متن انگلیسی کتاب روانشناسی و روح بخش پنجم صفحات ۹۴ تا ۱۳۳
DREAM AND REALITY
We are such stuff. As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
SHAKESPEARE
THE PRECEDING CHAPTER SURVEYED the religious, sexual, and psychological stages of spiritual history. The present one concerns the dream, which is not only a spiritual phenomenon par excellence, but also the most subjective and mystical of all mental phenomena, and a phenomenon more inclusive than the dreamer himself, because it allows him both to observe himself and to be at one with the universe. Man has long been intrigued by such phenomena, but he has not really learned much worth knowing about dreams as such because of his greater concern with what they mean, if anything. Primitive man believed that dreams had a special, divine significance; and whether they were responsible for animism, or vice versa, animistic man regarded them as evidence of his soul and its immortality. These two affirmative beliefs, on the one hand, and modern science's antispiritual denial that dreams are meaningful, on the other, serve to show how attitudes toward spiritual belief have variously conditioned the interpretation of dreams from time to time.
On this basis one may understand how primitive man could accept dreams of dead persons or his Double as evidence of his soul, and why during the sexual era man's "dreams of conception" and of unborn souls had a religious significance at odds with their erotic meaning. In certain totemistic Australian tribes, conception by the spirit's Double was announced to a mother or father in dreams that disclosed the name, the totem, and even the sex of the child.1
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1See the excellent section on "The meaning of dreams" (Bedeutung des Traumes ) in Karl Beth : Religion and Magic ( Religion und Magie ) , secondedition, 1927.
In the sexual era these dreams signified an ideology of procreative immortality, because then a husband or father who feared death at the hands of his forebears or descendants had anxiety dreams of their departed or unborn souls. At this time a woman's dreams also involved the idea of divine conception, by which her husband sought to preserve his old spiritual beliefs. After supplanting sexual ideology, Christianity regarded this kind of reassurance as wanton, and psychology finally called it a simple wish fulfillment of sexual libido. Setting aside for the moment a discussion of psychoanalysis, which stresses the dream but denies the soul, let us again consider the naive concept of the soul. In general, not only were dreams interpreted in terms of a currently ruling ideology, but in creating certain religious and social forms this ideology also evoked certain dream forms and experiences. The dreams were then fitted the more promptly into the current ideology, the closer both the dream and the ideology still stood to their common origin in spiritual belief. In the primitive era of animism and magic, dream and reality coincided completely, because they were both undisguisedexpressions of the spiritual world view. Primitive man therefore failed to interpret dreams, not because interpretation was beyond him, but because his point of view made interpretation unnecessary.
He felt this way because of his thorough adherence to the spiritual world view, which made his dream life more basic than his waking reality. And since the soul that was disclosed to the dreamer was unhampered by external circumstances, primitive man interpreted reality in terms of his dreams, and in so doing demonstrated a remarkable faculty for discovering their significance. When reality did not correspond to a dream, man simply corrected, influenced, and changed reality to fit the dream's spiritual meaning.
Certain North American Indian tribes who have been observed and described by French Jesuit missionaries2 felt compelled to carry out their dreams in real life, because otherwise the guardian spirit of the dream would be offended and the dreamer would die.
The dream is the oracle which all these people question and follow, the prophet who predicts things to come, the Cassandra who proclaims threatening misfortunes, the common physician for all ailments ... it is their absolute ruler ... it is their Mercury in their travels, their economy in the family; the dream often guides their assemblies; trading, fishing, hunting are customarily taken with its consent and seem almost to exist in order to conform to it; there is nothing, be it ever so costly, which they would not deny themselves for the sake of a dream. ... It is actually the Huron's chief deity.3
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2 Cited from Levy-Bruhl: How Natives Think (Die geistige Welt der Primitiven), Munich, 1927, p. 94 ff.
3 Communication by the Jesuits (Relation des Jesuites), X, 1636, p. 170.
Another Father4 relates that
In a real sense the Iroquois have only one deity which is the dream; they submit to it and follow all its commands to the letter. The Tsonnontou are even more bound to it than are the others; their faith in it is unqualified. What they believe they have done in a dream, they feel utterly obliged to carry out as soon as possible.
Similar views, and many examples from South Africa and Asia Minor such as Levy-Briihl has presented (loc. cit. yp.97), only reinforce the impression that primitive "interpretation" of the dream aims to actualize it and hence to interpret reality in terms of it.
This interesting fact cannot be explained by wish fulfillment, because many of these dreams and their resulting actions are so obviously concerned directly with wishes and their fulfillment. Later on we shall see how well willpsychology explains the transformation of dream into action, but let us first consider a few consequences of such action. The view that the individual will die if his dream is not acted out is explained by Levy-Briihl in terms of an affront to the guardian spirit ( jinni) whose will the dream expressed (p. 101). But this guardian spirit had closer ties with the immortal group soul than with the transitory individual soul, so that this stage portrays the conflict between the individual and collective souls, which dreams manifested as the mortal and immortal parts of man, and which often made the fate of the individual depend upon society's help, and the life of the community on the individual's willingness to sacrifice for it. The individual died when his own wish was notfulfilled, just as when he failed to accede to the wishes of others. While the dream seems here to be an egoistic expression of the individual soul and a moralistic expression of the collective soul, this conflict was resolved by the individual's action, which had somehow to meet the needs of the ego as well as the demands of others.
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4 Ibid., LIV, 1669-70, p. 96.
For the present, however, we are interested neither in the psychological motive behind the compulsion to translate dreams into action nor in its psychological consequences for the social behavior of the individual, but in the extent to which this "dream action" survived under the altered relationships of other eras and ideologies. In order not merely to answer this question but also to understand the raising of it, we should focus on the dream's place in the total world picture instead of on its origin and meaning. It is not a question of the possibility or nature of an interpretation but of whether the dream was accepted as true or as a mere phantom of the senses. Primitive man took the dream to be absolutely true, which meant not that he confused it with reality, but that he saw it as a higher reality. The dream neither predicted reality to come nor recalled that which had gone, but portrayed the true reality corresponding to the spiritual world view. This conception of the dream emanated from pure, preanimistic spiritual belief in the body-soul, according to which the corporeal self endured forever. Since the dream portrayed self-like, corporeal souls of the dead, of the living, and of one's own self, it seemed at first to be confirmed by primal spiritual belief. On this basis the spiritual significance of the dream as proof of the body-soul lay close to a reality whose characters simply seemed to continue acting in the dream experience, so that the phenomenon of the dream itself, apart from its content, proved the existence and independent survivalof the bodily soul, not only in the future to which the significance of the dream was subsequently restricted, but literally beyond time and space. The dream's content became important only when it conflicted with waking reality, which in an animistic age was not really violated any more by the appearance of unborn or dead persons in dreams than by the wandering of one's own Double in the upper or lower worlds. To the extent that the dream contradicted reality, the contradiction was neutralized by adjusting reality to suit the dream. The basis for this correction did not lie in any wish merely to improve reality, because this was rarely desired and less often achieved. It lay rather in the compulsion to bring reality into agreement with spiritual belief in order to sustain that belief. The same tendency to effect a complete agreement between dream and reality throws light on another phenomenon which has won an even more important place in human history than the primitive, spiritual translation of dream into reality.
