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The Interpretation of Dreams
Translated by A. A. Brill (1913)
Originally publish in New York by Macmillan.
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contents:
Preface
Chapter 1 (part 1, 2) The Scientific Literature of Dream-Problems (up to
1900)
Chapter 2 The Method
of Dream Interpretation
Chapter 3 The Dream as
Wish Fulfilment
Chapter 4 Distortion
in Dreams
Chapter 5 (part 1, 2) The
Material and Sources of Dreams
Chapter 6 (part 1,
2, 3, 4) The
Dream-Work
Chapter 7 (part 1, 2)
The Psychology of the Dream Process
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CHAPTER 7 (part 1)
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM PROCESSES
Among the dreams which have been communicated to me by others, there is
one which is at this point especially worthy of our attention. It was
told me by a female patient who had heard it related in a lecture on
dreams. Its original source is unknown to me. This dream evidently made
a deep impression upon the lady, since she went so far as to imitate it,
i.e., to repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own; in
order, by this transference, to express her agreement with a certain
point in the dream.
The preliminary conditions of this typical dream were as follows: A
father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child.
After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left
the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where
the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had
been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers.
After sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was
standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: "Father,
don't you see that I am burning?" The father woke up and noticed a
bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that
the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved
body were burnt by a fallen candle.
The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and the
explanation given by the lecturer, as my patient reported it, was
correct. The bright light shining through the open door on to the
sleeper's eyes gave him the impression which he would have received had
he been awake: namely, that a fire had been started near the corpse by a
falling candle. It is quite possible that he had taken into his sleep
his anxiety lest the aged watcher should not be equal to his task.
We can find nothing to change in this interpretation; we can only add
that the content of the dream must be overdetermined, and that the
speech of the child must have consisted of phrases which it had uttered
while still alive, and which were associated with important events for
the father. Perhaps the complaint, "I am burning," was associated with
the fever from which the child died, and "Father, don't you see?" to
some other affective occurrence unknown to us.
Now, when we have come to recognize that the dream has meaning, and
can be fitted into the context of psychic events, it may be surprising
that a dream should have occurred in circumstances which called for such
an immediate waking. We shall then note that even this dream is not
lacking in a wish-fulfilment. The dead child behaves as though alive; he
warns his father himself; he comes to his father's bed and clasps his
arm, as he probably did in the recollection from which the dream
obtained the first part of the child's speech. It was for the sake of
this wish- fulfilment that the father slept a moment longer. The dream
was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show
the child still living. If the father had waked first, and had then
drawn the conclusion which led him into the adjoining room, he would
have shortened the child's life by this one moment.
There can be no doubt about the peculiar features in this brief dream
which engage our particular interest. So far, we have endeavoured mainly
to ascertain wherein the secret meaning of the dream consists, how it is
to be discovered, and what means the dream-work uses to conceal it. In
other words, our greatest interest has hitherto been centered on the
problems of interpretation. Now, however, we encounter a dream which is
easily explained, and the meaning of which is without disguise; we note
that nevertheless this dream preserves the essential characteristics
which conspicuously differentiate a dream from our waking thoughts, and
this difference demands an explanation. It is only when we have disposed
of all the problems of interpretation that we feel how incomplete is our
psychology of dreams.
But before we turn our attention to this new path of investigation,
let us stop and look back, and consider whether we have not overlooked
something important on our way hither. For we must understand that the
easy and comfortable part of our journey lies behind us. Hitherto, all
the paths that we have followed have led, if I mistake not, to light, to
explanation, and to full understanding; but from the moment when we seek
to penetrate more deeply into the psychic processes in dreaming, all
paths lead into darkness. It is quite impossible to explain the dream as
a psychic process, for to explain means to trace back to the known, and
as yet we have no psychological knowledge to which we can refer such
explanatory fundamentals as may be inferred from the psychological
investigation of dreams. On the contrary, we shall be compelled to
advance a number of new assumptions, which do little more than
conjecture the structure of the psychic apparatus and the play of the
energies active in it; and we shall have to be careful not to go too far
beyond the simplest logical construction, since otherwise its value will
be doubtful. And even if we should be unerring in our inferences, and
take cognizance of all the logical possibilities, we should still be in
danger of arriving at a completely mistaken result, owing to the
probable incompleteness of the preliminary statement of our elementary
data. We shall not he able to arrive at any conclusions as to the
structure and function of the psychic instrument from even the most
careful investigation of dreams, or of any other isolated activity; or,
at all events, we shall not be able to confirm our conclusions. To do
this we shall have to collate such phenomena as the comparative study of
a whole series of psychic activities proves to be reliably constant. So
that the psychological assumptions which we base on the analysis of the
dream-processes will have to mark time, as it were, until they can join
up with the results of other investigations which, proceeding from
another starting-point, will seek to penetrate to the heart of the same
problem.
A. The Forgetting of Dreams
I propose, then, that we shall first of all turn our attention to a
subject which brings us to a hitherto disregarded objection, which
threatens to undermine the very foundation of our efforts at
dream-interpretation. The objection has been made from more than one
quarter that the dream which we wish to interpret is really unknown to
us, or, to be more precise, that we have no guarantee that we know it as
it really occurred.
What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our methods of
interpretation, is, in the first place, mutilated by the unfaithfulness
of our memory, which seems quite peculiarly incapable of retaining
dreams, and which may have omitted precisely the most significant parts
of their content. For when we try to consider our dreams attentively, we
often have reason to complain that we have dreamed much than we
remember; that unfortunately we know nothing more than this one
fragment, and that our recollection of even this fragment seems to us
strangely uncertain. Moreover, everything goes to prove that our memory
reproduces the dream not only incompletely but also untruthfully, in a
falsifying manner. As, on the one hand, we may doubt whether what we
dreamed was really as disconnected as it is in our recollections, so on
the other hand we may doubt whether a dream was really as coherent as
our account of it; whether in our attempted reproduction we have not
filled in the gaps which really existed, or those which are due to
forgetfulness, with new and arbitrarily chosen material; whether we have
not embellished the dream, rounded it off and corrected it, so that any
conclusion as to its real content becomes impossible. Indeed, one writer
(Spitta)[1] surmises that all that is orderly and coherent is really
first put into the dream during the attempt to recall it. Thus we are in
danger of being deprived of the very object whose value we have
undertaken to determine.
In all our dream-interpretations we have hitherto ignored these
warnings. On the contrary, indeed, we have found that the smallest, most
insignificant, and most uncertain components of the dream-content
invited interpretations no less emphatically than those which were
distinctly and certainly contained in the dream. In the dream of Irma's
injection we read: "I quickly called in Dr. M," and we assumed that even
this small addendum would not have got into the dream if it had not been
susceptible of a special derivation. In this way we arrived at the
history of that unfortunate patient to whose bedside I quickly called my
older colleague. In the seemingly absurd dream which treated the
difference between fifty-one and fifty-six as a quantity negligible the
number fifty-one was mentioned repeatedly. Instead of regarding this as
a matter of course, or a detail of indifferent value, we proceeded from
this to a second train of thought in the latent dream-content, which led
to the number fifty-one, and by following up this clue we arrived at the
fears which proposed fifty-one years as the term of life in the sharpest
opposition to a dominant train of thought which was boastfully lavish of
the years. In the dream Non vixit I found, as an insignificant
interpolation, that I had at first overlooked the sentence: As P does
not understand him, Fl asks me, etc. The interpretation then coming to a
standstill, I went back to these words, and I found through them the way
to the infantile phantasy which appeared in the dream-thoughts as an
intermediate point of junction. This came about by means of the poet's
verses:
Selten habt ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden
So verstanden wir uns gleich![2]
Every analysis will afford evidence of the fact that the most
insignificant features of the dream are indispensable to interpretation,
and will show how the completion of the task is delayed if we postpone
our examination of them. We have given equal attention, in the
interpretation of dreams, to every nuance of verbal expression found in
them; indeed, whenever we are confronted by a senseless or insufficient
wording, as though we had failed to translate the dream into the proper
version, we have respected even these defects of expression. In brief,
what other writers have regarded as arbitrary improvisations, concocted
hastily to avoid confusion, we have treated like a sacred text. This
contradiction calls for explanation.
It would appear, without doing any injustice to the writers in
question, that the explanation is in our favour. From the standpoint of
our newly-acquired insight into the origin of dreams, all contradictions
are completely reconciled. It is true that we distort the dream in our
attempt to reproduce it; we once more find therein what we have called
the secondary and often misunderstanding elaboration of the dream by the
agency of normal thinking. But this distortion is itself no more than a
part of the elaboration to which the dream-thoughts are constantly
subjected as a result of the dream-censorship. Other writers have here
suspected or observed that part of the dream-distortion whose work is
manifest; but for us this is of little consequence, as we know that a
far more extensive work of distortion, not so easily apprehended, has
already taken the dream for its object from among the hidden
dream-thoughts. The only mistake of these writers consists in believing
the modification effected in the dream by its recollection and verbal
expression to be arbitrary, incapable of further solution, and
consequently liable to lead us astray in our cognition of the dream.
They underestimate the determination of the dream in the psyche. Here
there is nothing arbitrary. It can be shown that in all cases a second
train of thought immediately takes over the determination of the
elements which have been left undetermined by the first. For example, I
wish quite arbitrarily to think of a number; but this is not possible;
the number that occurs to me is definitely and necessarily determined by
thoughts within me which may be quite foreign to my momentary
purpose.[3] The modifications which the dream undergoes in its revision
by the waking mind are just as little arbitrary. They preserve an
associative connection with the content, whose place they take, and
serve to show us the way to this content, which may itself be a
substitute for yet another content.
In analysing the dreams of patients I impose the following test of
this assertion, and never without success. If the first report of a
dream seems not very comprehensible, I request the dreamer to repeat it.
This he rarely does in the same words. But the passages in which the
expression is modified are thereby made known to me as the weak points
of the dream's disguise; they are what the embroidered emblem on
Siegfried's raiment was to Hagen. These are the points from which the
analysis may start. The narrator has been admonished by my announcement
that I intend to take special pains to solve the dream, and immediately,
obedient to the urge of resistance, he protects the weak points of the
dream's disguise, replacing a treacherous expression by a less relevant
one. He thus calls my attention to the expressions which he has
discarded. From the efforts made to guard against the solution of the
dream, I can also draw conclusions about the care with which the raiment
of the dream has been woven.
The writers whom I have mentioned are, however, less justified when
they attribute so much importance to the doubt with which our judgment
approaches the relation of the dream. For this doubt is not
intellectually warranted; our memory can give no guarantees, but
nevertheless we are compelled to credit its statements far more
frequently than is objectively justifiable. Doubt concerning the
accurate reproduction of the dream, or of individual data of the dream,
is only another offshoot of the dream-censorship, that is, of resistance
to the emergence of the dream-thoughts into consciousness. This
resistance has not yet exhausted itself by the displacements and
substitutions which it has effected, so that it still clings, in the
form of doubt, to what has been allowed to emerge. We can recognize this
doubt all the more readily in that it is careful never to attack the
intensive elements of the dream, but only the weak and indistinct ones.
But we already know that a transvaluation of all the psychic values has
taken place between the dream-thoughts and the dream. The distortion has
been made possible only by devaluation; it constantly manifests itself
in this way and sometimes contents itself therewith. If doubt is added
to the indistinctness of an element of the dream-content, we may,
following this indication, recognize in this element a direct offshoot
of one of the outlawed dream-thoughts. The state of affairs is like that
obtaining after a great revolution in one of the republics of antiquity
or the Renaissance. The once powerful, ruling families of the nobility
are now banished; all high posts are filled by upstarts; in the city
itself only the poorer and most powerless citizens, or the remoter
followers of the vanquished party, are tolerated. Even the latter do not
enjoy the full rights of citizenship. They are watched with suspicion.
In our case, instead of suspicion we have doubt. I must insist,
therefore, that in the analysis of a dream one must emancipate oneself
from the whole scale of standards of reliability; and if there is the
slightest possibility that this or that may have occurred in the dream,
it should be treated as an absolute certainty. Until one has decided to
reject all respect for appearances in tracing the dream-elements, the
analysis will remain at a standstill. Disregard of the element concerned
has the psychic effect, in the person analysed, that nothing in
connection with the unwished ideas behind this element will occur to
him. This effect is really not self-evident; it would be quite
reasonable to say, "Whether this or that was contained in the dream I do
not know for certain; but the following ideas happen to occur to me."
But no one ever does say so; it is precisely the disturbing effect of
doubt in the analysis that permits it to be unmasked as an offshoot and
instrument of the psychic resistance. Psycho- analysis is justifiably
suspicions. One of its rules runs: Whatever disturbs the progress of the
work is a resistance. [4] -
The forgetting of dreams, too, remains inexplicible until we seek to
explain it by the power of the psychic censorship. The feeling that one
has dreamed a great deal during the night and has retained only a little
of it may have yet another meaning in a number of cases: it may perhaps
mean that the dream-work has continued in a perceptible manner
throughout the night, but has left behind it only one brief dream. There
is, however, no possible doubt that a dream is progressively forgotten
on waking. One often forgets it in spite of a painful effort to recover
it. I believe, however, that just as one generally overestimates the
extent of this forgetting, so also one overestimates the lacunae in our
knowledge of the dream due to the gaps occurring in it. All the
dream-content that has been lost by forgetting can often be recovered by
analysis; in a number of cases, at all events, it is possible to
discover from a single remaining fragment, not the dream, of course-
which, after all, is of no importance- but the whole of the
dream-thoughts. It requires a greater expenditure of attention and
self-suppression in the analysis; that is all; but it shows that the
forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention.[5]
A convincing proof of the tendencious nature of dream-forgetting- of
the fact that it serves the resistance- is obtained on analysis by
investigating a preliminary stage of forgetting.[6] It often happens
that, in the midst of an interpretation, an omitted fragment of the
dream suddenly emerges which is described as having been previously
forgotten. This part of the dream that has been wrested from
forgetfulness is always the most important part. It lies on the shortest
path to the solution of the dream, and for that every reason it was most
exposed to the resistance. Among the examples of dreams that I have
included in the text of this treatise, it once happened that I had
subsequently to interpolate a fragment of dream-content. The dream is a
dream of travel, which revenges itself on two unamiable traveling
companions; I have left it almost entirely uninterpreted, as part of its
content is obscene. The part omitted reads: "I said, referring to a book
of Schiller's: 'It is from...' but corrected myself, as I realized my
mistake: 'It is by...' Whereupon the man remarked to his sister, 'Yes,
he said it correctly.'"[7]
Self-correction in dreams, which to some writers seems so wonderful,
does not really call for consideration. But I will draw from my own
memory an instance typical of verbal errors in dreams. I was nineteen
years of age when I visited England for the first time, and I spent a
day on the shore of the Irish Sea. Naturally enough, I amused myself by
picking up the marine animals left on the beach by the tide, and I was
just examining a starfish (the dream begins with Hollthurn- Holothurian)
when a pretty little girl came up to me and asked me: "Is it a starfish?
Is it alive?" I replied, "Yes, he is alive," but then felt ashamed of my
mistake, and repeated the sentence correctly. For the grammatical
mistake which I then made, the dream substitutes another which is quite
common among German people. "Das Buch ist von Schiller" is not to be
translated by "the book is from," but by "the book is by." That the
dream-work accomplishes this substitution, because the word from, owing
to its consonance with the German adjective fromm (pious, devout) makes
a remarkable condensation possible, should no longer surprise us after
all that we have heard of the intentions of the dream-work and its
unscrupulous selection of means. But what relation has this harmless
recollection of the seashore to my dream? It explains, by means of a
very innocent example, that I have used the word- the word denoting
gender, or sex or the sexual (he)- in the wrong place. This is surely
one of the keys to the solution of the dream. Those who have heard of
the derivation of the book-title Matter and Motion (Moliere in Le Malade
Imaginaire: La Matiere est-elle laudable?- A Motion of the bowels) will
readily be able to supply the missing parts.
Moreover, I can prove conclusively, by a demonstratio ad oculos, that
the forgetting of the dream is in a large measure the work of the
resistance. A patient tells me that he has dreamed, but that the dream
has vanished without leaving a trace, as if nothing had happened. We set
to work, however; I come upon a resistance which I explain to the
patient; encouraging and urging him, I help him to become reconciled to
some disagreeable thought; and I have hardly succeeded in doing so when
he exclaims: "Now I can recall what I dreamed!" The same resistance
which that day disturbed him in the work of interpretation caused him
also to forget the dream. By overcoming this resistance I have brought
back the dream to his memory.
In the same way the patient, having reached a certain part of the
work, may recall a dream which occurred three, four, or more days ago,
and which has hitherto remained in oblivion.[8]
Psycho-analytical experience has furnished us with yet another proof
of the fact that the forgetting of dreams depends far more on the
resistance than on the mutually alien character of the waking and
sleeping states, as some writers have believed it to depend. It often
happens to me, as well as to other analysts, and to patients under
treatment, that we are waked from sleep by a dream, as we say, and that
immediately thereafter, while in full possession of our mental
faculties, we begin to interpret the dream. Often in such cases I have
not rested until I have achieved a full understanding of the dream, and
yet it has happened that after waking I have forgotten the
interpretation- work as completely as I have forgotten the dream-content
itself, though I have been aware that I have dreamed and that I had
interpreted the dream. The dream has far more frequently taken the
result of the interpretation with it into forgetfulness than the
intellectual faculty has succeeded in retaining the dream in the memory.
But between this work of interpretation and the waking thoughts there is
not that psychic abyss by which other writers have sought to explain the
forgetting of dreams. When Morton Prince objects to my explanation of
the forgetting of dreams on the ground that it is only a special case of
the amnesia of dissociated psychic states, and that the impossibility of
applying my explanation of this special amnesia to other types of
amnesia makes it valueless even for its immediate purpose, he reminds
the reader that in all his descriptions of such dissociated states he
has never attempted to discover the dynamic explanation underlying these
phenomena. For had he done so, he would surely have discovered that
repression (and the resistance produced thereby) is the cause not of
these dissociations merely, but also of the amnesia of their psychic
content.
That dreams are as little forgotten as other psychic acts, that even
in their power of impressing themselves on the memory they may fairly be
compared with the other psychic performances, was proved to me by an
experiment which I was able to make while preparing the manuscript of
this book. I had preserved in my notes a great many dreams of my own
which, for one reason or another, I could not interpret, or, at the time
of dreaming them, could interpret only very imperfectly. In order to
obtain material to illustrate my assertion, I attempted to interpret
some of them a year or two later. In this attempt I was invariably
successful; indeed, I may say that the interpretation was effected more
easily after all this time than when the dreams were of recent
occurrence. As a possible explanation of this fact, I would suggest that
I had overcome many of the internal resistances which had disturbed me
at the time of dreaming. In such subsequent interpretations I have
compared the old yield of dream-thoughts with the present result, which
has usually been more abundant, and I have invariably found the old
dream-thoughts unaltered among the present ones. However, I soon
recovered from my surprise when I reflected that I had long been
accustomed to interpret dreams of former years that had occasionally
been related to me by my patients as though they had been dreams of the
night before; by the same method, and with the same success. In the
section on anxiety-dreams I shall include two examples of such delayed
dream-interpretations. When I made this experiment for the first time I
expected, not unreasonably, that dreams would behave in this connection
merely like neurotic symptoms. For when I treat a psychoneurotic for
instance, an hysterical patient, by psychoanalysis, I am compelled to
find explanations for the first symptoms of the malady, which have long
since disappeared, as well as for those still existing symptoms which
have brought the patient to me; and I find the former problem easier to
solve than the more exigent one of today. In the Studies in Hysteria,[9]
published as early as 1895, I was able to give the explanation of a
first hysterical attack which the patient, a woman over forty years of
age, had experienced in her fifteenth year.[10]
I will now make a few rather unsystematic remarks relating to the
interpretations of dreams, which will perhaps serve as a guide to the
reader who wishes to test my assertions by the analysis of his own
dreams.
He must not expect that it will be a simple and easy matter to
interpret his own dreams. Even the observation of endoptic phenomena,
and other sensations which are commonly immune from attention, calls for
practice, although this group of observations is not opposed by any
psychic motive. It is very much more difficult to get hold of the
unwished ideas. He who seeks to do so must fulfil the requirements laid
down in this treatise, and while following the rules here given, he must
endeavour to restrain all criticism, all preconceptions, and all
affective or intellectual bias in himself during the work of analysis.
He must be ever mindful of the precept which Claude Bernard held up to
the experimenter in the physiological laboratory: "Travailler comme une
bete"- that is, he must be as enduring as an animal, and also as
disinterested in the results of his work. He who will follow this advice
will no longer find the task a difficult one. The interpretation of a
dream cannot always be accomplished in one session; after following up a
chain of associations you will often feel that your working capacity is
exhausted; the dream will not tell you anything more that day; it is
then best to break off, and to resume the work the following day.
Another portion of the dream-content then solicits your attention, and
you thus obtain access to a fresh stratum of the dream-thoughts. One
might call this the fractional interpretation of dreams.
It is most difficult to induce the beginner in dream- interpretation
to recognize the fact that his task is not finished when he is in
possession of a complete interpretation of the dream which is both
ingenious and coherent, and which gives particulars of all the elements
of the dream-content. Besides this, another interpretation, an
over-interpretation of the same dream, one which has escaped him, may be
possible. It is really not easy to form an idea of the wealth of trains
of unconscious thought striving for expression in our minds, or to
credit the adroitness displayed by the dream-work in killing- so to
speak- seven flies at one stroke, like the journeyman tailor in the
fairy-tale, by means of its ambiguous modes of expression. The reader
will constantly be inclined to reproach the author for a superfluous
display of ingenuity, but anyone who has had personal experience of
dream-interpretation will know better than to do so.
On the other hand, I cannot accept the opinion, first expressed by H.
Silberer, that every dream- or even that many dreams, and certain groups
of dreams- calls for two different interpretations, between which there
is even supposed to be a fixed relation. One of these, which Silberer
calls the psycho- analytic interpretation, attributes to the dream any
meaning you please, but in the main an infantile sexual one. The other,
the more important interpretation, which he calls the anagogic
interpretation, reveals the more serious and often profound thoughts
which the dream-work has used as its material. Silberer does not prove
this assertion by citing a number of dreams which he has analysed in
these two directions. I am obliged to object to this opinion on the
ground that it is contrary to facts. The majority of dreams require no
over-interpretation, and are especially insusceptible of an anagogic
interpretation. The influence of a tendency which seeks to veil the
fundamental conditions of dream-formation and divert our interest from
its instinctual roots is as evident in Silberer's theory as in other
theoretical efforts of the last few years. In a number of cases I can
confirm Silberer's assertions; but in these the analysis shows me that
the dream-work was confronted with the task of transforming a series of
highly abstract thoughts, incapable of direct representation, from
waking life into a dream. The dream- work attempted to accomplish this
task by seizing upon another thought-material which stood in loose and
often allegorical relation to the abstract thoughts, and thereby
diminished the difficulty of representing them. The abstract
interpretation of a dream originating in this manner will be given by
the dreamer immediately, but the correct interpretation of the
substituted material can be obtained only by means of the familiar
technique.
