicated one, burdened, like many psychological interpretations of the Swiss school, with ethical considerations.
“By his own efforts,” Maeder writes, “Rosegger had worked himself up to a high position in life. This has made him proud and vain, two faults which easily disturb mankind, for they cause a man to suffer in the presence of superiors and place him in a parvenu position among the lowly.... Deep down, there takes place, in the sensitive poet, a gradual elaboration, a development of the moral personality.... The long series of tormenting dreams shows us the development of the psychic process which ends in a deep but effective humiliation of the dreamer.... His being sent away, dismissed, symbolizes in my opinion, the overcoming of the pride and vanity of the upstart.”