I refer to the telling of the dream as though it were an actual event experienced in the past by one's forebears, or in the present by one's contemporaries. Out of such stories grew myths, fairy tales, and historical fables, which not only worked over the same spiritual motifs as the dream, but corresponded to obviously dreamed events or to accounts of dreams as altered by subsequent action. While such narratives were told even by primitive animistic man, their development into true heroic myths belongs to the sexual era and to its more civilized peoples, the influence of whose ideology appears in the old dream action revised according to the new reality and its conscious content. The current tendency to actualize dream experiences as such originated with primitives. According to actual statements of North American Indians, dreams comprised their sole source of mythology5 and prevailed in many of their narratives.
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5 According to Ehrenreich: General Mythology and its Ethnological Foundations (Die allgemeine Mythologie und ihre ethnologischen Grundlegen), Leipzig, 1910, p.149.
Yet even when these tales only report events corresponding to spiritual beliefs, they still sound like dreams because their world view rests on the same ideology from which dreams arose. On this basis it is difficult to determine the extent to which actual events contributed to these verbal accounts; primitive man had to translate his dreams into action, so that his account may refer as well to the one as to the other. For the most part, both dream and action were unintentionally confused by the tendency to make them agree, so that one finds mythical themes only when it is apparent that the dream could not be carried over into reality. The tendency to relate the dream as an actual experience is explained by the persistent compulsion to validate the dream ideology as a factual account when one was not able to realize the dream itself in action. At later periods this original identification of dream and reality endured as a mixture, for, as early history shows, the accounts became a part of reality just as did the act, and the active hero tried to behave accordingly. The dream ideology not only reported dreamt deeds as though they had actually occurred, but such stories incited deeds which less strongwilled persons then reported as myths, These latter in turn set off dreams of similar deeds, which again were related as facts, and so on. All this, which a voluminous literature presents in detail, should only emphasize the view that the influence of the dream upon reality was at least as great as, and probably much more significant than, that of reality uponthe dream. When one also considers that at primitive levels reality was about the same as the dream reality governed by animism and magic, the dream leads to the same conclusion as did the spiritual phenomenon studied previously: that what increasingly constitutes reality amounts to a proof, support, and expression of spiritual belief, or to an attempt to verify this belief by making it real. But that excessive concretion of spiritual phenomena which became so crucial for scientific psychology was avenged here as elsewhere, for while the objective character of religion, state, and sexuality opposed their own symbolization, the subjective character of the dream restricted its objectification.
In fairy tales and mythical motifs, the involvement of the Beyond in the Present led to misfortune, and the translation of dream reality into actual reality produced and did not avert the tragic death of the hero. Like the fairy-tale hero, the strong-willed individual was not content with taking the dream passively, but had to act it out and to perish in his attempt at immortality. He died because of that temporal desire for immortality which really signified the survival of his bodily self, and he needed to learn that there was no survival of the bodily self, but only a spiritual rebirth through collective symbols. Yet the dream as a purely subjective phenomenon seemed to bear out preanimistic belief in the bodily soul, and it has persisted as evidence for individual immortality in all stages of development of spiritual belief. This phenomenon created the immortal character of the hero, who seemed to a certain extent divine, invulnerable, and unconquerable, and was always saved by a miracle in the moments of greatest danger, during which he awoke from his fearful dream to return to real life and the certainties of the present. At the same time, the tendency tomake the self's dream-world immortality real led to all the misfortune of Nemesis and of inevitable, tragic death.
The best example of this sort of thing, which betrays the "morality" of all history and the myth as a verified dream narrative, seems to lie in a tale of the Winnebago Indians which Paul RadinG has rendered and analyzed most effectively. The hero of this unquestionably mythical narrative, which was told as though it were real, was called "Traveler" because he had wandered about the world since his earliest childhood. He was the only descendant of one of four great water spirits whom the supreme Earthmaker had created with his own hands and who was proud of this supernatural origin.
On arriving home from his journey, the hero found his father in despair because he had learned that the archenemy of the water spirits was planning a war of annihilation against his tribe. The youth resolved to settle this conflict by a private duel with the enemy. He fasted to prepare himself for victory, and visited his water-spirit ancestors in the nether world. As the grandson of one of them, he received a blessing: "Grandson, I am going to give you a blessing. You are the first to receive one from me. Because you have made yourself suffer so much, because you have thirsted yourself to death, because you have made yourself a so truly compassion-inspiring spectacle, you shall attain to the full length of years. You shall die of old age. Remember that a normal life is very short. I was not born of a woman's womb, but Earthmaker molded me with his own hands." When the young man described this blessing to his father, the father replied: "My son, it is good. The water spirits are the greatest spirits in the world. You have had a good dream." Herethe youth's experience with the water spirit was interpreted7 as a dream caused by his transposed state and extended fast, which he apparently practiced not so much to steel himself for physical combat as to prove his superhumanity ( immortality). Even such fasting did not seem to satisfy him, because he obviously wanted the water spirit to reassure him of his immortality, even though such a promise was not mentioned in the account cited. In another story of the same Indians (loc. cit., p. 203), "The Faster," the son explained to the father that although a long life for himself, the death of his enemy, and the granting of all his wishes had all been guaranteed, he wanted to fast still longer in order to obtain realistic evidence of his immortality. ("But what I desire is never to die." The spirits could not dissuade him. "Indeed, I shall never be satisfied until I obtain the gift of immortal life," continued the boy. He was unable to face the thought of death; he dreaded it very much. In the council lodge of the spirits it was accordingly decided that he should die. So they looked down on the place where the boy was fasting, and there he lay dead. ) It was as though he fasted and died to prove his immortality. The moral of this story was a warning to the young not to fast too long or to attempt the impossible. It is no mere truism that youth can gratify only those wishes that can be fulfilled.
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6 Primitive Man as Philosopher. New York, 1927. See the chapter, "TheTragic Sense of Life."
7 I do not know whether there is anything in the text available to me, which signifies that the gift-giving and wish-gratifying water spirit is designated as the Traveler, an identification which the dream character only serves to make more clear.
A collective element prevailed in "The Traveler" in which the father and not the youth himself prompted the youth to fast longer, because it was only at his father's behest that the son decided to engage in a fatal conflict that wouldbenefit only the tribe. Hence the final gift which the water spirit granted the youth for his many fasts was the annihilation of a whole village of the enemy, so that the youth would not be killed by them at least. The water spirit also promised the youth the right to prepare a "medicine" from the bones of the water spirit which would make him immortal. 8
But it turned out that the water spirit had promised more than he could deliver. The basis for his deceit lay in his declaration that he wanted to insure the youth's gratitude for help received against the water spirit's enemy. After much irresolution, the youth finally killed the enemy, but not before they had placed a curse on him which made their kinsmen kill him on his way home from the battle.
Again, death overtook the youth because he wanted immortality, and because the water spirit granted him the death of others, which only proved his mortality. Among many primitives like the Winnebagos, immortality meant that death was not brought about by natural causes but by some individual transgression. Of course, this causality was so broadly conceived that death was always inescapable. In the Winnebago myth of the twins, a mere fit of passion often sufficed to evoke punishment by the evil spirit. The individual offense originally signified a certain desire for immortality, but in the animistic era death came from an exaggerated tendency to translate into reality the ancient belief in the preanimistic bodily soul which the dream seemed to justify.
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8 In a third narrative, "The Seer" (loc. cit., p. 196), the father prevails upon his son to fast in order to lengthen his own (the father's) life (rejuvenation wish ) . However, the father makes use of the water spirit's "medicine" only to kill others (in the final sense, the son), and therefore has to die. The tale of "The Traveler" retains only the father's ambition for his son, and seems to reconcile the paternal and filial immortality egoism.
