Freud - Complete Works (111 page)

   I hope that the foregoing
examples will be enough (till the next objection is raised) to make
it seem plausible that even dreams with a distressing content are
to be construed as wish-fulfilments. Nor will anyone regard it as a
chance coincidence that the interpretation of these dreams has
brought us up each time against topics about which people are loth
to speak or to think. The distressing feeling aroused by these
dreams is no doubt identical with the repugnance which tends
(usually with success) to restrain us from discussing or mentioning
such topics, and which each of us has to overcome if we
nevertheless find ourselves compelled to embark on them. But the
unpleasurable feeling which thus recurs in dreams does not disprove
the existence of a wish. Everyone has wishes that he would prefer
not to disclose to other people, and wishes that he will not admit
even to himself. On the other hand, we are justified in linking the
unpleasurable character of all these dreams with the fact of
dream-distortion. And we are justified in concluding that these
dreams are distorted and the wish-fulfilment contained in them
disguised to the point of being unrecognizable precisely owing to
the repugnance felt for the topic of the dream or for the wish
derived from it and to an intention to repress them. The distortion
in the dream is thus shown in fact to be an act of the censorship.
We shall be taking into account everything that has been brought to
light by our analysis of unpleasurable dreams if we make the
following modification in the formula in which we have sought to
express the nature of dreams:
a dream is a (disguised)
fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish
.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] A great
living writer, who, as I have been told, refuses to hear anything
of psycho-analysis or the interpretation of dreams, has
independently arrived at an almost identical formula for the nature
of dreams. He speaks of a dream as ‘the unauthorized
emergence of suppressed desires and wishes, under false features
and name’. (Spitteler, 1914, 1.)

  
[
Added
1911:] I shall anticipate questions which will be
discussed later by quoting at this point Otto Rank’s
enlargement and modification of the above basic formula: ‘On
the basis and with the help of repressed, infantile sexual
material, dreams regularly represent present-day, and also as a
rule erotic, wishes as fulfilled, in a veiled and symbolically
disguised shape.’ (Rank, 1910.)

  
[
Added
1925:] I have nowhere stated that I adopted
Rank’s formula as my own. The shorter version, as stated in
the text above, seems to me adequate. But the mere fact of my
having mentioned Rank’s modification has been enough to
unleash countless accusations against psycho-analysis of having
asserted that ‘all dreams have a sexual
content’.

   If
this sentence is taken in the sense in which it was intended, it
merely shows the unconscientious manner in which critics are
accustomed to perform their functions, and the readiness with which
opponents overlook the clearest statements if they do not give
scope to their aggressive inclinations. For only a few pages
earlier I had mentioned the variety of the wishes whose fulfilments
are to be found in children’s dreams (wishes to take part in
an excursion or a sail on a lake, or to make up for a missed meal,
and so on ); and in other passages I had discussed dreams of
hunger, dreams stimulated by thirst or by excretory needs, and
dreams of mere convenience. Even Rank himself made no absolute
assertion. The words he used were ‘also
as a rule
erotic wishes’, and what he said can be amply confirmed in
the dreams of most adults.

   The
situation would be different if ‘sexual’ was being used
by my critics in the sense in which it is now commonly employed in
psycho-analysis - in the sense of ‘Eros’. But my
opponents are scarcely likely to have had in mind the interesting
problem of whether all dreams are created by
‘libidinal’ instinctual forces as contrasted with
‘destructive’ ones.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

654

   There remain to be discussed
anxiety-dreams as a special sub-species of dreams with a
distressing content. The notion of regarding these as wishful
dreams will meet with very little sympathy from the unenlightened.
Nevertheless I can deal with anxiety-dreams very briefly at this
point. They do not present us with a new aspect of the
dream-problem; what they face us with is the whole question of
neurotic anxiety. The anxiety that we feel in a dream is only
apparently
explained by the dream’s content. If we
submit the content of the dream to analysis, we find that the
anxiety in the dream is no better justified by the dream’s
content than, let us say, the anxiety in a phobia is justified by
the idea to which the phobia relates. No doubt it is true, for
instance, that it is possible to fall out of a window and that
there is therefore reason for exercising a certain degree of
caution in the neighbourhood of a window; but we cannot see why the
anxiety felt in a phobia on this subject is so great and pursues
the patient far beyond its occasion. We find then that the same
thing may be validly asserted both of phobias and of
anxiety-dreams: in both cases the anxiety is only superficially
attached to the idea that accompanies it; it originates from
another source.

   Since this intimate connection
exists between anxiety in dreams and in neuroses, in discussing the
former I must refer to the latter. In a short paper on
anxiety-neurosis (Freud, 1895
b
), I argued some time ago that
neurotic anxiety is derived from sexual life and corresponds to
libido which has been diverted from its purpose and has found no
employment. Since then this formula has met the test of time; and
it enables us now to infer from it that anxiety-dreams are dreams
with a sexual content, the libido belonging to which has been
transformed into anxiety. There will be an opportunity later to
support this assertion by the analysis of some neurotic
patients’ dreams. In the course, too, of a further attempt to
arrive at a theory of dreams, I shall have occasion to discuss once
more the determinants of anxiety-dreams and their compatibility
with the theory of wish-fulfilment.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

655

CHAPTER V

THE
MATERIAL AND SOURCES OF DREAMS

When the analysis of the dream of Irma’s
injection showed us that a dream could be the fulfilment of a wish,
our interest was at first wholly absorbed by the question of
whether we had come upon a universal characteristic of dreams, and
for the time being we stifled our curiosity about any other
scientific problems that may have arisen during the work of the
interpretation. Having followed one path to its end, we may now
retrace our steps and choose another starting-point for our rambles
through the problems of dream-life: for the time being, we may
leave the topic of wish-fulfilment on one side, though we are still
far from having exhausted it.