The question whether every dream can be interpreted is to be answered
in the negative. One should not forget that in the work of
interpretation one is opposed by the psychic forces that are responsible
for the distortion of the dream. Whether one can master the inner
resistances by one's intellectual interest, one's capacity for
self-control, one's psychological knowledge, and one's experience in
dream-interpretation depends on the relative strength of the opposing
forces. It is always possible to make some progress; one can at all
events go far enough to become convinced that a dream has meaning, and
generally far enough to gain some idea of its meaning. It very often
happens that a second dream enables us to confirm and continue the
interpretation assumed for the first. A whole series of dreams,
continuing for weeks or months, may have a common basis, and should
therefore be interpreted as a continuity. In dreams that follow one
another, we often observe that one dream takes as its central point
something that is only alluded to in the periphery of the next dream,
and conversely, so that even in their interpretations the two supplement
each other. That different dreams of the same night are always to be
treated, in the work of interpretation, as a whole, I have already shown
by examples.
In the best interpreted dreams we often have to leave one passage in
obscurity because we observe during the interpretation that we have here
a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled, and which
furnishes no fresh contribution to the dream-content. This, then, is the
keystone of the dream, the point at which it ascends into the unknown.
For the dream-thoughts which we encounter during the interpretation
commonly have no termination, but run in all directions into the
net-like entanglement of our intellectual world. It is from some denser
part of this fabric that the dream-wish then arises, like the mushroom
from its mycelium.
Let us now return to the facts of dream-forgetting. So far, of
course, we have failed to draw any important conclusion from them. When
our waking life shows an unmistakable intention to forget the dream
which has been formed during the night, either as a whole, immediately
after waking, or little by little in the course of the day, and when we
recognize as the chief factor in this process of forgetting the psychic
resistance against the dream which has already done its best to oppose
the dream at night, the question then arises: What actually has made the
dream- formation possible against this resistance? Let us consider the
most striking case, in which the waking life has thrust the dream aside
as though it had never happened. If we take into consideration the play
of the psychic forces, we are compelled to assert that the dream would
never have come into existence had the resistance prevailed at night as
it did by day. We conclude, then, that the resistance loses some part of
its force during the night; we know that it has not been discontinued,
as we have demonstrated its share in the formation of dreams- namely,
the work of distortion. We have therefore to consider the possibility
that at night the resistance is merely diminished, and that dream-
formation becomes possible because of this slackening of the resistance;
and we shall readily understand that as it regains its full power on
waking it immediately thrusts aside what it was forced to admit while it
was feeble. Descriptive psychology teaches us that the chief determinant
of dream-formation is the dormant state of the psyche; and we may now
add the following explanation: The state of sleep makes dream-formation
possible by reducing the endopsychic censorship.
We are certainly tempted to look upon this as the only possible
conclusion to be drawn from the facts of dream-forgetting, and to
develop from this conclusion further deductions as to the comparative
energy operative in the sleeping and waking states. But we shall stop
here for the present. When we have penetrated a little farther into the
psychology of dreams we shall find that the origin of dream-formation
may be differently conceived. The resistance which tends to prevent the
dream-thoughts from becoming conscious may perhaps be evaded without
suffering reduction. It is also plausible that both the factors which
favour dream-formation, the reduction as well as the evasion of the
resistance, may be simultaneously made possible by the sleeping state.
But we shall pause here, and resume the subject a little later.
We must now consider another series of objections against our
procedure in dream-interpretation. For we proceed by dropping all the
directing ideas which at other times control reflection, directing our
attention to a single element of the dream, noting the involuntary
thoughts that associate themselves with this element. We then take up
the next component of the dream-content, and repeat the operation with
this; and, regardless of the direction taken by the thoughts, we allow
ourselves to be led onwards by them, rambling from one subject to
another. At the same time, we harbour the confident hope that we may in
the end, and without intervention on our part, come upon the dream-
thoughts from which the dream originated. To this the critic may make
the following objection: That we arrive somewhere if we start from a
single element of the dream is not remarkable. Something can be
associatively connected with every idea. The only thing that is
remarkable is that one should succeed in hitting upon the dream-thoughts
in this arbitrary and aimless excursion. It is probably a
self-deception; the investigator follows the chain of associations from
the one element which is taken up until he finds the chain breaking off,
whereupon he takes up a second element; it is thus only natural that the
originally unconfined associations should now become narrowed down. He
has the former chain of associations still in mind, and will therefore
in the analysis of the second dream-idea hit all the more readily upon
single associations which have something in common with the associations
of the first chain. He then imagines that he has found a thought which
represents a point of junction between two of the dream-elements. As he
allows himself all possible freedom of thought-connection, excepting
only the transitions from one idea to another which occur in normal
thinking, it is not difficult for him finally to concoct out of a series
of intermediary thoughts, something which he calls the dream-thoughts;
and without any guarantee, since they are otherwise unknown, he palms
these off as the psychic equivalent of the dream. But all this is a
purely arbitrary procedure, an ingenious-looking exploitation of chance,
and anyone who will go to this useless trouble can in this way work out
any desired interpretation for any dream whatever.
If such objections are really advanced against us, we may in defence
refer to the impression produced by our dream- interpretations, the
surprising connections with other dream- elements which appear while we
are following up the individual ideas, and the improbability that
anything which so perfectly covers and explains the dream as do our
dream-interpretations could be achieved otherwise than by following
previously established psychic connections. We might also point to the
fact that the procedure in dream-interpretation is identical with the
procedure followed in the resolution of hysterical symptoms, where the
correctness of the method is attested by the emergence and disappearance
of the symptoms- that is, where the interpretation of the text is
confirmed by the interpolated illustrations. But we have no reason to
avoid this problem- namely, how one can arrive at a pre-existent aim by
following an arbitrarily and aimlessly maundering chain of thoughts-
since we shall be able not to solve the problem, it is true, but to get
rid of it entirely.
For it is demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon ourselves
to an aimless excursion of thought when, as in the interpretation of
dreams, we renounce reflection and allow the involuntary ideas to come
to the surface. It can be shown that we are able to reject only those
directing ideas which are known to us, and that with the cessation of
these the unknown- or, as we inexactly say, unconscious- directing ideas
immediately exert their influence, and henceforth determine the flow of
the involuntary ideas. Thinking without directing ideas cannot be
ensured by any influence we ourselves exert on our own psychic life;
neither do I know of any state of psychic derangement in which such a
mode of thought establishes itself.[11] The psychiatrists have here far
too prematurely relinquished the idea of the solidity of the psychic
structure. I know that an unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid of
directing ideas, can occur as little in the realm of hysteria and
paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams. Perhaps it does not
occur at all in the endogenous psychic affections, and, according to the
ingenious hypothesis of Lauret, even the deliria observed in confused
psychic states have meaning and are incomprehensible to us only because
of omissions. I have had the same conviction whenever I have had an
opportunity of observing such states. The deliria are the work of a
censorship which no longer makes any effort to conceal its sway, which,
instead of lending its support to a revision that is no longer obnoxious
to it, cancels regardlessly anything to which it objects, thus causing
the remnant to appear disconnected. This censorship proceeds like the
Russian censorship on the frontier, which allows only those foreign
journals which have had certain passages blacked out to fall into the
bands of the readers to be protected.
The free play of ideas following any chain of associations may
perhaps occur in cases of destructive organic affections of the brain.
What, however, is taken to be such in the psychoneuroses may always be
explained as the influence of the censorship on a series of thoughts
which have been pushed into the foreground by the concealed directing
ideas.[12] It has been considered an unmistakable sign of free
association unencumbered by directing ideas if the emerging ideas (or
images) appear to be connected by means of the so-called superficial
associations- that is, by assonance, verbal ambiguity, and temporal
coincidence, without inner relationship of meaning; in other words, if
they are connected by all those associations which we allow ourselves to
exploit in wit and playing upon words. This distinguishing mark holds
good with associations which lead us from the elements of the
dream-content to the intermediary thoughts, and from these to the
dream-thoughts proper; in many analyses of dreams we have found
surprising examples of this. In these no connection was too loose and no
witticism too objectionable to serve as a bridge from one thought to
another. But the correct understanding of such surprising tolerance is
not far to seek. Whenever one psychic element is connected with another
by an obnoxious and superficial association, there exists also a correct
and more profound connection between the two, which succumbs to the
resistance of the censorship.
The correct explanation for the predominance of the superficial
associations is the pressure of the censorship, and not the suppression
of the directing ideas. Whenever the censorship renders the normal
connective paths impassable, the superficial associations will replace
the deeper ones in the representation. It is as though in a mountainous
region a general interruption of traffic, for example an inundation,
should render the broad highways impassable: traffic would then have to
be maintained by steep and inconvenient tracks used at other times only
by the hunter.
We can here distinguish two cases which, however, are essentially
one. In the first case, the censorship is directed only against the
connection of two thoughts which, being detached from one another,
escape its opposition. The two thoughts then enter successively into
consciousness; their connection remains concealed; but in its place
there occurs to us a superficial connection between the two which would
not otherwise have occurred to us, and which as a rule connects with
another angle of the conceptual complex instead of that from which the
suppressed but essential connection proceeds. Or, in the second case,
both thoughts, owing to their content, succumb to the censorship; both
then appear not in their correct form but in a modified, substituted
form; and both substituted thoughts are so selected as to represent, by
a superficial association, the essential relation which existed between
those that they have replaced. Under the pressure of the censorship, the
displacement of a normal and vital association by one superficial and
apparently absurd has thus occurred in both cases.
Because we know of these displacements, we unhesitatingly rely upon
even the superficial associations which occur in the course of
dream-interpretation.[13]
The psycho-analysis of neurotics makes abundant use of the two
principles: that with the abandonment of the conscious directing ideas
the control over the flow of ideas is transferred to the concealed
directing ideas; and that superficial associations are only a
displacement-substitute for suppressed and more profound ones. Indeed,
psycho-analysis makes these two principles the foundation-stones of its
technique. When I request a patient to dismiss all reflection, and to
report to me whatever comes into his mind, I firmly cling to the
assumption that he will not be able to drop the directing idea of the
treatment, and I feel justified in concluding that what he reports, even
though it may seem to be quite ingenuous and arbitrary, has some
connection with his morbid state. Another directing idea of which the
patient has no suspicion is my own personality. The full appreciation,
as well as the detailed proof of both these explanations, belongs to the
description of the psycho-analytic technique as a therapeutic method. We
have here reached one of the junctions, so to speak, at which we
purposely drop the subject of dream-interpretation.[14]
Of all the objections raised, only one is justified and still remains
to be met; namely, that we ought not to ascribe all the associations of
the interpretation-work to the nocturnal dream- work. By interpretation
in the waking state we are actually opening a path running back from the
dream-elements to the dream- thoughts. The dream-work has followed the
contrary direction, and it is not at all probable that these paths are
equally passable in opposite directions. On the contrary, it appears
that during the day, by means of new thought-connections, we sink shafts
that strike the intermediary thoughts and the dream-thoughts now in this
place, now in that. We can see how the recent thought- material of the
day forces its way into the interpretation- series, and how the
additional resistance which has appeared since the night probably
compels it to make new and further detours. But the number and form of
the collaterals which we thus contrive during the day are,
psychologically speaking, indifferent, so long as they point the way to
the dream-thoughts which we are seeking.
B. Regression
Now that we have defended ourselves against the objections raised, or
have at least indicated our weapons of defence, we must no longer delay
entering upon the psychological investigations for which we have so long
been preparing. Let us summarize the main results of our recent
investigations: The dream is a psychic act full of import; its motive
power is invariably a wish craving fulfilment; the fact that it is
unrecognizable as a wish, and its many peculiarities and absurdities,
are due to the influence of the psychic censorship to which it has been
subjected during its formation. Besides the necessity of evading the
censorship, the following factors have played a part in its formation:
first, a need for condensing the psychic material; second, regard for
representability in sensory images; and third (though not constantly),
regard for a rational and intelligible exterior of the dream-structure.
From each of these propositions a path leads onward to psychological
postulates and assumptions. Thus, the reciprocal relation of the
wish-motives, and the four conditions. as well as the mutual relations
of these conditions, must now be investigated; the dream must be
inserted in the context of the psychic life.
At the beginning of this section we cited a certain dream in order
that it might remind us of the problems that are still unsolved. The
interpretation of this dream (of the burning child) presented no
difficulties, although in the analytical sense it was not given in full.
We asked ourselves why, after all, it was necessary that the father
should dream instead of waking, and we recognized the wish to represent
the child as living as a motive of the dream. That there was yet another
wish operative in the dream we shall be able to show after further
discussion. For the present, however, we may say that for the sake of
the wish- fulfilment the thought-process of sleep was transformed into a
dream.
If the wish-fulfilment is cancelled out, only one characteristic
remains which distinguishes the two kinds of psychic events. The
dream-thought would have been: "I see a glimmer coming from the room in
which the body is lying. Perhaps a candle has fallen over, and the child
is burning!" The dream reproduces the result of this reflection
unchanged, but represents it in a situation which exists in the present
and is perceptible by the senses like an experience of the waking state.
This, however, is the most common and the most striking psychological
characteristic of the dream; a thought, usually the one wished for, is
objectified in the dream, and represented as a scene, or- as we think-
experienced.
But how are we now to explain this characteristic peculiarity of the
dream-work, or- to put it more modestly- how are we to bring it into
relation with the psychic processes?
On closer examination, it is plainly evident that the manifest form
of the dream is marked by two characteristics which are almost
independent of each other. One is its representation as a present
situation with the omission of perhaps; the other is the translation of
the thought into visual images and speech.
The transformation to which the dream-thoughts are subjected because
the expectation is put into the present tense is, perhaps, in this
particular dream not so very striking. This is probably due to the
special and really subsidiary role of the wish-fulfilment in this dream.
Let us take another dream, in which the dream-wish does not break away
from the continuation of the waking thoughts in sleep; for example, the
dream of Irma's injection. Here the dream-thought achieving
representation is in the conditional: "If only Otto could be blamed for
Irma's illness!" The dream suppresses the conditional, and replaces it
by a simple present tense: "Yes, Otto is to blame for Irma's illness."
This, then, is the first of the transformations which even the
undistorted dream imposes on the dream-thoughts. But we will not linger
over this first peculiarity of the dream. We dispose of it by a
reference to the conscious phantasy, the day- dream, which behaves in a
similar fashion with its conceptual content. When Daudet's M. Joyeuse
wanders unemployed through the streets of Paris while his daughter is
led to believe that he has a post and is sitting in his office, he
dreams, in the present tense, of circumstances that might help him to
obtain a recommendation and employment. The dream, then, employs the
present tense in the same manner and with the same right as the
day-dream. The present is the tense in which the wish is represented as
fulfilled.
The second quality peculiar to the dream alone, as distinguished from
the day-dream, is that the conceptual content is not thought, but is
transformed into visual images, to which we give credence, and which we
believe that we experience. Let us add. however, that not all dreams
show this transformation of ideas into visual images. There are dreams
which consist solely of thoughts, but we cannot on that account deny
that they are substantially dreams. My dream Autodidasker- the
day-phantasy about Professor N is of this character; it is almost as
free of visual elements as though I had thought its content during the
day. Moreover, every long dream contains elements which have not
undergone this transformation into the visual, and which are simply
thought or known as we are wont to think or know in our waking state.
And we must here reflect that this transformation of ideas into visual
images does not occur in dreams alone, but also in hallucinations and
visions, which may appear spontaneously in health, or as symptoms in the
psychoneuroses. In brief, the relation which we are here investigating
is by no means an exclusive one; the fact remains, however, that this
characteristic of the dream, whenever it occurs, seems to be its most
noteworthy characteristic, so that we cannot think of the dream-life
without it. To understand it, however, requires a very exhaustive
discussion.
Among all the observations relating to the theory of dreams to be
found in the literature of the subject, I should like to lay stress upon
one as being particularly worthy of mention. The famous G. T. H. Fechner
makes the conjecture,[15] in a discussion as to the nature of the
dreams, that the dream is staged elsewhere than in the waking ideation.
No other assumption enables us to comprehend the special peculiarities
of the dream- life.
The idea which is thus put before us is one of psychic locality. We
shall wholly ignore the fact that the psychic apparatus concerned is
known to us also as an anatomical preparation, and we shall carefully
avoid the temptation to determine the psychic locality in any anatomical
sense. We shall remain on psychological ground, and we shall do no more
than accept the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the
psychic activities much as we think of a compound microscope, a
photographic camera, or other apparatus. The psychic locality, then,
corresponds to a place within such an apparatus in which one of the
preliminary phases of the image comes into existence. As is well known,
there are in the microscope and the telescope such ideal localities or
planes, in which no tangible portion of the apparatus is located. I
think it superfluous to apologize for the imperfections of this and all
similar figures. These comparisons are designed only to assist us in our
attempt to make intelligible the complication of the psychic performance
by dissecting it and referring the individual performances to the
individual components of the apparatus. So far as I am aware, no attempt
has yet been made to divine the construction of the psychic instrument
by means of such dissection. I see no harm in such an attempt; I think
that we should give free rein to our conjectures, provided we keep our
heads and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building. Since for the
first approach to any unknown subject we need the help only of auxiliary
ideas, we shall prefer the crudest and most tangible hypothesis to all
others.
Accordingly, we conceive the psychic apparatus as a compound
instrument, the component parts of which we shall call instances, or,
for the sake of clearness, systems. We shall then anticipate that these
systems may perhaps maintain a constant spatial orientation to one
another, very much as do the different and successive systems of lenses
of a telescope. Strictly speaking, there is no need to assume an actual
spatial arrangement of the psychic system. It will be enough for our
purpose if a definite sequence is established, so that in certain
psychic events the system will be traversed by the excitation in a
definite temporal order. This order may be different in the case of
other processes; such a possibility is left open. For the sake of
brevity, we shall henceforth speak of the component parts of the
apparatus as Psi-systems.
The first thing that strikes us is the fact that the apparatus
composed of Psi-systems has a direction. All our psychic activities
proceed from (inner or outer) stimuli and terminate in innervations. We
thus ascribe to the apparatus a sensory and a motor end; at the sensory
end we find a system which receives the perceptions, ind at the motor
end another which opens the sluices of motility. The psychic process
generally runs from the perceptive end to the motor end. The most
general scheme of the psychic apparatus has therefore the following
appearance as shown in Fig. 1. (See illustration.) But this is only in
compliance with the requirement, long familiar to us, that the psychic
apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus. The reflex act
remains the type of every psychic activity as well.
We now have reason to admit a first differentiation at the sensory
end. The percepts that come to us leave in our psychic apparatus a
trace, which we may call a memory-trace. The function related to this
memory-trace we call the memory. If we hold seriously to our resolution
to connect the psychic processes into systems, the memory-trace can
consist only of lasting changes in the elements of the systems. But, as
has already been shown elsewhere, obvious difficulties arise when one
and the same system is faithfully to preserve changes in its elements
and still to remain fresh and receptive in respect of new occasions of
change. In accordance with the principle which is directing our attempt,
we shall therefore ascribe these two functions to two different systems.
We assume that an initial system of this apparatus receives the stimuli
of perception but retains nothing of them- that is, it has no memory;
and that behind this there lies a second system, which transforms the
momentary excitation of the first into lasting traces. The following
would then be the diagram of our psychic apparatus: (See illustration.)
We know that of the percepts which act upon the P-system, we retain
permanently something else as well as the content itself. Our percepts
prove also to be connected with one another in the memory, and this is
especially so if they originally occurred simultaneously. We call this
the fact of association. It is now clear that, if the P-system is
entirely lacking in memory, it certainly cannot preserve traces for the
associations; the individual P-elements would be intolerably hindered in
their functioning if a residue of a former connection should make its
influence felt against a new perception. Hence we must rather assume
that the memory-system is the basis of association. The fact of
association, then, consists in this- that in consequence of a lessening
of resistance and a smoothing of the ways from one of the mem-elements,
the excitation transmits itself to a second rather than to a third
mem-element.
On further investigation we find it necessary to assume not one but
many such mem-systems, in which the same excitation transmitted by the
P-elements undergoes a diversified fixation. The first of these
mem-systems will in any case contain the fixation of the association
through simultaneity, while in those lying farther away the same
material of excitation will be arranged according to other forms of
combination; so that relationships of similarity, etc., might perhaps be
represented by these later systems. It would, of course, be idle to
attempt to express in words the psychic significance of such a system.
Its characteristic would lie in the intimacy of its relations to
elements of raw material of memory- that is (if we wish to hint at a
more comprehensive theory) in the gradations of the conductive
resistance on the way to these elements.
An observation of a general nature, which may possibly point to
something of importance, may here be interpolated. The P-system, which
possesses no capacity for preserving changes, and hence no memory,
furnishes to consciousness the complexity and variety of the sensory
qualities. Our memories, on the other hand, are unconscious in
themselves; those that are most deeply impressed form no exception. They
can be made conscious, but there is no doubt that they unfold all their
activities in the unconscious state. What we term our character is
based, indeed, on the memory- traces of our impressions, and it is
precisely those impressions that have affected us most strongly, those
of our early youth, which hardly ever become conscious. But when
memories become conscious again they show no sensory quality, or a very
negligible one in comparison with the perceptions. If, now, it can be
confirmed that for consciousness memory and quality are mutually
exclusive in the Psi-systems, we have gained a most promising insight
into the determinations of the neuron excitations.[16]
What we have so far assumed concerning the composition of the psychic
apparatus at the sensible end has been assumed regardless of dreams and
of the psychological explanations which we have hitherto derived from
them. Dreams, however, will serve as a source of evidence for our
knowledge of another part of the apparatus. We have seen that it was
impossible to explain dream- formation unless we ventured to assume two
psychic instances, one of which subjected the activities of the other to
criticism, the result of which was exclusion from consciousness.
We have concluded that the criticizing instance maintains closer
relations with the consciousness than the instance criticized. It stands
between the latter and the consciousness like a screen. Further, we have
found that there is reason to identify the criticizing instance with
that which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary
conscious activities. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we now
replace these instances by systems, the criticizing system will
therefore be moved to the motor end. We now enter both systems in our
diagram, expressing, by the names given them, their relation to
consciousness. (See illustration.)