Before we turn to the sexual era to see how the cause of death was transferred from an actualization of one's own immortal bodily soul (or dream-soul) to an abdication in favor of one's child, we should consider a feature of the original dream ideology which may help us to understand the mythical life of the hero. In the Winnebago narratives the individual and his immortality were dedicated to society and to altruism within the meaning of collective spiritual belief. This dedication, which was a sacrifice from which the individual at times sought to escape by leaving the group, was symbolized more clearly by Traveler than by the classical heroes who tried to escape the spiritual demands for socialization by setting forth on adventures that promised personal immortality. Yet this escape always led to death. In the sense of dream ideology, Traveler, whose strife for immortality so clearly betrayed such a retreat from social duty, seems to symbolize the wandering soul which leaves the sleeping body to roam beyond space and time. Hence the mythical hero who possibly portrayed the independent and immortal dream ego, or soul, was compelled to pursue his own destiny even when it meant only his death and a mythical immortality. As a transition to the sexual era, in which the individual abandoned his bodily immortality for a procreative one, we may cite the early Babylonian legend of the divine human, Gilgamesh, and his mortal friend, Eabani. Both ideologies seem to be embodied in these two friends and their destinies, while Utnapishti, the ancestor who warned of the Deluge, corresponded to the immortal water spirit. Following the death of his friend Eabani, Gilgamesh renounced himself to Utnapishti in order to gain immortality for himself, just as the Indian youth had done to the water spirit. His fast wasnot deliberate, for he was unable to find food on his difficult journey from the waters of the dead, and, after he had eaten at the bidding of Utnapishti's wife, he fell asleep from fatigue (death sleep). Although this journey into the nether world in which Gilgamesh failed to find immortality was not related as a dream, like all dreams motivated by myths, the story betrays its dream character even in the absence of explicit evidence to that effect. There was the significant dream in which Gilgamesh learned of the arrival of the plainsman, Eabani, who was determined to be the hero's mortal friend, brother, and comrade in arms:
Once he dreamt how in the starlight a star fell upon him like a host of the heavenly deity, Anu; how he could not shake off this burden because of its greater strength; how he finally clove to it as he would to a woman and then laid it at the feet of his wise mother, Reshat-Belit, who made it equal to Gilgamesh. In a second dream there appeared to him a man whomlike the star in the first dream he laid at the feet of his mother, whom he likewise pressed to himself, and whom his mother likewise made his equal. Both phenomena symbolized his future friend and beloved companion, Eabani, and since this concerned Erekh, Gilgamesh addressed him and brought the two together in friendship.9 .
This dream forecast the future because the magic-minded person had to translate it into reality 10
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9 Quoted from P. Jensen: The Gilgamesh Epic in World Literature (Der Gilgamesch-Epos in der Wcltliteratur ) Vol. I, 1906, p. 7.
10 Later (op. cit., pp. 583 f), Jensen makes it plausible that these dreams were reported in the Book of Kings (I, 17) as actual occurrences, and indeed in Elias's awakening from the dead: "With this he laid the lifeless body of the widow's son on Elias's bed, lay on him thrice at full length so as to bring him to life, and then gave him over to his mother."
The fact that we areconcerned with two quite similar dreams occurring the same night offers us differing cues which lead us further into the spiritual meaning of the material, and disclose its relevance to the emerging sexual era. The involvement of the mother in both the dream and its interpretation signified her consent to the hero's new son and brother. Her interpretation superseded her own conception- and birth-dream which Gilgamesh dreamt twice (as it were, for her), and which was to be attributed to her only in the fully developed sexual era. I do not mean that the Babylonians had displaced the dream from the mother to the son, any more than I believe that Gilgamesh's dream signified concealed incest with his mother, although the dream made Gilgamesh the creator of Eabani, whom the mother simply accepted in her interpretation to her son. The characteristic feature of this animistic dream material is exactly that Gilgamesh created Eabani by waking him from the dead, as God created man, and not by begetting him as a father does his son. Hence Gilgamesh was two-thirds a god, and in a sense stood nearer to immortality than did the mortal Eabani whom he created as a representation of his mortal Double.
This whole conception is confirmed by Eabani's fate, and by the motivation of his mortality, which already betrayed the influence of sexual ideology. Undisturbed by earthly cares and human knowledge, Eabani lived a paradisiacal life with the desert animals until the hunters whom he had driven from the desert got their revenge upon him. From the temple of Ishtar these hunters fetched one Hierolule, who seduced Eabani and robbed him of his "innocence." The animals then fled him; he found no peace in the city and cursed all women as the cause of his downfall. He had fearful premonitions and dreams of death, which were soonfollowed by his actual death. Gilgamesh then lamented Eabanfs death as though it were his own which it did symbolize, because Gilgamesh's mortal counterpart was lost with Eabani's death, and because his immortal self remained in perpetual.fear of death until he perished in search of immortality. In the narrative, Eabani's spirit appeared in order to manifest the will of the gods, and to cause and not merely to announce Gilgamesh's death. In contrast with Eabani and Adam, the hero of the sexual era who succumbed to sexual temptation and lost his immortality, Gilgamesh resisted the temptations of Ishtar:
"Come now, my Gilgamesh, make love to me! Give me a child by thee! Be my husband and let me be thy wife," so spake she to him and urged her suit with glowing words. But he remembered her past, her faithlessness in love, and the misfortunes which all her lovers had suffered. She had already lain with five others, and had caused them all to suffer in some way.. . . The sixth, Ishullanu, her father's gardener, whom she had asked to dine with her but who had scornfully rejected her, was struck down by her and confined like an animal so that he could not move. (Jensen, pp. 17 f.)
But abstinence from intercourse was as pernicious for Gilgamesh as giving in to seduction had been for the others. For the scorned Ishtar sent a powerful "celestial bull" which wounded Eabani, who then had to die because he killed the bull. On the next day Eabani dreamt of his death and acquired an illness that became fatal twelve days later. The thoroughly frightened Gilgamesh then cried, "Could not I, as he, lay me to rest and never arise throughout all eternity?" Thus at the beginning of the sexual era this story ofGilgamesh shows clearly how the heroic myth sprang from animistic tales which related the dream as true, and sought to transpose its hero into reality. The hero's brother (or sibling) role characteristic of fabulous dream motifs represents the hero's mortal Double or bodily soul of the dream. This role also symbolized the passivity of the hero, to whom everything happened as in a dream, and it symbolized his stupidity, his inexperience, and his naive adherence to ancient spiritual belief which the mythical hero had lost by his acceptance of sexual knowledge and ideology. The mythical hero stood alone, and had no helper, guardian spirit, or Double. But since his nature was partly divine and partly human, he incorporated both mortal and immortal souls within himself. The hero of the spiritual era perished in his attempt to realize immortality in the form of perpetual life. The hero of the sexual era relinquished immortality to his descendants, and achieved it through his children. The Gilgamesh epic juxtaposed and embodied these two ideologies in the hero and his Double, with Gilgamesh meeting his fate in terms of the surviving animistic ideology, and Eabani his through the new sexual ideology. At the same time, the myth shows that one could no longer deny sexuality, because abstinence involved the same danger of death as did intercourse.11
However, it is significant that the original cause of death was not sexuality as defined by the Bible and Western morality, but the very egoistic wish for immortality which governed sexual resistance, in relation to which sexuality was interpreted as sin. Adam perished because of his wish for immortality, and not because of sexuality, which was actually imposed on Eve and him as a duty. This is clear even in the biblical account as long as one does not follow the spiritual line of the Church in interpreting sexuality as sin. Eating the forbidden fruit amounted to gaining the tree of life, or the "medicine," and should have rendered sexuality superfluous because it made the original egoistic immortality possible. All doubt as to this conception of the "fall from grace" is precluded by an ancient Sumerian parallel 12 to the biblical story, which, as far as the incomplete text allows, construes the real offense as being the struggle for immortality, without once mentioning sexual temptation and "sin."
