Dreams in Folklore

Sigmund Freud, D. E. Oppenheim, A. M. O. Richards

• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789124972
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

David Ernst Oppenheim, a classics scholar and professor of Greek and Latin at a Vienna school, had begun pursuing an interest in the interrelatedness of mythology, folklore and psychoanalytic concepts, and attended lectures given by Freud in 1906. In 1909, he sent to Freud a paper he had written about mythology in which he revealed a knowledge of psychoanalysis. He was subsequently invited to join Freud's Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1910, where he gave talks on the fire as a sexual symbol and on suicides at school age.The manuscript for Dreams in Folklore, to which Oppenheim contributed the folklore and Freud the commentary, was written in 1911. It remained in the possession of his family, before finally being published in 1958.Along with the English translation of a letter from Freud to Oppenheim, and the manuscript itself, Dreams in Folklore also includes the complete original paper in German, "Träume im Folklore."

PART I—DREAMS IN FOLKLORE

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

The existence of this paper, written jointly by Freud and Professor D. E. Oppenheim of Vienna, had been totally overlooked until the summer of 1956, when Mrs. Liffman, Oppenheim’s daughter, then living in Australia, brought it to the notice of a New York bookseller. Soon afterwards the manuscript was acquired on behalf of the Sigmund Freud Archives by Dr. Bernard L. Pacella, and it is through his generosity, and with the unfailing help of Dr. K. R. Eissler, the Secretary of the Archives, that we are now able to publish it for the first time. The German original is included in this volume.

David Ernst Oppenheim, Freud’s collaborator in this paper, was born at Brünn, in what is now Czechoslovakia, in 1881. He was a classical scholar and became professor at the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna, where he taught Greek and Latin. Dr. Ernest Jones (Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. II) mentions him among those who attended Freud’s University lectures in 1906; but his acquaintance with Freud apparently dates only from 1909. In the autumn of that year he seems to have sent Freud a copy of a paper dealing with classical mythology in a way which showed a knowledge of psychoanalytic literature, for a letter of Freud’s has survived (dated October 28, 1909) thanking him for it in very warm terms and suggesting that he should bring his knowledge of the classics into the service of psychoanalytic studies.{3} The outcome was evidently his association with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, of which (again according to Jones, loc. cit.) he became a member in 1910. On April 20 of that year he opened a symposium in the Vienna Society on suicide (particularly among schoolboys), which was published in the form of a brochure (1910). Oppenheim’s contribution will be found there under the signature “Unus Multorum,” but it was reprinted under his own name some years later in a collective work Heilen und Bilden, edited by Adler and Furtmüller (1914). The published minutes of the Vienna Society show that he read three “short communications” during 1910 and 1911, the first of which, on “Folklore Material Bearing upon Dream Symbolism” (November 16, 1910) has an evident relation to the present work. In the spring of 1911 Freud brought out the third edition of The Interpretation of Dreams and in this he inserted a footnote at the very end of the book, mentioning Oppenheim’s work in connection with dreams in folklore and stating that a paper on the subject was shortly to appear (Standard Ed., 5, 621). The footnote was omitted in all later editions. This omission, as well as the disappearance of the present paper, is no doubt accounted for by the fact that soon afterwards Oppenheim became an adherent of Adler’s and, along with five other members, resigned from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on October 11, 1911. He died during the Second World War in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, in which both he and his wife were interned. After the war his wife emigrated to Australia, taking with her the manuscript, which she had been able to preserve. In accordance with her wishes, its publication was withheld until after her own death.

It is possible to date Freud’s share in this paper within fairly narrow limits. It cannot have been written before the early part of 1911, as is shown by a reference in it to Stekel’s Die Sprache des Traumes which was published toward the beginning of that year (p. 49); and it must have been completed before the final breach with Adler the same summer.

Though the manuscript as we now possess it has had no final revision by its authors, it in fact calls for very little editorial tidying up, and it gives us a clear means of judging the share taken in it by its two authors. The raw material was evidently collected by Oppenheim. This was largely derived from the periodical Anthropophyteia (Leipzig, 1904-1913), edited by F. S. Krauss, in which Freud had always taken a special interest.{4} (Cf. his open letter to its editor, 1910, and his preface to Bourke’s Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, 1913, which is particularly relevant to the present paper.) Oppenheim copied out this material, partly in typescript and partly by hand (adding a very few short remarks), and submitted it to Freud, who then arranged it in an appropriate sequence, pasted Oppenheim’s sheets on to much larger sheets of his own, and interpolated them with a profuse commentary. Freud must then have returned the whole manuscript to Oppenheim, who seems once more to have added two or three further notes (some of them in shorthand).

