horse

In Freud’s discussion of dreams, the horse is a mobile and multiply determined image: it can carry traces of childhood memory, an adult dreamer’s personal history, physical discomfort, and professional conflict. Its significance does not come from a fixed symbolic meaning alone. In the examples Freud presents, the horse changes function as associations accumulate, showing how a dream can turn bodily experience and recollection into an image that both disguises and expresses psychic concerns.

A patient’s dream of falling

An elderly woman dreams that she is hurrying out to shop when she collapses on the Graben in Vienna. Cab-drivers and other people gather, but no one helps her rise. After repeated attempts, she is put into a cab, and a large, heavily laden basket is thrown in after her through a window. The episode brings together a horse’s fall, a woman’s own fall, and memories of people who had fallen or pleaded for help; the horse is one strand in that dense chain of associations, rather than the dream’s only subject.

Freud connects the dream’s opening to the sight of a fallen horse and its collapse to a horse-race. The dreamer had once been a horsewoman, and the image also reaches back to an early memory involving a caretaker’s seventeen-year-old son, who had suffered convulsions in the street and been taken home in a carriage. She had heard about the incident rather than witnessed it, but the idea of someone falling acquired a powerful hold on her imagination and later influenced the form of her hysterical attacks. In Freud’s reading, the horse’s fall thus participates in a sequence in which an early report becomes an enduring image, then returns in a dream and in the dreamer’s bodily symptoms.

The dream’s remaining details extend that sequence into adult experience. Freud interprets the woman’s fall on the Graben through the site’s association with prostitution, and the basket through her memories of rejecting suitors and feeling rejected in turn. It also evokes a fantasy of marrying beneath her station and having to shop for herself. The basket can further stand for a servant, bringing back recollections of a cook dismissed for theft and a housemaid dismissed after a relationship with the household coachman. The coachman’s occupation supplies Freud with an association for the cab-drivers in the dream, who, unlike the remembered man who later married the housemaid, refuse to help the fallen woman. The horse’s fall is therefore embedded in a network of childhood, social, and personal meanings rather than functioning as a simple emblem.

Freud’s dream of riding

Freud describes a dream in which he rides a grey horse. At first he is timid and awkward, as if merely holding on; then he meets a colleague, P., mounted high in the saddle and warning him, perhaps that his seat is poor. Gradually Freud becomes comfortable on what he calls a highly intelligent horse. A cushion fills the space between the horse’s neck and hindquarters as a makeshift saddle, and horse and rider pass between two heavy wagons. Freud later turns to dismount near a small chapel with an open door, then reaches a hotel in the same street. Although he could let the horse continue alone, he prefers to lead it, and feels ashamed at the thought of arriving at the hotel on horseback. A hotel-boy shows him a note underlined twice, bearing the words “Nothing to eat” and a second, unclear instruction resembling “No work”; Freud also has the vague sense of being in a strange town where he is doing no work.

The dream arose during a painful illness. The previous day Freud had suffered from boils that made movement difficult, including one at the base of the scrotum that had become as large as an apple and caused severe pain with each step. Fatigue, lack of appetite, continued work, and pain combined to distress him. Although he felt unfit to practise medicine, the condition’s nature and location brought to mind an activity for which he would have been even less fit: riding. The dream gives him precisely that activity, turning the horse into an emphatic contradiction of the complaint. Freud notes that he could not in reality ride and had sat on a horse only once, without a saddle and without enjoyment; in the dream, he rides because he does not want to have the painful condition.

Freud interprets the improvised saddle as the poultice that had enabled him to sleep. As pain began to make itself felt, the dream presented an incompatible scene of riding and so helped him remain asleep. In his account, it effectively reassured him that he could go on sleeping because a person with the complaint could not be riding. The dream did not remove the physical condition; it temporarily represented its opposite, numbing the pain sufficiently for Freud to continue sleeping. The horse is therefore at once a dream image and part of the dream’s response to an external bodily stimulus.

Associations and professional rivalry

The horse also connects the bodily situation to Freud’s relations with P. Its grey colour matches the pepper-and-salt-coloured suit P. had worn when Freud last saw him in the country. Freud links the suggested use of highly spiced food as a cause of boils to this image, preferring that explanation to one involving sugar. These associations make the horse’s colour more than scenery: it is a point where the dream’s physical occasion and a recollection of the colleague meet.

Freud further associates riding high with P.’s tendency to act superior after taking over a woman patient whom Freud had treated. The horse stands symbolically for that patient, whom Freud calls highly intelligent; the dream’s sense of being at home on the horse recalls Freud’s former position in her household before P. replaced him. A recent remark from one of Freud’s few well-wishers among the city’s leading physicians—that he had thought Freud was firmly in the saddle in that connection—provides another verbal bridge between professional standing and riding. Freud also relates the awkward, crosswise way he first sits on the horse to his own therapeutic “feats,” through a word association with the circus-rider. The sequence lets the horse carry both the wishful image of mastery and the memory of having been displaced by a colleague.

The horse within dream-work

Freud’s interpretation does not end with the immediate bodily and professional associations. He reads the hotel note, with its phrases about having nothing to eat and no work, as alluding to the possibility that his painful condition could prevent him from continuing his demanding work. The dream also draws on childhood quarrels with a nephew only a year older than Freud, who was then living in England, and on travel impressions from Italy: the dream street combines memories of Verona and Siena. Further interpretation leads Freud to sexual dream-thoughts and to a verbal association between Italy and the genitals, as well as back to the house where he had practised before P. and the place where the boil was located.

These accumulating connections illustrate Freud’s account of dream-work: one dream element can join multiple recollections and concerns, while the dream’s scene offers a way to represent material that cannot appear directly in waking thought. The horse begins as an image that denies pain, but also links that denial to the poultice, P.’s clothing and professional position, the patient Freud had lost, his work, childhood conflict, and travel memories. Its meanings are not presented as a universal code. They arise from the particular associations Freud supplies, making the horse a compact meeting point between physical stimulus and psychic history.