The last of the systems at the motor end we call the preconscious
(Pcs.) to denote that the exciting processes in this system can reach
consciousness without any further detention, provided certain other
conditions are fulfilled, e.g., the attainment of a definite degree of
intensity, a certain apportionment of that function which we must call
attention, etc. This is at the same time the system which holds the keys
of voluntary motility. The system behind it we call the unconscious
(Ucs), because it has no access to consciousness except through the
preconscious, in the passage through which the excitation-process must
submit to certain changes.[17]
In which of these systems, then, do we localize the impetus to
dream-formation? For the sake of simplicity, let us say in the system
Ucs. We shall find, it is true, in subsequent discussions, that this is
not altogether correct; that dream-formation is obliged to make
connection with dream-thoughts which belong to the system of the
preconscious. But we shall learn elsewhere, when we come to deal with
the dream-wish, that the motive-power of the dream is furnished by the
Ucs, and on account of this factor we shall assume the unconscious
system as the starting- point for dream-formation. This
dream-excitation, like all the other thought-structures, will now strive
to continue itself in the Pcs, and thence to gain admission to the
consciousness.
Experience teaches us that the path leading through the preconscious
to consciousness is closed to the dream-thoughts during the day by the
resisting censorship. At night they gain admission to consciousness; the
question arises: In what way and because of what changes? If this
admission were rendered possible to the dream-thoughts by the weakening,
during the night, of the resistance watching on the boundary between the
unconscious and the preconscious, we should then have dreams in the
material of our ideas, which would not display the hallucinatory
character that interests us at present.
The weakening of the censorship between the two systems, Ucs and Pcs,
can explain to us only such dreams as the Autodidasker dream but not
dreams like that of the burning child, which- as will be remembered- we
stated as a problem at the outset in our present investigations.
What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe in no
other way than by saying that the excitation follows a retrogressive
course. It communicates itself not to the motor end of the apparatus,
but to the sensory end, and finally reaches the system of perception. If
we call the direction which the psychic process follows from the
unconscious into the waking state progressive, we may then speak of the
dream as having a regressive character.[18]
This regression is therefore assuredly one of the most important
psychological peculiarities of the dream-process; but we must not forget
that it is not characteristic of the dream alone. Intentional
recollection and other component processes of our normal thinking
likewise necessitate a retrogression in the psychic apparatus from some
complex act of ideation to the raw material of the memory-traces which
underlie it. But during the waking state this turning backwards does not
reach beyond the memory-images; it is incapable of producing the
hallucinatory revival of the perceptual images. Why is it otherwise in
dreams? When we spoke of the condensation-work of the dream we could not
avoid the assumption that by the dream-work the intensities adhering to
the ideas are completely transferred from one to another. It is probably
this modification of the usual psychic process which makes possible the
cathexis[19] of the system of P to its full sensory vividness in the
reverse direction to thinking. -
I hope that we are not deluding ourselves as regards the importance
of this present discussion. We have done nothing more than give a name
to an inexplicable phenomenon. We call it regression if the idea in the
dream is changed back into the visual image from which it once
originated. But even this step requires justification. Why this
definition if it does not teach us anything new? Well, I believe that
the word regression is of service to us, inasmuch as it connects a fact
familiar to us with the scheme of the psychic apparatus endowed with
direction. At this point, and for the first time, we shall profit by the
fact that we have constructed such a scheme. For with the help of this
scheme we shall perceive, without further reflection, another
peculiarity of dream-formation. If we look upon the dream as a process
of regression within the hypothetical psychic apparatus, we have at once
an explanation of the empirically proven fact that all thought-relations
of the dream-thoughts are either lost in the dream-work or have
difficulty in achieving expression. According to our scheme, these
thought-relations are contained not in the first mem-systems, but in
those lying farther to the front, and in the regression to the
perceptual images they must forfeit expression. In regression, the
structure of the dream- thoughts breaks up into its raw material.
But what change renders possible this regression which is impossible
during the day? Let us here be content with an assumption. There must
evidently be changes in the cathexis of the individual systems, causing
the latter to become more accessible or inaccessible to the discharge of
the excitation; but in any such apparatus the same effect upon the
course of the excitation might be produced by more than one kind of
change. We naturally think of the. sleeping state, and of the many
cathectic changes which this evokes at the sensory end of the apparatus.
During the day there is a continuous stream flowing from the Psi- system
of the P toward the motility end; this current ceases at night, and can
no longer block the flow of the current of excitation in the opposite
direction. This would appear to be that seclusion from the outer world
which, according to the theory of some writers, is supposed to explain
the psychological character of the dream. In the explanation of the
regression of the dream we shall, however, have to take into account
those other regressions which occur during morbid waking states. In
these other forms of regression the explanation just given plainly
leaves us in the lurch. Regression occurs in spite of the uninterrupted
sensory current in a progressive direction.
The hallucinations of hysteria and paranoia, as well as the visions
of mentally normal persons, I would explain as corresponding, in fact,
to regressions, i.e., to thoughts transformed into images; and would
assert that only such thoughts undergo this transformation as are in
intimate connection with suppressed memories, or with memories which
have remained unconscious. As an example, I will cite the case of one of
my youngest hysterical patients- a boy of twelve, who was prevented from
falling asleep by "green faces with red eyes," which terrified him. The
source of this manifestation was the suppressed, but once conscious
memory of a boy whom he had often seen four years earlier, and who
offered a warning example of many bad habits, including masturbation,
for which he was now reproaching himself. At that time his mother had
noticed that the complexion of this ill-mannered boy was greenish and
that he had red (i.e., red-rimmed) eyes. Hence his terrifying vision,
which merely determined his recollection of another saying of his
mother's, to the effect that such boys become demented, are unable to
learn anything at school, and are doomed to an early death. A part of
this prediction came true in the case of my little patient; he could not
get on at school, and, as appeared from his involuntary associations, he
was in terrible dread of the remainder of the prophecy. However, after a
brief period of successful treatment his sleep was restored, his anxiety
removed, and he finished his scholastic year with an excellent record.
Here I may add the interpretation of a vision described to me by an
hysterical woman of forty, as having occurred when she was in normal
health. One morning she opened her eyes and saw her brother in the room,
although she knew him to be confined in an insane asylum. Her little son
was asleep by her side. Lest the child should be frightened on seeing
his uncle, and fall into convulsions, she pulled the sheet over his
face. This done, the phantom disappeared. This apparition was the
revision of one of her childish memories, which, although conscious, was
most intimately connected with all the unconscious material in her mind.
Her nurserymaid had told her that her mother, who had died young (my
patient was then only eighteen months old), had suffered from epileptic
or hysterical convulsions, which dated back to a fright caused by her
brother (the patient's uncle) who appeared to her disguised as a spectre
with a sheet over his head. The vision contains the same elements as the
reminiscence, viz., the appearance of the brother, the sheet, the
fright, and its effect. These elements, however, are arranged in a fresh
context, and are transferred to other persons. The obvious motive of the
vision, and the thought which it replaced, was her solicitude lest her
little son, who bore a striking resemblance to his uncle, should share
the latter's fate.
Both examples here cited are not entirely unrelated to the state of
sleep, and may for that reason be unfitted to afford the evidence for
the sake of which I have cited them. I will, therefore, refer to my
analysis of an hallucinatory paranoic woman patient[20] and to the
results of my hitherto unpublished studies on the psychology of the
psychoneuroses, in order to emphasize the fact that in these cases of
regressive thought- transformation one must not overlook the influence
of a suppressed memory, or one that has remained unconscious, this being
usually of an infantile character. This memory draws into the
regression, as it were, the thoughts with which it is connected, and
which are kept from expression by the censorship- that is, into that
form of representation in which the memory itself is psychically
existent. And here I may add, as a result of my studies of hysteria,
that if one succeeds in bringing to consciousness infantile scenes
(whether they are recollections or phantasies) they appear as
hallucinations, and are divested of this character only when they are
communicated. It is known also that even in persons whose memories are
not otherwise visual, the earliest infantile memories remain vividly
visual until late in life.
If, now, we bear in mind the part played in the dream-thoughts by the
infantile experiences, or by the phantasies based upon them, and
recollect how often fragments of these re-emerge in the dream- content,
and how even the dream-wishes often proceed from them, we cannot deny
the probability that in dreams, too, the transformation of thoughts into
visual images may be the result of the attraction exercised by the
visually represented memory, striving for resuscitation, upon the
thoughts severed from the consciousness and struggling for expression.
Pursuing this conception. we may further describe the dream as the
substitute for the infantile scene modified by transference to recent
material. The infantile scene cannot enforce its own revival, and must
therefore be satisfied to return as a dream.
This reference to the significance of the infantile scenes (or of
their phantastic repetitions) as in a certain degree furnishing the
pattern for the dream-content renders superfluous the assumption made by
Scherner and his pupils concerning inner sources of stimuli. Scherner
assumes a state of visual excitation, of internal excitation in the
organ of sight, when the dreams manifest a special vividness or an
extraordinary abundance of visual elements. We need raise no objection
to this assumption; we may perhaps content ourselves with assuming such
a state of excitation only for the psychic perceptive system of the
organ of vision; we shall, however, insist that this state of excitation
is a reanimation by the memory of a former actual visual excitation. I
cannot, from my own experience, give a good example showing such an
influence of an infantile memory; my own dreams are altogether less rich
in perceptual elements than I imagine those of others to be; but in my
most beautiful and most vivid dream of late years I can easily trace the
hallucinatory distinctness of the dream-contents to the visual qualities
of recently received impressions. In chapter VI., H, I mentioned a dream
in which the dark blue of the water, the brown of the smoke issuing from
the ship's funnels, and the sombre brown and red of the buildings which
I saw made a profound and lasting impression upon my mind. This dream,
if any, must be attributed to visual excitation, but what was it that
had brought my organ of vision into this excitable state? It was a
recent impression which had joined itself to a series of former
impressions. The colours I beheld were in the first place those of the
toy blocks with which my children had erected a magnificent building for
my admiration, on the day preceding the dream. There was the sombre red
on the large blocks, the blue and brown on the small ones. Joined to
these were the colour impressions of my last journey in Italy: the
beautiful blue of the Isonzo and the lagoons, the brown hue of the Alps.
The beautiful colours seen in the dream were but a repetition of those
seen in memory.
Let us summarize what we have learned about this peculiarity of
dreams: their power of recasting their idea-content in visual images. We
may not have explained this character of the dream- work by referring it
to the known laws of psychology, but we have singled it out as pointing
to unknown relations, and have given it the name of the regressive
character. Wherever such regression has occurred, we have regarded it as
an effect of the resistance which opposes the progress of thought on its
normal way to consciousness, and of the simultaneous attraction exerted
upon it by vivid memories.[21] The regression in dreams is perhaps
facilitated by the cessation of the progressive stream flowing from the
sense-organs during the day; for which auxiliary factor there must be
some compensation, in the other forms of regression, by the
strengthening of the other regressive motives. We must also bear in mind
that in pathological cases of regression, just as in dreams, the process
of energy-transference must be different from that occurring in the
regressions of normal psychic life, since it renders possible a full
hallucinatory cathexis of the perceptive system. What we have described
in the analysis of the dream-work as regard for representability may be
referred to the selective attraction of visually remembered scenes
touched by the dream-thoughts.
As to the regression, we may further observe that it plays a no less
important part in the theory of neurotic symptom-formation than in the
theory of dreams. We may therefore distinguish a threefold species of
regression: (a) a topical one, in the sense of the scheme of the
Psi-systems here exponded; (b) a temporal one, in so far as it is a
regression to older psychic formations; and (c) a formal one, when
primitive modes of expression and representation take the place of the
customary modes. These three forms of regression are, however, basically
one, and in the majority of cases they coincide, for that which is older
in point of time is at the same time formally primitive and, in the
psychic topography, nearer to the perception-end.
We cannot leave the theme of regression in dreams without giving
utterance to an impression which has already and repeatedly forced
itself upon us, and which will return to us reinforced after a deeper
study of the psychoneuroses: namely, that dreaming is on the whole an
act of regression to the earliest relationships of the dreamer, a
resuscitation of his childhood, of the impulses which were then dominant
and the modes of expression which were then available. Behind this
childhood of the individual we are then promised an insight into the
phylogenetic childhood, into the evolution of the human race, of which
the development of the individual is only an abridged repetition
influenced by the fortuitous circumstances of life. We begin to suspect
that Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that in a dream "there
persists a primordial part of humanity which we can no longer reach by a
direct path," and we are encouraged to expect, from the analysis of
dreams, a knowledge of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of
psychical things in him that are innate. It would seem that dreams and
neuroses have preserved for us more of the psychical antiquities than we
suspected; so that psycho-analysis may claim a high rank among those
sciences which endeavour to reconstruct the oldest and darkest phases of
the beginnings of mankind.
It is quite possible that we shall not find this first part of our
psychological evaluation of dreams particularly satisfying. We must,
however, console ourselves with the thought that we are, after all,
compelled to build out into the dark. If we have not gone altogether
astray, we shall surely reach approximately the same place from another
starting-point, and then, perhaps, we shall be better able to find our
bearings.
C. The Wish-Fulfilment
The dream of the burning child (cited above) affords us a welcome
opportunity for appreciating the difficulties confronting the theory of
wish-fulfilment. That a dream should be nothing but a wish-fulfilment
must undoubtedly seem strange to us all- and not only because of the
contradiction offered by the anxiety-dream. Once our first analyses had
given us the enlightenment that meaning and psychic value are concealed
behind our dreams, we could hardly have expected so unitary a
determination of this meaning. According to the correct but summary
definition of Aristotle, the dream is a continuation of thinking in
sleep. Now if, during the day, our thoughts perform such a diversity of
psychic acts- judgments, conclusions, the answering of objections,
expectations, intentions, etc.- why should they be forced at night to
confine themselves to the production of wishes only? Are there not, on
the contrary, many dreams that present an altogether different psychic
act in dream-form- for example, anxious care- and is not the father's
unusually transparent dream of the burning child such a dream? From the
gleam of light that falls upon his eyes while he is asleep the father
draws the apprehensive conclusion that a candle has fallen over and may
be burning the body; he transforms this conclusion into a dream by
embodying it in an obvious situation enacted in the present tense. What
part is played in this dream by the wish-fulfilment? And how can we
possibly mistake the predominance of the thought continued from the
waking state or evoked by the new sensory impression?
All these considerations are justified, and force us to look more
closely into the role of the wish-fulfilment in dreams, and the
significance of the waking thoughts continued in sleep.
It is precisely the wish-fulfilment that has already caused us to
divide all dreams into two groups. We have found dreams which were
plainly wish-fulfilments; and others in which the wish- fulfilment was
unrecognizable and was often concealed by every available means. In this
latter class of dreams we recognized the influence of the
dream-censorship. The undisguised wish-dreams were found chiefly in
children; short, frank wish-dreams seemed (I purposely emphasize this
word) to occur also in adults.
We may now ask whence in each case does the wish that is realized in
the dream originate? But to what opposition or to what diversity do we
relate this whence? I think to the opposition between conscious daily
life and an unconscious psychic activity which is able to make itself
perceptible only at night. I thus, find a threefold possibility for the
origin of a wish. Firstly, it may have been excited during the day, and
owing to external circumstances may have remained unsatisfied; there is
thus left for the night an acknowledged and unsatisfied wish. Secondly,
it may have emerged during the day, only to be rejected; there is thus
left for the night an unsatisfied but suppressed wish. Thirdly, it may
have no relation to daily life, but may belong to those wishes which
awake only at night out of the suppressed material in us. If we turn to
our scheme of the psychic apparatus, we can localize a wish of the first
order in the system Pcs. We may assume that a wish of the second order
has been forced back from the Pcs system into the Ucs system, where
alone, if anywhere, can it maintain itself; as for the wish- impulse of
the third order, we believe that it is wholly incapable of leaving the
Ucs system. Now, have the wishes arising from these different sources
the same value for the dream, the same power to incite a dream?
On surveying the dreams at our disposal with a view to answering this
question, we are at once moved to add as a fourth source of the
dream-wish the actual wish-impetus which arises during the night (for
example, the stimulus of thirst, and sexual desire). It then seems to us
probable that the source of the dream-wish does not affect its capacity
to incite a dream. I have in mind the dream of the child who continued
the voyage that had been interrupted during the day, and the other
children's dreams cited in the same chapter; they are explained by an
unfulfilled but unsuppressed wish of the daytime. That wishes suppressed
during the day assert themselves in dreams is shown by a great many
examples. I will mention a very simple dream of this kind. A rather
sarcastic lady, whose younger friend has become engaged to be married,
is asked in the daytime by her acquaintances whether she knows her
friend's fiance, and what she thinks of him. She replies with
unqualified praise, imposing silence on her own judgment, although she
would have liked to tell the truth, namely, that he is a commonplace
fellow- one meets such by the dozen (Dutzendmensch). The following night
she dreams that the same question is put to her, and that she replies
with the formula: "In case of subsequent orders, it will suffice to
mention the reference number." Finally, as the result of numerous
analyses, we learn that the wish in all dreams that have been subject to
distortion has its origin in the unconscious, and could not become
perceptible by day. At first sight, then, it seems that in respect of
dream-formation all wishes are of equal value and equal power.
I cannot prove here that this is not really the true state of
affairs, but I am strongly inclined to assume a stricter determination
of the dream-wish. Children's dreams leave us in no doubt that a wish
unfulfilled during the day may instigate a dream. But we must not forget
that this is, after all, the wish of a child; that it is a wish-impulse
of the strength peculiar to childhood. I very much doubt whether a wish
unfulfilled in the daytime would suffice to create a dream in an adult.
It would rather seem that, as we learn to control our instinctual life
by intellection, we more and more renounce as unprofitable the formation
or retention of such intense wishes as are natural to childhood. In
this, indeed, there may be individual variations; some retain the
infantile type of the psychic processes longer than others; just as we
find such differences in the gradual decline of the originally vivid
visual imagination. In general, however, I am of the opinion that
unfulfilled wishes of the day are insufficient to produce a dream in
adults. I will readily admit that the wish-impulses originating in
consciousness contribute to the instigation of dreams, but they probably
do no more. The dream would not occur if the preconscious wish were not
reinforced from another source.
That source is the unconscious. I believe that the conscious wish
becomes effective in exciting a dream only when it succeeds in arousing
a similar unconscious wish which reinforces it. From the indications
obtained in the psychoanalysis of the neuroses, I believe that these
unconscious wishes are always active and ready to express themselves
whenever they find an opportunity of allying themselves with an impulse
from consciousness, and transferring their own greater intensity to the
lesser intensity of the latter.[22] It must, therefore, seem that the
conscious wish alone has been realized in the dream; but a slight
peculiarity in the form of the dream will put us on the track of the
powerful ally from the unconscious. These ever-active and, as it were,
immortal wishes of our unconscious recall the legendary Titans who, from
time immemorial, have been buried under the mountains which were once
hurled upon them by the victorious gods, and even now quiver from time
to time at the convulsions of their mighty limbs. These wishes, existing
in repression, are themselves of infantile origin, as we learn from the
psychological investigation of the neuroses. Let me, therefore, set
aside the view previously expressed, that it matters little whence the
dream-wish originates, and replace it by another, namely: the wish
manifested in the dream must be an infantile wish. In the adult it
originates in the Ucs, while in the child, in whom no division and
censorship exist as yet between the Pcs and Ucs, or in whom these are
only in process of formation, it is an unfulfilled and unrepressed wish
from the waking state. I am aware that this conception cannot be
generally demonstrated, but I maintain that it can often be demonstrated
even where one would not have suspected it, and that it cannot be
generally refuted. -
In dream-formation, the wish-impulses which are left over from the
conscious waking life are, therefore, to be relegated to the background.
I cannot admit that they play any part except that attributed to the
material of actual sensations during sleep in relation to the
dream-content. If I now take into account those other psychic
instigations left over from the waking life of the day, which are not
wishes, I shall merely be adhering to the course mapped out for me by
this line of thought. We may succeed in provisionally disposing of the
energetic cathexis of our waking thoughts by deciding to go to sleep. He
is a good sleeper who can do this; Napoleon I is reputed to have been a
model of this kind. But we do not always succeed in doing it, or in
doing it completely. Unsolved problems, harassing cares, overwhelming
impressions, continue the activity of our thought even during sleep,
maintaining psychic processes in the system which we have termed the
preconscious. The thought-impulses continued into sleep may be divided
into the following groups:
1. Those which have not been completed during the day, owing to some
accidental cause.
2. Those which have been left uncompleted because our mental powers
have failed us, i.e., unsolved problems.
3. Those which have been turned back and suppressed during the day.
This is reinforced by a powerful fourth group:
4. Those which have been excited in our Ucs during the day by the
workings of the Pcs; and finally we may add a fifth, consisting of:
5. The indifferent impressions of the day, which have therefore been
left unsettled.
We need not underrate the psychic intensities introduced into sleep
by these residues of the day's waking life, especially those emanating
from the group of the unsolved issues. It is certain that these
excitations continue to strive for expression during the night, and we
may assume with equal certainty that the state of sleep renders
impossible the usual continuance of the process of excitation in the
preconscious and its termination in becoming conscious. In so far as we
can become conscious of our mental processes in the ordinary way, even
during the night, to that extent we are simply not asleep. I cannot say
what change is produced in the Pcs system by the state of sleep,[23] but
there is no doubt that the psychological characteristics of sleep are to
be sought mainly in the cathectic changes occurring just in this system,
which dominates, moreover, the approach to motility, paralysed during
sleep. On the other hand, I have found nothing in the psychology of
dreams to warrant the assumption that sleep produces any but secondary
changes in the conditions of the Ucs system. Hence, for the nocturnal
excitations in the Pcs there remains no other path than that taken by
the wish-excitations from the Ucs; they must seek reinforcement from the
Ucs, and follow the detours of the unconscious excitations. But what is
the relation of the preconscious day-residues to the dream? There is no
doubt that they penetrate abundantly into the dream; that they utilize
the dream-content to obtrude themselves upon consciousness even during
the night; indeed, they sometimes even dominate the dream-content, and
impel it to continue the work of the day; it is also certain that the
day-residues may just as well have any other character as that of
wishes. But it is highly instructive, and for the theory of
wish-fulfilment of quite decisive importance, to see what conditions
they must comply with in order to be received into the dream.
Let us pick out one of the dreams cited above, e.g., the dream in
which my friend Otto seems to show the symptoms of Basedow's disease
(chapter V., D). Otto's appearance gave me some concern during the day,
and this worry, like everything else relating to him, greatly affected
me. I may assume that this concern followed me into sleep. I was
probably bent on finding out what was the matter with him. During the
night my concern found expression in the dream which I have recorded.
