In another series of dreams we learn from analysis that the wish itself, which has given rise to the dream, and whose fulfilment the dream turns out to be, has originated in childhood—until one is astonished to find that the child with all its impulses lives on in the dream.
I shall now continue the interpretation of a dream which has already proved instructive—I refer to the dream in which friend R. is my uncle (p. 116). We have carried its interpretation far enough for the wish-motive, of being appointed professor, to assert itself tangibly; and we have explained the affection displayed in the dream for friend R. as a fiction of opposition and spite against the aspersion of the two colleagues, who appear in the dream thoughts. The dream was my own; I may, therefore, continue the analysis by stating that my feelings were not quite satisfied by the solution reached. I know that my opinion of these colleagues who are so badly treated in the dream thoughts would have been expressed in quite different terms in waking life; the potency of the wish not to share their fate in the matter of appointment seemed to me too slight to account for the discrepancy between my estimate in the dream and that of waking. If my desire to be addressed by a new title proves so strong it gives proof of a morbid ambition, which I did not know to exist in me, and which I believe is far from my thoughts. I do not know how others, who think they know me, would judge me, for perhaps I have really been ambitious; but if this be true, my ambition has long since transferred itself to other objects than the title and rank of assistant-professor.
Whence, then, the ambition which the dream has ascribed to me? Here I remember a story which I heard often in my childhood, that at my birth an old peasant’s wife had prophesied to my happy mother (I was her first-born) that she had given to the world a great man. Such prophecies must occur very frequently; there are so many mothers happy in expectation, and so many old peasant wives whose influence on earth has waned, and who have therefore turned their eyes towards the future. The prophetess was not likely to suffer for it either. Might my hunger for greatness have originated from this source? But here I recollect an impression from the later years of my childhood, which would serve still better as an explanation. It was of an evening at an inn on the Prater,[[BA]] where my parents were accustomed to take me when I was eleven or twelve years old. We noticed a man who went from table to table and improvised verses upon any subject that was given to him. I was sent to bring the poet to our table and he showed himself thankful for the message. Before asking for his subject he threw off a few rhymes about me, and declared it probable, if he could trust his inspiration, that I would one day become a “minister.” I can still distinctly remember the impression made by this second prophecy. It was at the time of the election for the municipal ministry; my father had recently brought home pictures of those elected to the ministry—Herbst, Giskra, Unger, Berger, and others—and we had illuminated them in honour of these gentlemen. There were even some Jews among them; every industrious Jewish schoolboy therefore had the making of a minister in him. Even the fact that until shortly before my enrolment in the University I wanted to study jurisprudence, and changed my plans only at the last moment, must be connected with the impressions of that time. A minister’s career is under no circumstances open to a medical man. And now for my dream! I begin to see that it transplants me from the sombre present to the hopeful time of the municipal election, and fulfils my wish of that time to the fullest extent. In treating my two estimable and learned colleagues so badly, because they are Jews, the one as a simpleton and the other as a criminal—in doing this I act as though I were the minister of education, I put myself in his place. What thorough revenge I take upon his Excellency! He refuses to appoint me professor extraordinarius, and in return I put myself in his place in the dream.
Another case establishes the fact that although the wish which actuates the dream is a present one, it nevertheless draws great intensification from childhood memories. I refer to a series of dreams which are based upon the longing to go to Rome. I suppose I shall still have to satisfy this longing by means of dreams for a long time to come, because, at the time of year which is at my disposal for travelling, a stay at Rome is to be avoided on account of considerations of health.[[BB]] Thus I once dreamt of seeing the Tiber and the bridge of St. Angelo from the window of a railroad compartment; then the train starts, and it occurs to me that I have never entered the city at all. The view which I saw in the dream was modelled after an engraving which I had noticed in passing the day before in the parlour of one of my patients. On another occasion some one is leading me upon a hill and showing me Rome half enveloped in mist, and so far in the distance that I am astonished at the distinctness of the view. The content of this dream is too rich to be fully reported here. The motive, “to see the promised land from afar,” is easily recognisable in it. The city is Lübeck, which I first saw in the mist; the original of the hill is the Gleichenberg. In a third dream, I am at last in Rome, as the dream tells me. To my disappointment, the scenery which I see is anything but urban. A little river with black water, on one side of which are black rocks, on the other large white flowers. I notice a certain Mr. Zucker (with whom I am superficially acquainted), and make up my mind to ask him to show me the way into the city. It is apparent that I am trying in vain to see a city in the dream which I have never seen in waking life. If I resolve the landscape into its elements, the white flowers indicate Ravenna, which is known to me, and which, for a time at least, deprived Rome of its leading place as capital of Italy. In the swamps around Ravenna we had seen the most beautiful water-lilies in the middle of black pools of water; the dream makes them grow on meadows, like the narcissi of our own Aussee, because at Ravenna it was such tedious work to fetch them out of the water. The black rock, so close to the water, vividly recalls the valley of the Tepl at Karlsbad. “Karlsbad” now enables me to account for the peculiar circumstance that I ask Mr. Zucker the way. In the material of which the dream is composed appear also two of those amusing Jewish anecdotes, which conceal so much profound and often bitter worldly wisdom, and which we are so fond of quoting in our conversation and letters. One is the story of the “constitution,” and tells how a poor Jew sneaks into the express train for Karlsbad without a ticket, how he is caught and is treated more and more unkindly at each call for tickets by the conductor, and how he tells a friend, whom he meets at one of the stations during his miserable journey, and who asks him where he is travelling: “To Karlsbad, if my constitution will stand it.” Associated with this in memory is another story about a Jew who is ignorant of French, and who has express instructions to ask in Paris for the way to the Rue Richelieu. Paris was for many years the object of my own longing, and I took the great satisfaction with which I first set foot on the pavement in Paris as a warrant that I should also attain the fulfilment of other wishes. Asking for the way is again a direct allusion to Rome, for of course all roads lead to Rome. Moreover, the name Zucker (English, sugar) again points to Karlsbad, whither we send all persons afflicted with the constitutional disease, diabetes (Zuckerkrankheit, sugar-disease). The occasion for this dream was the proposal of my Berlin friend that we should meet in Prague at Easter. A further allusion to sugar and diabetes was to be found in the matters which I had to talk over with him.