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11 One of the rare primitive narratives which denies the reality of dreams (i.e., immortality of the soul), deals with an infringement of a sexual prohibition. This unusual dream story, which concerns a legend of the Kpellese and is reported by D. Westermann in A Negro Tribe in Liberia (Ein Nogerstamm in Liberia, pp. 457 f), indicates only in the final sentence that the events which appeared in the dream were not real: "What he dreamt was imaginary. Had the young man's dream been real anything that anyone dreams would be real." Kpana, the hero of the story, was enjoined by his friends to go fishing. He ate, and then slept so heavily against his fish basket that the others could not waken him, and thebasket on his back befouled his clothing. He dreamed that he came to the king of another city who offered Kpana his daughter on the condition that he would not return home. The Rock, which had the role of dream god, presented him with a rich nuptial gift for his bride, but made his possession of his beloved and her country dependent on the condition that he lie with the girl for eight days without indulging in the sexual act. But on the seventh day Kpana succumbed to the girl's enticements. Then Kpana awoke from his dream and looked back at his fouled clothing. The long, deep sleep and the fouling are unequivocal symbols of death as punishment for failing to abstain from the sexual act, or for failing to abstain spiritually, which makes the dream untrue.
12 Cf. Edw. Chiera: "A Sumerian Tablet Relating to the Fall of Man." The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures. Vol. XXXIX, No. 1, Oct. 1
Although man ate of the divine fruit and was driven from the garden into the desert, the end of the text says that he did not therefore fall into sin but reached a higher plane of existence. He did not get "the reed that frees from death" any more than did the youth in Traveler, but he acquired a large portion of worldly goods. "Humanity, thou art to know abundance!" On the basis of what has already been covered, this closing statement may be understood to mean that man should give up his hope for immortality and turn his interests to his present life. This narrative, which in other respects concerned a race more than an individual, clearly states that man's punishment was not the loss of his immortality, which he had never had in the first place, but of his earthly life and the happiness it could have held for him had his search for immortality not robbed him of it. This Sumerian text emphasizes the motif of eating which also plays a prominent role in the biblical story, the epic of Gilgamesh, and the myth of the Winnebagos. The Sumerian tablet portrayed man as being driven from the heavenly fields with the words: "Go, till the garden, raise food for eating! Thou shalt never reach me ( the food of God ) " And then: ". . . since the hand of the sons of the menials has reached the food, their eyes have been opened . . ." he receives a wealth of nourishment from the beasts and the fields.
The biblical account interpreted the agricultural motif as a curse. But, after being banished from the realm of the immortals, the hero of the Gilgamesh epic received bread from Utnapishti's wife and, according to Utnapishti's instructions, gathered a plant from the lake, which corresponded to the bread of eternal life. However, this plant only protected the hero from the immediate dangers and rescued him from a serpent. It must be noted that Gilgamesh did not eat the plant as soon as he found it, because it was food for the soul rather than for the body. When we relate this insight to the ritual fasts of primitives and to their magical concept of eating as an incorporation of soul-stuff (Mana), we have to recognize in all these myths a warning that manshould direct his attention more to earthly sustenance than to spiritual food, or that he should at least relate food and nourishment to physical rather than religious motives. However, as the Faster shows, this spiritual nourishment and immortalizing food of the gods really signified the superhuman ability to live without earthly nourishment. Apparently the acceptance of sexuality as a means to procreative immortality had an influence on this practical side of nourishment, because it involved a strong motive to compensate for the loss of spiritual power resulting from the sexual act by an in kind and ingestion of nourishment that was superior quantity. However, it seems to me that the irrelevance of earthly nourishment for independent survival of the soul also stemmed from the dream, for the widespread custom of placing food and other necessities of life in the grave with the dead belonged to a preanimistic belief that the bodysoul could not survive apart from the body and its welfare. At the animistic stage of spiritual belief, fasting corresponded to sleep, and eating was an "awakening symptom" which warmed the dreamer of his mortality, but also showed him that he still lived and had not fallen asleep forever.
Like other realistic culture phenomena, the transition from natural nourishment (fruit and game) to cattle breeding and agriculture is explicable largely in terms of spiritual ideology. The traditions cited above, which portray the transition from the spiritual to the sexual era, also disclose the relation of the spiritual era to natural nourishment (paradise), and of the sexual era to the cultivation of food. It is as though man had first to know and recognize sexuality for itself before he could utilize procreation and fertilization in plants and animals for his own ends. This is both the biblical "knowledge" and, according to the Sumerian text, the progress which man makes both by exchanging individual for procreative immortality and by enriching his earthly life through an abundance of food, clothing, and other goods. 13 But this "application" of sexual knowledge, which signified an exaggerated personal goal and was symbolized 14 by agriculture and stockbreeding, finally led to worldly luxury, gluttony, and lust, and allowed man to forget spirituality and his future life.
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13 Gilgamesh, who came to Utnapishti starved and naked, received nourishment (bread) and a beautiful garment which never wore out (hence Adam and Eve's leaf garments which were supplanted by hides, and natural fruits which were supplanted by cultivated ones). Agriculture derived personal possession from sexual ideology, since the possession of agricultural goods, as of a child, was a result of one's own activity. In the presexual era, the natural pasture lands had belonged to the community or commonwealth. Gilgamesh knew no better than to kill the celestial bull which Ishtar had sent with her love, and to make a weapon of its horns. In contrast, how noble a stockbreeder seemed Jacob with his speckled lambs!
14 See my Pstjchoanalytic Contributions to the Study of Myths (Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung) Second edition, 1922, Chapter II: "Symbolism" (Die Symbolik), especially 28 ff. In Chapter IV, on "The Significance of the Deluge Saga" (Zur Deutung der Sintflutsage) I have also indicated the dream origin of the great flood, by referring to individual dreams.
