The Unconscious - H. W. Chase

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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 school-mate was replaced by one belonging to the present.

      As a rule, of course, a childhood scene is represented in the manifest dream content only by an allusion, and must be extricated from the dream by means of interpretation. The citation of examples of this kind cannot have a very convincing effect, because every guarantee that they are experiences of childhood is lacking; if they belong to an earlier time of life, they are no longer recognised by our memory. Justification for the conclusion that such childish experiences generally exist in dreams is based upon a great number of factors which become apparent in psychoanalytical work, and which seem reliable enough when regarded as a whole. But when, for the purposes of dream interpretation, such references of dreams to childish experiences are torn from their context, they will perhaps not make much impression, especially since I never give all the material upon which the interpretation depends. However, I shall not let this prevent me from giving some examples.

      I. The following dream is from another female patient: She is in a large room, in which there are all kinds of machines, perhaps, as she imagines, an orthopædic institute. She hears that I have no time, and that she must take the treatment along with five others. But she resists, and is unwilling to lie down on the bed—or whatever it is—which is intended for her. She stands in a corner and waits for me to say "It is not true." The others, meanwhile, laugh at her, saying it is all foolishness on her part. At the same time it is as if she were called upon to make many small squares.

      The first part of the content of this dream is an allusion to the treatment and a transference on me. The second contains an allusion to a childhood scene; the two portions are connected by the mention of the bed. The orthopædic institute refers to one of my talks in which I compared the treatment as to its duration and nature with an orthopædic treatment. At the beginning of the treatment I had to tell her that for the present I had little time for her, but that later on I would devote a whole hour to her daily. This aroused in her the old sensitiveness, which is the chief characteristic of children who are to be hysterical. Their desire for love is insatiable. My patient was the youngest of six brothers and sisters (hence, "with five others"), and as such the favourite of her father, but in spite of that she seems to have found that her beloved father devoted too little time and attention to her. The detail of her waiting for me to say "It is not true," has the following explanation: A tailor's apprentice had brought her a dress, and she had given him the money for it. Then she asked her husband whether she would have to pay the money again if the boy were to lose it. To tease her, her husband answered "Yes" (the teasing in the dream), and she asked again and again, and waited for him to say "It is not true." The thought of the latent dream-content may now be construed as follows: Will she have to pay me the double amount if I devote twice the time to her? a thought which is stingy or filthy. (The uncleanliness of childhood is often replaced in the dream by greediness for money; the word filthy here supplies the bridge.) If all that about waiting until I should say, &c., serves as a dream circumlocution for the word "filthy," the standing-in-a-corner and not lying down-on-the-bed are in keeping; for these two features are component parts of a scene of childhood, in which she had soiled her bed, and for punishment was put into a corner, with the warning that papa would not love her any more, and her brothers and sisters laughed at her, &c. The little squares refer to her young niece, who has shown her the arithmetical trick of writing figures in nine squares, I believe it is, in such a way that upon being added together in any direction they make fifteen.

      II. Here is the dream of a man: He sees two boys tussling with each other, and they are cooper's boys, as he concludes from the implements which are lying about; one of the boys has thrown the other down, the prostrate one wears ear-rings with blue stones. He hurries after the wrongdoer with lifted cane, in order to chastise him. The latter takes refuge with a woman who is standing against a wooden fence, as though it were his mother. She is the wife of a day labourer, and she turns her back to the man who is dreaming. At last she faces about and stares at him with a horrible look, so that he runs away in fright; in her eyes the red flesh of the lower lid seems to stand out.

      The dream has made abundant use of trivial occurrences of the previous day. The day before he actually saw two boys on the street, one of whom threw the other one down. When he hurried up to them in order to settle the quarrel, both of them took flight. Coopers' boys: this is explained only by a subsequent dream, in the analysis of which he used the expression, "To knock the bottom out of the barrel." Ear-rings with blue stones, according to his observation, are chiefly worn by prostitutes. Furthermore, a familiar doggerel rhyme about two boys comes up: "The other boy, his name was Mary" (that is, he was a girl). The woman standing up: after the scene with the two boys, he took a walk on the bank of the Danube, and took advantage of being alone to urinate against a wooden fence. A little later during his walk, a decently dressed elderly lady smiled at him very pleasantly, and wanted to hand him her card with her address.

      Since in the dream the woman stood as he had while urinating, it is a question of a woman urinating, and this explains the "horrible look," and the prominence of the red flesh, which can only refer to the genitals which gap in squatting. He had seen genitals in his childhood, and they had appeared in later recollection as "proud flesh" and as "wound." The dream unites two occasions upon which, as a young boy, the dreamer had had opportunity to see the genitals of little girls, in throwing one down, and while another was urinating; and, as is shown by another association, he had kept in memory a punishment or threat of his father's, called forth by the sexual curiosity which the boy manifested on these occasions.

      III. A great mass of childish memories, which have been hastily united in a phantasy, is to be found behind the following dream of a young lady.

       She goes out in trepidation, in order to do some shopping. On the Graben15 she sinks to her knees as though broken down. Many people collect around her, especially the hackney-coach drivers; but no one helps her to get up. She makes many unavailing attempts; finally she must have succeeded, for she is put into a hackney-coach which is to take her home. A large, heavily laden basket (something like a market-basket) is thrown after her through the window.

      This is the same woman who is always harassed in her dreams as she was harassed when a child. The first situation of the dream is apparently taken from seeing a horse that had fallen, just as "broken down" points to horse-racing. She was a rider in her early years, still earlier she was probably also a horse. Her first childish memory of the seventeen- year-old son of the porter, who, being seized on the street by an epileptic fit, was brought home in a coach, is connected with the idea of falling down. Of this, of course, she has only heard, but the idea of epileptic fits and of falling down has obtained great power over her phantasies, and has later influenced the form of her own hysterical attacks. When a person of the female sex dreams of falling, this almost regularly has a sexual significance; she becomes a "fallen woman," and for the purpose of the dream under consideration this interpretation is probably the least doubtful, for she falls on the Graben, the place in Vienna which is known as the concourse of prostitutes. The market-basket admits of more than one interpretation; in the sense of refusal (German, Korb = basket—snub, refusal), she remembers the many snubs which she first gave her suitors, and which she later, as she thinks, received herself. Here belongs also the detail that no one will help her up, which she herself interprets as being disdained. Furthermore, the market-basket recalls phantasies that have already appeared in the course of analysis, in which she imagines she has married far beneath her station, and now goes marketing herself. But lastly the market-basket might be interpreted as the mark of a servant. This suggests further childhood memories—of a cook who was sent away because she stole; she, too, sank to her knees and begged for mercy. The dreamer was at that time twelve years old. Then there is a recollection of a chamber-maid, who was dismissed because she had an affair with the coachman of the household, who, incidently, married her afterwards. This recollection, therefore, gives us a clue to the coachman

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