Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/403

Rh was a year older than I. In these he had the upper hand, and I early learned how to defend myself; we lived together inseparably, loved each other, and at the same time, as statements of older persons testify, scuffled with and accused each other. In a certain sense all my friends are incarnations of this first figure, "which early appeared to my blurred sight"; they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned in the years of adolescence, and then we acted Cæsar and Brutus. An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person, not simultaneously, of course, nor in repeated alterations, as had been the case in my first childhood years.

I do not here wish to trace the manner in which a recent occasion for emotion may reach back to one in childhood—through connections like these I have just described—in order to find a substitute for itself, in this earlier occasion for the sake of increased emotional effect. Such an investigation would belong to the psychology of the unconscious, and would find its place in a psychological explanation of neuroses. Let us assume for the purposes of dream interpretation that a childhood recollection makes its appearance or is formed by the fancy, say to the following effect: Two children get into a fight on account of some object—just what we shall leave undecided, although memory or an allusion of memory has a very definite one in mind—and each one claims that he got to it first, and that he, therefore, has first right to it. They come to blows, for might makes right; and, according to the intimation of the dream, I must have known that I was in the wrong (noticing the error myself), but this time I remain the stronger and take possession of the battlefield; the defeated combatant hurries to my father, his grandfather, and accuses me, and I defend myself with the words which I know from my father: "I hit him because he hit me." Thus this recollection, or more probably fancy, which forces itself upon my attention in the course of the analysis—from my present knowledge I myself do not know how—becomes an intermediary of the dream thoughts that collects the emotional 2 B