In the version printed below, therefore, the contributions made by the two authors are automatically distinguished, if we leave out of account any previous interchange of views. All the “raw material,” printed here in somewhat smaller type, is to be attributed to Oppenheim; Freud is responsible for everything else—the introduction, the commentaries, the conclusion, and the whole arrangement of the material. The only change made by the editor has been to transfer the references from the body of the text to the footnotes. Oppenheim’s very few marginal remarks have also been printed as footnotes, with their authorship specified. Some of these, however, have unfortunately become illegible.

No attempt has been made in the translation to reproduce the various dialects in which many of the original stories are written. A conventional idiom has been adopted, of a kind usually associated with folk tales. The references have been checked wherever possible, and a number of errors in them corrected. Editorial comments are printed in square brackets.

J. S.

DREAMS IN FOLKLORE

“CELSI PRAETEREUNT AUSTERA POEMATA RAMNES.”

PERSIUS, Satirae{5}

One of us (O.) in his studies of folklore has made two observations with regard to the dreams narrated there which seem to him worth communicating. Firstly, that the symbolism employed in these dreams coincides completely with that accepted by psychoanalysis, and secondly, that a number of these dreams are understood by the common people in the same way as they would be interpreted by psychoanalysis—that is, not as premonitions about a still unrevealed future, but as the fulfillment of wishes, the satisfaction of needs which arise during the state of sleep. Certain peculiarities of these, usually indecent, dreams, which are told as comic anecdotes, have encouraged the second of us (Fr.) to attempt an interpretation of them which has made them seem more serious and more deserving of attention.

I—PENIS SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS OCCURRING IN FOLKLORE

The dream which we introduce first, although it contains no symbolic representations, sounds almost like ridicule of the prophetic and a plea in favor of the psychological interpretation of dreams.

A DREAM INTERPRETATION{6}

A girl got up from her bed and told her mother that she had had a most strange dream.

“Well, what did you dream, then?” asked her mother.

“How shall I tell you? I don’t know myself what it was—some sort of long and red and blunted thing.”

“Long means a road,” said her mother reflectively, “a long road; red means joy, but I don’t know what blunted can mean.”

The girl’s father, who was getting dressed meanwhile, and was listening to everything that the mother and daughter were saying, muttered at this, more or less to himself: “It sounds rather like my cock.”{7}

It is very much more convenient to study dream symbolism in folklore than in actual dreams. Dreams are obliged to conceal things and only surrender their secrets to interpretation; these comic anecdotes, however, which are disguised as dreams, are intended as communications, meant to give pleasure to the person who tells them as well as to the listener, and therefore the interpretation is added quite unashamedly to the symbol. These stories delight in stripping off the veiling symbols.

In the following quatrain the penis appears as a scepter:

Last night I dreamt

I was King of the land,

And how jolly I was

With a prick in my hand.{8}

Now compare with this “dream” the following examples in which the same symbolism is employed outside a dream.

I love a little lass

The prettiest I’ve seen,

I’ll put a scepter in your hand

And you shall be a queen.{9}

“Remember, my boy,” said Napoleon,

The Emperor of renown,

“So long as the prick is the scepter

The cunt will be the crown.”{10}

A different variant of this symbolic exaltation of the genitals is favored in the imagination of artists. A fine etching by Félicien Rops,{11} bearing the title “Tout est grand chez les rois” [“Everything about kings is great”], shows the naked figure of a king with the features of the Roi Soleil [Louis XIV], whose gigantic penis, which rises to arm level, itself wears a crown. The right hand balances a scepter, while the left clasps a large orb, which by reason of a central cleft achieves an unmistakable resemblance to another part of the body which is the object of erotic desires.{12} The index finger of the left hand is inserted into this groove.

In the Silesian folksong that follows, the dream is only invented in order to hide a different occurrence. The penis appears here as a worm (“fat earthworm”), which has crawled into the girl, and at the right time crawls out again as a little worm (baby).{13}

SONG OF THE EARTHWORM{14}

Asleep on the grass one day a young lass

Susanna of passion was dreaming,

A soft smile did play around her nose as she lay

While she thought of her swain and his scheming.

Then—dream full of fear!—it swift did appear

That her lover so handsome and charming

Had become as she slept a fat earthworm which crept

Right inside. What could be more alarming?

Full of dread in her heart she awoke with a start

And swift to the village she hied her

And tearfully told all the folk young and old

That an earthworm had crawled up inside her.

Her wailing and tears came at last to the ears

Of her mother who cursed and swore roundly;

With bodings of gloom she repaired to her room

And examined the maiden most soundly.

For the earthworm she sought, but alas! could find nought—

An unfortunate thing which dismayed her.

So ...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE BY BERNARD L. PACELLA
• LETTER FROM SIGMUND FREUD TO D. E. OPPENHEIM
• BRIEF VON SIGMUND FREUD AN D. E. OPPENHEIM
• PART I-DREAMS IN FOLKLORE
• PART II-TRÄUME IM FOLKLORE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER