The dream begins with the name of a station, which probably must have partially awakened me. For this name, which was Marburg, I substituted Hollthurn. The fact that I heard Marburg when it was first called, or perhaps when it was called a second time, is proved by the mention in the dream of Schiller, who was born in Marburg, though not in the one in Styria.[[FD]] Now this time, although I was travelling first-class, it was under very disagreeable circumstances. The train was overcrowded; I had met a gentleman and lady in my compartment who seemed persons of quality, but who did not have the good breeding or who did not think it worth while to conceal their displeasure at my intrusion. My polite salutation was not answered, and although the man and the woman sat next each other (with their backs in the direction in which we were riding), the woman made haste to pre-empt the place opposite her and next the window with her umbrella; the door was immediately closed and demonstrative remarks about the opening of windows were exchanged. Probably I was quickly recognised as a person hungry for fresh air. It was a hot night, and the air in the compartment, thus shut on all sides, was almost suffocating. My experience as a traveller leads me to believe that such inconsiderate, obtrusive conduct marks people who have only partly paid for their tickets, or not at all. When the conductor came, and I presented my dearly bought ticket, the lady called out ungraciously, and as though threateningly: “My husband has a pass.” She was a stately figure with sour features, in age not far from the time set for the decay of feminine beauty; the man did not get a chance to say anything at all, and sat there motionless. I tried to sleep. In the dream I take terrible revenge on my disagreeable travelling companions; no one would suspect what insults and humiliations are concealed behind the disjointed fragments of the first half of the dream. After this desire has been satisfied, the second wish, to exchange my compartment for another, makes itself evident. The dream makes changes of scene so often, and without raising the least objection to such changes, that it would not have been in the least remarkable if I had immediately replaced my travelling companions by more pleasant ones for my recollection. But this was one of the cases where something or other objected to the change of scene and considered explanation of the change necessary. How did I suddenly get into another compartment? I surely could not remember having changed cars. So there was only one explanation: I must have left the carriage while asleep, a rare occurrence, examples for which, however, are furnished by the experience of the neuropathologist. We know of persons who undertake railroad journeys in a crepuscular state without betraying their abnormal condition by any sign, until some station on the journey they completely recover consciousness, and are then surprised at the gap in their memory. Thus, while I am still dreaming, I declare my own case to be such a one of “Automatisme ambulatoire.”
Analysis permits another solution. The attempt at explanation, which so astounds me if I am to attribute it to the dream activity, is not original, but is copied from the neurosis of one of my patients. I have already spoken on another page of a highly cultured and, in conduct, kind-hearted man, who began, shortly after the death of his parents, to accuse himself of murderous inclinations, and who suffered because of the precautionary measures he had to take to insure himself against these inclinations. At first walking along the street was made painful for him by the compulsion impelling him to demand an accounting of all the persons he met as to whither they had vanished; if one of them suddenly withdrew from his pursuing glance, there remained a painful feeling and a thought of the possibility that he might have put the man out of the way. This compulsive idea concealed, among other things, a Cain-fancy, for “all men are brothers.” Owing to the impossibility of accomplishing his task, he gave up taking walks and spent his life imprisoned within his four walls. But news of murderous acts which have been committed outside constantly reached his room through the papers, and his conscience in the form of a doubt kept accusing him of being the murderer. The certainty of not having left his dwelling for weeks protected him against these accusations for a time, until one day there dawned upon him the possibility that he might have left his house while in an unconscious condition, and might thus have committed the murder without knowing anything about it. From that time on he locked his house door, and handed the key over to his old housekeeper, and strictly forbade her to give it into his hands even if he demanded it.
This, then, is the origin of the attempted explanation, that I may have changed carriages while in an unconscious condition—it has been transferred from the material of the dream thoughts to the dream in a finished state, and is obviously intended to identify me with the person of that patient. My memory of him was awakened by an easy association. I had made my last night journey with this man a few weeks before. He was cured, and was escorting me into the country, to his relatives who were summoning me; as we had a compartment to ourselves, we left all the windows open through the night, and, as long as I had remained awake, we had a delightful conversation. I knew that hostile impulses towards his father from the time of his childhood, in connection with sexual material, had been at the root of his illness. By identifying myself with him, I wanted to make an analogous confession to myself. The second scene of the dream really resolves itself into a wanton fancy to the effect that my two elderly travelling companions had acted so uncivilly towards me for the reason that my arrival prevented them from exchanging love-tokens during the night as they had intended. This fancy, however, goes back to an early childhood scene in which, probably impelled by sexual inquisitiveness, I intruded upon the bedroom of my parents, and was driven from it by my father’s emphatic command.
