The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

Strangely enough, I once did actually play the part of Brutus. When I was a boy of fourteen, I presented the scene between Brutus and Caesar in
Schiller's poem to an audience of children: with the assistance of my nephew, who was a year older than I, and who had come to us from England -
and was thus a revenant - for in him I recognized the playmate of my early childhood. Until the end of my third year we had been inseparable; we
had loved each other and fought each other and, as I have already hinted, this childish relation has determined all my later feelings in my
intercourse with persons of my own age. My nephew John has since then had many incarnations, which have revivified first one and then another
aspect of a character that is ineradicably fixed in my unconscious memory. At times he must have treated me very badly, and I must have opposed
my tyrant courageously, for in later years I was often told of a short speech in which I defended myself when my father - his grandfather - called
me to account: "Why did you hit John?" "I hit him because he hit me." It must be this childish scene which causes non vivit to become non vixit,
for in the language of later childhood striking is known as wichsen (German: wichsen = to polish, to wax, i.e., to thrash); and the dream-work
does not disdain to take advantage of such associations. My hostility towards my friend P, which has so little foundation in reality - he was
greatly my superior, and might therefore have been a new edition of my old playmate - may certainly be traced to my complicated relations with
John during our childhood. I shall, as I have said, return to this dream later on.
G. Absurd Dreams - Intellectual Performances in Dreams
Hitherto, in our interpretation of dreams, we have come upon the element of absurdity in the dream-content so frequently that we must no longer
postpone the investigation of its cause and its meaning. We remember, of course, that the absurdity of dreams has furnished the opponents of
dream-interpretation with their chief argument for regarding the dream as merely the meaningless product of an attenuated and fragmentary
activity of the psyche.
I will begin with a few examples in which the absurdity of the dream-content is apparent only, disappearing when the dream is more thoroughly
examined. These are certain dreams which - accidently [sic], one begins by thinking - are concerned with the dreamer's dead father.
1. Here is the dream of a patient who had lost his father six years before the date of the dream:
His father had been involved in a terrible accident. He was travelling by the night express when the train was derailed, the seats were telescoped,
and his head was crushed from side to side. The dreamer sees him lying on his bed; from his left eyebrow a wound runs vertically upwards. The
dreamer is surprised that his father should have met with an accident (since he is dead already, as the dreamer adds in relating his dream). His
father's eyes are so clear.
I.
According to the prevailing standards of dream-criticism, this dream-content would be explained as follows: At first, while the dreamer is
picturing his father's accident, he has forgotten that his father has already been many years in his grave; in the course of the dream this memory
awakens, so that he is surprised at his own dream even while he is dreaming it. Analysis, however, tells us that it is quite superfluous to seek for
such explanations. The dreamer had commissioned a sculptor to make a bust of his father, and he had inspected the bust two days before the
dream. It is this which seems to him to have come to grief (the German word means gone wrong or met with an accident). The sculptor has never
seen his father, and has had to work from photographs. On the very day before the dream the son had sent an old family servant to the studio in
order to see whether he, too, would pass the some judgment upon the marble bust - namely, that it was too narrow between the temples. And now
follows the memory-material which has contributed to the formation of the dream: The dreamer's father had a habit, whenever he was harassed by
business cares or domestic difficulties, of pressing his temples between his hands, as though his head was growing too large and be was trying to
compress it. When the dreamer was four years old, he was present when a pistol was accidentally discharged, and his father's eyes were blackened
(his eyes are so clear). When his father was thoughtful or depressed, he had a deep furrow in his forehead just where the dream shows his wound.
The fact that in the dream this wrinkle is replaced by a wound points to the second occasion for the dream. The dreamer had taken a photograph
of his little daughter; the plate had fallen from his hand, and when he picked it up it revealed a crack which ran like a vertical furrow across the
child's forehead, extending as far as the eyebrow. He could not help feeling a superstitious foreboding, for on the day before his mother's death
the negative of her portrait had been cracked.
Thus, the absurdity of this dream is simply the result of a carelessness of verbal expression, which does not distinguish between the bust or the
photograph and the original. We are all accustomed to making remarks like: "Don't you think it's exactly your father?" The appearance of
absurdity in this dream might, of course, have been easily avoided. If it were permissible to form an opinion on the strength of a single case, one
might be tempted to say that this semblance of absurdity is admitted or even desired.
Here is another example of the same kind from my own dreams (I lost my father in the year 1896):
After his death, my father has played a part in the political life of the Magyars, and has united them into a political whole; and here I see,
indistinctly, a little picture: a number of men, as though in the Reichstag; a man is standing on one or two chairs; there are others round about
II.