Freud - Complete Works (136 page)

   Nevertheless, I will not deny
that critical thought-activity which is not a mere repetition of
material in the dream-thoughts
does
have a share in the
formation of dreams. I shall have to elucidate the part played by
this factor at the end of the present discussion. It will then
become apparent that this thought-activity is not produced by the
dream-thoughts but by the dream itself after it has already, in a
certain sense, been completed.

   Provisionally, then, it may be
said that the logical relations between the dream-thoughts are not
given any separate representation in dreams. For instance, if a
contradiction occurs in a dream, it is either a contradiction of
the dream itself or a contradiction derived from the subject-matter
of one of the dream-thoughts. A contradiction in a dream can only
correspond in an exceedingly indirect manner to a contradiction
between
the dream-thoughts. But just as the art of painting
eventually found a way of expressing, by means other than the
floating labels, at least the
intention
of the words of the
personages represented - affection, threats, warnings, and so on -
so too there is a possible means by which dreams can take account
of some of the logical relations between their dream-thoughts, by
making an appropriate modification in the method of representation
characteristic of dreams. Experience shows that different dreams
vary greatly in this respect. While some dreams completely
disregard the logical sequence of their material, others attempt to
give as full an indication of it as possible. In doing so dreams
depart sometimes more and some times less widely from the text that
is at their disposal for manipulation. Incidentally dreams vary
similarly in their treatment of the
chronological
sequence
of the dream-thoughts, if such a sequence has been established in
the unconscious (as, for instance, in the dream of Irma’s
injection).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

784

   What means does the dream-work
possess for indicating these relations in the dream-thoughts which
it is so hard to represent? I will attempt to enumerate them one by
one.

   In the first place, dreams take
into account in a general way the connection which undeniably
exists between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining
the whole material into a single situation or event. They reproduce
logical connection
by
simultaneity in time
. Here they
are acting like the painter who, in a picture of the School of
Athens or of Parnassus, represents in one group all the
philosophers or all the poets. It is true that they were never in
fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountain-top; but
they certainly form a group in the conceptual sense.

   Dreams carry this method of
reproduction down to details. Whenever they show us two elements
close together, this guarantees that there is some specially
intimate connection between what correspond to them among the
dream-thoughts. In the same way, in our system of writing,
‘
ab
’ means that the two letters are to be
pronounced in a single syllable. If a gap is left between the
‘
a
’ and the ‘
b
’, it means
that the ‘
a
’ is the last letter of one word and
the ‘
b
’ is the first of the next one. So, too,
collocations in dreams do not consist of any chance, disconnected
portions of the dream-material, but of portions which are fairly
closely connected in the dream-thoughts as well.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

785

   For representing
causal
relations
dreams have two procedures which are in essence the
same. Suppose the dream-thoughts run like this: ‘Since this
was so and so, such and such was bound to happen.’ Then the
commoner method of representation would be to introduce the
dependent clause as an introductory dream and to add the principal
clause as the main dream. If I have interpreted aright, the
temporal sequence may be reversed. But the more extensive part of
the dream always corresponds to the principal clause.

   One of my women patients once
produced an excellent instance of this way of representing
causality in a dream which I shall later record fully. It consisted
of a short prelude and a very diffuse piece of dream which was
centred to a marked degree on a single theme and might be entitled
‘The Language of Flowers.’

   The introductory dream was as
follows:
She went into the kitchen, where her two maids were,
and found fault with them for not having got her ‘bite of
food’ ready. At the same time she saw a very large quantity
of common kitchen crockery standing upside down in the kitchen to
drain; it was piled up in heaps. The two maids went to fetch some
water and had to step into a kind of river which came right up to
the house or into the yard
. The main dream then followed,
beginning thus:
She was descending from a height over some
strangely constructed palisades, and felt glad that her dress was
not caught in them
 . . . etc.

   The introductory dream related to
the dreamer’s parents’ home. No doubt she had often
heard her mother using the words that occurred in the dream. The
heaps of common crockery were derived from a modest hardware shop
which was located in the same building. The other part of the dream
contained a reference to her father, who used always to run after
the maids and who eventually contracted a fatal illness during a
flood. (The house stood near a river-bank.) Thus the thought
concealed behind the introductory dream ran as follows:
‘Because I was born in this house, in such mean and
depressing circumstances . . . ’ The main
dream took up the same thought and presented it in a form modified
by wish-fulfilment: ‘I am of high descent.’ Thus the
actual underlying thought was: ‘Because I am of such low
descent, the course of my life has been so and so.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

786

   The division of a dream into two
unequal parts does not invariably, so far as I can see, signify
that there is a causal relation between the thoughts behind the two
parts. It often seems as though the same material were being
represented in the two dreams from different points of view. (This
is certainly the case where a series of dreams during one night end
in an emission or orgasm - a series in which the somatic need finds
its way to progressively clearer expression.) Or the two dreams may
have sprung from separate centres in the dream-material, and their
content may overlap, so that what is the centre in one dream is
present as a mere hint in the other, and
vice versa
. But in
a certain number of dreams a division into a shorter preliminary
dream and a longer sequel does in fact signify that there is a
causal relation between the two pieces.

   The other method of representing
a causal relation is adapted to less extensive material and
consists in one image in the dream, whether of a person or thing,
being transformed into another. The existence of a causal relation
is only to be taken seriously if the transformation actually occurs
before our eyes and not if we merely notice that one thing has
appeared in the place of another.

   I have said that the two methods
of representing a causal relation were in essence the same. In both
cases causation is represented by temporal sequence: in one
instance by a sequence of dreams and in the other by the direct
transformation of one image into another. In the great majority of
cases, it must be confessed, the causal relation is not represented
at all but is lost in the confusion of elements which inevitably
occurs in the process of dreaming.