   Now that the application of our
procedure for interpreting dreams enables us to disclose a
latent
content in them which is of far greater significance
than their
manifest
one, the pressing task at once arises of
re-examining one by one the various problems raised by dreams, to
see whether we may not now be in a position to find satisfactory
solutions for the conundrums and contradictions which seemed
intractable so long as we were only acquainted with the manifest
content.

   In the first chapter I have given
a detailed account of the views of the authorities on the relation
of dreams with waking life and on the origin of the material of
dreams. No doubt, too, my readers will recall the three
characteristics of memory in dreams, which have been so often
remarked on but which have never been explained:

   (1) Dreams show a clear
preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days.
Cf. Robert, Strümpell, Hildebrandt and Hallam and Weed.

   (2) They make their selection
upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not
recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and
unnoticed.

   (3) They have at their disposal
the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details
from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as
trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long
since forgotten.¹

  
All these peculiarities
shown by dreams in their choice of material have, of course, only
been studied by earlier writers in connection with their
manifest
content.

  
¹
The view adopted by Robert that the purpose
of dreams is to unburden our memory of the useless impressions of
daytime is plainly no longer tenable if indifferent memory images
from our childhood appear at all frequently in dreams. Otherwise we
could only conclude that dreams perform their function most
inadequately.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

656

(A)

RECENT AND INDIFFERENT MATERIAL IN
DREAMS

   If I examine my own experience on
the subject of the origin of the elements included in the content
of dreams, I must begin with an assertion that in every dream it is
possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the
previous day. This view is confirmed by every dream that I look
into, whether my own or anyone else’s. Bearing this fact in
mind, I am able, on occasion, to begin a dream’s
interpretation by looking for the event of the previous day which
set it in motion; in many instances, indeed, this is the easiest
method. In the two dreams which I have analysed in detail in my
last chapters (the dream of Irma’s injection and the dream of
my uncle with a yellow beard) the connection with the previous day
is so obvious as to require no further comment. But in order to
show the regularity with which such a connection can be traced, I
will go through the records of my own dreams and give some
instances. I shall only quote enough of the dream to indicate the
source we are looking for:

    (1)
I was visiting a
house into which I had difficulty in gaining admittance . . .; in
the meantime I kept a lady
WAITING
.

   
Source
: I had had a
conversation with a female relative the evening before in which I
had told her that she would have to
wait
for a purchase she
wanted to make till . . . etc.

    (2)
I had written a
MONOGRAPH
on certain
(indistinct) species of plant
.

   
Source
: That morning
I had seen a
monograph
on the genus Cyclamen in the window
of a book-shop.

    (3)
I saw two women in
the street
,
A MOTHER AND
DAUGHTER
,
the latter of whom was a patient of
mine
.

   
Source
: One of my
patients had explained to me the previous evening the difficulties
her
mother
was putting in the way of her continuing her
treatment.

    (4)
I took out a
subscription in S. and R.’s bookshop for a periodical
costing
TWENTY FLORINS
a year
.

   
Source
: My wife had
reminded me the day before that I still owed her
twenty
florins
for the weekly household expenses.

    (5)
I received a
COMMUNICATION
from the
Social Democratic
COMMITTEE
,
treating me as though
I were a
MEMBER
.

   
Source
: I had
received
communications
simultaneously from the Liberal
Election
Committee
and from the Council of the Humanitarian
League, of which latter body I was in fact
a member
.

    (6)
A man standing
on
A CLIFF IN THE MIDDLE OF THE
SEA, IN THE STYLE OF BÖCKLIN
.

   
Source
: Dreyfus on
the Ile di Diable; I had had news at the same time from my
relatives in
England
, etc.

   The question may be raised
whether the point of contact with the dream is invariably the
events of the
immediately
preceding day or whether it may go
back to impressions derived from a rather more extensive period of
the most recent past. It is unlikely that this question involves
any matter of theoretical importance; nevertheless I am inclined to
decide in favour of the exclusiveness of the claims of the day
immediately preceding the dream - which I shall speak of as the
‘dream-day’. Whenever it has seemed at first that the
source of a dream was an impression two or three days earlier,
closer enquiry has convinced me that the impression had been
recalled on the previous day and thus that it was possible to show
that a reproduction of the impression, occurring on the previous
day, could be inserted between the day of the original event and
the time of the dream; moreover it has been possible to indicate
the contingency on the previous day which may have led to the
recalling of the older impression.

   On the other hand I do not feel
convinced that there is any regular interval of biological
significance between the instigating daytime impression and its
recurrence in the dream. (Swoboda, 1904, has mentioned an initial
period of eighteen hours in this connection.)¹