A fourth dream, occurring shortly after the last one mentioned, brings me back to Rome. I see a street-corner before me and am astonished to see so many German placards posted there. On the day before I had written my friend with prophetic vision that Prague would probably not be a comfortable resort for German travellers. The dream, therefore, simultaneously expressed the wish to meet him at Rome instead of at the Bohemian city, and a desire, which probably originated during my student days, that the German language might be accorded more tolerance in Prague. Besides I must have understood the Czech language in the first three years of my childhood, because I was born in a small village of Moravia, inhabited by Slavs. A Czech nursery rhyme, which I heard in my seventeenth year, became, without effort on my part, so imprinted upon my memory that I can repeat it to this day, although I have no idea of its meaning. There is then no lack in these dreams also of manifold relations to impressions from the first years of my life.
It was during my last journey to Italy, which, among other places, took me past Lake Trasimenus, that I at last found what re-enforcement my longing for the Eternal City had received from the impressions of my youth; this was after I had seen the Tiber, and had turned back with painful emotions when I was within eighty kilometers of Rome. I was just broaching the plan of travelling to Naples via Rome the next year, when this sentence, which I must have read in one of our classical authors, occurred to me: “It is a question which of the two paced up and down in his room the more impatiently after he had made the plan to go to Rome—Assistant-Headmaster Winckelman or the great general Hannibal.” I myself had walked in Hannibal’s footsteps; like him I was destined never to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania after the whole world had expected him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had reached this point of similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium; like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies during the Punic war, not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Then, when I came finally to understand the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-semitic sentiment among my class-mates to assume a definite attitude, the figure of the semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my eyes. Hannibal and Rome symbolised for me as a youth the antithesis between the tenaciousness of the Jews and the organisation of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of that earlier time. Thus the wish to get to Rome has become the cover and symbol in my dream-life for several warmly cherished wishes, for the realisation of which one might work with the perseverance and single-mindedness of the Punic general, and whose fulfilment sometimes seems as little favoured by fortune as the wish of Hannibal’s life to enter Rome.
And now for the first time I happen upon the youthful experience which, even to-day, still manifests its power in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and to reveal to me his views about the things of this world in his conversation. In this way he once told me, in order to show into how much better times I had been born than he, the following: “While I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday on a street in the village where you were born; I was handsomely dressed and wore a new fur cap. Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one blow and shouts: “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” “And what did you do?” “I went into the street and picked up the cap,” was the calm answer. That did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings—the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar[[BC]] Barka made his boy swear at the domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies.”
I think I can follow my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general still further back into my childhood, so that possibly we have here the transference of an already formed emotional relation to a new vehicle. One of the first books which fell into my childish hands, after I learned to read, was Thiers’ Konsulat und Kaiserreich (Consulship and Empire); I remember I pasted on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers little labels with the names of the Imperial marshals, and that at that time Masséna (as a Jew Menasse) was already my avowed favourite. Napoleon himself follows Hannibal in crossing the Alps. And perhaps the development of this martial ideal can be traced still further back into my childhood, to the wish which the now friendly, now hostile, intercourse during my first three years with a boy a year older than myself must have actuated in the weaker of the two playmates.
The deeper one goes in the analysis of dreams, the more often one is put on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream sources in the latent dream content.
We have learned (p. 16) that the dream very rarely reproduces experiences in such a manner that they constitute the sole manifest dream content, unabridged and unchanged. Still some authentic examples showing this process have been reported, and I can add some new ones which again refer to infantile scenes. In the case of one of my patients, a dream once gave a barely disfigured reproduction of a sexual occurrence, which was immediately recognised as an accurate recollection. The memory of it indeed had never been lost in waking life, but it had been greatly obscured, and its revivification was a result of the preceding work of analysis. The dreamer had at the age of twelve visited a bed-ridden schoolmate, who had exposed himself by a movement in bed, probably only by chance. At the sight of the genitals, he was seized by a kind of compulsion, exposed himself and took hold of the member belonging to the other boy, who, however, looked at him with surprise and indignation, whereupon he became embarrassed and let go. A dream repeated this scene twenty-three years later, with all the details of the emotions occurring in it, changing it, however, in this respect, that the dreamer took the passive part instead of the active one, while the person of the schoolmate was replaced by one belonging to the present.