Not only was its content senseless, but it failed to show any
wish-fulfilment. But I began to search for the source of this
incongruous expression of the solicitude felt during the day, and
analysis revealed a connection. I identified my friend Otto with a
certain Baron L and myself with a Professor R. There was only one
explanation of my being impelled to select just this substitute for the
day- thought. I must always have been ready in the Ucs to identify
myself with Professor R, as this meant the realization of one of the
immortal infantile wishes, viz., the wish to become great. Repulsive
ideas respecting my friend, ideas that would certainly have been
repudiated in a waking state, took advantage of the opportunity to creep
into the dream; but the worry of the day had likewise found some sort of
expression by means of a substitute in the dream-content. The
day-thought, which was in itself not a wish, but on the contrary a
worry, had in some way to find a connection with some infantile wish,
now unconscious and suppressed, which then allowed it- duly dressed up-
to arise for consciousness. The more domineering the worry the more
forced could be the connection to be established; between the content of
the wish and that of the worry there need be no connection, nor was
there one in our example.
It would perhaps be appropriate, in dealing with this problem, to
inquire how a dream behaves when material is offered to it in the
dream-thoughts which flatly opposes a wish-fulfilment; such as justified
worries, painful reflections and distressing realizations. The many
possible results may be classified as follows: (a) The dream-work
succeeds in replacing all painful ideas by contrary ideas. and
suppressing the painful affect belonging to them. This, then, results in
a pure and simple satisfaction-dream, a palpable wish-fulfilment,
concerning which there is nothing more to be said. (b) The painful ideas
find their way into the manifest dream-content, more or less modified,
but nevertheless quite recognizable. This is the case which raises
doughts about the wish-theory of dreams, and thus calls for further
investigation. Such dreams with a painful content may either be
indifferent in feeling, or they may convey the whole painful affect,
which the ideas contained in them seem to justify, or they may even lead
to the development of anxiety to the point of waking.
Analysis then shows that even these painful dreams are wish-
fulfilments. An unconscious and repressed wish, whose fulfilment could
only be felt as painful by the dreamer's ego, has seized the opportunity
offered by the continued cathexis of painful day- residues, has lent
them its support, and has thus made them capable of being dreamed. But
whereas in case (a) the unconscious wish coincided with the conscious
one, in case (b) the discord between the unconscious and the conscious-
the repressed material and the ego- is revealed, and the situation in
the fairy-tale, of the three wishes which the fairy offers to the
married couple, is realized (see p. 534 below). The gratification in
respect of the fulfilment of the repressed wish may prove to be so great
that it balances the painful affects adhering to the day-residues; the
dream is then indifferent in its affective tone, although it is on the
one hand the fulfilment of a wish, and on the other the fulfilment of a
fear. Or it may happen that the sleeper's ego plays an even more
extensive part in the dream-formation, that it reacts with violent
resentment to the accomplished satisfaction of the repressed wish, and
even goes so far as to make an end of the dream by means of anxiety. It
is thus not difficult to recognize that dreams of pain and anxiety are,
in accordance with our theory, just as much wish-fulfilments as are the
straightforward dreams of gratification.
Painful dreams may also be punishment dreams. It must be admitted
that the recognition of these dreams adds something that is, in a
certain sense, new to the theory of dreams. What is fulfilled by them is
once more an unconscious wish- the wish for the punishment of the
dreamer for a repressed, prohibited wish- impulse. To this extent, these
dreams comply with the requirement here laid down: that the motive-power
behind the dream-formation must be furnished by a wish belonging to the
unconscious. But a finer psychological dissection allows us to recognize
the difference between this and the other wish-dreams. In the dreams of
group (b) the unconscious dream-forming wish belonged to the repressed
material. In the punishment-dreams it is likewise an unconscious wish,
but one which we must attribute not to the repressed material but to the
ego.
Punishment-dreams point, therefore, to the possibility of a still
more extensive participation of the ego in dream-formation. The
mechanism of dream-formation becomes indeed in every way more
transparent if in place of the antithesis conscious and unconscious, we
put the antithesis: ego and repressed. This, however, cannot be done
without taking into account what happens in the psychoneuroses, and for
this reason it has not been done in this book. Here I need only remark
that the occurrence of punishment-dreams is not generally subject to the
presence of painful day-residues. They originate, indeed, most readily
if the contrary is true, if the thoughts which are day-residues are of a
gratifying nature, but express illicit gratifications. Of these thoughts
nothing, then, finds its way into the manifest dream except their
contrary, just as was the case in the dreams of group (a). Thus it would
be the essential characteristic of punishment-dreams that in them it is
not the unconscious wish from the repressed material (from the system
Ucs) that is responsible for dream-formation but the punitive wish
reacting against it, a wish pertaining to the ego, even though it is
unconscious (i.e., preconscious).[24]
I will elucidate some of the foregoing observations by means of a
dream of my own, and above all I will try to show how the dream- work
deals with a day-residue involving painful expectation:
Indistinct beginning. I tell my wife I have some news for her,
something very special. She becomes frightened, and does not wish to
hear it. I assure her that on the contrary it is something which will
please her greatly, and I begin to tell her that our son's Officers'
Corps has sent a sum of money (5,000 k.?)... something about honourable
mention... distribution... at the same time I have gone with her into a
sitting room, like a store-room, in order to fetch something from it.
Suddenly I see my son appear; he is not in uniform but rather in a
tight-fitting sports suit (like a seal?) with a small cap. He climbs on
to a basket which stands to one side near a chest, in order to put
something on this chest. I address him; no answer. It seems to me that
his face or forehead is bandaged, he arranges something in his mouth,
pushing something into it. Also his hair shows a glint of grey. I
reflect: Can he be so exhausted? And has he false teeth? Before I can
address him again I awake without anxiety, but with palpitations. My
clock points to 2.30 a.m.
To give a full analysis is once more impossible. I shall therefore
confine myself to emphasizing some decisive points. Painful expectations
of the day had given occasion for this dream; once again there had been
no news for over a week from my son, who was fighting at the Front. It
is easy to see that in the dream-content the conviction that he has been
killed or wounded finds expression. At the beginning of the dream one
can observe an energetic effort to replace the painful thoughts by their
contrary. I have to impart something very pleasing, something about
sending money, honourable mention, and distribution. (The sum of money
originates in a gratifying incident of my medical practice; it is
therefore trying to lead the dream away altogether from its theme.) But
this effort fails. The boy's mother has a presentiment of something
terrible and does not wish to listen. The disguises are too thin; the
reference to the material to be suppressed shows through everywhere. If
my son is killed, then his comrades will send back his property; I shall
have to distribute whatever he has left among his sisters, brothers and
other people. Honourable mention is frequently awarded to an officer
after he has died the "hero's death." The dream thus strives to give
direct expression to what it at first wished to deny, whilst at the same
time the wish-fulfilling tendency reveals itself by distortion. (The
change of locality in the dream is no doubt to be understood as
threshold symbolism, in line with Silberer's view.) We have indeed no
idea what lends it the requisite motive-power. But my son does not
appear as failing (on the field of battle) but climbing.- He was, in
fact, a daring mountaineer.- He is not in uniform, but in a sports suit;
that is, the place of the fatality now dreaded has been taken by an
accident which happened to him at one time when he was ski- running,
when he fell and fractured his thigh. But the nature of his costume,
which makes him look like a seal, recalls immediately a younger person,
our comical little grandson; the grey hair recalls his father, our
son-in-law, who has had a bad time in the War. What does this signify?
But let us leave this: the locality, a pantry, the chest, from which he
wants to take something (in the dream, to put something on it), are
unmistakable allusions to an accident of my own, brought upon myself
when I was between two and three years of age. I climbed on a foot-stool
in the pantry, in order to get something nice which was on a chest or
table. The footstool tumbled over and its edge struck me behind the
lower jaw. I might very well have knocked all my teeth out. At this
point, an admonition presents itself: it serves you right- like a
hostile impulse against the valiant warrior. A profounder analysis
enables me to detect the hidden impulse, which would be able to find
satisfaction in the dreaded mishap to my son. It is the envy of youth
which the elderly man believes that he has thoroughly stifled in actual
life. There is no mistaking the fact that it was the very intensity of
the painful apprehension lest such a misfortune should really happen
that searched out for its alleviation such a repressed wish-fulfilment.
I can now clearly define what the unconscious wish means for the
dream. I will admit that there is a whole class of dreams in which the
incitement originates mainly or even exclusively from the residues of
the day; and returning to the dream about my friend Otto, I believe that
even my desire to become at last a professor extraordinarius would have
allowed me to sleep in peace that night, had not the day's concern for
my friend's health continued active. But this worry alone would not have
produced a dream; the motive-power needed by the dream had to be
contributed by a wish, and it was the business of my concern to find
such a wish for itself, as the motive power of the dream. To put it
figuratively, it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of
the entrepreneur in the dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as we say, has
the idea, and feels impelled to realize it, can do nothing without
capital; he needs a capitalist who will defray the expense, and this
capitalist, who contributes the psychic expenditure for the dream, is
invariably and indisputably, whatever the nature of the waking thoughts,
a wish from the unconscious.
In other cases the capitalist himself is the entrepreneur; this,
indeed, seems to be the more usual case. An unconscious wish is excited
by the day's work, and this now creates the dream. And the
dream-processes provide a parallel for all the other possibilities of
the economic relationship here used as an illustration. Thus the
entrepreneur may himself contribute a little of the capital, or several
entrepreneurs may seek the aid of the same capitalist, or several
capitalists may jointly supply the capital required by the
entrepreneurs. Thus there are dreams sustained by more than one
dream-wish, and many similar variations, which may be readily imagined,
and which are of no further interest to us. What is still lacking to our
discussion of the dream-wish we shall only be able to complete later on.
The tertium comparationis in the analogies here employed, the
quantitative element of which an allotted amount is placed at the free
disposal of the dream, admits of a still closer application to the
elucidation of the dream-structure. As shown in chapter VI., B., we can
recognize in most dreams a centre supplied with a special sensory
intensity. This is, as a rule, the direct representation of the
wish-fulfilment; for, if we reverse the displacements of the dream-work,
we find that the psychic intensity of the elements in the dream-thoughts
is replaced by the sensory intensity of the elements in the
dream-content. The elements in the neighbourhood of the wish-fulfilment
have often nothing to do with its meaning, but prove to be the offshoots
of painful thoughts which are opposed to the wish. But owing to their
connection with the central element, often artificially established,
they secure so large a share of its intensity as to become capable of
representation. Thus, the representative energy of the wish-fulfilment
diffuses itself over a certain sphere of association, within which all
elements are raised to representation, including even those that are in
themselves without resources. In dreams containing several dynamic
wishes we can easily separate and delimit the spheres of the individual
wish-fulfilments, and we shall find that the gaps in the dream are often
of the nature of boundary-zones.
Although the foregoing remarks have restricted the significance of
the day-residues for the dream, they are none the less deserving of some
further attention. For they must be a necessary ingredient in
dream-formation, inasmuch as experience reveals the surprising fact that
every dream shows in its content a connection with a recent waking
impression, often of the most indifferent kind. So far we have failed to
understand the necessity for this addition to the dream-mixture (chapter
V., A.). This necessity becomes apparent only when we bear in mind the
part played by the unconscious wish, and seek further information in the
psychology of the neuroses. We shall then learn that an unconscious
idea, as such, is quite incapable of entering into the preconscious, and
that it can exert an influence there only by establishing touch with a
harmless idea already belonging to the preconscious, to which it
transfers its intensity, and by which it allows itself to be screened.
This is the fact of transference, which furnishes the explanation of so
many surprising occurrences in the psychic life of neurotics. The
transference may leave the idea from the preconscious unaltered, though
the latter will thus acquire an unmerited intensity, or it may force
upon this some modification derived from the content of the transferred
idea. I trust the reader will pardon my fondness for comparisons with
daily life, but I feel tempted to say that the situation for the
repressed idea is like that of the American dentist in Austria, who may
not carry on his practice unless he can get a duly installed doctor of
medicine to serve him as a signboard and legal "cover." Further, just as
it is not exactly the busiest physicians who form such alliances with
dental practitioners, so in the psychic life the choice as regards
covers for repressed ideas does not fall upon such preconscious or
conscious ideas as have themselves attracted enough of the attention
active in the preconscious. The unconscious prefers to entangle with its
connections either those impressions and ideas of the preconscious which
have remained unnoticed as being indifferent or those which have
immediately had attention withdrawn from them again (by rejection). it
is a well-known proposition of the theory of associations, confirmed by
all experience, that ideas which have formed a very intimate connection
in one direction assume a negative type of attitude towards whole groups
of new connections. I have even attempted at one time to base a theory
of hysterical paralysis on this principle.
If we assume that the same need of transference on the part of the
repressed ideas, of which we have become aware through the analysis of
the neurosis, makes itself felt in dreams also, we can at once explain
two of the problems of the dream: namely, that every dream-analysis
reveals an interweaving of a recent impression, and that this recent
element is often of the most indifferent character. We may add what we
have already learned elsewhere, that the reason why these recent and
indifferent elements so frequently find their way into the dream-content
as substitutes for the very oldest elements of the dream-thoughts is
that they have the least to fear from the resisting censorship. But
while this freedom from censorship explains only the preference shown to
the trivial elements, the constant presence of recent elements points to
the necessity for transference. Both groups of impressions satisfy the
demand of the repressed ideas for material still free from associations,
the indifferent ones because they have offered no occasion for extensive
associations, and the recent ones because they have not had sufficient
time to form such associations.
We thus see that the day-residues, among which we may now include the
indifferent impressions, not only borrow something from the Ucs when
they secure a share in dream-formation- namely, the motive-power at the
disposal of the repressed wish- but they also offer to the unconscious
something that is indispensable to it, namely, the points of attachment
necessary for transference. If we wished to penetrate more deeply into
the psychic processes, we should have to throw a clearer light on the
play of excitations between the preconscious and the unconscious, and
indeed the study of the psychoneuroses would impel us to do so; but
dreams, as it happens, give us no help in this respect.
Just one further remark as to the day-residues. There is no doubt
that it is really these that disturb our sleep, and not our dreams
which, on the contrary, strive to guard our sleep. But we shall return
to this point later.
So far we have discussed the dream-wish; we have traced it back to
the sphere of the Ucs, and have analysed its relation to the
day-residues, which, in their turn, may be either wishes, or psychic
impulses of any other kind, or simply recent impressions. We have thus
found room for the claims that can be made for the dream-forming
significance of our waking mental activity in all its multifariousness.
It might even prove possible to explain, on the basis of our train of
thought, those extreme cases in which the dream, continuing the work of
the day, brings to a happy issue an unsolved problem of waking life. We
merely lack a suitable example to analyse, in order to uncover the
infantile or repressed source of wishes, the tapping of which has so
successfully reinforced the efforts of the preconscious activity. But we
are not a step nearer to answering the question: Why is it that the
unconscious can furnish in sleep nothing more than the motive-power for
a wish-fulfilment? The answer to this question must elucidate the
psychic nature of the state of wishing: and it will be given with the
aid of the notion of the psychic apparatus.
We do not doubt that this apparatus, too, has only arrived at its
present perfection by a long process of evolution. Let us attempt to
restore it as it existed in an earlier stage of capacity. From
postulates to be confirmed in other ways, we know that at first the
apparatus strove to keep itself as free from stimulation as possible,
and therefore, in its early structure, adopted the arrangement of a
reflex apparatus, which enabled it promptly to discharge by the motor
paths any sensory excitation reaching it from without. But this simple
function was disturbed by the exigencies of life, to which the apparatus
owes the impetus toward further development. The exigencies of life
first confronted it in the form of the great physical needs. The
excitation aroused by the inner need seeks an outlet in motility, which
we may describe as internal change or expression of the emotions. The
hungry child cries or struggles helplessly. But its situation remains
unchanged; for the excitation proceeding from the inner need has not the
character of a momentary impact, but of a continuing pressure. A change
can occur only if, in some way (in the case of the child by external
assistance), there is an experience of satisfaction, which puts an end
to the internal excitation. An essential constituent of this experience
is the appearance of a certain percept (of food in our example), the
memory-image of which is henceforth associated with the memory- trace of
the excitation arising from the need. Thanks to the established
connection, there results, at the next occurrence of this need, a
psychic impulse which seeks to revive the memory- image of the former
percept, and to re-evoke the former percept itself; that is, it actually
seeks to re-establish the situation of the first satisfaction. Such an
impulse is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception
constitutes the wish- fulfilment, and the full cathexis of the
perception, by the excitation springing from the need, constitutes the
shortest path to the wish-fulfilment. We may assume a primitive state of
the psychic apparatus in which this path is actually followed, i.e., in
which the wish ends in hallucination. This first psychic activity
therefore aims at an identity of perception: that is, at a repetition of
that perception which is connected with the satisfaction of the need.
This primitive mental activity must have been modified by bitter
practical experience into a secondary and more appropriate activity. The
establishment of identity of perception by the short regressive path
within the apparatus does not produce the same result in another respect
as follows upon cathexis of the same perception coming from without. The
satisfaction does not occur, and the need continues. In order to make
the internal cathexis equivalent to the external one, the former would
have to be continuously sustained, just as actually happens in the
hallucinatory psychoses and in hunger-phantasies, which exhaust their
performance in maintaining their hold on the object desired. In order to
attain to more appropriate use of the psychic energy, it becomes
necessary to suspend the full regression, so that it does not proceed
beyond the memory-image, and thence can seek other paths, leading
ultimately to the production of the desired identity from the side of
the outer world.[25] This inhibition, as well as the subsequent
deflection of the excitation, becomes the task of a second system, which
controls voluntary motility, i.e., a system whose activity first leads
on to the use of motility for purposes remembered in advance. But all
this complicated mental activity, which works its way from the
memory-image to the production of identity of perception via the outer
world, merely represents a roundabout way to wish-fulfilment made
necessary by experience.[26] Thinking is indeed nothing but a substitute
for the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream is called a
wish-fulfilment, this becomes something self-evident, since nothing but
a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity. The dream, which
fulfils its wishes by following the short regressive path, has thereby
simply preserved for us a specimen of the primary method of operation of
the psychic apparatus, which has been abandoned as inappropriate. What
once prevailed in the waking state, when our psychic life was still
young and inefficient, seems to have been banished into our nocturnal
life; just as we still find in the nursery those discarded primitive
weapons of adult humanity, the bow and arrow. Dreaming is a fragment of
the superseded psychic life of the child. In the psychoses, those modes
of operation of the psychic apparatus which are normally suppressed in
the waking state reassert themselves, and thereupon betray their
inability to satisfy our demands in the outer world.[27]
The unconscious wish-impulses evidently strive to assert themselves
even during the day, and the fact of transference, as well as the
psychoses, tells us that they endeavour to force their way through the
preconscious system to consciousness and the command of motility. Thus,
in the censorship between Ucs and Pcs, which the dream forces us to
assume, we must recognize and respect the guardian of our psychic
health. But is it not carelessness on the part of this guardian to
diminish his vigilance at night, and to allow the suppressed impulses of
the Ucs to achieve expression, thus again making possible the process of
hallucinatory regression? I think not, for when the critical guardian
goes to rest- and we have proof that his slumber is not profound- he
takes care to close the gate to motility. No matter what impulses from
the usually inhibited Ucs may bustle about the stage, there is no need
to interfere with them; they remain harmless, because they are not in a
position to set in motion the motor apparatus which alone can operate to
produce any change in the outer world. Sleep guarantees the security of
the fortress which has to be guarded. The state of affairs is less
harmless when a displacement of energies is produced, not by the decline
at night in the energy put forth by the critical censorship, but by the
pathological enfeeblement of the latter, or the pathological
reinforcement of the unconscious excitations, and this while the
preconscious is cathected and the gates of motility are open. The
guardian is then overpowered; the unconscious excitations subdue the
Pcs, and from the Pcs they dominate our speech and action, or they
enforce hallucinatory regressions, thus directing an apparatus not
designed for them by virtue of the attraction exerted by perceptions on
the distribution of our psychic energy. We call this condition
psychosis.
We now find ourselves in the most favourable position for continuing
the construction of our psychological scaffolding, which we left after
inserting the two systems, Ucs and Pcs. However, we still have reason to
give further consideration to the wish as the sole psychic motive-power
in the dream. We have accepted the explanation that the reason why the
dream is in every case a wish-fulfilment is that it is a function of the
system Ucs, which knows no other aim than wish-fulfilment, and which has
at its disposal no forces other than the wish-impulses. Now if we want
to continue for a single moment longer to maintain our right to develop
such far-reaching psychological speculations from the facts of
dream-interpretation, we are in duty bound to show that they insert the
dream into a context which can also embrace other psychic structures. If
there exists a system of the Ucs- or something sufficiently analogous
for the purposes of our discussion- the dream cannot be its sole
manifestation; every dream may be a wish-fulfilment, but there must be
other forms of abnormal wish-fulfilment as well as dreams. And in fact
the theory of all psychoneurotic symptoms culminates in the one
proposition that they, too, must be conceived as wish-fulfilments of the
unconscious.[28] Our explanation makes the dream only the first member
of a series of the greatest importance for the psychiatrist, the
understanding of which means the solution of the purely psychological
part of the psychiatric problem.[29] But in other members of this group
of wish-fulfilments- for example, in the hysterical symptoms- I know of
one essential characteristic which I have so far failed to find in the
dream. Thus, from the investigations often alluded to in this treatise,
I know that the formation of an hysterical symptom needs a junction of
both the currents of our psychic life. The symptom is not merely the
expression of a realized unconscious wish; the latter must be joined by
another wish from the preconscious, which is fulfilled by the same
symptom; so that the symptom is at least doubly determined, once by each
of the conflicting systems. Just as in dreams, there is no limit to
further over- determination. The determination which does not derive
from the Ucs is, as far as I can see, invariably a thought-stream of
reaction against the unconscious wish; for example, a self- punishment.
Hence I can say, quite generally, that an hysterical symptom originates
only where two contrary wish-fulfilments, having their source in
different psychic systems, are able to meet in a single expression.[30]
Examples would help us but little here, as nothing but a complete
unveiling of the complications in question can carry conviction. I will
therefore content myself with the bare assertion, and will cite one
example, not because it proves anything, but simply as an illustration.
The hysterical vomiting of a female patient proved, on the one hand, to
be the fulfilment of an unconscious phantasy from the years of puberty-
namely, the wish that she might be continually pregnant, and have a
multitude of children; and this was subsequently supplemented by the
wish that she might have them by as many fathers as possible. Against
this immoderate wish there arose a powerful defensive reaction. But as
by the vomiting the patient might have spoilt her figure and her beauty,
so that she would no longer find favour in any man's eyes, the symptom
was also in keeping with the punitive trend of thought, and so, being
admissible on both sides, it was allowed to become a reality. This is
the same way of acceding to a wish-fulfilment as the queen of the
Parthians was pleased to adopt in the case of the triumvir Crassus.
Believing that he had undertaken his campaign out of greed for gold, she
caused molten gold to be poured into the throat of the corpse. "Here
thou hast what thou hast longed for!"
Of the dream we know as yet only that it expresses a wish- fulfilment
of the unconscious; and apparently the dominant preconscious system
permits this fulfilment when it has compelled the wish to undergo
certain distortions. We are, moreover, not in fact in a position to
demonstrate regularly the presence of a train of thought opposed to the
dream-wish, which is realized in the dream as well as its antagonist.
