Freud - Complete Works (140 page)

  
²
[
Footnote added
1930:] In the light
of later knowledge this statement can no longer stand.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

807

   I shall deal elsewhere (see
below) with the meaning and psychical significance of the judgement
which often turns up in dreams expressed in the phrase ‘after
all this is only a dream’. Here I will merely say in
anticipation that it is intended to detract from the importance of
what is being dreamt. The interesting and allied problem, as to
what is meant when some of the content of a dream is described in
the dream itself as ‘dreamt’ - the enigma of the
‘dream within a dream’ - has been solved in a similar
sense by Stekel, who has analysed some convincing examples. The
intention is, once again, to detract from the importance of what is
‘dreamt’ in the dream, to rob it of its reality. What
is dreamt in a dream after waking from the ‘dream within a
dream’ is what the dream-wish seeks to put in the place of an
obliterated reality. It is safe to suppose, therefore, that what
has been ‘dreamt’ in the dream is a representation of
the reality, the true recollection, while the continuation of the
dream, on the contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes.
To include something in a ‘dream within a dream’ is
thus equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a dream had
never happened. In other words, if a particular event is inserted
into a dream as a dream by the dream-work itself, this implies the
most decided confirmation of the reality of the event - the
strongest
affirmation
of it. The dream-work makes use of
dreaming as a form of repudiation, and so confirms the discovery
that dreams are wish-fulfilments.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

808

(D)

CONSIDERATIONS OF
REPRESENTABILITY

   We have been occupied so far with
investigating the means by which dreams represent the relations
between the dream-thoughts. In the course of this investigation,
however, we have more than once touched upon the further topic of
the general nature of the modifications which the material of the
dream-thoughts undergoes for the purpose of the formation of a
dream. We have learnt that that material, stripped to a large
extent of its relations, is submitted to a process of compression,
while at the same time displacements of intensity between its
elements necessarily bring about a psychical transvaluation of the
material. The displacements we have hitherto considered turned out
to consist in the replacing of some one particular idea by another
in some way closely associated with it, and they were used to
facilitate condensation in so far as, by their means, instead of
two
elements, a single common element intermediate between
them found its way into the dream. We have not yet referred to any
other sort of displacement. Analyses show us, however, that another
sort exists and that it reveals itself in a change in the
verbal
expression
of the thoughts concerned. In both cases there is a
displacement along a chain of associations; but a process of such a
kind can occur in various psychical spheres, and the outcome of the
displacement may in one case be that one element is replaced by
another, while the outcome in another case may be that a single
element has its
verbal form
replaced by another.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

809

   This second species of
displacement which occurs in dream-formation is not only of great
theoretical interest but is also specially well calculated to
explain the appearance of fantastic absurdity in which dreams are
disguised. The direction taken by the displacement usually results
in a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought being
exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one. The advantage, and
accordingly the purpose, of such a change jumps to the eyes. A
thing that is pictorial is, from the point of view of a dream, a
thing that is
capable of being represented
: it can be
introduced into a situation in which abstract expressions offer the
same kind of difficulties to representation in dreams as a
political leading article in a newspaper would offer to an
illustrator. But not only representability, but the interests of
condensation and the censorship as well can be the gainers from
this exchange. A dream-thought is unusable so long as it is
expressed in an abstract form; but when once it has been
transformed into pictorial language, contrasts and identifications
of the kind which the dream-work requires, and which it creates if
they are not already present, can be established more easily than
before between the new form of expression and the remainder of the
material underlying the dream. This is so because in every language
concrete terms, in consequence of the history of their development,
are richer in associations than conceptual ones. We may suppose
that a good part of the intermediate work done during the formation
of a dream, which seeks to reduce the dispersed dream-thoughts to
the most succinct and unified expression possible, proceeds along
the line of finding appropriate verbal transformations for the
individual thoughts. Any one thought, whose form of expression may
happen to be fixed for other reasons, will operate in a determinant
and selective manner on the possible forms of expression allotted
to the other thoughts, and it may do so, perhaps, from the very
start - as is the case in writing a poem. If a poem is to be
written in rhymes, the second line of a couplet is limited by two
conditions: it must express an appropriate meaning, and the
expression of that meaning must rhyme with the first line. No doubt
the best poem will be one in which we fail to notice the intention
of finding a rhyme, and in which the two thoughts have, by mutual
influence, chosen from the very start a verbal expression which
will allow a rhyme to emerge with only slight subsequent
adjustment.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