I consider it superfluous to multiply further examples. All of them would confirm what we have learned from those which have been already cited, namely, that an act of judgment in the dream is nothing but the repetition of a prototype which it has in the dream thoughts. In most cases it is an inappropriate repetition introduced in an unfitting connection; occasionally, however, as in our last example, it is so artfully disposed that it may give the impression of being an independent thought activity in the dream. At this point we might turn our attention to that psychic activity which indeed does not seem to co-operate regularly in the formation of dreams, but whose effort it is, wherever it does co-operate, to fuse together those dream elements that are incongruent on account of their origins in an uncontradictory and intelligible manner. We consider it best, however, first to take up the expressions of emotion which appear in the dream, and to compare them with the emotions which analysis reveals to us in the dream thoughts.
(g) The Affects in the Dream.
A profound remark of Stricker’s[[77]] has called our attention to the fact that the expressions of emotion in the dream do not permit of being disposed of in the slighting manner in which we are accustomed to shake off the dream itself, after we have awakened. “If I am afraid of robbers in the dream, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real,” and the same is true if I am glad in the dream. According to the testimony of our feelings, the emotion experienced in the dream is in no way less valid than one of like intensity experienced in waking life, and the dream makes its claim to be taken up as a part of our real mental experiences, more energetically on account of its emotional content than on account of its ideal content. We do not succeed in accomplishing this separation in waking life, because we do not know how to estimate an emotion psychically except in connection with a presentation content. If in kind or in intensity an affect and an idea are incongruous, our waking judgment becomes confused.
The fact that in dreams the presentation content does not entail the affective influence which we should expect as necessary in waking thought has always caused astonishment. Strümpell was of the opinion that ideas in the dream are stripped of their psychic values. But neither does the dream lack opposite instances, where the expression of intense affect appears in a content, which seems to offer no occasion for its development. I am in a horrible, dangerous, or disgusting situation in the dream, but I feel nothing of fear or aversion; on the other hand, I am sometimes terrified at harmless things and glad at childish ones.
This enigma of the dream disappears more suddenly and more completely than perhaps any other of the dream problems, if we pass from the manifest to the latent content. We shall then no longer be concerned to explain it, for it will no longer exist. Analysis teaches us that presentation contents have undergone displacements and substitutions, while affects have remained unchanged. No wonder, then, that the presentation content which has been altered by dream disfigurement no longer fits the affect that has remained intact; but there is no cause for wonder either after analysis has put the correct content in its former place.
In a psychic complex which has been subjected to the influence of the resisting censor the affects are the unyielding constituent, which alone is capable of guiding us to a correct supplementation. This state of affairs is revealed in psychoneuroses even more distinctly than in the dream. Here the affect is always in the right, at least as far as its quality goes; its intensity may even be increased by means of a displacement of neurotic attention. If a hysteric is surprised that he is so very afraid of a trifle, or if the patient with compulsive ideas is astonished that he develops such painful self-reproach out of a nonentity, both of them err in that they regard the presentation content—the trifle or the nonentity—as the essential thing, and they defend themselves in vain because they make this presentation content the starting point in their thought. Psychoanalysis, however, shows them the right way by recognising that, on the contrary, the affect is justified, and by searching for the presentation which belongs to it and which has been suppressed by means of replacement. The assumption is here made that the development of affect and the presentation content do not constitute such an indissoluble organic union as we are accustomed to think, but that the two parts may be, so to speak, soldered together in such a way that they may be detached from one another by means of analysis. Dream interpretation shows that this is actually the case.
I give first an example in which analysis explains the apparent absence of affect in a presentation content which ought to force a development of emotion.