Dream Psychology

invite us again? You always have such a good table."

Now the meaning of the dream is clear. I may say to the patient: "It is
just as though you had thought at the time of the request: 'Of course,
I'll invite you, so you can eat yourself fat at my house and become
still more pleasing to my husband. I would rather give no more suppers.'
The dream then tells you that you cannot give a supper, thereby
fulfilling your wish not to contribute anything to the rounding out of
your friend's figure. The resolution of your husband to refuse
invitations to supper for the sake of getting thin teaches you that one
grows fat on the things served in company." Now only some conversation
is necessary to confirm the solution. The smoked salmon in the dream has
not yet been traced. "How did the salmon mentioned in the dream occur to
you?" "Smoked salmon is the favorite dish of this friend," she answered.
I happen to know the lady, and may corroborate this by saying that she
grudges herself the salmon just as much as my patient grudges herself
the caviare.

The dream admits of still another and more exact interpretation, which
is necessitated only by a subordinate circumstance. The two
interpretations do not contradict one another, but rather cover each
other and furnish a neat example of the usual ambiguity of dreams as
well as of all other psychopathological formations. We have seen that at
the same time that she dreams of the denial of the wish, the patient is
in reality occupied in securing an unfulfilled wish (the caviare
sandwiches). Her friend, too, had expressed a wish, namely, to get
fatter, and it would not surprise us if our lady had dreamt that the
wish of the friend was not being fulfilled. For it is her own wish that
a wish of her friend's--for increase in weight--should not be fulfilled.
Instead of this, however, she dreams that one of her own wishes is not
fulfilled. The dream becomes capable of a new interpretation, if in the
dream she does not intend herself, but her friend, if she has put
herself in the place of her friend, or, as we may say, has identified
herself with her friend.

I think she has actually done this, and as a sign of this identification
she has created an unfulfilled wish in reality. But what is the meaning
of this hysterical identification? To clear this up a thorough
exposition is necessary. Identification is a highly important factor in
the mechanism of hysterical symptoms; by this means patients are enabled
in their symptoms to represent not merely their own experiences, but the
experiences of a great number of other persons, and can suffer, as it
were, for a whole mass of people, and fill all the parts of a drama by
means of their own personalities alone. It will here be objected that
this is well-known hysterical imitation, the ability of hysteric
subjects to copy all the symptoms which impress them when they occur in
others, as though their pity were stimulated to the point of
reproduction. But this only indicates the way in which the psychic
process is discharged in hysterical imitation; the way in which a
psychic act proceeds and the act itself are two different things. The
latter is slightly more complicated than one is apt to imagine the
imitation of hysterical subjects to be: it corresponds to an unconscious
concluded process, as an example will show. The physician who has a
female patient with a particular kind of twitching, lodged in the
company of other patients in the same room of the hospital, is not
surprised when some morning he learns that this peculiar hysterical
attack has found imitations. He simply says to himself: The others have
seen her and have done likewise: that is psychic infection. Yes, but
psychic infection proceeds in somewhat the following manner: As a rule,
patients know more about one another than the physician knows about each
of them, and they are concerned about each other when the visit of the
doctor is over. Some of them have an attack to-day: soon it is known
among the rest that a letter from home, a return of lovesickness or the
like, is the cause of it. Their sympathy is aroused, and the following
syllogism, which does not reach consciousness, is completed in them: "If
it is possible to have this kind of an attack from such causes, I too
may have this kind of an attack, for I have the same reasons." If this
were a cycle capable of becoming conscious, it would perhaps express
itself in _fear_ of getting the same attack; but it takes place in
another psychic sphere, and, therefore, ends in the realization of the
dreaded symptom. Identification is therefore not a simple imitation, but
a sympathy based upon the same etiological claim; it expresses an "as
though," and refers to some common quality which has remained in the
unconscious.

Identification is most often used in hysteria to express sexual
community. An hysterical woman identifies herself most readily--although
not exclusively--with persons with whom she has had sexual relations, or
who have sexual intercourse with the same persons as herself. Language
takes such a conception into consideration: two lovers are "one." In the
hysterical phantasy, as well as in the dream, it is sufficient for the
identification if one thinks of sexual relations, whether or not they
become real. The patient, then, only follows the rules of the hysterical
thought processes when she gives expression to her jealousy of her
friend (which, moreover, she herself admits to be unjustified, in that
she puts herself in her place and identifies herself with her by
creating a symptom--the denied wish). I might further clarify the
process specifically as follows: She puts herself in the place of her
friend in the dream, because her friend has taken her own place relation
to her husband, and because she would like to take her friend's place in
the esteem of her husband[2].

The contradiction to my theory of dreams in the case of another female
patient, the most witty among all my dreamers, was solved in a simpler
manner, although according to the scheme that the non-fulfillment of one
wish signifies the fulfillment of another. I had one day explained to
her that the dream is a wish of fulfillment. The next day she brought me
a dream to the effect that she was traveling with her mother-in-law to
their common summer resort. Now I knew that she had struggled violently
against spending the summer in the neighborhood of her mother-in-law. I