Freud - Complete Works (427 page)

Dreams In Folklore

2526

   The dream which now follows
symbolizes the penis by a
dagger
: the woman who dreams it is
pulling at a dagger in order to stab herself, when she is awakened
by her husband and exhorted not to tear his member off.

A BAD DREAM

   A
woman dreamt that things had got to such a pitch that they had
nothing to eat before the holiday and could not buy anything
either. Her husband had drunk up all the money. There was only a
lottery ticket left and even this they really ought to pawn. But
the man was still keeping it back, for the draw was to be on the
second of January. He said: ‘Wife, now tomorrow is the draw,
let the ticket wait a while longer. If we don’t win, then we
must sell the ticket or pawn it.’ - ‘Well, the devil
take it, all you’ve bought is worry, and you’ve got
about as much out of it as there is milk in a billy-goat.’ So
the next day arrived. See, along came the newspaper man. He stopped
him, took a copy and began to look down the list. He ran his eyes
over the figures, he looked through every column, his number was
not among them. He did not trust his eyes, looked through once
again and this time sure enough he came upon the number of his
ticket. The number was the same, but the number of the series did
not fit. Once again he did not trust himself and thought to
himself: ‘This must be a mistake. Wait a bit, I will go to
the bank and make certain one way or the other.’ So he went
there with his head hanging. On the way he met a second newspaper
man. He bought another copy of a second paper, scanned the list and
found the number of his ticket straight away. The number of the
series, too, was the same as the one which included his ticket. The
prize of 5,000 roubles fell to his lot. He burst into the bank,
rushed up and asked them to pay out on the winning ticket at once.
The banker said that they could not pay out yet, only in a week or
two. He began to beg and pray: ‘Please be kind, give me one
thousand at least, I can get the rest later!’ The banker
refused, but advised him to apply to the private individual who had
procured the winning lottery ticket for him. What was to be done
now? Just then a little Jew appeared as though he had sprung up
from the ground. He smelt a bargain and made him an offer to pay
over the money at once, though instead of 5,000 only 4,000. The
fifth thousand would be his own share. The man was delighted at
this good fortune and decided to give the Jew the thousand, just so
that he could get the money on the spot. He took the money from the
Jew and handed over the ticket to him. Then he went home. On the
way he went into an inn, swallowed a quick glass and from there
went straight home. He walked along grinning and humming a little
song. His wife saw him through the window and thought: ‘Now
he’s certainly sold the lottery ticket; you can see
he’s cheerful, he’s probably paid a visit to the inn
and got himself drunk because he was feeling miserable.’ Then
he came indoors, put the money on the kitchen table and went to his
wife to bring her the good news that he had won and had got the
money. While they were hugging and kissing one another to their
heart’s content because they were so happy, their little
three-year-old daughter grabbed the money and threw it into the
stove. Then they came along to count the money and it was no longer
there. The last bundle of notes was already on fire. In a rage the
man seized hold of the little girl by the legs and dashed her
against the stove. She dropped dead. Disaster stared him in the
face, there was no escaping Siberia now. He seized his revolver and
bang! he shot himself in the chest and dropped dead. Horrified by
such a disaster, the woman snatched up a dagger and was going to
stab herself. She tried to pull it out of the sheath but could not
manage it however she tried. Then she heard a voice as though from
Heaven: ‘Enough, let go! What are you doing?’ She woke
up and saw that she was not pulling at a dagger but at her
husband’s tool, and he was saying: ‘Enough, let go or
you’ll tear it off!’

Dreams In Folklore

2527

   The representation of the penis
as a weapon, cutting knife,¹ dagger, etc., is familiar to us
from the anxiety dreams of abstinent women in particular and also
lies at the root of numerous phobias in neurotic people. The
complicated disguise of this present dream, however, demands that
we should make an attempt to clarify our understanding of it by a
psycho-analytic interpretation based on interpretations already
carried out. In doing so we are not overlooking the fact that we
shall be going beyond the material presented in the folk tale
itself and that consequently our conclusions will lose in
certainty.

   Since this dream ends in an act
of sexual aggression carried out by the woman as a dream-action,
this suggests that we should take the state of
material
need
in the content of the dream as a substitute for a state of
sexual
need. Only the most extreme libidinal compulsion can
at all justify such aggressiveness on the part of a woman. Other
pieces of the dream-content point in a quite definite and different
direction. The blame for the state of need is ascribed to the man.
(He had drunk up all the money.)² The dream goes on to get rid
of the man and the child and skilfully evades the sense of guilt
attached to these wishes by causing the child to be killed by the
man who then commits suicide out of remorse. Since this is the
content of the dream we are led to conclude from many analogous
instances that here is a woman who is not satisfied by her husband
and who in her phantasies is longing for another marriage. It is
all one for the interpretation whether we like to regard this
dissatisfaction of the dreamer’s as a permanent state of want
or merely as the expression of a temporary one. The lottery, which
in the dream brought about a short-lived state of happiness, could
perhaps be understood as a symbolic reference to marriage. This
symbol has not yet been identified with certainty in
psycho-analytic work, but people are in the habit of saying that
marriage is a game of chance, that in marriage one either draws the
winning lot or a blank.³ The numbers, which have been
enormously magnified
⁴
by the
dream-work, could well correspond in that case to the number of
repetitions of the satisfying act that are wished for. We are thus
made aware that the act of pulling the man’s member not only
has the meaning of libidinal provocation but also the additional
meaning of contemptuous criticism, as though the woman wanted to
pull the member off - as the man correctly assumed - because it was
no good, did not fulfil its obligations.

