The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud (1900)

And now, for the first time, I happened upon the youthful experience which even to-day still expresses its power in all these emotions and
dreams. I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his
views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born into happier
times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed,
with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts, 'Jew, get off the pavement!'"- "And what did
you do?"- "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied. 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 sentiments-
the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his son swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans.[15] Ever
since then Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies. -
I think I can trace my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general still further back into my childhood, so that it is probably only an instance of an
already established emotional relation being transferred to a new vehicle. One of the first books which fell into my childish hands after I learned
to read was Thiers' Consulate and Empire. I remember that I pasted on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers little labels bearing the names of the
Imperial marshals, and that at that time Massena (as a Jew, Menasse) was already my avowed favourite.[16] This preference is doubtless also to
be explained by the fact of my having been born, a hundred years later, on the same date. Napoleon himself is associated with Hannibal through
the crossing of the Alps. And perhaps the development of this martial ideal may be traced yet farther back, to the first three years of my
childhood, to wishes which my alternately friendly and hostile relations with a boy a year older than myself must have evoked in the weaker of
the two playmates. -
The deeper we go into the analysis of dreams, the more often are we put on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream-sources
in the latent dream-content.
We have learned that dreams very rarely reproduce memories in such a manner as to constitute, unchanged and unabridged, the sole manifest
dream-content. Nevertheless, a few authentic examples which show such reproduction have been recorded, and I can add a few new ones, which
once more refer to scenes of childhood. In the case of one of my patients a dream once gave a barely distorted reproduction of a sexual incident,
which was immediately recognized as an accurate recollection. The memory of it had never been completely lost in the waking life, but it had
been greatly obscured, and it was revivified by the previous work of analysis. The dreamer had at the age of twelve visited a bedridden
schoolmate, who had exposed himself, probably only by a chance movement in bed. At the sight of the boy's genitals he was seized by a kind of
compulsion, exposed himself, and took hold of the member of the other boy who, however, looked at him in surprise and indignation, whereupon
he became embarrassed and let it go. A dream repeated this scene twenty-three years later, with all the details of the accompanying emotions,
changing it, however, in this respect, that the dreamer played the passive instead of the active role, while the person of the schoolmate was
replaced by a contemporary.
As a rule, of course, a scene from childhood is represented in the manifest dream-content only by an allusion, and must be disentangled from the
dream by interpretation. The citation of examples of this kind cannot be very convincing, because any guarantee that they are really experiences
of childhood is lacking; if they belong to an earlier period of life, they are no longer recognized by our memory. The conclusion that such childish
experiences recur at all in dreams is justified in psychoanalytic work by a great number of factors, which in their combined results appear to be
sufficiently reliable. But when, for the purposes of dream-interpretation, such references to childish experiences are torn out of their context, they
may not perhaps seem very impressive, especially where I do not even give all the material upon which the interpretation is based. However, I
shall not let this deter me from giving a few examples. -
I.
With one of my female patients all dreams have the character of hurry; she is hurrying so as to be in time, so as not to miss her train, and so on. In
one dream she has to visit a girl friend; her mother had told her to ride and not walk; she runs, however, and keeps on calling. The material that
emerged in the analysis allowed one to recognize a memory of childish romping, and, especially for one dream, went back to the popular childish
game of rapidly repeating the words of a sentence as though it was all one word. All these harmless jokes with little friends were remembered
because they replaced other less harmless ones.[17] -
II.
The following dream was dreamed by another female patient: She is in a large room in which there are all sorts of machines; it is rather like what
she would imagine an orthopaedic institute to be. She hears that I am pressed for time, and that she must undergo 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 though she were called
upon to make a number of little squares.
The first part of the content of this dream is an allusion to the treatment and to the transference to myself. The second contains an allusion to a
scene of childhood; the two portions are connected by the mention of the bed. The orthopaedic institute is an allusion to one of my talks, in which