This collapse of the first concretion of sexual ideology simulated the myth of the great flood, which was the first epic of mankind because it comprehended the fate of an entire people rather than of a single individual. In thisstory. When the gods had decided to destroy the city by a flood, Ea, the god of the deep, sent Utnapishti a dream which warned him: "Thou, man of Shurippak, son of Upar-Tutu! Build a shelter! Build a ship! Forget thy worldly wealth; look to thy life! Bring all manner of beings into this ship!" The story means that Gilgamesh was shown how man could win immortality not by actively seeking it in his own way, but in the way of the passive mythical hero to whom the gods disclosed the immortal soul in a dream. According to spiritual ideology, this means that man escaped from a too realistic sexual era into a dream which reassured him that his corporeal soul existed, and that he remained immortal in spite of his acceptance of the sexual ideology. Before we turn to the classical Oedipus myth of the sexual era, which discloses the transition to the type of dream analysis characteristic of the psychological era, I may summarize the foregoing findings with respect to the various forms of epic narrative. The fairy tale as the earliest form of narrative corresponds to the preanimistic equivalence of dream and reality, in which the dream was narrated as a working reality. This was possible because its ideology agreed throughout with the magical world view. The Odyssey was the finest example of this narrative which persisted into the heroic, sexual era without losing its dream character. Odysseus was the passive dream hero to whom everything happenedfavorably, of coursein a dream. His salvation from all the threats of death in the lower world and from all the dangers of sexuality in the upper world are so patently significant for the question of immortality that the point needs only to be mentioned. In contrast to the fairy tale, the heroic myth of ancient civilized peoples belonged to a phase of the sexual era in legend everything perished because of sexuality in the sense of the new ideology, and ceased to multiply merely by expansion of the group. This epic, which the Bible related as fact, also appears in the Gilgamesh legend of Utnapishti, which explains how a hero as well as a human being could be excluded from the realm of the spiritual gods. Yet the flood really seems to be a dream product, and not just astory. When the gods had decided to destroy the city by a flood, Ea, the god of the deep, sent Utnapishti a dream which warned him: "Thou, man of Shurippak, son of Upar-Tutu! Build a shelter! Build a ship! Forget thy worldly wealth; look to thy life! Bring all manner of beings into this ship!" The story means that Gilgamesh was shown how man could win immortality not by actively seeking it in his own way, but in the way of the passive mythical hero to whom the gods disclosed the immortal soul in a dream. According to spiritual ideology, this means that man escaped from a too realistic sexual era into a dream which reassured him that his corporeal soul existed, and that he remained immortal in spite of his acceptance of the sexual ideology. Before we turn to the classical Oedipus myth of the sexual era, which discloses the transition to the type of dream analysis characteristic of the psychological era, I may summarize the foregoing findings with respect to the various forms of epic narrative. The fairy tale as the earliest form of narrative corresponds to the preanimistic equivalence of dream and reality, in which the dream was narrated as a working reality. This was possible because its ideology agreed throughout with the magical world view. The Odyssey was the finest example of this narrative which persisted into the heroic, sexual era without losing its dream character. Odysseus was the passive dream hero to whom everything happenedfavorably, of coursein a dream. His salvation from all the threats of death in the lower world and from all the dangers of sexuality in the upper world are so patently significant for the question of immortality that the point needs only to be mentioned.
In contrast to the fairy tale, the heroic myth of ancient civilized peoples belonged to a phase of the sexual era inwhich dreams were no longer told as reality but were relived by an active hero in real life. A myth portrays
not only a
hero's superhuman efforts to win immortality, but the fruitlessness of these efforts as well, and it ends
tragically, in
contrast to the fairy tale which ends happily. That the mythical dream was true only when it could be translated into
reality was consistent with the realization of immortality in the hereafter. The Grecian Oedipus saga was the purest type of this legend, because it tried to put sexual ideology directly at the service of personal immortality. In contrast to the spiritual ideology of the fairy tale, the mythical hero stood alone, because in his mortal and immortal respects he represented the spiritual Double that had originated in dream ideology.
The epic differed from these two narrative types in dealing with the fate of whole peoples. This is consistent with the view that even the sexual era's collective immortality, which was embodied in the group and manifested in collective consciousness, offered no satisfactory solution for the problem of individuality. Through its efforts to assert itself as an expanding power, a people may perish in just such a collective, procreative struggle for personal immortality. The classical example of the folk epic, which portrays this collective and ineffective strife for concrete spiritual and sexual immortality, is the Iliad. Fairy tales quite properly treated the dream as a present experience. In myths the dream determined future behavior, because its sexual ideology of immortality first had to be translated into reality. The epic portrayed the hero's dreamt fate as a past event, because the old dream ideology could no longer cope with current events, and because it could only console man for the fact that good times had come andgone. Thus a poet served his disillusioned people by going back to the mythical dream form for the bodily soul as a consolation against "murderous" war. We now come to the psychological era, in which the dream acquired a "wish fulfilling" function not by virtue of its content, as Freud would say, but by virtue of the dream itself, irrespective even of its Freudian "latent" content, which is not spiritual but merely psychological. The dream itself did not concern wishes that could be fulfilled, but spiritual ones that could not be fulfilled. It showed man the soul that was independent of his body, and it was the dream as such and not its particular content that did this. The anxiety dream was an exception, in which the self escaped from its fear of mortality by awakening from a deathlike sleep. 15 Other than anxiety dreams served to prolong sleep, not in a psychological sense of providing gratification (Freud ) but in the spiritual sense of demonstrating immortality. Anxiety dreams interrupted sleep when it came too near to death and threatened the feeling of immortality. Both types of dream served to deny death; the one, by positively evoking the dreamer's own bodily soul and the souls of dead or absent persons; and in the other, negatively, by rescuing the dreamer from deathlike sleep. Thus dreaming itself became a denial of death, because it always proved that one still survived and had not fallen into one's final sleep.
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15 "For 'dreaming* and for 'being half dead' East African natives use the same expression, 'drokuku* "; from Ig. Jezower: The Book of Dreams (Das Buch der Tra'ume), Berlin 1928, p. IX. Also, among primitives, sleep and death are closely related conceptually as well as linguistically; see F. Scherke, On the Behavior of Primitives Regarding Death (Ueber das Verhalten Primitiven zum Tode), Langensalza, 1923, p.212.
It is characteristic that Freud's psychological dream interpretation, which was based on the ideology of wish fulfillment, avoided the problem of the anxiety dream, ostensibly because this type of dream concerned the unsolved problem of neurotic anxiety. However, this anxiety corresponded to a death anxiety like that of the dream, and it precluded psychological interpretation because the dream was spiritual. Because man's wish for immortality made death incomprehensible to him as a natural phenomenon, the dream was as "causeless" as the death for which he had to find new causes at every stage of spiritual belief. In this sense, primitive man's original "explanation" of death was the most nearly correct because it was spiritual and not causal: the individual brought about his own death by insisting that his immortality be transformed into reality. The reinterpretation of this explanation in the sense of sexual ideology, which blamed sex for death, still governs our whole Western morality through the concept of sin, on which the psychoanalytic explanation of anxiety and guilt was based. Freud's attempt to subordinate the anxiety dream to the theory of wish fulfillment, which interpreted anxiety as a displaced wish, was always unsatisfactory even to Freud. Particularly because of the "death symbolism" of dreams which Stekel16 has stressed, and because of the theory of anxiety presented in my Trauma of Birth (Trauma der Geburt), this theory of wish fulfillment has become untenable..
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16 Wilhelm Stekel: The Language of the Dream (Die Sprache des Traumes), Wiesbaden, 1911.
There may be differentiated, then, two groups of dreams which the ancients' motives and "imagination" led them to differentiate in relation to their particular spiritual ideology as real and "god given," respectively, since, on the one hand,primitive man believed that while he slept his soul voluntarily left his body and visited living or dead persons and, on the other, that the souls of absent or dead persons came to him almost against his wishes. These were pleasant and unpleasant dreams, or wish- and anxiety-dreams in the psychological sense. The former reassured the dreamer that his own soul was a being independent of his body because it wandered about as it pleased; and, in reminding him of dead persons, the latter forewarned him of his mortality. Homer differentiated "light" and "dark" dreams, which corresponded to the higher and lower worlds depicted by many dreams in the Iliad. Such dreams were either divine apparitions which called upon humans to act and warned them of impending action, or human manifestations of the spirits of the dead. Therefore, these two groups of dreams were oriented respectively to the future and the present, or to the soul's immortality and mortality. An attempt to make anxiety dreams subject to the wish for an immortal soul seems recognizable in the newer idea that all dreams should be god-given and therefore prophetic, as were the dead who often appeared in dreams. "Those seeking counsel had to enter a certain temple or go to a cleft in the rocks (for example, in Pytho) whence flowed stimulating vapors, and to fall into a sleep during which certain dream apparitions offered them instruction. In place of the dark Earth goddess, Gaia, there followed later the radiant Apollo, god of light, and the inspired dreamer on whom the Delphic oracle bestowed this unique power became an important follower of the Apollonian cult/'17
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17 L. Binswanger: Changes in Dream Conceptualization and Interpretation, from the Greeks up to the Present Day (Wandlungen in der Auffassung und Dcutung des Traumes von den Griechen bis zur Gegenwart), Berlin 1928.