   The alternative
‘either-or’ cannot be expressed in dreams in any way
whatever. Both of the alternatives are usually inserted in the text
of the dream as though they were equally valid. The dream of
Irma’s injection contains a classic instance of this. Its
latent thoughts clearly ran: ‘I am not responsible for the
persistence of Irma’s pains; the responsibility lies
either
in her recalcitrance to accepting my solution,
or
in the unfavourable sexual conditions under which she
lives and which I cannot alter,
or
in the fact that her
pains are not hysterical at all but of an organic nature.’
The dream, on the other hand, fulfilled all of these possibilities
(which were almost mutually exclusive), and did not hesitate to add
a fourth solution, based on the dream-wish. After interpreting the
dream, I proceeded to insert the ‘either-or’ into the
context of the dream thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

787

   If, however, in reproducing a
dream, its narrator feels inclined to make use of an
‘either-or’ - e.g. ‘it was either a garden or a
sitting-room’ - what was present in the dream-thoughts was
not an alternative but an ‘and’, a simple addition. An
‘either-or’ is mostly used to describe a dream-element
that has a quality of vagueness - which, however, is capable of
being resolved. In such cases the rule for interpretation is: treat
the two apparent alternatives as of equal validity and link them
together with an ‘and’.

   For instance, on one occasion a
friend of mine was stopping in Italy and I had been without his
address for a considerable time. I then had a dream of receiving a
telegram containing this address. I saw it printed in blue on the
telegraph form. The first word was vague:

‘
Via
’, perhaps

or
‘
Villa
’                            
; the second was clear: ‘
Secerno
’

or possibly even
(‘
Casa
’)

The second word sounded like some Italian name
and reminded me of discussions I had had with my friend on the
subject of etymology. It also expressed my anger with him for
having kept his address
secret
from me for so long. On the
other hand, each of the three alternatives for the first word
turned out on analysis to be an independent and equally valid
starting point for a chain of thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

788

   During the night before my
father’s funeral I had a dream of a printed notice, placard
or poster - rather like the notices forbidding one to smoke in
railway waiting-rooms - on which appeared either

             
‘You are requested to close the eyes’

or,       
‘You are requested to close an eye.’

   I usually write this in the
form:

                                                                
the

                      
‘You are requested to
close       eye(s).’

                                                                 
an

Each of these two versions had a meaning of
its own and led in a different direction when the dream was
interpreted. I had chosen the simplest possible ritual for the
funeral, for I knew my father’s own views on such ceremonies.
But some other members of the family were not sympathetic to such
puritanical simplicity and thought we should be disgraced in the
eyes of those who attended the funeral. Hence one of the versions:
‘you are requested to close an eye’, i.e. to
‘wink at’ or ‘overlook.’ Here it is
particularly easy to see the meaning of the vagueness expressed by
the ‘either-or.’ The dream-work failed to establish a
unified wording for the dream-thoughts which could at the same time
be ambiguous, and the two main lines of thought consequently began
to diverge even in the manifest content of the dream.

   In a few instances the difficulty
of representing an alternative is got over by dividing the dream
into two pieces of equal length.

   The way in which dreams treat the
category of contraries and contradictories is highly remarkable. It
is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist so far
as dreams are concerned. They show a particular preference for
combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one
and the same thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to
represent any element by its wishful contrary; so that there is no
way of deciding at a first glance whether any element that admits
of a contrary is present in the dream-thoughts as a positive or as
a negative.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] I was
astonished to learn from a pamphlet by K. Abel,
The Antithetical
Meaning of Primal Words
(1884) (cf. my review of it,
1910
e
) - and the fact has been confirmed by other
philologists - that the most ancient languages behave exactly like
dreams in this respect. In the first instance they have only a
single word to describe the two contraries at the extreme ends of a
series of qualities or activities (e.g. ‘strong-weak’,
‘old-young’, ‘far-near’,
‘bind-sever’); they only form distinct terms for the
two contraries by a secondary process of making small modifications
in the common word. Abel demonstrates this particularly from
Ancient Egyptian; but he shows that there are distinct traces of
the same course of development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic
languages as well.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

789

 
 In one of the dreams recorded just above, the first clause of
which has already been interpreted (‘because my descent was
such and such’), the dreamer saw herself climbing down over
some palisades holding a blossoming branch in her hand. In
connection with this image she thought of the angel holding a spray
of lilies in pictures of the Annunciation - her own name was Maria
- and of girls in white robes walking in Corpus Christi
processions, when the streets are decorated with green branches.
Thus the blossoming branch in the dream without any doubt alluded
to sexual innocence. However, the branch was covered with
red
flowers, each of which was like a camellia. By the end
of her walk - so the dream went on - the blossoms were already a
good deal faded. There then followed some unmistakable allusions to
menstruation. Accordingly, the same branch which was carried like a
lily and as though by an innocent girl was at the same time an
allusion to the
Dame aux camélias
who, as we know,
usually wore a white camellia, except during her periods, when she
wore a red one. The same blossoming branch (cf. ‘des
Mädchens Blüten’ [‘the maiden’s
blossoms’] in Goethe’s poem ‘Der Müllerin
Verrat’) represented both sexual innocence and its contrary.
And the same dream which expressed her joy at having succeeded in
passing through life immaculately gave one glimpses at certain
points (e.g. in the fading of the blossoms) of the contrary train
of ideas - of her having been guilty of various sins against sexual
purity (in her childhood, that is). In analysing the dream it was
possible clearly to distinguish the two trains of thought, of which
the consoling one seemed the more superficial and the
self-reproachful one the deeper-lying - trains of thought which
were diametrically opposed to each other but whose similar though
contrary elements were represented by the same elements in the
manifest dream.