Only now and then have we found in dream-analyses signs of
reaction-products as, for instance, my affection for my friend R in the
dream of my uncle (chapter IV.). But the contribution from the
preconscious which is missing here may be found in another place. The
dream can provide expression for a wish from the Ucs by means of all
sorts of distortions, once the dominant system has withdrawn itself into
the wish to sleep, and has realized this wish by producing the changes
of cathexis within the psychic apparatus which are within its power;
thereupon holding on to the wish in question for the whole duration of
sleep.[31]
Now this persistent wish to sleep on the part of the preconscious has
a quite general facilitating effect on the formation of dreams. Let us
recall the dream of the father who, by the gleam of light from the
death-chamber, was led to conclude that his child's body might have
caught fire. We have shown that one of the psychic forces decisive in
causing the father to draw this conclusion in the dream instead of
allowing himself to be awakened by the gleam of light was the wish to
prolong the life of the child seen in the dream by one moment. Other
wishes originating in the repressed have probably escaped us, for we are
unable to analyse this dream. But as a second source of motive- power in
this dream we may add the father's desire to sleep, for, like the life
of the child, the father's sleep is prolonged for a moment by the dream.
The underlying motive is: "Let the dream go on, or I must wake up." As
in this dream, so in all others, the wish to sleep lends its support to
the unconscious wish. In chapter III. we cited dreams which were
manifestly dreams of convenience. But in truth all dreams may claim this
designation. The efficacy of the wish to go on sleeping is most easily
recognized in the awakening dreams, which so elaborate the external
sensory stimulus that it becomes compatible with the continuance of
sleep; they weave it into a dream in order to rob it of any claims it
might make as a reminder of the outer world. But this wish to go on
sleeping must also play its part in permitting all other dreams, which
can only act as disturbers of the state of sleep from within. "Don't
worry; sleep on; it's only a dream," is in many cases the suggestion of
the Pcs to consciousness when the dream gets too bad; and this describes
in a quite general way the attitude of our dominant psychic activity
towards dreaming, even though the thought remains unuttered. I must draw
the conclusion that throughout the whole of our sleep we are just as
certain that we are dreaming as we are certain that we are sleeping. It
is imperative to disregard the objection that our consciousness is never
directed to the latter knowledge, and that it is directed to the former
knowledge only on special occasions, when the censorship feels, as it
were, taken by surprise. On the contrary, there are persons in whom the
retention at night of the knowledge that they are sleeping and dreaming
becomes quite manifest, and who are thus apparently endowed with the
conscious faculty of guiding their dream-life. Such a dreamer, for
example, is dissatisfied with the turn taken by a dream; he breaks it
off without waking, and begins it afresh, in order to continue it along
different lines, just like a popular author who, upon request, gives a
happier ending to his play. Or on another occasion, when the dream
places him in a sexually exciting situation, he thinks in his sleep: "I
don't want to continue this dream and exhaust myself by an emission; I
would rather save it for a real situation."
The Marquis Hervey (Vaschide) declared that he had gained such power
over his dreams that he could accelerate their course at will, and turn
them in any direction he wished. It seems that in him the wish to sleep
had accorded a place to another, a preconscious wish, the wish to
observe his dreams and to derive pleasure from them. Sleep is just as
compatible with such a wish- resolve as it is with some proviso as a
condition of waking up (wet-nurse's sleep), We know, too, that in all
persons an interest in dreams greatly increases the number of dreams
remembered after waking.
Concerning other observations as to the guidance of dreams, Ferenczi
states: "The dream takes the thought that happens to occupy our psychic
life at the moment, and elaborates it from all sides. It lets any given
dream-picture drop when there is a danger that the wish-fulfilment will
miscarry, and attempts a new kind of solution, until it finally succeeds
in creating a wish- fulfilment that satisfies in one compromise both
instances of the psychic life."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes
[1] Similar views are expressed by Foucault and Tannery.
[2] Seldom have you understood me,
Seldom have I understood you,
But when we found ourselves in the mire,
We at once understood each other!
[3] Cf. The Psycho-pathology of Everday Life.
[4] This peremptory statement: "Whatever disturbs the progress of the
work is a resistance" might easily be misunderstood. It has, of course,
the significance merely of a technical rule, a warning for the analyst.
It is not denied that during an analysis events may occur which cannot
be ascribed to the intention of the person analysed. The patient's
father may die in other ways than by being murdered by the patient, or a
war may break out and interrupt the analysis. But despite the obvious
exaggeration of the above statement there is still something new and
useful in it. Even if the disturbing event is real and independent of
the patient, the extent of the disturbing influence does often depend
only on him, and the resistance reveals itself unmistakably in the ready
and immoderate exploitation of such an opportunity. -
[5] As an example of the significance of doubt and uncertainty in a
dream with a simultaneous shrinking of the dream-content to a single
element, see my General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis the dream of the
sceptical lady patient, p. 492 below, the analysis of which was
successful, despite a short postponement. -
[6] Concerning the intention of forgetting in general, see my The
Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life.
[7] Such corrections in the use of foreign languages are not rare in
dreams, but they are usually attributed to foreigners. Maury (p. 143),
while he was studying English, once dreamed that he informed someone
that he had called on him the day before in the following words: "I
called for you yesterday." The other answered correctly: "You mean: I
called on you yesterday."
[8] Ernest Jones describes an analogous case of frequent occurrence;
during the analysis of one dream another dream of the same night is
often recalled which until then was not merely forgotten, but was not
even suspected.
[9] Studien uber Hysterie, Case II.
[10] Dreams which have occurred during the first years of childhood,
and which have sometimes been retained in the memory for decades with
perfect sensorial freshness, are almost always of great importance for
the understanding of the development and the neurosis of the dreamer.
The analysis of them protects the physician from errors and
uncertainties which might confuse him even theoretically.
[11] Only recently has my attention been called to the fact that Ed.
von Hartmann took the same view with regard to this psychologically
important point: Incidental to the discussion of the role of the
unconscious in artistic creation (Philos. d. Unbew., Vol. i, Sect. B.,
Chap. V) Eduard von Hartmann clearly enunciated the law of association
of ideas which is directed by unconscious directing ideas, without
however realizing the scope of this law. With him it was a question of
demonstrating that "every combination of a sensuous idea when it is not
left entirely to chance, but is directed to a definite end, is in need
of help from the unconscious," and that the conscious interest in any
particular thought-association is a stimulus for the unconscious to
discover from among the numberless possible ideas the one which
corresponds to the directing idea. "It is the unconscious that selects,
and appropriately, in accordance with the aims of the interest: and this
holds true for the associations in abstract thinking (as sensible
representations and artistic combinations as well as for flashes of
wit)." Hence, a limiting of the association of ideas to ideas that evoke
and are evoked in the sense of pure association-psychology is untenable.
Such a restriction "would be justified only if there were states in
human life in which man was free not only from any conscious purpose,
but also from the domination or cooperation of any unconscious interest,
any passing mood. But such a state hardly ever comes to pass, for even
if one leaves one's train of thought seemingly altogether to chance, or
if one surrenders oneself entirely to the involuntary dreams of
phantasy, yet always other leading interests, dominant feelings and
moods prevail at one time rather than another, and these will always
exert an influence on the association of ideas." (Philos. d. Unbew.,
IIe, Aufl. i. 246). In semi-conscious dreams there always appear only
such ideas as correspond to the (unconscious) momentary main interest.
By rendering prominent the feelings and moods over the free
thought-series, the methodical procedure of psycho-analysis is
thoroughly justified even from the standpoint of Hartmann's Psychology
(N. E. Pohorilles, Internat. Zeitschrift. f. Ps. A., I, [1913], p. 605).
Du Prel concludes from the fact that a name which we vainly try to
recall suddenly occurs to the mind that there is an unconscious but none
the less purposeful thinking, whose result then appears in consciousness
(Philos. d. Mystik, p. 107).
[12] Jung has brilliantly corroborated this statement by analyses of
dementia praecox. (Cf. The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, translated by
A. A. Brill. Monograph Series, [Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases
Publishing Co., New York].)
[13] The same considerations naturally hold good of the case in which
superficial associations are exposed in the dream-content, as, for
example, in both the dreams reported by Maury (p. 50, pelerinage-
pelletier- pelle, kilometer- kilograms- gilolo, Lobelia- Lopez- Lotto).
I know from my work with neurotics what kind of reminiscence is prone to
represent itself in this manner. It is the consultation of encyclopedias
by which most people have satisfied their need of an explanation of the
sexual mystery when obsessed by the curiosity of puberty.
[14] The above statements, which when written sounded very
improbable, have since been corroborated and applied experimentally by
Jung and his pupils in the Diagnostiche Assoziationsstudien.
[15] Psychophysik, Part. II, p. 520.
[16] Since writing this, I have thought that consciousness occurs
actually in the locality of the memory-trace.
[17] The further elaboration of this linear diagram will have to
reckon with the assumption that the system following the Pcs represents
the one to which we must attribute consciousness (Cs), so that P = Cs.
[18] The first indication of the element of regression is already
encountered in the writings of Albertus Magnus. According to him the
imaginatio constructs the dream out of the tangible objects which it has
retained. The process is the converse of that operating in the waking
state. Hobbes states (Leviathan, ch. 2): "In sum our dreams are the
reverse of our imagination, the motion, when we are awake, beginning at
one end, and when we dream at another" (quoted by Havelock Ellis, loc.
cit., p. 112). -
[19] From the Greek Kathexo, to occupy, used here in place of the
author's term Besetzung, to signify a charge or investment of energy.-
TR.
[20] Selected Papers on Hysteria, "Further Observations on the
Defence-Neuro-Psychoses," p. 97 above.
[21] In a statement of the theory of repression it should be
explained that a thought passes into repression owing to the co-
operation of two of the factors which influence it. On the one side (the
censorship of Cs) it is pushed, and from the other side (the Ucs) it is
pulled, much as one is helped to the top of the Great Pyramid. (Compare
the paper Repression, p. 422 below.)
[22] They share this character of indestructibility with all other
psychic acts that are really unconscious- that is, with psychic acts
belonging solely to the system Ucs. These paths are opened once and for
all; they never fall into disease; they conduct the excitation process
to discharge as often as they are charged again with unconscious
excitation. To speak metaphorically, they suffer no other form of
annihilation than did the shades of the lower regions in the Odyssey,
who awoke to new life the moment they drank blood. The processes
depending on the preconscious system are destructible in quite another
sense. The psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on this difference.
[23] I have endeavoured to penetrate farther into the relations of
the sleeping state and the conditions of hallucination in my essay,
"Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," Collected
Papers, IV, p. 137.
[24] Here one may consider the idea of the super-ego which was later
recognized by psycho-analysis.
[25] In other words: the introduction of a test of reality is
recognized as necessary.
[26] Le Lorrain justly extols the wish-fulfilments of dreams: "Sans
fatigue serieuse, sans etre oblige de recourir a cette lutte opiniatre
et longue qui use et corrode les jouissances poursuivies." [Without
serious fatigue, without being obliged to have recourse to that long and
stubborn struggle which exhausts and wears away pleasures sought.]
[27] I have further elaborated this train of thought elsewhere, where
I have distinguished the two principles involved as the
pleasure-principle and the reality-principle. Formulations regarding the
Two Principles in Mental Functioning, in Collected Papers, Vol. iv. p.
13.
[28] Expressed more exactly: One portion of the symptom corresponds
to the unconscious wish-fulfilment, while the other corresponds to the
reaction-formation opposed to it.
[29] Hughlings Jackson has expressed himself as follows: "Find out
all about dreams, and you will have found out all about insanity."
[30] Cf. my latest formulation (in Zeitschrift fur Sexual-
wissenschaft, Bd. I) of the origin of hysterical symptoms in the
treatise on "Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality,"
Collected Papers, II, p. 51. This forms chapter X of Selected Papers on
Hysteria, p. 115 above.
[31] This idea has been borrowed from the theory of sleep of
Liebault, who revived hypnotic research in modern times (Du Sommeil
provoque, etc., Paris [1889]).
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contents:
Preface
Chapter 1 (part 1, 2) The Scientific Literature of Dream-Problems (up to
1900)
Chapter 2 The Method
of Dream Interpretation
Chapter 3 The Dream as
Wish Fulfilment
Chapter 4 Distortion
in Dreams
Chapter 5 (part 1, 2) The
Material and Sources of Dreams
Chapter 6 (part 1,
2, 3, 4) The
Dream-Work
Chapter 7 (part 1, 2)
The Psychology of the Dream Process
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CHAPTER 7 (part 2)
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM PROCESSES
D. Waking Caused by Dreams -- The Function of Dreams -- The Anxiety
Dream
Now that we know that throughout the night the preconscious is
orientated to the wish to sleep, we can follow the dream-process with
proper understanding. But let us first summarize what we already know
about this process. We have seen that day-residues are left over from
the waking activity of the mind, residues from which it has not been
possible to withdraw all cathexis. Either one of the unconscious wishes
has been aroused through the waking activity during the day or it so
happens that the two coincide; we have already discussed the
multifarious possibilities. Either already during the day or only on the
establishment of the state of sleep the unconscious wish has made its
way to the day- residues, and has effected a transference to them. Thus
there arises a wish transferred to recent material; or the suppressed
recent wish is revived by a reinforcement from the unconscious. This
wish now endeavours to make its way to consciousness along the normal
path of the thought processes, through the preconscious, to which indeed
it belongs by virtue of one of its constituent elements. It is, however,
confronted by the censorship which still subsists, and to whose
influence it soon succumbs. It now takes on the distortion for which the
way has already been paved by the transference to recent material. So
far it is on the way to becoming something resembling an obsession, a
delusion, or the like, i.e., a thought reinforced by a transference, and
distorted in expression owing to the censorship. But its further
progress is now checked by the state of sleep of the preconscious; this
system has presumably protected itself against invasion by diminishing
its excitations. The dream-process, therefore, takes the regressive
course, which is just opened up by the peculiarity of the sleeping
state, and in so doing follows the attraction exerted on it by memory-
groups, which are, in part only, themselves present as visual cathexis,
not as translations into the symbols of the later systems. On its way to
regression it acquires representability. The subject of compression will
be discussed later. The dream- process has by this time covered the
second part of its contorted course. The first part threads its way
progressively from the unconscious scenes or phantasies to the
preconscious, while the second part struggles back from the boundary of
the censorship to the tract of the perceptions. But when the
dream-process becomes a perception-content, it has, so to speak, eluded
the obstacle set up in the Pcs by the censorship and the sleeping state.
It succeeds in drawing attention to itself, and in being remarked by
consciousness. For consciousness, which for us means a sense- organ for
the apprehension of psychic qualities, can be excited in waking life
from two sources: firstly, from the periphery of the whole apparatus,
the perceptive system; and secondly, from the excitations of pleasure
and pain which emerge as the sole psychic qualities yielded by the
transpositions of energy in the interior of the apparatus. All other
processes in the Psi- systems, even those in the preconscious, are
devoid of all psychic quality, and are therefore not objects of
consciousness, inasmuch as they do not provide either pleasure or pain
for its perception. We shall have to assume that these releases of
pleasure and pain automatically regulate the course of the cathectic
processes. But in order to make possible more delicate performances, it
subsequently proved necessary to render the flow of ideas more
independent of pain-signals. To accomplish this, the Pcs system needed
qualities of its own which could attract consciousness, and most
probably received them through the connection of the preconscious
processes with the memory-system of speech-symbols, which was not devoid
of quality. Through the qualities of this system, consciousness,
hitherto only a sense- organ for perceptions, now becomes also a
sense-organ for a part of our thought-processes. There are now, as it
were, two sensory surfaces, one turned toward perception and the other
toward the preconscious thought-processes.
I must assume that the sensory surface of consciousness which is
turned to the preconscious is rendered far more unexcitable by sleep
than the surface turned toward the P-system. The giving up of interest
in the nocturnal thought-process is, of course, an appropriate
procedure. Nothing is to happen in thought; the preconscious wants to
sleep. But once the dream becomes perception, it is capable of exciting
consciousness through the qualities now gained. The sensory excitation
performs what is in fact its function; namely, it directs a part of the
cathectic energy available in the Pcs to the exciting cause in the form
of attention. We must therefore admit that the dream always has a waking
effect- that is, it calls into activity part of the quiescent energy of
the Pcs. Under the influence of this energy, it now undergoes the
process which we have described as secondary elaboration with a view to
coherence and comprehensibility. This means that the dream is treated by
this energy like any other perception-content; it is subjected to the
same anticipatory ideas as far, at least, as the material allows. As far
as this third part of the dream-process has any direction, this is once
more progressive.
To avoid misunderstanding, it will not be amiss to say a few words as
to the temporal characteristics of these dream- processes. In a very
interesting discussion, evidently suggested by Maury's puzzling
guillotine dream, Goblot tries to demonstrate that a dream takes up no
other time than the transition period between sleeping and waking. The
process of waking up requires time; during this time the dream occurs.
It is supposed that the final picture of the dream is so vivid that it
forces the dreamer to wake; in reality it is so vivid only because when
it appears the dreamer is already very near waking. "Un reve, c'est un
reveil qui commence."[32]
It has already been pointed out by Dugas that Goblot, in order to
generalize his theory, was forced to ignore a great many facts. There
are also dreams from which we do not awaken; for example, many dreams in
which we dream that we dream. From our knowledge of the dream-work, we
can by no means admit that it extends only over the period of waking. On
the contrary, we must consider it probable that the first part of the
dream-work is already begun during the day, when we are still under the
domination of the preconscious. The second phase of the dream-work,
viz., the alteration by the censorship, the attraction exercised by
unconscious scenes, and the penetration to perception, continues
probably all through the night, and accordingly we may always be correct
when we report a feeling that we have been dreaming all night, even
although we cannot say what we have dreamed. I do not however, think
that it is necessary to assume that up to the time of becoming conscious
the dream-processes really follow the temporal sequence which we have
described; viz., that there is first the transferred dream-wish, then
the process of distortion due to the censorship, and then the change of
direction to regression, etc. We were obliged to construct such a
sequence for the sake of description; in reality, however, it is
probably rather a question of simultaneously trying this path and that,
and of the excitation fluctuating to and fro, until finally, because it
has attained the most apposite concentration, one particular grouping
remains in the field. Certain personal experiences even incline me to
believe that the dream-work often requires more than one day and one
night to produce its result, in which case the extraordinary art
manifested in the construction of the dream is shorn of its miraculous
character. In my opinion, even the regard for the comprehensibility of
the dream as a perceptual event may exert its influence before the dream
attracts consciousness to itself. From this point, however, the process
is accelerated, since the dream is henceforth subjected to the same
treatment as any other perception. It is like fire works, which require
hours for their preparation and then flare up in a moment.
Through the dream-work, the dream-process now either gains sufficient
intensity to attract consciousness to itself and to arouse the
preconscious (quite independently of the time or profundity of sleep),
or its intensity is insufficient, and it must wait in readiness until
attion, becoming more alert immediately before waking, meets it
half-way. Most dreams seem to operate with relatively slight psychic
intensities, for they wait for the process of waking. This, then,
explains the fact that as a rule we perceive something dreamed if we are
suddenly roused from a deep sleep. Here, as well as in spontaneous
waking, our first glance lights upon the perception-content created by
the dream-work, while the next falls on that provided by the outer
world.
But of greater theoretical interest are those dreams which are
capable of waking us in the midst of our sleep. We may bear in mind the
purposefulness which can be demonstrated in all other cases, and ask
ourselves why the dream, that is, the unconscious wish, is granted the
power to disturb our sleep, i.e., the fulfilment of the preconscious
wish. The explanation is probably to be found in certain relations of
energy which we do not yet understand. If we did so, we should probably
find that the freedom given to the dream and the expenditure upon it of
a certain detached attention represent a saving of energy as against the
alternative case of the unconscious having to be held in check at night
just as it is during the day. As experience shows, dreaming, even if it
interrupts our sleep several times a night, still remains compatible
with sleep. We wake up for a moment, and immediately fall asleep again.
It is like driving off a fly in our sleep; we awake ad hoc. When we fall
asleep again we have removed the cause of disturbance. The familiar
examples of the sleep of wet-nurses, etc., show that the fulfilment of
the wish to sleep is quite compatible with the maintenance of a certain
amount of attention in a given direction.
But we must here take note of an objection which is based on a
greater knowledge of the unconscious processes. We have ourselves
described the unconscious wishes as always active, whilst nevertheless
asserting that in the daytime they are not strong enough to make
themselves perceptible. But when the state of sleep supervenes, and the
unconscious wish has shown its power to form a dream, and with it to
awaken the preconscious, why does this power lapse after cognizance has
been taken of the dream? Would it not seem more probable that the dream
should continually renew itself, like the disturbing fly which, when
driven away, takes pleasure in returning again and again? What
justification have we for our assertion that the dream removes the
disturbance to sleep?
It is quite true that the unconscious wishes are always active. They
represent paths which are always practicable, whenever a quantum of
excitation makes use of them. It is indeed an outstanding peculiarity of
the unconscious processes that they are indestructible. Nothing can be
brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing is past or forgotten. This
is impressed upon us emphatically in the study of the neuroses, and
especially of hysteria. The unconscious path of thought which leads to
the discharge through an attack is forthwith passable again when there
is a sufficient accumulation of excitation. The mortification suffered
thirty years ago operates, after having gained access to the unconscious
sources of affect, during all these thirty years as though it were a
recent experience. Whenever its memory is touched, it revives, and shows
itself to be cathected with excitation which procures a motor discharge
for itself in an attack. It is precisely here that psychotherapy must
intervene, its task being to ensure that the unconscious processes are
settled and forgotten. Indeed, the fading of memories and the weak
affect of impressions which are no longer recent, which we are apt to
take as self-evident, and to explain as a primary effect of time on our
psychic memory-residues, are in reality secondary changes brought about
by laborious work. It is the preconscious that accomplishes this work;
and the only course which psychotherapy can pursue is to bring the Ucs
under the dominion of the Pcs.
There are, therefore, two possible issues for any single unconscious
excitation-process. Either it is left to itself, in which case it
ultimately breaks through somewhere and secures, on this one occasion, a
discharge for its excitation into motility, or it succumbs to the
influence of the preconscious, and through this its excitation becomes
bound instead of being discharged. It is the latter case that occurs in
the dream-process. The cathexis from the Pcs which goes to meet the
dream once this has attained to perception, because it has been drawn
thither by the excitation of consciousness, binds the unconscious
excitation of the dream and renders it harmless as a disturber of sleep.