Thus, as Rohde has so convincinglyshown in his book Psyche, 18 the Greek spiritual cult and belief in immortality influenced both divine affairs and important worldly events. Like the primitive fast, this temple sleep, which made a seeker of counsel receptive to dreams and their interpretation, gave way during the fifth century B.C. to dream books and tables which stipulated prophecies and warnings to be drawn from dream images and symbols. This kind of dream interpretation came from Egypt, the land of mantic and death cults, and, like the longing for immortality of the soul, has survived even in current superstitions. In contrast, the scientific concern with dreams has had only a relatively short history, and has produced very few ideas not already anticipated in the spiritual approach to dreams. Aristotle 19 may be cited again, even though Hippocrates and Artemidorus20 had pointed out the relation of dreams to the dreamer's experiences, personal relations, and bodily processes. Aristotle was the first to try to give a physiology and psychology of dreams related to the sense organs, "in so far as he sought to explain dreams not as events external to man himself but as necessary manifestations of the human spirit." (Binswanger) As psychoanalysis has since tried to do, Artemidorus sought to combine psychological and symbolic dream interpretation by explaining all dreams in terms of the individual psyche instead of the gods, and it was this scientific conception which led ultimately to Freud's substitution of two kinds of interpretation for two kinds of dream. Artemidorus also distinguished between meaningful dreams, which forecast the future, and those which were meaningless, subjective in origin, and allied with actual bodily and psychic stimuli (Freud's "diurnal remnants"). But since dream content could not always be explained even in relation to a primitive world view, Artemidorus further divided meaningful dreams into those which portrayed the event as it actually would occur with the same persons in the dream, and into those which portrayed the future allegorically and required a more sophisticated interpretation. The belief that dreams which portray events according to their actual nature forbode good, clearly reflects a "psychological" interpretation of the old identity of dream and reality. On the other hand, Artemidorus was the first to group dreams systematically according to the objects which they portrayed (birth, death, sexuality, bodily members, occupation, etc.), and thus to establish a dream typology. According to Freud's own statements, these typical dreams which recur in the same or similar ways with most individuals, have opposed Freud's theory of individual analysis, just as the anxiety dream deprived him of his theory of wish fulfillment. One should not be surprised then to find old spiritual material worked over in the content of typical dreams, for whose interpretation Freud had to refer to mythology and cultural history. That the water dream symbolized birth and death, and always rescued the dreamer from an actually nonexistent danger, should of itself suffice to indicate the spiritual import of the dream in the sense of im-mortality ideology, in contrast to psychological interpretation in the sense of wish fulfillment. The reference of this type of dream to the "unconscious" wish of childhood was only a restatement of the incomprehensible soul concept in psychological terms. The dream of being nude, which Freud explained by an adult compulsion based on infantile exhibitionistic pleasure, may have a birth ("birthday clothes") as well as a death interpretation (compare the undressing of Gilgamesh upon his entrance into the nether regions); and actually the episode in the Odyssey which Freud cited by way of comparison, in which the hero awoke from his sleep naked and covered with mud in the presence of Nausicaa, was a miraculous salvation from death to a new life, such as occurred several times in the Odyssey. As elsewhere, Freud made the sexual element in this episode the sole basis for its interpretation. Thus, in the first edition of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud treated typical dreams as reproductions of the child's pleasurable sensations from swinging or rocking, but explained them later by reference to birds as sexual symbols of masculine 21 potency. Yet again, in the first edition of Interpretation of Dreams (p. 175), one encounters the dream by a four-year-old girl, in which Freud interpreted her playmates' flying away as a death symbol only because it enabled him to show the little egoist's death wish against her sister and relatives, who as angels, all flew away in her dream. Disregarding the fact that a child's normal egoism demands vehicles of play just as often as it rejects them, perhaps the deeper egoism of the dream consists of the wish that even though one were dead one would not be entirely so, and that if one had wingsone could come back to play as well as to live. Freud even comprehended the dream of the death of loved ones as a fulfillment of the death wish which was valid for oneself (1st edition, p. 172), and which he misplaced onto the weakness of childhood without resolving the resultant difficulties of the misplacement or really explaining the dream. He had to limit the death wish of the child against his elders to those of the same sex, and then to "interpret" spiritual symbols ( immortality ideology ) psychologically as jealousy in the sense of sexual ideology. He believed he had found the sanction for this interpretation in the fable of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father, married his own mother, and perished when he discovered his crime.
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18 Erwin Rohde: Psyche. Grecian Spiritual Cults and Belief in Immortality (Psyche. Seclenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen), 1893, 9th and 10th editions, Tubingen, 1925.
19 Minor scientific writings (Kleine naturwiss. Schriften), Leipzig, 1924. See especially, "Sleeping and Waking" (Vom Schlafen und Wachen), "Dreams (Von den Traumen), and "Prophetic dreams" (Von den weissagenden Traumen).
20 Artemidorus of Daldis: Symbolism of dreams (Symbolik der Traume), Translated and annotated by Fr. S. Krauss, Vienna, 1881. (Hans Licht has translated the sexual portions of this work in Volume IX of Anthropophytera. )
21 In this instance he rests on Dr. Paul Feder's interpretation of the sensation of flying as an autosymbolic representation of erection
However, this downfall of Oedipus was no more a punishment for incest and patricide than Adam's death was a punishment for sexual intercourse. It was not a "punishment" at all, but one of the numerous "causal explanations" of death, whose inevitability man could not accept and therefore wanted to deny in order to gain immortality. Only in contrast to primitives (Traveler), Oedipus did not seek immortality in the sense of belief in an individual corporeal soul as Gilgamesh and Achilles had done, by invoking the Doubles and shades of departed friends, but, in the sense of the new sexual era, by denying his father and wanting to be reborn in his mother. Like all other heroes, Oedipus died trying to achieve immortality. Freud explained this spiritual myth psychologically in terms of the so-called sexual relation of the child to his elders, in which the child wanted to possess the member of the opposite sex and therefore turned his jealous hatred against the member of the same sex. In this example we can readily detect the emergence of psychology from spiritual belief. The imminent objection that the animistic view was essentially a prescientific interpretation of the same facts which psychoanalysis has explained psychologically, breaks down in relation to the clear primacy of the immaterial and unreal. The accounts of incestuous relations among natural and civilized peoples are particularly well suited to support this view, for like primitive group relations they are social manifestations of collective spirituality, or, as in the highly developed states of the sexual era, they are the purest examples of actualization of spiritual ideology by deeds that may be found in dreams. Thus the incest dream to which the legend of Oedipus refers was not the result of repressed incestuous wishes. Instead, actual incest was the result of actualizing the dream, in which the wish was not to possess the mother but to prove the ego's ideology of spiritual immortality. The Oedipus fable belonged to a phase of the sexual era in which the individual who was striving for immortality learned that the dream could no longer be translated into reality because the ancient spiritual belief necessary to this translation had to be abandoned. The position of Sophocles in Oedipus (see p. 995 of Donner's translation), in which the mother mentioned the hero's incest dream, seems to me to support this point. "For many men see themselves associated with their mothers in their dreams. Yet whoever regards this as meaningless bears the burden of life easily." This remark was no mere consoling reference to thetypicality of the dream in question, but a warning to Oedipus to accommodate himself to the ruling ideology which no longer allowed him to make the dream true in order to substantiate spiritual belief, and suggested rather that he regard the dream as inconsequential. Oedipus answered with thehint that all would be very well if his mother had not actually been alive, i.e., had he not translated his experience into reality. In this connection it was significant that the mother, as a concrete incarnation of the sexual era, controverts the validity of this dream, which should have been the experience of a masculine dreamer. 22
Moreover, Jakaste brings the mother's point of view into relation with a general world view expressed in the Oedipus saga, 23 which incited one to live according to the manifest character of reality without 24 trying to explain it causally. The Oedipus fable allows one to show not only how physiological interpretation grew out of spiritual belief, but also how the concretely inclined ideology of the sexual era served to give psychology a biological foundation. The sexual interpretation of the Oedipus saga was not original with Freud, but was an interpretation of spiritual belief in the sense of the ideology of the sexual era. Although its deep latent meaning was spiritual, Freud tried to interpret it psychobiologically. His attempt was paradigmatic of all psychoanalysis, which has interpreted spiritual phenomena of the sexual era in psychobiological terms. There is certainly no question that such an interpretation is possible, but the complete absence of methodological separation of these various categories of differing importance has led to the formidable confusion of spiritual phenomena, biological facts, andpsychological concepts, which is evident in Freud's attempts at dream interpretation.
