LITMIR.BIZ

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doctrine, I thrust myself forward and defended a very one-sided view. Thereupon a sagacious older school-fellow, who has since shown his capacity for leading men and organising the masses, and who, moreover, bears a name belonging to the animal kingdom, arose and called us down thoroughly; he too, he said, had herded swine in his youth, and had come back repentant to the house of his father. I started up (as in the dream), became very uncivil, and answered that since I knew he had herded swine, I was not surprised at the tone of his discourse. (In the dream I am surprised at my national German sentiment.) There was great commotion; and the demand came from all sides that I take back what I had said, but I remained steadfast. The man who had been insulted was too sensible to take the advice, which was given him, to send a challenge, and let the matter drop.

      The remaining elements of this scene of the dream are of more remote origin. What is the meaning of the Count's proclaiming the colt's foot? Here I must consult my train of associations. Colt's-foot (German: Huflattich)—lattice—lettuce—salad-dog (the dog that grudges others what he cannot eat himself). Here plenty of opprobrious epithets may be discerned : Gir-affe (German Affe=monkey, ape), pig, sow, dog; I might even find means to arrive at donkey, on a detour by way of a name, and thus again at contempt for an academic teacher. Furthermore I translate colt's-foot (Huflattich)—I do not know how correctly—by "pisse-en-lit." I got this idea from Zola's Germinal, in which children are ordered to bring salad of this kind. The dog—chien—has a name sounding like the major function (chier, as pisser stands for the minor one). Now we shall soon have before us the indecent in all three of its categories; for in the same Germinal, which has a lot to do with the future revolution there is described a very peculiar contest, depending upon the production of gaseous excretions, called flatus.²² And now I must remark how the way to this flatus has been for a long while preparing, beginning with the flowers, and proceeding to the Spanish rhyme of Isabelita to Ferdinand and Isabella, and, by way of Henry VIII., to English history at the time of the expedition of the Armada against England, after the victorious termination of which the English struck a medal with the inscription: "Afflavit et dissipati sunt," for the storm had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had thought of taking this phrase for the title of a chapter on "Therapeutics"—to be meant half jokingly—if I should ever have occasion to give a detailed account of my conception and treatment of hysteria.

      I cannot give such a detailed solution of the second scene of the dream, out of regard for the censor. For at this point I put myself in the place of a certain eminent gentleman of that revolutionary period, who also had an adventure with an eagle, who is said to have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, and the like; and I believe I should not be justified at this point in passing the censor, although it was an aulic councillor (aula, consilarius aulicus) who told me the greater part of these stories. The allusion to the suite of rooms in the dream relates to the private car of his Excellency, into which I had opportunity to look for a moment; but it signifies, as so often in dreams, a woman (Frauenzimmer; German Zimmer—room is appended to Frauen—woman, in order to imply a slight amount of contempt).²³ In the person of the housekeeper I give scant recognition to an intelligent elderly lady for the entertainment and the many good stories which I have enjoyed at her house.... The feature of the lamp goes back to Grillparzer, who notes a charming experience of a similar nature, which he afterwards made use of in "Hero and Leander" (the billows of the ocean and of love—the Armada and the storm ).²⁴

      I must also forgo detailed analysis of the two remaining portions of the dream; I shall select only those elements which lead to two childhood scenes, for the sake of which alone I have taken up the dream. The reader will guess that it is sexual matter which forces me to this suppression; but he need not be content with this explanation. Many things which must be treated as secrets in the presence of others are not treated as such with one's self, and here it is not a question of considerations inducing me to hide the solution, but of motives of the inner censor concealing the real content of the dream from myself. I may say, then, that the analysis shows these three portions of the dream to be impertinent boasting, the exuberance of an absurd grandiose idea which has long since been suppressed in my waking life, which, however, dares show itself in the manifest dream content by one or two projections (I seem clever to myself), and which makes the arrogant mood of the evening before the dream perfectly intelligible. It is boasting, indeed, in all departments; thus the mention of Graz refers to the phrase: What is the price of Graz? which we are fond of using when we feel over-supplied with money. Whoever will recall Master Rabelais's unexcelled description of the "Life and Deeds of Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel," will be able to supply the boastful content intimated in the first portion of the dream. The following belongs to the two childhood scenes which have been promised. I had bought a new trunk for this journey, whose colour, a brownish violet, appears in the dream several times. (Violet-brown violets made of stiff material, next to a thing which is called "girl-catcher"—the furniture in the governmental chambers). That something new attracts people's attention is a well-known belief of children. Now I have been told the following story of my childhood; I remember hearing the story rather than the occurrence itself. I am told that at the age of two I still occasionally wetted my bed, that I was often reproached on this subject, and that I consoled my father by promising to buy him a beautiful new red bed in N. (the nearest large city). (Hence the detail inserted in the dream that we bought the urinal in the city or had to buy it; one must keep one's promises. Attention is further called to the identity of the male urinal and the feminine trunk, box). All the megalomania of the child is contained in this promise. The significance of the dream of difficulty in urinating in the case of the child has been already considered in the interpretation of an earlier dream (cf. the dream on p. 145).

      Now there was another domestic occurrence, when I was seven or eight years old, which I remember very well. One evening, before going to bed I had disregarded the dictates of discretion not to satisfy my wants in the bedroom of my parents and in their presence, and in his reprimand for this delinquency my father made the remark: "That boy will never amount to anything." It must have terribly mortified my ambition, for allusions to this scene return again and again in my dreams, and are regularly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: "You see, I have amounted to something after all." Now this childhood scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which of course, the roles are inter- changed for the sake of revenge. The elderly man, obviously my father, for the blindness in one eye signifies his glaucoma²⁵ on one side is now urinating before me as I once urinated before him. In glaucoma I refer to cocaine, which stood my father in good stead in his operation, as though I had thereby fulfilled my promises. Besides that I make sport of him; since he is blind I must hold the urinal in front of him, and I gloat over allusions to my discoveries in the theory of hysteria, of which I am so proud.²⁶

      If the two childhood scenes of urinating are otherwise closely connected with the desire for greatness, their rehabilitation on the trip to the Aussee was further favoured by the accidental circumstance that my compartment had no water-closet, and that I had to expect embarrassment on the ride as actually happened in the morning. I awoke with the sensation of a bodily need. I suppose one might be inclined to credit these sensations with being the actual stimulus of the dream; I should, however, prefer a different conception—namely, that it was the dream thoughts which gave rise to the desire to urinate. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in sleep by any need, at least at the time of this awakening, a quarter of four in the morning. I may forestall further objection by remarking that I have hardly ever felt a desire to urinate after awakening early on other journeys made under more comfortable circumstances. Moreover, I can leave this point undecided without hurting my argument.

      Since I have learned, further, from experience in dream analysis that there always remain important trains of thought proceeding from dreams whose interpretation at first seems complete (because the sources of the dream and the actuation of the wish are easily demonstrable), trains of thought reaching back into earliest childhood, I have been forced to ask myself whether this feature does not constitute an essential condition of dreaming. If I were to generalise this thesis, a connection with what has been recently experienced would form a part of the manifest content of every dream and a connection with what has been most remotely experienced, of its latent content; and I can actually show in the analysis

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