When the dreamer wakes up for a moment, he has really chased away the
fly that threatened to disturb his sleep. We may now begin to suspect
that it is really more expedient and economical to give way to the
unconscious wish, to leave clear its path to regression so that and it
may form a dream, and then to bind and dispose of this dream by means of
a small outlay of preconscious work, than to hold the unconscious in
check throughout the whole period of sleep. It was, indeed, to be
expected that the dream, even if originally it was not a purposeful
process, would have seized upon some definite function in the play of
forces of the psychic life. We now see what this function is. The dream
has taken over the task of bringing the excitation of the Ucs, which had
been left free, back under the domination of the preconscious; it thus
discharges the excitation of the Ucs, acts as a safety-valve for the
latter, and at the same time, by a slight outlay of waking activity,
secures the sleep of the preconscious. Thus, like the other psychic
formations of its group, the dream offers itself as a compromise,
serving both systems simultaneously, by fulfilling the wishes of both,
in so far as they are mutually compatible. A glance at Robert's
"elimination theory" will show that we must agree with this author on
his main point, namely, the determination of the function of dreams,
though we differ from him in our general presuppositions and in our
estimation of the dream-process.[33] -
But an obvious reflection must show us that this secondary function
of the dream has no claim to recognition within the framework of any
dream-interpretation. Thinking ahead, making resolutions, sketching out
attempted solutions which can then perhaps be realized in waking life-
these and many more performances are functions of the unconscious and
preconscious activities of the mind which continue as day-residues in
the sleeping state, and can then combine with an unconscious wish to
form a dream (chapter VII., C.). The function of thinking ahead in the
dream is thus rather a function of preconscious waking thought, the
result of which may be disclosed to us by the analysis of dreams or
other phenomena. After the dream has so long been fused with its
manifest content, one must now guard against confusing it with the
latent dream-thoughts.
The above qualification- in so far as the two wishes are mutually
compatible- contains a suggestion that there may be cases in which the
function of the dream fails. The dream-process is, to begin with,
admitted as a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious, but if this attempted
wish-fulfilment disturbs the preconscious so profoundly that the latter
can no longer maintain its state of rest, the dream has broken the
compromise, and has failed to perform the second part of its task. It is
then at once broken off, and replaced by complete awakening. But even
here it is not really the fault of the dream if, though at other times
the guardian, it has now to appear as the disturber of sleep, nor need
this prejudice us against its averred purposive character. This is not
the only instance in the organism in which a contrivance that is usually
to the purpose becomes inappropriate and disturbing so soon as something
is altered in the conditions which engender it; the disturbance, then,
at all events serves the new purpose of indicating the change, and of
bringing into play against it the means of adjustment of the organism.
Here, of course, I am thinking of the anxiety-dream, and lest it should
seem that I try to evade this witness against the theory of wish-
fulfilment whenever I encounter it, I will at least give some
indications as to the explanation of the anxiety-dream.
That a psychic process which develops anxiety may still be a wish-
fulfilment has long ceased to imply any contradiction for us. We may
explain this occurrence by the fact that the wish belongs to one system
(the Ucs), whereas the other system (the Pcs) has rejected and
suppressed it.[34] The subjection of the Ucs by the Pcs is not
thoroughgoing even in perfect psychic health; the extent of this
suppression indicates the degree of our psychic normality. Neurotic
symptoms indicate to us that the two systems are in mutual conflict; the
symptoms are the result of a compromise in this conflict, and they
temporarily put an end to it. On the one hand, they afford the Ucs a way
out for the discharge of its excitation- they serve it as a kind of
sally- gate- while, on the other hand, they give the Pcs the possibility
of dominating the Ucs in some degree. It is instructive to consider, for
example, the significance of a hysterical phobia, or of agoraphobia. A
neurotic is said to be incapable of crossing the street alone, and this
we should rightly call a symptom. Let someone now remove this symptom by
constraining him to this action which he deems himself incapable of
performing. The result will be an attack of anxiety, just as an attack
of anxiety in the street has often been the exciting cause of the
establishment of an agoraphobia. We thus learn that the symptom has been
constituted in order to prevent the anxiety from breaking out. The
phobia is thrown up before the anxiety like a frontier fortress.
We cannot enlarge further on this subject unless we examine the role
of the affects in these processes, which can only be done here
imperfectly. We will therefore affirm the proposition that the principal
reason why the suppression of the Ucs becomes necessary is that, if the
movement of ideas in the Ucs were allowed to run its course, it would
develop an affect which originally had the character of pleasure, but
which, since the process of repression, bears the character of pain. The
aim, as well as the result, of the suppression is to prevent the
development of this pain. The suppression extends to the idea- content
of the Ucs, because the liberation of pain might emanate from this
idea-content. We here take as our basis a quite definite assumption as
to the nature of the development of affect. This is regarded as a motor
or secretory function, the key to the innervation of which is to be
found in the ideas of the Ucs. Through the domination of the Pcs these
ideas are as it were strangled, that is, inhibited from sending out the
impulse that would develop the affect. The danger which arises, if
cathexis by the Pcs ceases, thus consists in the fact that the
unconscious excitations would liberate an affect that- in consequence of
the repression that has previously occurred- could only be felt as pain
or anxiety.
This danger is released if the dream-process is allowed to have its
own way. The conditions for its realization are that repressions shall
have occurred, and that the suppressed wish- impulses can become
sufficiently strong. They, therefore, fall entirely outside the
psychological framework of dream-formation. Were it not for the fact
that our theme is connected by just one factor with the theme of the
development of anxiety, namely, by the setting free of the Ucs during
sleep, I could refrain from the discussion of the anxiety-dream
altogether, and thus avoid all the obscurities involved in it.
The theory of the anxiety-dream belongs, as I have already repeatedly
stated, to the psychology of the neuroses. I might further add that
anxiety in dreams is an anxiety-problem and not a dream-problem. Having
once exhibited the point of contact of the psychology of the neuroses
with the theme of the dream- process, we have nothing further to do with
it. There is only one thing left which I can do. Since I have asserted
that neurotic anxiety has its origin in sexual sources, I can subject
anxiety- dreams to analysis in order to demonstrate the sexual material
in their dream-thoughts.
For good reasons, I refrain from citing any of the examples so
abundantly placed at my disposal by neurotic patients, and prefer to
give some anxiety-dreams of children.
Personally, I have had no real anxiety-dream for decades, but I do
recall one from my seventh or eighth year which I subjected to
interpretation some thirty years later. The dream was very vivid, and
showed me my beloved mother, with a peculiarly calm, sleeping
countenance, carried into the room and laid on the bed by two (or three)
persons with birds' beaks. I awoke crying and screaming, and disturbed
my parents' sleep. The peculiarly draped, excessively tall figures with
beaks I had taken from the illustrations of Philippson's Bible; I
believe they represented deities with the heads of sparrowhawks from an
Egyptian tomb- relief. The analysis yielded, however, also the
recollection of a house-porter's boy, who used to play with us children
on a meadow in front of the house; I might add that his name was Philip.
It seemed to me then that I first heard from this boy the vulgar word
signifying sexual intercourse, which is replaced among educated persons
by the Latin word coitus, but which the dream plainly enough indicates
by the choice of the birds' heads. I must have guessed the sexual
significance of the word from the look of my worldly-wise teacher. My
mother's expression in the dream was copied from the countenance of my
grandfather, whom I had seen a few days before his death snoring in a
state of coma. The interpretation of the secondary elaboration in the
dream must therefore have been that my mother was dying; the
tomb-relief, too, agrees with this. I awoke with this anxiety, and could
not calm myself until I had waked my parents. I remember that I suddenly
became calm when I saw my mother; it was as though I had needed the
assurance: then she was not dead. But this secondary interpretation of
the dream had only taken place when the influence of the developed
anxiety was already at work. I was not in a state of anxiety because I
had dreamt that my mother was dying; I interpreted the dream in this
manner in the preconscious elaboration because I was already under the
domination of the anxiety. The latter, however, could be traced back,
through the repression to a dark, plainly sexual craving, which had
found appropriate expression in the visual content of the dream.
A man twenty-seven years of age, who had been seriously ill for a
year, had repeatedly dreamed, between the ages of eleven and thirteen,
dreams attended with great anxiety, to the effect that a man with a
hatchet was running after him; he wanted to run away, but seemed to be
paralysed, and could not move from the spot. This may be taken as a good
and typical example of a very common anxiety-dream, free from any
suspicion of a sexual meaning. In the analysis, the dreamer first
thought of a story told him by his uncle (chronologically later than the
dream), viz., that he was attacked at night in the street by a
suspicious- looking individual; and he concluded from this association
that he might have heard of a similar episode at the time of the dream.
In association with the hatchet, he recalled that during this period of
his life he once hurt his hand with a hatchet while chopping wood. This
immediately reminded him of his relations with his younger brother, whom
he used to maltreat and knock down. He recalled, in particular, one
occasion when he hit his brother's head with his boot and made it bleed,
and his mother said: "I'm afraid he will kill him one day." While he
seemed to be thus held by the theme of violence, a memory from his ninth
year suddenly emerged. His parents had come home late and had gone to
bed, whilst he was pretending to be asleep. He soon heard panting, and
other sounds that seemed to him mysterious, and he could also guess the
position of his parents in bed. His further thoughts showed that he had
established an analogy between this relation between his parents and his
own relation to his younger brother. He subsumed what was happening
between his parents under the notion of "an act of violence and a
fight." The fact that he had frequently noticed blood in his mother's
bed corroborated this conception.
That the sexual intercourse of adults appears strange and alarming to
children who observe it, and arouses anxiety in them, is, I may say, a
fact established by everyday experience. I have explained this anxiety
on the ground that we have here a sexual excitation which is not
mastered by the child's understanding, and which probably also
encounters repulsion because their parents are involved, and is
therefore transformed into anxiety. At a still earlier period of life
the sexual impulse towards the parent of opposite sex does not yet
suffer repression, but as we have seen (chapter V., D.) expresses itself
freely.
For the night terrors with hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) so
frequent in children I should without hesitation offer the same
explanation. These, too, can only be due to misunderstood and rejected
sexual impulses which, if recorded, would probably show a temporal
periodicity, since an intensification of sexual libido may equally be
produced by accidentally exciting impressions and by spontaneous
periodic processes of development.
I have not the necessary observational material for the full
demonstration of this explanation.[35] On the other hand, pediatrists
seem to lack the point of view which alone makes intelligible the whole
series of phenomena, both from the somatic and from the psychic side. To
illustrate by a comical example how closely, if one is made blind by the
blinkers of medical mythology, one may pass by the understanding of such
cases, I will cite a case which I found in a thesis on pavor nocturnus
(Debacker, 1881, p. 66).
A boy of thirteen, in delicate health, began to be anxious and
dreamy; his sleep became uneasy, and once almost every week it was
interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with hallucinations. The
memory of these dreams was always very distinct. Thus he was able to
relate that the devil had shouted at him: "Now we have you, now we have
you!" and then there was a smell of pitch and brimstone, and the fire
burned his skin. From this dream he woke in terror; at first he could
not cry out; then his voice came back to him, and he was distinctly
heard to say: "No, no, not me; I haven't done anything," or: "Please,
don't; I will never do it again!" At other times he said: "Albert has
never done that!" Later he avoided undressing, "because the fire
attacked him only when he was undressed." In the midst of these evil
dreams, which were endangering his health, he was sent into the country,
where he recovered in the course of eighteen months. At the age of
fifteen he confessed one day: "Je n'osais pas l'avouer, mais j'eprouvais
continuellement des picotements et des surexcitations aux parties;[36] a
la fin, cela m'enervait tant que plusieurs fois j'ai pense me jeter par
la fenetre du dortoir."[37]
It is, of course, not difficult to guess: 1. That the boy had
practised masturbation in former years, that he had probably denied it,
and was threatened with severe punishment for his bad habit (His
confession: Je ne le ferai plus;[38] his denial: Albert n'a jamais fait
ca.)[39] 2. That, under the advancing pressure of puberty, the
temptation to masturbate was re-awakened through the titillation of the
genitals. 3. That now, however, there arose within him a struggle for
repression, which suppressed the libido and transformed it into anxiety,
and that this anxiety now gathered up the punishments with which he was
originally threatened.
Let us, on the other hand, see what conclusions were drawn by the
author (p. 69):
"1. It is clear from this observation that the influence of puberty
may produce in a boy of delicate health a condition of extreme weakness,
and that this may lead to a very marked cerebral anaemia.[40]
"2. This cerebral anaemia produces an alteration of character,
demono-maniacal hallucinations, and very violent nocturnal, and perhaps
also diurnal, states of anxiety.
"3. The demonomania and the self-reproaches of the boy can be traced
to the influences of a religious education which had acted upon him as a
child.
"4. All manifestations disappeared as a result of a lengthy sojourn
in the country, bodily exercise, and the return of physical strength
after the termination of puberty.
"5. Possibly an influence predisposing to the development of the
boy's cerebral state may be attributed to heredity and to the father's
former syphilis."
Then finally come the concluding remarks: "Nous avons fait entrer
cette observation dans le cadre delires apyretiques d'inanition, car
c'est a l'ischemie cerebrale que nous rattachons cet etat
particulier."[41]
E. The Primary and Secondary Processes. Repression
In attempting to penetrate more profoundly into the psychology of the
dream-processes, I have undertaken a difficult task, to which, indeed,
my powers of exposition are hardly adequate. To reproduce the
simultaneity of so complicated a scheme in terms of a successive
description, and at the same time to make each part appear free from all
assumptions, goes fairly beyond my powers. I have now to atone for the
fact that in my exposition of the psychology of dreams I have been
unable to follow the historic development of my own insight. The lines
of approach to the comprehension of the dream were laid down for me by
previous investigations into the psychology of the neuroses, to which I
should not refer here, although I am constantly obliged to do so;
whereas I should like to work in the opposite direction, starting from
the dream, and then proceeding to establish its junction with the
psychology of the neuroses. I am conscious of all the difficulties which
this involves for the reader, but I know of no way to avoid them.
Since I am dissatisfied with this state of affairs, I am glad to
dwell upon another point of view, which would seem to enhance the value
of my efforts. As was shown in the introductory section, I found myself
confronted with a theme which had been marked by the sharpest
contradictions on the part of those who had written on it. In the course
of our treatment of the problems of the dream, room has been found for
most of these contradictory views. We have been compelled to take
decided exception to two only of the views expressed: namely, that the
dream is a meaningless process, and that it is a somatic process. Apart
from these, we have been able to find a place for the truth of all the
contradictory opinions at one point or another of the complicated tissue
of the facts, and we have been able to show that each expressed
something genuine and correct. That our dreams continue the impulses and
interests of waking life has been generally confirmed by the discovery
of the hidden dream-thoughts. These concern themselves only with things
that seem to us important and of great interest. Dreams never occupy
themselves with trifles. But we have accepted also the opposite view,
namely, that the dream gathers up the indifferent residues of the day,
and cannot seize upon any important interest of the day until it has in
some measure withdrawn itself from waking activity. We have found that
this holds true of the dream-content, which by means of distortion gives
the dream-thought an altered expression. We have said that the
dream-process, owing to the nature of the mechanism of association,
finds it easier to obtain possession of recent or indifferent material,
which has not yet been put under an embargo by our waking mental
activity; and that, on account of the censorship, it transfers the
psychic intensity of the significant but also objectionable material to
the indifferent. The hypermnesia of the dream and its ability to dispose
of infantile material have become the main foundations of our doctrine;
in our theory of dreams we have assigned to a wish of infantile origin
the part of the indispensable motive-power of dream-formation. It has
not, of course, occurred to us to doubt the experimentally demonstrated
significance of external sensory stimuli during sleep; but we have
placed this material in the same relation to the dream-wish as the
thought-residues left over from our waking activity. We need not dispute
the fact that the dream interprets objective sensory stimuli after the
manner of an illusion; but we have supplied the motive for this
interpretation, which has been left indeterminate by other writers. The
interpretation proceeds in such a way that the perceived object is
rendered harmless as a source of disturbance of sleep, whilst it is made
usable for the wish-fulfilment. Though we do not admit as a special
source of dreams the subjective state of excitation of the sensory
organs during sleep (which seems to have been demonstrated by Trumbull
Ladd), we are, nevertheless, able to explain this state of excitation by
the regressive revival of the memories active behind the dream. As to
the internal organic sensations, which are wont to be taken as the
cardinal point of the explanation of dreams, these, too, find a place in
our conception, though indeed a more modest one. These sensations- the
sensations of falling, of soaring, or of being inhibited- represent an
ever-ready material, which the dream-work can employ to express the
dream- thought as often as need arises.
That the dream-process is a rapid and momentary one is, we believe,
true as regards the perception by consciousness of the preformed
dream-content; but we have found that the preceding portions of the
dream-process probably follow a slow, fluctuating course. As for the
riddle of the superabundant dream-content compressed into the briefest
moment of time, we have been able to contribute the explanation that the
dream seizes upon ready-made formations of the psychic life. We have
found that it is true that dreams are distorted and mutilated by the
memory, but that this fact presents no difficulties, as it is only the
last manifest portion of a process of distortion which has been going on
from the very beginning of the dream-work. In the embittered
controversy, which has seemed irreconcilable, whether the psychic life
is asleep at night, or can make the same use of all its faculties as
during the day, we have been able to conclude that both sides are right,
but that neither is entirely so. In the dream-thoughts we found evidence
of a highly complicated intellectual activity, operating with almost all
the resources of the psychic apparatus; yet it cannot be denied that
these dream- thoughts have originated during the day, and it is
indispensable to assume that there is a sleeping state of the psychic
life. Thus, even the doctrine of partial sleep received its due, but we
have found the characteristic feature of the sleeping state not in the
disintegration of the psychic system of connections, but in the special
attitude adopted by the psychic system which is dominant during the day-
the attitude of the wish to sleep. The deflection from the outer world
retains its significance for our view, too; though not the only factor
at work, it helps to make possible the regressive course of the
dream-representation. The abandonment of voluntary guidance of the flow
of ideas is incontestable; but psychic life does not thereby become
aimless, for we have seen that upon relinquishment of the voluntary
directing ideas, involuntary ones take charge. On the other hand, we
have not only recognized the loose associative connection of the dream,
but have brought a far greater area within the scope of this kind of
connection than could have been suspected; we have, however, found it
merely an enforced substitute for another, a correct and significant
type of association. To be sure, we too have called the dream absurd,
but examples have shown us how wise the dream is when it simulates
absurdity. As regards the functions that have been attributed to the
dream, we are able to accept them all. That the dream relieves the mind,
like a safety-valve, and that, as Robert has put it, all kinds of
harmful material are rendered harmless by representation in the dream,
not only coincides exactly with our own theory of the twofold
wish-fulfilment in the dream, but in its very wording becomes more
intelligible for us than it is for Robert himself. The free indulgence
of the psyche in the play of its faculties is reproduced in our theory
as the non-interference of the preconscious activity with the dream. The
return of the embryonal standpoint of psychic life in the dream, and
Havelock Ellis's remark that the dream is "an archaic world of vast
emotions and imperfect thoughts," appear to us as happy anticipations of
our own exposition, which asserts that primitive modes of operations
that are suppressed during the day play a part in the formation of
dreams. We can fully identify ourselves with Sully's statement, that
"our dreams bring back again our earlier and successively developed
personalities, our old ways of regarding things, with impulses and modes
of reaction which ruled us long ago"; and for us, as for Delage, the
suppressed material becomes the mainspring of the dream.
We have fully accepted the role that Scherner ascribes to the
dream-phantasy, and his own interpretations, but we have been obliged to
transpose them, as it were, to another part of the problem. It is not
the dream that creates the phantasy, but the activity of unconscious
phantasy that plays the leading part in the formation of the
dream-thoughts. We remain indebted to Scherner for directing us to the
source of the dream-thoughts, but almost everything that he ascribes to
the dream-work is attributable to the activity of the unconscious during
the day, which instigates dreams no less than neurotic symptoms. The
dream- work we had to separate from this activity as something quite
different and far more closely controlled. Finally, we have by no means
renounced the relation of the dream to psychic disturbances, but have
given it, on new ground, a more solid foundation.
Held together by the new features in our theory as by a superior
unity, we find the most varied and most contradictory conclusions of
other writers fitting into our structure; many of them are given a
different turn, but only a few of them are wholly rejected. But our own
structure is still unfinished. For apart from the many obscure questions
in which we have involved ourselves by our advance into the dark regions
of psychology, we are now, it would seem, embarrassed by a new
contradiction. On the one hand, we have made it appear that the
dream-thoughts proceed from perfectly normal psychic activities, but on
the other hand we have found among the dream-thoughts a number of
entirely abnormal mental processes, which extend also to the
dream-content, and which we reproduce in the interpretation of the
dream. All that we have termed the dream-work seems to depart so
completely from the psychic processes which we recognize as correct and
appropriate that the severest judgments expressed by the writers
mentioned as to the low level of psychic achievement of dreams must
appear well founded.
Here, perhaps, only further investigations can provide an explanation
and set us on the right path. Let me pick out for renewed attention one
of the constellations which lead to dream- formation.
We have learned that the dream serves as a substitute for a number of
thoughts derived from our daily life, and which fit together with
perfect logic. We cannot, therefore, doubt that these thoughts have
their own origin in our normal mental life. All the qualities which we
value in our thought-processes, and which mark them out as complicated
performances of a high order, we shall find repeated in the
dream-thoughts. There is, however, no need to assume that this mental
work is performed during sleep; such an assumption would badly confuse
the conception of the psychic state of sleep to which we have hitherto
adhered. On the contrary, these thoughts may very well have their origin
in the daytime, and, unremarked by our consciousness, may have gone on
from their first stimulus until, at the onset of sleep, they have
reached completion. If we are to conclude anything from this state of
affairs, it can only be that it proves that the most complex mental
operations are possible without the cooperation of consciousness- a
truth which we have had to learn anyhow from every psycho-analysis of a
patient suffering from hysteria or obsessions. These dream-thoughts are
certainly not in themselves incapable of consciousness; if we have not
become conscious of them during the day, this may have been due to
various reasons. The act of becoming conscious depends upon a definite
psychic function- attention- being brought to bear. This seems to be
available only in a determinate quantity, which may have been diverted
from the train of thought in question by other aims. Another way in
which such trains of thought may be withheld from consciousness is the
following: From our conscious reflection we know that, when applying our
attention, we follow a particular course. But if that course leads us to
an idea which cannot withstand criticism, we break off and allow the
cathexis of attention to drop. Now, it would seem that the train of
thought thus started and abandoned may continue to develop without our
attention returning to it, unless at some point it attains a specially
high intensity which compels attention. An initial conscious rejection
by our judgment, on the ground of incorrectness or uselessness for the
immediate purpose of the act of thought, may, therefore, be the cause of
a thought-process going on unnoticed by consciousness until the onset of
sleep.