This is best seen in the symbolism which the psychoanalytic interpreter of dreams invokes when the dreamer's individual material fails to explain a dream, i.e., when the psychological interpretation breaks down because it fails to apply to the spiritual material which is the essence of the dream. Freud committed the same methodological error when he invoked the sexual interpretation that the symbol had acquired in the sexual era. After all, it was not Freud who first interpreted the symbol sexually, for man had already done that in the sexual era. Freud only (mis-) took this sexual interpretation for the original phenomenon, and then proceeded to interpret it psychobiologically without recognizing that he was merely rephrasing the sexualized spiritual ideology in scientific terms and was utterly failing to consider the basic spiritual phenomenon which required for its understanding something other than a sexual or psychological interpretation.
Now this psychological interpretation, which rested on the consoling ideology of "free association," had nothing to do with the dream as such, but belonged to a later discussion of psychic causality (see the last chapter, below) whose methodological status I have already questioned.25
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22 In Dawn ( Morgenrotc ) , Nietzsche erroneously ascribes this hint to the hero himself: "Wise Oedipus already knew how to take comfort in the thought that one can do nothing about his dreams."
23 Truth and Reality (Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit), p. 33. Also, "The analytic reaction" (Die analytische Reaktion), pp. 67 f.
24 Jakaste: "What needs man to fear, who depends upon chance and foresees nothing? Know only what is; to live is best: fear nought of thy mother's marriage."
25 See especially, "The analytic reaction" (Die analytische Reaktion), Second Section: "Past and present" ( Vcrgangenheit und Gegenwart), 47 ff.
And, as Freud himself admitted, the purely psychological part of his Interpretation of Dreams yielded nothing characteristic of the dream itself, but only matters of general psychological significance, such as the mechanisms of transference, condensation, symbolism, etc. In the Interpretation, and more definitely in the "Id," Freud ascribed these mechanisms to the unconscious, and so merely rephrased the spiritual psychologically. Symbolic and anxiety dreams, which resist interpretation in terms of any individual psychology of the self, show this most clearly because they can be understood only in relation to that "unconscious" which never becomes conscious, and which Jung has properly called "collective" because of its identity with the spiritual. The typical sexual symbols of serpent, mouse, and bird originally had spiritual meanings, and it was only this characteristic which made them useful in the sexual era's new ideology. Freud then biologized them, as Stekel biologized the spiritual ideology in his "death symbolism," without denying the broad aspects of the death problem. Thus psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams faced the antithesis of death and sexuality, which corresponds to the concepts of 26 but without guilt and punishment of the Fall through Sin, having first considered its underlying immortality ideology. However, all extra-symbolic materials which free association brings to light in the dream content are not unconscious but "preconscious." That is, they are individual ideas having only a psychological meaning; they are unrelated to the other-worldly, spiritual, or "divine" content which underlies consciousness, and of which there is a trace in Freud's high regard both for the "depth" of the unconscious and for the interpretation of dreams as such. However, Freud turned this depth into a superficial thing, because he interpretedin the terms of natural science psychology that which he failed to recognize as spiritual in the already concretizedform of the sexual ideology. But this psychological explanation of dreams completely failed to be an explanation because one interprets all conscious contents psychologically in the same way and not as just momentarily conscious, but as something capable of mutual involvement with any other content that can become conscious. The state of sleep, which is the single fact characteristic of the dream, remained the same for Freud as it had been for Aristotle. But just as Aristotle's original psychology of dreams found it hard to separate itself from Plato's spiritual doctrine, and just as Aristotle tried to supplant Plato's belief in the prophetic character of dreams with his own psychophysiological explanations, so in his high regard for the dream as a portrayal of the unconscious, and in spite of his own intentions, Freud came after all to honor the ancient spiritual interpretation and to invite the criticism of all natural scientists, who like Freud condemned these ancient beliefs as superstitions. The new respect for the dream was Freud's only real contribution to the dream problem, both because he rescued it from the insignificance thrust upon it by experimental and sensory-physiological psychology, and because he gave it a deep interpretation which revealed not the unconscious but only the ancient spiritual beliefs.
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26The comprehensive presentation by N. P. Williams: The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin ( London, 1927 ) attempts to show the origin of these ideas in Judaism, and traces the development which they experienced under Christianity.
Freud's other contributions had nothing to do with the nature of the dream, for they comprised a psychology derived from the dream phenomenon by interpretation, and not by an understanding of a spiritually won science. In order to substantiate this claim we should consider the significance of the Interpretation of Dreams for general psychology as well as for the development of Freudian psychology. It appears to me beyond question that the volume published in 1900 represented the standard work on psychoanalysis in a sense other than thatwhich Freud intended. I see in the Interpretation the beginning of the true Freudian psychoanalysis, which one may regard as originating historically with Breuer, as Freud averred, which actually became allied psychologically with Breuer, and which was more Freud's own personal creation than was the version of psychoanalysis appearing in his Interpretation of Dreams. Apart from its psychoanalytic significance, the psychological orientation inherent in the Interpretation of Dreams represents a decisive turning point in the development of scientific psychology, not so much by virtue of the information it provides as by the tendencies which it betrays.
By scientific criteria, the Freudian Interpretation of Dreams signifies a marked advance in the realm of subjective psychology, because it made the dreamer both the subject and object of psychological observation. The "observer" was excluded and, as Freud noted in his preface, the inner life of the person investigated was exposed to the scrutiny of outsiders to a degree yet unheard of in natural science. On the face of it, this remarkable attitude on Freud's part should have been able to disarm almost any critic, because it made Freud appear not to be placing any personal interest in an analysis of the father of psychoanalysis above the facts. But we are obliged to be more critical and to look at the Interpretation of Dreams objectively, not only because such objectivity should have been hard for its author to attain, but also because it constitutes the only way of understanding the psychoanalytic theory based on the Interpretation of Dreams, and of enabling anyone to evaluate its significance for psychological science.
