Wish-fulfilment through non-fulfilment

Wish-fulfilment through non-fulfilment names a paradox at the heart of the dream theory developed here: a dream can seem to frustrate a wish while satisfying another one through that very frustration. A dinner party that cannot be given, a summer journey the dreamer had successfully avoided, and a wish that an analyst be mistaken all show how an apparent denial can carry a positive, if disguised, outcome. The examples also insist that interpretation must proceed through the dreamer’s associations: its surface logic alone cannot disclose whose wish is being refused, or why.

The dinner-party dream and its first interpretation

The first dream belongs to a patient who describes a thwarted plan: she intends to give a dinner party, but has only smoked salmon in the house; the shops are shut on Sunday afternoon, and the telephone is out of order. She must abandon the party. On its face, the dream is coherent and seems to represent the opposite of wish-fulfilment. The interpretation therefore turns away from the surface scene and asks what happened the previous day.

Her husband, a wholesale butcher whom she describes as worthy and capable, had resolved to lose weight. He intended to rise early, exercise, follow a strict diet, and, above all, accept no more dinner invitations. The patient also recounts his encounter with a painter who wanted to paint his expressive head. Her husband replied coarsely that the painter would prefer a piece of a pretty young woman’s backside to his face. She says she is very much in love with him and teases him. She has also asked him not to give her caviare.

That request is a deliberately maintained frustration in waking life. For a long time she has wanted a bread-roll with caviare each morning, but has begrudged the expense. Her husband would readily have provided it if she had asked; instead, she asked him not to, so that she could continue teasing him about the denied treat. The analyst finds this explanation insufficient on its own. As in Bernheim’s examples of post-hypnotic instructions, a stated reason may be an inadequate explanation concealing a motive the person has not acknowledged. The patient’s real-life wish for caviare is refused by design, while the dream likewise presents a wish that cannot be fulfilled. The question becomes not only what is denied, but why she needs a denial.

Further associations bring in a friend of whom the patient is jealous because her husband praises her. The friend is very thin, whereas the husband prefers a buxom figure. During a visit the previous day, the friend had spoken of wanting to put on weight and had asked when the patient would invite them to eat at her home again, praising the food. The dream’s blocked dinner party can now be read as the patient’s wish not to feed the friend and thereby help her become more attractive to the husband. The husband’s new resolve to avoid dinner invitations supplies a further link: social meals are associated with gaining weight. The smoked salmon, initially unexplained, is the friend’s favourite dish; the patient confirms that the friend likes it as much as she herself likes caviare.

A second meaning: identification and jealousy

The dinner-party dream does not have only one interpretation. Its second meaning arises from the contrast between the patient’s own refused caviare and the friend’s wish to gain weight. The patient may dream not of herself but of her friend: she puts herself in the friend’s place, or identifies with her. On this reading, the dream depicts the friend’s wish as unfulfilled, while presenting the frustration as the patient’s own. The patient’s deliberate creation of a denied wish in waking life provides, in the account’s interpretation, an indication of that identification.

The two readings are compatible. In one, the patient’s wish is that her friend not be made plumper by the food at the dinner party. In the other, she represents the friend’s unfulfilled wish by dreaming that she herself cannot give the party. The wish that fails in the manifest scene is therefore not evidence against wish-fulfilment: the refusal can satisfy the dreamer’s wish that another person be frustrated, while the displacement of identity lets that wish appear in another form.

The account connects this process to identification in hysteria. It distinguishes identification from mere imitation: imitation reproduces symptoms observed in another person, whereas identification allows a patient to express, through her own symptoms, experiences belonging to many people and to take on roles within a drama using her own resources. It adds that sexual relations are especially frequent points of identification in hysteria, though they are not the only ones; even the thought of sexual relations can be sufficient, without an assumption that they have occurred. In the dinner-party example, the patient’s acknowledged, if unjustified, jealousy is expressed by taking the friend’s place in the dream. The friend is imagined as wishing to occupy the patient’s place in her husband’s affections, and the dream turns that rivalry into an exchange of positions.

The mother-in-law dream and the analyst’s error

A second patient offers a more direct challenge to the theory. After being told that dreams fulfil wishes, she returns the next day with a dream in which she is travelling with her mother-in-law to a country house they are to share. The analyst already knows that she has strongly resisted spending the summer with her mother-in-law and has recently succeeded in avoiding the arrangement by renting a country house far from her mother-in-law’s residence. The dream appears to undo the solution she wanted: it puts her back into the very companionship she had escaped.

The interpretation turns the apparent reversal into a wish directed at the analyst. According to the dream, his theory is wrong; therefore, the patient wishes that he be wrong, and the dream fulfils that wish. But the wish to disprove him is not the whole explanation. It attaches to a more serious matter in her illness. Analysis had led him to infer that something important had happened to her during a particular period of her life. She denied it because she could remember nothing. Further work showed that the analyst’s inference was correct. The dream’s wish that he be mistaken thus also expresses a justified wish that the suspected events had never taken place. The dream can stage a wish for the analyst’s failure while carrying, beneath it, the more consequential wish that a painful past were unreal.

Rivalry, reversal, and the limits of the surface

The account also gives a school-era example, though it is explicitly an interpretation by supposition rather than the result of analysis. A lawyer who had attended the analyst’s lecture on dreams as wish-fulfilments later dreams that he has lost all his cases. The analyst jokes that nobody wins every case, but privately wonders whether the dream revives a school rivalry: he had been top of the class for eight years, while his former fellow-pupil stood somewhere in the middle. The apparent professional disaster might fulfil the friend’s old wish that the analyst make a thorough fool of himself. Because this reading is conjectural, it illustrates a possible application of the mechanism rather than establishing a confirmed interpretation.

Across these cases, the dream’s surface outcome and its underlying wish need not point in the same direction. Failure may be the form in which a wish appears when the desired frustration belongs to a rival; an unwanted reunion may express the dreamer’s wish to overturn the analyst’s claim, while also concealing a wish that suspected events had not occurred. The examples therefore make interpretation dependent on associations and context, not on treating the manifest misfortune as a transparent statement of desire. They also preserve a limit: the dinner-party interpretations are presented as mutually compatible, while the lawyer’s dream is offered only as a possibility. Non-fulfilment is not a license to assign any hidden wish; the proposed meaning must be supported by the dreamer’s circumstances and the associations that connect the dream’s details to them.