Let us now recapitulate: We call such a train of thought a
preconscious train, and we believe it to be perfectly correct, and that
it may equally well be a merely neglected train or one that has been
interrupted and suppressed. Let us also state in plain terms how we
visualize the movement of our thought. We believe that a certain
quantity of excitation, which we call cathectic energy, is displaced
from a purposive idea along the association paths selected by this
directing idea. A neglected train of thought has received no such
cathexis, and the cathexis has been withdrawn from one that was
suppressed or rejected; both have thus been left to their own
excitations. The train of thought cathected by some aim becomes able
under certain conditions to attract the attention of consciousness, and
by the mediation of consciousness it then receives hyper-cathexis. We
shall be obliged presently to elucidate our assumptions as to the nature
and function of consciousness.
A train of thought thus incited in the Pcs may either disappear
spontaneously, or it may continue. The former eventuality we conceive as
follows: it diffuses its energy through all the association paths
emanating from it, and throws the entire chain of thoughts into a state
of excitation, which continues for a while, and then subsides, through
the excitation which had called for discharge being transformed into
dormant cathexis. If this first eventuality occurs, the process has no
further significance for dream-formation. But other directing ideas are
lurking in our preconscious, which have their source in our unconscious
and ever- active wishes. These may gain control of the excitation in the
circle of thoughts thus left to itself, establish a connection between
it and the unconscious wish, and transfer to it the energy inherent in
the unconscious wish. Henceforth the neglected or suppressed train of
thought is in a position to maintain itself, although this reinforcement
gives it no claim to access to consciousness. We may say, then, that the
hitherto preconscious train of thought has been drawn into the
unconscious.
Other constellations leading to dream-formation might be as follows:
The preconscious train of thought might have been connected from the
beginning with the unconscious wish, and for that reason might have met
with rejection by the dominating aim- cathexis. Or an unconscious wish
might become active for other (possibly somatic) reasons, and of its own
accord seek a transference to the psychic residues not cathected by the
Pcs. All three cases have the same result: there is established in the
preconscious a train of thought which, having been abandoned by the
preconscious cathexis, has acquired cathexis from the unconscious wish.
From this point onward the train of thought is subjected to a series
of transformations which we no longer recognize as normal psychic
processes, and which give a result that we find strange, a
psychopathological formation. Let us now emphasize and bring together
these transformations:
1. The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of
discharge in their entirety, and pass from one idea to another, so that
individual ideas are formed which are endowed with great intensity.
Through the repeated occurrence of this process, the intensity of an
entire train of thought may ultimately be concentrated in a single
conceptual unit. This is the fact of compression or condensation with
which we become acquainted when investigating the dream-work. It is
condensation that is mainly responsible for the strange impression
produced by dreams, for we know of nothing analogous to it in the normal
psychic life that is accessible to consciousness. We get here, too,
ideas which are of great psychic significance as nodal points or as
end-results of whole chains of thought, but this value is not expressed
by any character actually manifest for our internal perception; what is
represented in it is not in any way made more intensive. In the process
of condensation the whole set of psychic connections becomes transformed
into the intensity of the idea-content. The situation is the same as
when, in the case of a book, I italicize or print in heavy type any word
to which I attach outstanding value for the understanding of the text.
In speech, I should pronounce the same word loudly, and deliberately,
and with emphasis. The first simile points immediately to one of the
examples which were given of the dream-work (trimethylamine in the dream
of Irma's injection). Historians of art call our attention to the fact
that the most ancient sculptures known to history follow a similar
principle, in expressing the rank of the persons represented by the size
of the statues. The king is made two or three times as tall as his
retinue or his vanquished enemies. But a work of art of the Roman period
makes use of more subtle means to accomplish the same end. The figure of
the Emperor is placed in the centre, erect and in his full height, and
special care is bestowed on the modelling of this figure; his enemies
are seen cowering at his feet; but he is no longer made to seem a giant
among dwarfs. At the same time, in the bowing of the subordinate to his
superior, even in our own day, we have an echo of this ancient principle
of representation.
The direction followed by the condensations of the dream is
prescribed on the one hand by the true preconscious relations of the
dream-thoughts, and, on the other hand, by the attraction of the visual
memories in the unconscious. The success of the condensation-work
produces those intensities which are required for penetration to the
perception-system.
2. By the free transference of intensities, and in the service of the
condensation, intermediary ideas- compromises, as it were- are formed
(cf. the numerous examples). This, also, is something unheard of in the
normal movement of our ideas, where what is of most importance is the
selection and the retention of the right conceptual material. On the
other hand, composite and compromise formations occur with extraordinary
frequency when we are trying to find verbal expression for preconscious
thoughts; these are considered slips of the tongue.
3. The ideas which transfer their intensities to one another are very
loosely connected, and are joined together by such forms of association
as are disdained by our serious thinking, and left to be exploited
solely by wit. In particular, assonances and punning associations are
treated as equal in value to any other associations.
4. Contradictory thoughts do not try to eliminate one another, but
continue side by side, and often combine to form condensation- products,
as though no contradiction existed; or they form compromises for which
we should never forgive our thought, but which we frequently sanction in
our action.
These are some of the most conspicuous abnormal processes to which
the dream-thoughts which have previously been rationally formed are
subjected in the course of the dream-work. As the main feature of these
processes, we may see that the greatest importance is attached to
rendering the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the
content and the intrinsic significance of the psychic elements to which
these cathexes adhere become matters of secondary importance. One might
perhaps assume that condensation and compromise-formation are effected
only in the service of regression, when the occasion arises for changing
thoughts into images. But the analysis- and still more plainly the
synthesis- of such dreams as show no regression towards images, e.g.,
the dream Autodidasker: Conversation with Professor N, reveals the same
processes of displacement and condensation as do the rest.
We cannot, therefore, avoid the conclusion that two kinds of
essentially different psychic processes participate in dream- formation;
one forms perfectly correct and fitting dream- thoughts, equivalent to
the results of normal thinking, while the other deals with these
thoughts in a most astonishing and, as it seems, incorrect way. The
latter process we have already set apart in chapter VI as the dream-work
proper. What can we say now as to the derivation of this psychic
process?
It would be impossible to answer this question here if we had not
penetrated a considerable way into the psychology of the neuroses, and
especially of hysteria. From this, however, we learn that the same
"incorrect" psychic processes- as well as others not enumerated- control
the production of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we find at
first a series of perfectly correct and fitting thoughts, equivalent to
our conscious ones, of whose existence in this form we can, however,
learn nothing, i.e., which we can only subsequently reconstruct. If they
have forced their way anywhere to perception, we discover from the
analysis of the symptom formed that these normal thoughts have been
subjected to abnormal treatment, and that by means of condensation and
compromise-formation, through superficial associations which cover up
contradictions, and eventually along the path of regression, they have
been conveyed into the symptom. In view of the complete identity between
the peculiarities of the dream-work and those of the psychic activity
which issues in psychoneurotic symptoms, we shall feel justified in
transferring to the dream the conclusions urged upon us by hysteria.
From the theory of hysteria we borrow the proposition that such an
abnormal psychic elaboration of a normal train of thought takes place
only when the latter has been used for the transference of an
unconscious wish which dares from the infantile life and is in a state
of repression. Complying with this proposition, we have built up the
theory of the dream on the assumption that the actuating dream-wish
invariably originates in the unconscious; which, as we have ourselves
admitted, cannot be universally demonstrated, even though it cannot be
refuted. But in order to enable us to say just what repression is, after
employing this term so freely, we shall be obliged to make a further
addition to our psychological scaffolding.
We had elaborated the fiction of a primitive psychic apparatus, the
work of which is regulated by the effort to avoid accumulation of
excitation, and as far as possible to maintain itself free from
excitation. For this reason it was constructed after the plan of a
reflex apparatus; motility, in the first place as the path to changes
within the body, was the channel of discharge at its disposal. We then
discussed the psychic results of experiences of gratification, and were
able at this point to introduce a second assumption, namely, that the
accumulation of excitation- by processes that do not concern us here- is
felt as pain, and sets the apparatus in operation in order to bring
about again a state of gratification, in which the diminution of
excitation is perceived as pleasure. Such a current in the apparatus,
issuing from pain and striving for pleasure, we call a wish. We have
said that nothing but a wish is capable of setting the apparatus in
motion and that the course of any excitation in the apparatus is
regulated automatically by the perception of pleasure and pain. The
first occurrence of wishing may well have taken the form of a
hallucinatory cathexis of the memory of gratification. But this
hallucination, unless it could be maintained to the point of exhaustion,
proved incapable of bringing about a cessation of the need, and
consequently of securing the pleasure connected with gratification.
Thus, there was required a second activity- in our terminology the
activity of a second system- which would not allow the memory- cathexis
to force its way to perception and thence to bind the psychic forces,
but would lead the excitation emanating from the need-stimulus by a
detour, which by means of voluntary motility would ultimately so change
the outer world as to permit the real perception of the gratifying
object. Thus far we have already elaborated the scheme of the psychic
apparatus; these two systems are the germ of what we set up in the fully
developed apparatus as the Ucs and Pcs.
To change the outer world appropriately by means of motility requires
the accumulation of a large total of experiences in the memory-systems,
as well as a manifold consolidation of the relations which are evoked in
this memory-material by various directing ideas. We will now proceed
further with our assumptions. The activity of the second system, groping
in many directions, tentatively sending forth cathexes and retracting
them, needs on the one hand full command over all memory- material, but
on the other hand it would be a superfluous expenditure of energy were
it to send along the individual thought-paths large quantities of
cathexis, which would then flow away to no purpose and thus diminish the
quantity needed for changing the outer world. Out of a regard for
purposiveness, therefore, I postulate that the second system succeeds in
maintaining the greater part of the energic cathexes in a state of rest,
and in using only a small portion for its operations of displacement.
The mechanics of these processes is entirely unknown to me; anyone who
seriously wishes to follow up these ideas must address himself to the
physical analogies, and find some way of getting a picture of the
sequence of motions which ensues on the excitation of the neurones. Here
I do no more than hold fast to the idea that the activity of the first
Psi-system aims at the free outflow of the quantities of excitation, and
that the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it,
effects an inhibition of this outflow, a transformation into dormant
cathexis, probably with a rise of potential. I therefore assume that the
course taken by any excitation under the control of the second system is
bound to quite different mechanical conditions from those which obtain
under the control of the first system. After the second system has
completed its work of experimental thought, it removes the inhibition
and damming up of the excitations and allows them to flow off into
motility.
An interesting train of thought now presents itself if we consider
the relations of this inhibition of discharge by the second system to
the process of regulation by the pain-principle. Let us now seek out the
counterpart of the primary experience of gratification, namely, the
objective experience of fear. Let a perception-stimulus act on the
primitive apparatus and be the source of a pain-excitation. There will
then ensue uncoordinated motor manifestations, which will go on until
one of these withdraws the apparatus from perception, and at the same
time from the pain. On the reappearance of the percept this
manifestation will immediately be repeated (perhaps as a movement of
flight), until the percept has again disappeared. But in this case no
tendency will remain to recathect the perception of the source of pain
by hallucination or otherwise. On the contrary, there will be a tendency
in the primary apparatus to turn away again from this painful
memory-image immediately if it is in any way awakened, since the
overflow of its excitation into perception would, of course, evoke (or
more precisely, begin to evoke) pain. This turning away from a
recollection, which is merely a repetition of the former flight from
perception, is also facilitated by the fact that, unlike the perception,
the recollection has not enough quality to arouse consciousness, and
thereby to attract fresh cathexis. This effortless and regular turning
away of the psychic process from the memory of anything that had once
been painful gives us the prototype and the first example of psychic
repression. We all know how much of this turning away from the painful,
the tactics of the ostrich, may still be shown as present even in the
normal psychic life of adults.
In obedience to the pain-principle, therefore, the first Psi- system
is quite incapable of introducing anything unpleasant into the
thought-nexus. The system cannot do anything but wish. If this were to
remain so, the activity of thought of the second system, which needs to
have at its disposal all the memories stored up by experience, would be
obstructed. But two paths are now open: either the work of the second
system frees itself completely from the pain-principle, and continues
its course, paying no heed to the pain attached to given memories, or it
contrives to cathect the memory of the pain in such a manner as to
preclude the liberation of pain. We can reject the first possibility, as
the pain-principle also proves to act as a regulator of the cycle of
excitation in the second system; we are therefore thrown back upon the
second possibility, namely, that this system cathects a memory in such a
manner as to inhibit any outflow of excitation from it, and hence, also,
the outflow, comparable to a motor-innervation, needed for the
development of pain. And thus, setting out from two different
starting-points, i.e., from regard for the pain-principle, and from the
principle of the least expenditure of innervation, we are led to the
hypothesis that cathexis through the second system is at the same time
an inhibition of the discharge of excitation. Let us, however, keep a
close hold on the fact- for this is the key to the theory of repression-
that the second system can only cathect an idea when it is in a position
to inhibit any pain emanating from this idea. Anything that withdrew
itself from this inhibition would also remain inaccessible for the
second system, i.e., would immediately be given up by virtue of the
pain- principle. The inhibition of pain, however, need not be complete;
it must be permitted to begin, since this indicates to the second system
the nature of the memory, and possibly its lack of fitness for the
purpose sought by the process of thought.
The psychic process which is alone tolerated by the first system I
shall now call the primary process; and that which results under the
inhibiting action of the second system I shall call the secondary
process. I can also show at another point for what purpose the second
system is obliged to correct the primary process. The primary process
strives for discharge of the excitation in order to establish with the
quantity of excitation thus collected an identity of perception; the
secondary process has abandoned this intention, and has adopted instead
the aim of an identity of thought. All thinking is merely a detour from
the memory of gratification (taken as a purposive idea) to the identical
cathexis of the same memory, which is to be reached once more by the
path of motor experiences. Thought must concern itself with the
connecting-paths between ideas without allowing itself to be misled by
their intensities. But it is obvious that condensations of ideas and
intermediate or compromise-formations are obstacles to the attainment of
the identity which is aimed at; by substituting one idea for another
they swerve away from the path which would have led onward from the
first idea. Such procedures are, therefore, carefully avoided in our
secondary thinking. It will readily be seen, moreover, that the pain-
principle, although at other times it provides the thought- process with
its most important clues, may also put difficulties in its way in the
pursuit of identity of thought. Hence, the tendency of the thinking
process must always be to free itself more and more from exclusive
regulation by the pain-principle, and to restrict the development of
affect through the work of thought to the very minimum which remains
effective as a signal. This refinement in functioning is to be achieved
by a fresh hyper- cathexis, effected with the help of consciousness. But
we are aware that this refinement is seldom successful, even in normal
psychic life, and that our thinking always remains liable to
falsification by the intervention of the pain-principle.
This, however, is not the breach in the functional efficiency of our
psychic apparatus which makes it possible for thoughts representing the
result of the secondary thought-work to fall into the power of the
primary psychic process; by which formula we may now describe the
operations resulting in dreams and the symptoms of hysteria. This
inadequacy results from the converging of two factors in our
development, one of which pertains solely to the psychic apparatus, and
has exercised a determining influence on the relation of the two
systems, while the other operates fluctuatingly, and introduces motive
forces of organic origin into the psychic life. Both originate in the
infantile life, and are a precipitate of the alteration which our
psychic and somatic organism has undergone since our infantile years.
When I termed one of the psychic processes in the psychic apparatus
the primary process, I did so not only in consideration of its status
and function, but was also able to take account of the temporal
relationship actually involved. So far as we know, a psychic apparatus
possessing only the primary process does not exist, and is to that
extent a theoretical fiction but this at least is a fact: that the
primary processes are present in the apparatus from the beginning, while
the secondary processes only take shape gradually during the course of
life, inhibiting and overlaying the primary, whilst gaining complete
control over them perhaps only in the prime of life. Owing to this
belated arrival of the secondary processes, the essence of our being,
consisting of unconscious wish-impulses, remains something which cannot
be grasped or inhibited by the preconscious; and its part is once and
for all restricted to indicating the most appropriate paths for the
wish-impulses originating in the unconscious. These unconscious wishes
represent for all subsequent psychic strivings a compulsion to which
they Must submit themselves, although they may perhaps endeavour to
divert them and to guide them to superior aims. In consequence of this
retardation, an extensive region of the memory-material remains in fact
inaccessible to preconscious cathexis.
Now among these wish-impulses originating in the infantile life.
indestructible and incapable of inhibition, there are some the
fulfilments of which have come to be in contradiction with the purposive
ideas of our secondary thinking. The fulfilment of these wishes would no
longer produce an affect of pleasure, but one of pain; and it is just
this conversion of affect that constitutes the essence of what we call
repression. In what manner and by what motive forces such a conversion
can take place constitutes the problem of repression, which we need here
only to touch upon in passing. It will suffice to note the fact that
such a conversion of affect occurs in the course of development (one
need only think of the emergence of disgust, originally absent in
infantile life), and that it is connected with the activity of the
secondary system. The memories from which the unconscious wish evokes a
liberation of affect have never been accessible to the Pcs, and for that
reason this liberation cannot be inhibited. It is precisely on account
of this generation of affect that these ideas are not now accessible
even by way of the preconscious thoughts to which they have transferred
the energy of the wishes connected with them. On the contrary, the pain-
principle comes into play, and causes the Pcs to turn away from these
transference-thoughts. These latter are left to themselves, are
repressed, and thus, the existence of a store of infantile memories,
withdrawn from the beginning from the Pcs, becomes the preliminary
condition of repression.
In the most favourable case, the generation of pain terminates so
soon as the cathexis is withdrawn from the transference-thoughts in the
Pcs, and this result shows that the intervention of the pain-principle
is appropriate. It is otherwise, however, if the repressed unconscious
wish receives an organic reinforcement which it can put at the service
of its transference-thoughts, and by which it can enable them to attempt
to break through with their excitation, even if the cathexis of the Pcs
has been taken away from them. A defensive struggle then ensues,
inasmuch as the Pcs reinforces the opposite to the repressed thoughts
(counter- cathexis), and the eventual outcome is that the transference-
thoughts (the carriers of the unconscious wish) break through in some
form of compromise through symptom-formation. But from the moment that
the repressed thoughts are powerfully cathected by the unconscious
wish-impulse, but forsaken by the preconscious cathexis, they succumb to
the primary psychic process, and aim only at motor discharge; or, if the
way is clear, at hallucinatory revival of the desired identity of
perception. We have already found, empirically, that the incorrect
processes described are enacted only with thoughts which are in a state
of repression. We are now in a position to grasp yet another part of the
total scheme of the facts. These incorrect Processes are the primary
processes of the psychic apparatus; they occur wherever ideas abandoned
by the preconscious cathexis are left to themselves and can become
filled with the uninhibited energy which flows from the unconscious and
strives for discharge. There are further facts which go to show that the
processes described as incorrect are not really falsifications of our
normal procedure, or defective thinking. but the modes of operation of
the psychic apparatus when freed from inhibition. Thus we see that the
process of the conveyance of the preconscious excitation to motility
occurs in accordance with the same procedure, and that in the linkage of
preconscious ideas with words we may easily find manifested the same
displacements and confusions (which we ascribe to inattention). Finally,
a proof of the increased work made necessary by the inhibition of these
primary modes of procedure might be found in the fact that we achieve a
comical effect, a surplus to be discharged through laughter, if we allow
these modes of thought to come to consciousness.
The theory of the psychoneuroses asserts with absolute certainty that
it can only be sexual wish-impulses from the infantile life, which have
undergone repression (affect-conversion) during the developmental period
of childhood, which are capable of renewal at later periods of
development (whether as a result of our sexual constitution, which has,
of course, grown out of an original bi-sexuality, or in consequence of
unfavourable influences in our sexual life); and which therefore supply
the motive-power for all psychoneurotic symptom-formation. It is only by
the introduction of these sexual forces that the gaps still demonstrable
in the theory of repression can be filled. Here, I will leave it
undecided whether the postulate of the sexual and infantile holds good
for the theory of dreams as well; I am not completing the latter,
because in assuming that the dream-wish invariably originates in the
unconscious I have already gone a step beyond the demonstrable.[42] Nor
will I inquire further into the nature of the difference between the
play of psychic forces in dream-formation and in the formation of
hysterical symptoms, since there is missing here the needed fuller
knowledge of one of the two things to be compared. But there is another
point which I regard as important, and I will confess at once that it
was only on account of this point that I entered upon all the
discussions concerning the two psychic systems, their modes of
operation, and the fact of repression. It does not greatly matter
whether I have conceived the psychological relations at issue with
approximate correctness, or, as is easily possible in such a difficult
matter, wrongly and imperfectly. However our views may change about the
interpretation of the psychic censorship or the correct and the abnormal
elaboration of the dream-content. it remains certain that such processes
are active in dream-formation, and that in their essentials they reveal
the closest analogy with the processes observed in the formation of
hysterical symptoms. Now the dream is not a pathological phenomenon; it
does not presuppose any disturbance of our psychic equilibrium; and it
does not leave behind it any weakening of our efficiency or capacities.
The objection that no conclusions can be drawn about the dreams of
healthy persons from my own dreams and from those of my neurotic
patients may be rejected without comment. If, then, from the nature of
the given phenomena we infer the nature of their motive forces, we find
that the psychic mechanism utilized by the neuroses is not newly-created
by a morbid disturbance that lays hold of the psychic life, but lies in
readiness in the normal structure of our psychic apparatus. The two
psychic systems, the frontier-censorship between them, the inhibition
and overlaying of the one activity by the other, the relations of both
to consciousness- or whatever may take place of these concepts on a
juster interpretation of the actual relations- all these belong to the
normal structure of our psychic instrument, and the dream shows us one
of the paths which lead to a knowledge of this structure. If we wish to
be content with a minimum of perfectly assured additions to our
knowledge, we shall say that the dream affords proof that the suppressed
material continues to exist even in the normal person and remains
capable of psychic activity. Dreams are one of the manifestations of
this suppressed material; theoretically, this is true in all cases; and
in tangible experience, it has been found true in at least a great
number of cases, which happen to display most plainly the more striking
features of the dream-life. The suppressed psychic material, which in
the waking state has been prevented from expression and cut off from
internal perception by the mutual neutralization of contradictory
attitudes, finds ways and means, under the sway of
compromise-formations, of obtruding itself on consciousness during the
night.
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. [43] At any rate, the
interpretation of dreams is the via regia to a knowledge of the
unconscious element in our psychic life.
By the analysis of dreams we obtain some insight into the composition
of this most marvellous and most mysterious of instruments; it is true
that this only takes us a little way, but it gives us a start which
enables us, setting out from the angle of other (properly pathological)
formations, to penetrate further in our disjoining of the instrument.
For disease- at all events that which is rightly called functional- does
not necessarily presuppose the destruction of this apparatus, or the
establishment of new cleavages in its interior: it can be explained
dynamically by the strengthening and weakening of the components of the
play of forces, so many of the activities of which are covered up in
normal functioning. It might be shown elsewhere how the fact that the
apparatus is a combination of two instances also permits of a refinement
of its normal functioning which would have been impossible to a single
system.[44]
F. The Unconscious and Consciousness. Reality.
If we look more closely, we may observe that the psychological
considerations examined in the foregoing chapter require us to assume,
not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the psychic
apparatus, but two kinds of processes or courses taken by excitation.