We must be critical because this very personal material was used in the book to portray and establish a general scientific interpretation of dreams. As other critics have noted, this book was a greater contribution to dream interpretation than to dream analysis; 27 it was a psychology of dreams, but a psychology which at its best left dreams unexplained. The interpretation of dreams never was and never can be scientific, even when a complete psychological analysis underlies it. Interpretation is always spiritual because it has always yielded, and still yields, meanings which conform to various spiritual ideologies; and between it and psychological analysis there exists a gap which cannot be bridged for many types of dream, a gap which is inherent in the problem of the dream, and which brings a dualism to the Interpretation of Dreams which Freud tried but only failed to mask. In the foreword to the second edition of the Interpretation of Dreams ( 1909 ) Freud gave a hint of this dualism of which he was unaware when he wrote the book: "I believe it to be a part of my self-analysis and a reaction to the death of my father, which is the most significant event and the most incisive deprivation in the life of a man." With the first edition this personal insight which was mentioned so casually had already become the basis for Freud's entire psychoanalytic psychology, and it survives as such today. In this quotation Freud declared the subjective source of his psychology, just as though he had established the universality of the father complex independently of it and would now verify placidly that the theory held in his own case as well. Certainly the subjective origin of an idea does not detract from any objective validity which it may otherwise prove to have. But it is obvious that the general validity of the Freudian thesis is to be disputed. Even in psychoanalysis, daily experience shows that the death of one's father is not necessarily the most important event in the life of a man, but that it may often be an extremely minor one. I even venture to assert that the death of Freud's father was not the most important event of his life prior to his writing of the Interpretation of Dreams. The question why Freud then believed in the importance of his father's death and should have predicted it for all human experience leads us deeper into the problem of psychology than does any theoretical study of dreams. We must first relate to this belief of Freud the psychoanalytically suggested doubt whether and to what degree a person's declarations about himself approximate psychological truth. Freud's own analyses have taught us to be skeptical of these assertions which gain their most important ends by a compulsive displacement of the analysee's attention. Freud achieved this particular insight through his analyses of his own dreams, not immediately, as one might expect, but a few years later when he began to revise the book for a new edition. In the meantime he had worked the Oedipus complex which had dominated the Interpretation of Dreams into the core of his psychology, and for this reason had come to visualize the father complex also as something separate. Yet it is difficult to understand how Freud's relation to Breuer could play no essential role in such a personal volume as the Interpretation, in contrast to the banal event of a mature man losing his father whom he had spiritually long since outgrown. In fact, one may scarcely doubt which event in the life of the forty-year-old Freud was the more important: the death of his father, or his simultaneous separation from Breuer, whom he had to thank for the key to his understanding of the neurotic, and from whom he was compelled to separate in order to pursue his own development.
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27 For example, Kuno Mattenzwey: "A study in exposition and criticism of the Freudian theory of neuroses" ( Versuch zu einer Darstellung und Kritik der Freudschen Neurosenlehre ) , Zeitschr. f. Pathopsychologie, vol. 1, 1912.
I shall appeal here only to generally known facts and not go deeply into Freud's biography, since I am trying to give an analysis not of Freud, but only of his psychology and of psychology in general as an essentially projective affair, and as an individual's attempt to create his own comfort and consolation.
A detailed proof that most of Freud's dreams prior to the Interpretation of Dreams really concerned Breuer, or that they were influenced by him, would lead us too far from our theme and too deep into Freud's purely personal affairs. Moreover, I believe that every reader can use this key to the problem because the relationships are apparent even without Freud's ever having said a word about them. There is only the information that Freud counted his relation with Breuer among those permissible "discretions" which he acknowledged in his "foreword" to the first edition. But this was not very probable, because the fact of his separation from Breuer was known, and because Freud exposed a degree of intimacy inconsistent with his acknowledgment of feelings toward an old colleague that were not entirely friendly. One must either assume that Freud's dreams which stemmed from the period of his separation conflict had no role in the matter, or grant my assertion that this separation played so important a role that Freud had to deny it and substitute for it his more banal relation to his father. Freud's separation from Breuer, which really corresponded to his departure from earlier, purely medical ideals, appears to have come about gradually around 1895, with the complete break in their personal relations coming later.28 This "death" or "killing" of Breuer was a loss the reaction to which the rationalized Interpretation of Dreams displaced onto the concurrent death of Freud's father. For the moment, let us neglect the motive for this displacement, and consider the consequences which such a denial of actuality and displacement into the past must have had for Freud's theorizing. Once this displacement was introduced and Breuer had been replaced by Freud's father, whose death was identified with Freud's loss of Breuer, a motive had to be found in Freud's childhood for Freud's ostensible death wish against his father, which Freud's dream seemed to imply. This motive appeared in the fable of Oedipus, which was then built into the core both of Freud's interpretation of dreams and into the psychology he built on this interpretation. The Oedipus material also allowed the death wish against the father to unite with the desire to possess the mother sexually, and so enabled Freud to postulate the sex drive as the cause of ambitious desires. Before we pursue other implications of this view we must return to the question what should cause such a displacement from actuality to the past, both in Freud's case and in general. The answer I have is a simple one: such displacement has a therapeutic effect in the broadest sense of the word, and illustrates a wholly generalized process in mental life. Freud himself has shown that an individual's various conflicts are mutually related, and it is just these relationships which make the therapeutic effect possible. If the "guilt-father" (pater peccavi) can be displaced from the present into the past, there can be a momentary discharge of guilt feeling and an attitude of consolation and forgiveness. For Freud, the connection between actuality and the past existed for the guilt problem as well, and this connection was established in Freud's relation to Breuer as in his relation to his father without being "transferred" to Breuer. But the Interpretation of Dreams does not show a single attempt on Freud's part towant to understand and explain his relation to Breuer on the basis of his father complex, as one would expect him to do in the light of his theory; rather are Breuer and his relation to Freud absolutely nonexistent either as problems or memories. This is a complete denial which was ultimately covered up completely by the father problem. I say "denial" because psychologically it is absolutely impossible that Freud's recent memory of his painful conflict with Breuer and of their decisive separation could have become as completely erased as it would seem to have been in the Interpretation of Dreams. As I have mentioned before, this cannot be a matter of discretion on Freud's part, because he expanded it into a vital feature of the whole book. As I know, none of the citations of persons by initial letters which appear in the Interpretation of Dreams referred to Breuer; on the other hand, important roles were played by "Friend O.," a colleague to whom Freud bore obligations, and by "Friend P.," a rival colleague. But Freud was obviously blind to Breuer's point of view. So, when he wondered apropos of the "uncle dream" that he could recall only the name Joseph, of his fifth uncle ( see the note on page 96 of the first edition), or the dream non vixit (241 ff ) which betrays Breuer's "killing" most clearly ( Freud turned it into non vivit ) , he was brought back to Kaiser Joseph Street. Freudhimself observed the frequent appearance of the name Joseph in the Interpretation of Dreams, but explained it by its identification with Pharaoh's dream interpreter, and not in relation to the fact that he had put himself in the place of his friend Joseph Breuer. 29
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28 It would not even be unlikely that the death of Freud's father in 1896 had hastened or even effected his final step toward independence
.29 I suppose that Freud's interest in forgetting, following his separation from Breuer and during his occupation with the Interpretation of Dreams, was connected with the displacement of Breuer from his memory. In the first example (1898), in Freud's Pst/chopathology of everyday life (Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens ) , Freud was unable to recall the name of the Italian painter Signorelli, and obtained instead two substitutes, each of which began with the letter B. ( "Sigm." is the abbreviation Freud used for his given name.) False recollection appeared concerning a traveler whom Freud accompanied on part of a journey, and, as Freud confessed, this recollection was concerned with compulsive thoughts of death.