   We should not have lingered over
the interpretation of this dream and exploited it beyond its overt
symbolism were it not that other dreams which likewise end in a
dream-action demonstrate that the common people have recognized
here a typical situation which, wherever it occurs, is susceptible
to the same explanation. (Cf. below
p. 2538
.)

  
¹
[
Footnote by
Oppenheim:] A knife is
habitually carried by a burglar [‘
Einbrecher
’,
literally, ‘someone who breaks in’]. The kind of
breaking-in intended is shown by a proverbial phrase from Solingen,
reported in
Anthropophyteia
,
5
, 182: ‘After
marriage comes a burglary [breaking-in].’ Cf. the Berlin
slang term ‘
Brecheisen
’ [‘jemmy’,
literally, ‘breaking-iron’] for ‘a powerful
penis’ (
Anthropophyteia
,
7
, 3).

  
²
[
Marginal Note by
Oppenheim:] Cf.
further below our remarks on ‘marriage portion’ as a
term for ‘penis’ and ‘purse’ for
‘testes’ and also in comparisons between virility and
wealth and between the thirst for gold and libido.

  
³
Another dream about a lottery in this
little collection confirms this suggestion.

  
⁴
Psycho-analytic experience shows that
noughts appended to numbers in dreams can be ignored in
interpretation.

Dreams In Folklore

2528

II

FAECES-SYMBOLISM AND RELATED DREAM-ACTIONS

   Psycho-analysis has taught us
that in the very earliest period of childhood faeces is a highly
prized substance, in relation to which coprophilic instincts find
satisfaction. With the repression of these instincts, which is
accelerated as much as possible by up-bringing, this substance
falls into contempt and then serves conscious purposes as a means
of expressing disdain and scorn. Certain forms of mental activity
such as joking are still able to make the obstructed source of
pleasure accessible for a brief moment, and thus show how much of
the esteem in which human beings once held their faeces still
remains preserved in the unconscious. The most important residue of
this former esteem is, however, that all the interest which the
child has had in faeces is transferred in the adult on to another
material which he learns in life to set above almost everything
else - gold.¹ How old this connection between excrement and
gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremias:² gold,
according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of
hell.³

   In dreams in folklore gold is
seen in the most unambiguous way to be a symbol of faeces. If the
sleeper feels a need to defaecate, he dreams of gold, of treasure.
The disguise in the dream, which is designed to mislead him into
satisfying his need in bed, usually makes the pile of faeces serve
as a sign to mark the place where the treasure is to be found; that
is to say, the dream - as though by means of endopsychic perception
- states outright, even if in a reversed form, that gold is a sign
or a symbol for faeces.

   A simple treasure- or
defaecation-dream of this kind is the following one, related in the
Facetiae
of Poggio.

  
¹
Cf. ‘Character and Anal
Erotism’ (1908
b
),

  
²
Jeremias (1904, 115
n
.).

  
³
[
Marginal Note by
Oppenheim:]
Similarly in Mexico.

Dreams In Folklore

2529

DREAM-GOLD
¹

   A
certain man related in company that he had dreamt he had found
gold. Thereupon another man capped it with this story. (What
follows is quoted verbatim.)

  
‘My neighbour once dreamt that the Devil had led him to a
field to dig for gold; but he found none. Then the Devil said:
"It is there for sure, only you cannot dig it up now; but take
note of the place so that you may recognize it again by
yourself."

 
 ‘When the man asked that the place should be made
recognizable by some sign, the Devil suggested: "Just shit on
it, then it will not occur to anybody that there is gold lying
hidden here and you will be able to recognize the exact
place." The man did so and then immediately awoke and felt
that he had done a great heap in his bed.’

   (We
give the conclusion in summary.) As he was fleeing from the house,
he put on a cap in which a cat had done its business during the
same night. He had to wash his head and his hair. ‘Thus his
dream-gold was turned to filth.’

  
Tarasevsky (1909, 194, No. 232) reports a similar dream from the
Ukraine in which a peasant receives some treasure from the Devil,
to whom he has lit a candle, and puts a pile of faeces to mark the
place.
²

   We need not be surprised if the
Devil appears in these two dreams as a bestower of treasure and a
seducer, for the Devil - himself an angel expelled from Paradise -
is certainly nothing else than the personification of the repressed
unconscious instinctual life.³

   The motives behind these simple
comic anecdotes about dreams appear to be exhausted in a cynical
delight in dirt and a malicious satisfaction over the
dreamer’s embarrassment. But in other dreams about treasure
the form taken by the dream is confused in all sorts of ways and
includes various constituents the origin and significance of which
we may well investigate. For we shall not regard even these
dream-contents, which are intended to provide a rationalistic
justification for obtaining the satisfaction, as entirely arbitrary
and meaningless.

   In the two next examples, the
dream is not ascribed to a person sleeping alone but to one of two
sleepers - two men - who share a bed. As a result of the dream, the
dreamer dirties his bedfellow.

  
¹
Poggio (1905, No. 130).

  
²
[
Addition by
Oppenheim:] Attention
is there drawn to parallels in
Anthropophyteia
,
4
,
342-345, Nos. 580-581.

  
³
‘Character and Anal Erotism’
(1908
b
).

Dreams In Folklore

2530

A LIVELY DREAM
¹

   Two
travelling journeymen arrived weary at an inn and asked for a
night’s lodging. ‘Yes,’ said the host, ‘if
you are not afraid, you can have a bedroom, but it’s a
haunted one. If you want to stay, that’s all right, and the
night will cost you nothing as far as sleeping goes.’ The
lads asked one another: ‘Are you frightened?’
‘No.’ Very well, so they seized another litre of wine
and went to the room assigned to them.