But this does not disturb us; for we must always be ready to drop our
auxiliary ideas, when we think we are in a position to replace them by
something which comes closer to the unknown reality. Let us now try to
correct certain views which may have taken a misconceived form as long
as we regarded the two systems, in the crudest and most obvious sense,
as two localities within the psychic apparatus- views which have left a
precipitate in the terms repression and penetration. Thus, when we say
that an unconscious thought strives for translation into the
preconscious in order subsequently to penetrate through to
consciousness, we do not mean that a second idea has to be formed, in a
new locality, like a paraphrase, as it were, whilst the original
persists by its side; and similarly, when we speak of penetration into
consciousness, we wish carefully to detach from this notion any idea of
a change of locality. When we say that a preconscious idea is repressed
and subsequently absorbed by the unconscious, we might be tempted by
these images, borrowed from the idea of a struggle for a particular
territory, to assume that an arrangement is really broken up in the one
psychic locality and replaced by a new one in the other locality. For
these comparisons we will substitute a description which would seem to
correspond more closely to the real state of affairs; we will say that
an energic cathexis is shifted to or withdrawn from a certain
arrangement, so that the psychic formation falls under the domination of
a given instance or is withdrawn from it. Here again we replace a
topographical mode of representation by a dynamic one; it is not the
psychic formation that appears to us as the mobile element, but its
innervation.[45]
Nevertheless, I think it expedient and justifiable to continue to use
the illustrative idea of the two systems. We shall avoid any abuse of
this mode of representation if we remember that ideas, thoughts, and
psychic formations in general must not in any case be localized in
organic elements of the nervous system but, so to speak, between them,
where resistances and association-tracks form the correlate
corresponding to them. Everything that can become an object of internal
perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the
crossing of light-rays. But we are justified in thinking of the systems-
which have nothing psychic in themselves, and which never become
accessible to our psychic perception- as something similar to the lenses
of the telescope, which project the image. If we continue this
comparison, we might say that the censorship between the two systems
corresponds to the refraction of rays on passing into a new medium.
Thus far, we have developed our psychology on our own responsibility;
it is now time to turn and look at the doctrines prevailing in modern
psychology, and to examine the relation of these to our theories. The
problem of the unconscious in psychology is, according to the forcible
statement of Lipps,[46] less a psychological problem than the problem of
psychology. As long as psychology disposed of this problem by the verbal
explanation that the psychic is the conscious, and that unconscious
psychic occurrences are an obvious contradiction, there was no
possibility of a physician's observations of abnormal mental states
being turned to any psychological account. The physician and the
philosopher can meet only when both acknowledge that unconscious psychic
processes is the appropriate and justified expression for all
established fact. The physician cannot but reject, with a shrug of his
shoulders, the assertion that consciousness is the indispensable quality
of the psychic; if his respect for the utterances of the philosophers is
still great enough, he may perhaps assume that he and they do not deal
with the same thing and do not pursue the same science. For a single
intelligent observation of the psychic life of a neurotic, a single
analysis of a dream, must force upon him the unshakable conviction that
the most complicated and the most accurate operations of thought, to
which the name of psychic occurrences can surely not be refused, may
take place without arousing consciousness.[47] The physician, it is
true, does not learn of these unconscious processes until they have
produced an effect on consciousness which admits of communication or
observation. But this effect on consciousness may show a psychic
character which differs completely from the unconscious process, so that
internal perception cannot possibly recognize in the first a substitute
for the second. The physician must reserve himself the right to
penetrate, by a Process of deduction, from the effect on consciousness
to the unconscious psychic process; he learns in this way that the
effect on consciousness is only a remote psychic product of the
unconscious process, and that the latter has not become conscious as
such, and has, moreover, existed and operated without in any way
betraying itself to consciousness. -
Du Prel says: "The problem: what is the psyche, manifestly requires a
preliminary examination as to whether consciousness and psyche are
identical. But it is just this preliminary question which is answered in
the negative by the dream, which shows that the concept of the psyche
extends beyond that of consciousness, much as the gravitational force of
a star extends beyond its sphere of luminosity" (Philos. d. Mystik, p.
47).
"It is a truth which cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the
concepts of consciousness and of the psyche are not co-extensive" (p.
306).
A return from the over-estimation of the property of consciousness is
the indispensable preliminary to any genuine insight into the course of
psychic events. As Lipps has said, the unconscious must be accepted as
the general basis of the psychic life. The unconscious is the larger
circle which includes the smaller circle of the conscious; everything
conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage, whereas the unconscious
can stop at this stage, and yet claim to be considered a full psychic
function. The unconscious is the true psychic reality; in its inner
nature it is just as much unknown to us as the reality of the external
world, and it is just as imperfectly communicated to us by the data of
consciousness as is the external world by the reports of our
sense-organs.
We get rid of a series of dream-problems which have claimed much
attention from earlier writers on the subject when the old antithesis
between conscious life and dream-life is discarded, and the unconscious
psychic assigned to its proper place. Thus, many of the achievements
which are a matter for wonder in a dream are now no longer to be
attributed to dreaming, but to unconscious thinking, which is active
also during the day. If the dream seems to make play with a symbolical
representation of the body, as Scherner has said, we know that this is
the work of certain unconscious phantasies, which are probably under the
sway of sexual impulses and find expression not only in dreams, but also
in hysterical phobias and other symptoms. If the dream continues and
completes mental work begun during the day, and even brings valuable new
ideas to light, we have only to strip off the dream-disguise from this,
as the contribution of the dream-work, and a mark of the assistance of
dark powers in the depths of the psyche (cf. the devil in Tartini's
sonata-dream). The intellectual achievement as such belongs to the same
psychic forces as are responsible for all such achievements during the
day. We are probably much too inclined to over-estimate the conscious
character even of intellectual and artistic production. From the reports
of certain writers who have been highly productive, such as Goethe and
Helmholtz, we learn, rather, that the most essential and original part
of their creations came to them in the form of inspirations, and offered
itself to their awareness in an almost completed state. In other cases,
where there is a concerted effort of all the psychic forces, there is
nothing strange in the fact that conscious activity, too, lends its aid.
But it is the much-abused privilege of conscious activity to hide from
us all other activities wherever it participates.
It hardly seems worth while to take up the historical significance of
dreams as a separate theme. Where, for instance, a leader has been
impelled by a dream to engage in a bold undertaking, the success of
which has had the effect of changing history, a new problem arises only
so long as the dream is regarded as a mysterious power and contrasted
with other more familiar psychic forces. The problem disappears as soon
as we regard the dream as a form of expression for impulses to which a
resistance was attached during the day, whilst at night they were able
to draw reinforcement from deep-lying sources of excitation.[48] But the
great respect with which the ancient peoples regarded dreams is based on
a just piece of psychological divination. It is a homage paid to the
unsubdued and indestructible element in the human soul, to the demonic
power which furnishes the dream- wish, and which we have found again in
our unconscious.
It is not without purpose that I use the expression in our
unconscious, for what we so call does not coincide with the unconscious
of the philosophers, nor with the unconscious of Lipps. As they use the
term, it merely means the opposite of the conscious. That there exist
not only conscious but also unconscious psychic processes is the opinion
at issue, which is so hotly contested and so energetically defended.
Lipps enunciates the more comprehensive doctrine that everything psychic
exists as unconscious, but that some of it may exist also as conscious.
But it is not to prove this doctrine that we have adduced the phenomena
of dreams and hysterical symptom-formation; the observation of normal
life alone suffices to establish its correctness beyond a doubt. The
novel fact that we have learned from the analysis of psycho-pathological
formations, and indeed from the first member of the group, from dreams,
is that the unconscious- and hence all that is psychic- occurs as a
function of two separate systems, and that as such it occurs even in
normal psychic life. There are consequently two kinds of unconscious,
which have not as yet been distinguished by psychologists. Both are
unconscious in the psychological sense; but in our sense the first,
which we call Ucs, is likewise incapable of consciousness; whereas the
second we call Pcs because its excitations, after the observance of
certain rules, are capable of reaching consciousness; perhaps not before
they have again undergone censorship, but nevertheless regardless of the
Ucs system. The fact that in order to attain consciousness the
excitations must pass through an unalterable series, a succession of
instances, as is betrayed by the changes produced in them by the
censorship, has enabled us to describe them by analogy in spatial terms.
We described the relations of the two systems to each other and to
consciousness by saying that the system Pcs is like a screen between the
system Ucs and consciousness. The system Pcs not only bars access to
consciousness, but also controls the access to voluntary motility, and
has control of the emission of a mobile cathectic energy, a portion of
which is familiar to us as attention.[49]
We must also steer clear of the distinction between the super-
conscious and the subconscious, which has found such favour in the more
recent literature on the psychoneuroses, for just such a distinction
seems to emphasize the equivalence of what is psychic and what is
conscious.
What role is now left, in our representation of things, to the
phenomenon of consciousness, once so all-powerful and over- shadowing
all else? None other than that of a sense-organ for the perception of
psychic qualities. According to the fundamental idea of our schematic
attempt we can regard conscious perception only as the function proper
to a special system for which the abbreviated designation Cs commends
itself. This system we conceive to be similar in its mechanical
characteristics to the perception-system P, and hence excitable by
qualities, and incapable of retaining the trace of changes: i.e., devoid
of memory. The psychic apparatus which, with the sense-organ of the
P-systems, is turned to the outer world, is itself the outer world for
the sense-organ of Cs, whose teleological justification depends on this
relationship. We are here once more confronted with the principle of the
succession of instances which seems to dominate the structure of the
apparatus. The material of excitation flows to the sense-organ Cs from
two sides: first from the P-system, whose excitation, qualitatively
conditioned, probably undergoes a new elaboration until it attains
conscious perception; and, secondly, from the interior of the apparatus
itself, whose quantitative processes are perceived as a qualitative
series of pleasures and pains once they have reached consciousness after
undergoing certain changes.
The philosophers, who became aware that accurate and highly
complicated thought-structures are possible even without the co-
operation of consciousness, thus found it difficult to ascribe any
function to consciousness; it appeared to them a superfluous mirroring
of the completed psychic process. The analogy of our Cs system with the
perception-systems relieves us of this embarrassment. We see that
perception through our sense-organs results in directing an
attention-cathexis to the paths along which the incoming sensory
excitation diffuses itself; the qualitative excitation of the P-system
serves the mobile quantity in the psychic apparatus as a regulator of
its discharge. We may claim the same function for the overlying
sense-organ of the Cs system. By perceiving new qualities, it furnishes
a new contribution for the guidance and suitable distribution of the
mobile cathexis-quantities. By means of perceptions of pleasure and
pain, it influences the course of the cathexes within the psychic
apparatus, which otherwise operates unconsciously and by the
displacement of quantities. It is probable that the pain- principle
first of all regulates the displacements of cathexis automatically, but
it is quite possible that consciousness contributes a second and more
subtle regulation of these qualities, which may even oppose the first,
and perfect the functional capacity of the apparatus, by placing it in a
position contrary to its original design, subjecting even that which
induces pain to cathexis and to elaboration. We learn from neuro-
psychology that an important part in the functional activity of the
apparatus is ascribed to these regulations by the qualitative
excitations of the sense-organs. The automatic rule of the primary
pain-principle, together with the limitation of functional capacity
bound up with it, is broken by the sensory regulations, which are
themselves again automatisms. We find that repression, which, though
originally expedient, nevertheless finally brings about a harmful lack
of inhibition and of psychic control, overtakes memories much more
easily than it does perceptions, because in the former there is no
additional cathexis from the excitation of the psychic sense-organs.
Whilst an idea which is to be warded off may fail to become conscious
because it has succumbed to repression, it may on other occasions come
to be repressed simply because it has been withdrawn from conscious
perception on other grounds. These are clues which we make use of in
therapy in order to undo accomplished repressions.
The value of the hyper-cathexis which is produced by the regulating
influence of the Cs sense-organs on the mobile quantity is demonstrated
in a teleological context by nothing more clearly than by the creation
of a new series of qualities, and consequently a new regulation, which
constitutes the prerogative of man over animals. For the mental
processes are in themselves unqualitative except for the excitations of
pleasure and pain which accompany them: which, as we know, must be kept
within limits as possible disturbers of thought. In order to endow them
with quality, they are associated in man with verbal memories, the
qualitative residues of which suffice to draw upon them the attention of
consciousness, which in turn endows thought with a new mobile cathexis.
It is only on a dissection of hysterical mental processes that the
manifold nature of the problems of consciousness becomes apparent. One
then receives the impression that the transition from the preconscious
to the conscious cathexis is associated with a censorship similar to
that between Ucs and Pcs. This censorship, too, begins to act only when
a certain quantitative limit is reached, so that thought-formations
which are not very intense escape it. All possible cases of detention
from consciousness and of penetration into consciousness under certain
restrictions are included within the range of psychoneurotic phenomena;
all point to the intimate and twofold connection between the censorship
and consciousness. I shall conclude these psychological considerations
with the record of two such occurrences.
On the occasion of a consultation a few years ago, the patient was an
intelligent-looking girl with a simple, unaffected manner. She was
strangely attired; for whereas a woman's dress is usually carefully
thought out to the last pleat, one of her stockings was hanging down and
two of the buttons of her blouse were undone. She complained of pains in
one of her legs, and exposed her calf without being asked to do so. Her
chief complaint, however, was as follows: She had a feeling in her body
as though something were sticking into it which moved to and fro and
shook her through and through. This sometimes seemed to make her whole
body stiff. On hearing this, my colleague in consultation looked at me:
the trouble was quite obvious to him. To both of us it seemed peculiar
that this suggested nothing to the patient's mother, though she herself
must repeatedly have been in the situation described by her child. As
for the girl, she had no idea of the import of her words, or she would
never have allowed them to pass her lips. Here the censorship had been
hoodwinked so successfully that under the mask of an innocent complaint
a phantasy was admitted to consciousness which otherwise would have
remained in the preconscious.
Another example: I began the psycho-analytic treatment of a boy
fourteen who was suffering from tic convulsif, hysterical vomiting,
headache, etc., by assuring him that after closing his eyes he would see
pictures or that ideas would occur to him, which he was to communicate
to me. He replied by describing pictures. The last impression he had
received before coming to me was revived visually in his memory. He had
been playing a game of checkers with his uncle, and now he saw the
checkerboard before him. He commented on various positions that were
favourable or unfavourable, on moves that were not safe to make. He then
saw a dagger lying on the checker-board- an object belonging to his
father, but which his phantasy laid on the checker-board. Then a sickle
was lying on the board; a scythe was added; and finally, he saw the
image of an old peasant mowing the grass in front of his father's house
far away. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of
pictures. Disagreeable family circumstances had made the boy excited and
nervous. Here was a case of a harsh, irascible father, who had lived
unhappily with the boy's mother, and whose educational methods consisted
of threats; he had divorced his gentle and delicate wife, and remarried;
one day he brought home a young woman as the boy's new mother. The
illness of the fourteen-year-old boy developed a few days later. It was
the suppressed rage against his father that had combined these images
into intelligible allusions. The material was furnished by a
mythological reminiscence. The sickle was that with which Zeus castrated
his father; the scythe and the image of the peasant represented Kronos,
the violent old man who devours his children, and upon whom Zeus wreaks
his vengeance in so unfilial a manner. The father's marriage gave the
boy an opportunity of returning the reproaches and threats which the
child had once heard his father utter because he played with his
genitals (the draught-board; the prohibited moves; the dagger with which
one could kill). We have here long-impressed memories and their
unconscious derivatives which, under the guise of meaningless pictures,
have slipped into consciousness by the devious paths opened to them.
If I were asked what is the theoretical value of the study of dreams,
I should reply that it lies in the additions to psychological knowledge
and the beginnings of an understanding of the neuroses which we thereby
obtain. Who can foresee the importance a thorough knowledge of the
structure and functions of the psychic apparatus may attain, when even
our present state of knowledge permits of successful therapeutic
intervention in the curable forms of psychoneuroses? But, it may be
asked, what of the practical value of this study in regard to a
knowledge of the psyche and discovery of the hidden peculiarities of
individual character? Have not the unconscious impulses revealed by
dreams the value of real forces in the psychic life? Is the ethical
significance of the suppressed wishes to be lightly disregarded, since,
just as they now create dreams, they may some day create other things?
I do not feel justified in answering these questions. I have not
followed up this aspect of the problem of dreams. In any case, however,
I believe that the Roman Emperor was in the wrong in ordering one of his
subjects to be executed because the latter had dreamt that he had killed
the Emperor. He should first of all have endeavoured to discover the
significance of the man's dreams; most probably it was not what it
seemed to be. And even if a dream of a different content had actually
had this treasonable meaning, it would still have been well to recall
the words of Plato- that the virtuous man contents himself with dreaming
of that which the wicked man does in actual life. I am therefore of the
opinion that dreams should be acquitted of evil. Whether any reality is
to be attributed to the unconscious wishes, I cannot say. Reality must,
of course, be denied to all transitory and intermediate thoughts. If we
had before us the unconscious wishes, brought to their final and truest
expression, we should still do well to remember that psychic reality is
a special form of existence which must not be confounded with material
reality. It seems, therefore, unnecessary that people should refuse to
accept the responsibility for the immorality of their dreams. With an
appreciation of the mode of functioning of the psychic apparatus, and an
insight into the relations between conscious and unconscious, all that
is ethically offensive in our dream-life and the life of phantasy for
the most part disappears.
"What a dream has told us of our relations to the present (reality)
we will then seek also in our consciousness and we must not be surprised
if we discover that the monster we saw under the magnifying-glass of the
analysis is a tiny little infusorian" (H. Sachs).
For all practical purposes in judging human character, a man's
actions and conscious expressions of thought are in most cases
sufficient. Actions, above all, deserve to be placed in the front rank;
for many impulses which penetrate into consciousness are neutralized by
real forces in the psychic life before they find issue in action;
indeed, the reason why they frequently do not encounter any psychic
obstacle on their path is because the unconscious is certain of their
meeting with resistances later. In any case, it is highly instructive to
learn something of the intensively tilled soil from which our virtues
proudly emerge. For the complexity of human character, dynamically moved
in all directions, very rarely accommodates itself to the arbitrament of
a simple alternative, as our antiquated moral philosophy would have it.
And what of the value of dreams in regard to our knowledge of the
future? That, of course, is quite out of the question. One would like to
substitute the words: in regard to our knowledge of the past. For in
every sense a dream has its origin in the past. The ancient belief that
dreams reveal the future is not indeed entirely devoid of the truth. By
representing a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the
future; but this future, which the dreamer accepts as his present, has
been shaped in the likeness of the past by the indestructible wish.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes
[32] A dream is the beginning of wakening.
[33] Is this the only function which we can attribute to dreams? I
know of no other. A. Maeder, to be sure, has endeavoured to claim for
the dream yet other secondary functions. He started from the just
observation that many dreams contain attempts to provide solutions of
conflicts, which are afterwards actually carried through. They thus
behave like preparatory practice for waking activities. He therefore
drew a parallel between dreaming and the play of animals and children,
which is to be conceived as a training of the inherited instincts, and a
preparation for their later serious activity, thus setting up a fonction
ludique for the dream. A little while before Maeder, Alfred Adler
likewise emphasized the function of thinking ahead in the dream. (An
analysis which I published in 1905 contained a dream which may be
conceived as a resolution-dream, which was repeated night after night
until it was realized.)
[34] General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, p. 534 below.
[35] This material has since been provided in abundance by the
literature of psycho-analysis.
[36] The emphasis [on 'parties'] is my own, though the meaning is
plain enough without it.
[37] I did not dare admit it, but I continually felt tinglings and
overexcitements of the parts; at the end, it wearied me so much that
several times I thought to throw myself from the dormitory window.
[38] I will not do it again.
[39] Albert never did that.
[40] The italics ['very marked cerebral anaemia.'] are mine.
[41] We put this case in the file of apyretic delirias of inanition,
for it is to cerebral anaemia that we attach this particular state.
[42] Here, as elsewhere, there are gaps in the treatment of the
subject, which I have deliberately left, because to fill them up would,
on the one hand, require excessive labour, and, on the other hand, I
should have to depend on material which is foreign to the dream. Thus,
for example, I have avoided stating whether I give the word suppressed a
different meaning from that of the word repressed. No doubt, however, it
will have become clear that the latter emphasizes more than the former
the relation to the unconscious. I have not gone into the problem, which
obviously arises, of why the dream-thoughts undergo distortion by the
censorship even when they abandon the progressive path to consciousness,
and choose the path of regression. And so with other similar omissions.
I have, above all, sought to give some idea of the problems to which the
further dissection of the dream- work leads, and to indicate the other
themes with which these are connected. It was, however, not always easy
to decide just where the pursuit should be discontinued. That I have not
treated exhaustively the part which the psycho-sexual life plays in the
dream, and have avoided the interpretation of dreams of an obviously
sexual content, is due to a special reason- which may not perhaps be
that which the reader would expect. It is absolutely alien to my views
and my neuropathological doctrines to regard the sexual life as a
pudendum with which neither the physician nor the scientific
investigator should concern himself. To me, the moral indignation which
prompted the translator of Artemidorus of Daldis to keep from the
reader's knowledge the chapter on sexual dreams contained in the
Symbolism of Dreams is merely ludicrous. For my own part, what decided
my procedure was solely the knowledge that in the explanation of sexual
dreams I should be bound to get deeply involved in the still unexplained
problems of perversion and bisexuality; it was for this reason that I
reserved this material for treatment elsewhere.
[43] If I cannot influence the gods, I will stir up Acheron.
[44] The dream is not the only phenomenon that permits us to base our
psycho-pathology on psychology. In a short unfinished series of articles
in the Monatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologie ("uber den
psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit," 1898, and "uber
Deckerinnerungen," 1899) I attempted to interpret a number of psychic
manifestations from everyday life in support of the same conception.
(These and other articles on "Forgetting," "Lapses of Speech," etc.,
have now been published in the Psycho- pathology of Everyday Life.)
[45] This conception underwent elaboration and modification when it
was recognized that the essential character of a preconscious idea was
its connection with the residues of verbal ideas. See The Unconscious,
p. 428 below.
[46] Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der Psychologie. Lecture
delivered at the Third International Psychological Congress at Munich,
1897.
[47] I am happy to be able to point to an author who has drawn from
the study of dreams the same conclusion as regards the relation between
consciousness and the unconscious.
[48] Cf. (chapter II.), the dream (Sa-Turos) of Alexander the Great
at the siege of Tyre.
[49] Cf. here my remarks in the Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research, vol. xxvi, in which the descriptive, dynamic and
systematic meanings of the ambiguous word Unconscious are distinguished
from one another.
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