810

   In a few instances a change of
expression of this kind assists dream-condensation even more
directly, by finding a form of words which owing to its ambiguity
is able to give expression to more than one of the dream-thoughts.
In this way the whole domain of verbal wit is put at the disposal
of the dream-work. There is no need to be astonished at the part
played by words in dream-formation. Words, since they are the nodal
point of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to
ambiguity; and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and
phobias), no less than dreams, make unashamed use of the advantages
thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and
disguise.¹ It is easy to show that dream-distortion too
profits from displacement of expression. If one ambiguous word is
used instead of two unambiguous ones the result is
misleading; and if our everyday, sober method of expression is
replaced by a pictorial one, our understanding is brought to a
halt, particularly since a dream never tells us whether its
elements are to be interpreted literally or in a figurative sense
or whether they are to be connected with the material of the
dream-thoughts directly or through the intermediary of some
interpolated phraseology. In interpreting any dream-element it is
in general doubtful

   (
a
) whether it is to be
taken in a positive or negative sense (as an antithetic
relation),

   (
b
) whether it is to be
interpreted historically (as a recollection),

   (
c
) whether it is to be
interpreted symbolically, or

   (
d
) whether its
interpretation is to depend on its wording.

Yet, in spite of all this ambiguity, it is
fair to say that the productions of the dream-work, which, it must
be remembered,
are not made with the intention of being
understood
, present no greater difficulties to their
translators than do the ancient hieroglyphic scripts to those who
seek to read them.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] See my volume
on jokes (1905
c
) and the discussion there of the use of
‘verbal bridges’ in the solution of neurotic
symptoms.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

811

   I have already given several
examples of representations in dreams which are only held together
by the ambiguity of their wording. (For instance, ‘She opened
her mouth properly’ in the dream of Irma’s injection
and ‘I could not go after all’ in the dream which I
last quoted.) I will now record a dream in which a considerable
part was played by the turning of abstract thought into pictures.
The distinction between dream-interpretation of this kind and
interpretation by means of symbolism can still be drawn quite
sharply. In the case of symbolic dream-interpretation the key to
the symbolization is arbitrarily chosen by the interpreter; whereas
in our cases of verbal disguise the keys are generally known and
laid down by firmly established linguistic usage. If one has the
right idea at one’s disposal at the right moment, one can
solve dreams of this kind wholly or in part even independently of
information from the dreamer.

   A lady of my acquaintance had the
following dream:
She was at the Opera. A Wagner opera was being
performed, and had lasted till a quarter to eight in the morning.
There were tables set out in the stalls, at which people were
eating and drinking. Her cousin, who had just got back from his
honeymoon, was sitting at one of the tables with his young wife,
and an aristocrat was sitting beside them. Her cousin’s wife,
so it appeared, had brought him back with her from the honeymoon,
quite openly, just as one might bring back a hat. In the middle of
the stalls there was a high tower, which had a platform on top of
it surrounded by an iron railing. High up at the top was the
conductor, who had the features of Hans Richter. He kept running
round the railing, and was perspiring violently; and from that
position he was conducting the orchestra which was grouped about
the base of the tower. She herself was sitting in a box with a
woman friend
(whom I knew).
Her younger sister wanted to
hand her up a large lump of coal from the stalls, on the ground
that she had not known it would be so long, and must be simply
freezing by now. (As though the boxes required to be heated during
the long performance.)

   Even though the dream was well
focused on a single situation, yet in other respects it was
sufficiently senseless: the tower in the middle of the stalls, for
instance, with the conductor directing the orchestra from the top
of it! And above all the coal that her sister handed up to
her!  I deliberately refrained from asking for an analysis of
the dream. But since I had some knowledge of the dreamer’s
personal relations, I was able to interpret certain pieces of it
independently of her. I knew she had had a great deal of sympathy
for a musician whose career had been prematurely cut short by
insanity. So I decided to take the tower in the stalls
metaphorically. It then emerged that the man whom she had wanted to
see in Hans Richter’s place
towered high above
the
other members of the orchestra. The tower might be described as a
composite picture formed by apposition. The lower part of its
structure represented the man’s greatness; the railing at the
top, behind which he was running round like a prisoner or an animal
in a cage - this was an allusion to the unhappy man’s
name¹ - represented his ultimate fate. The two ideas might
have been brought together in the word
‘
Narrenturm
’.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] Hugo
Wolf.

  
²
[Literally ‘Fools’ Tower’
- an old term for an insane asylum.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

812

   Having thus discovered the mode
of representation adopted by the dream, we might attempt to use the
same key for solving its second apparent absurdity - the coal
handed up to the dreamer by her sister. ‘Coal’ must
mean  ‘secret love’:

                                                               
Kein
Feuer
, keine
Kohle

                                                               
kann brennen so heiss

                                                               
als wie
heimliche Liebe
,

                                                               
von der niemand nichts weiss.
¹

   She herself and her woman friend
had been left unmarried. Her younger sister, who still had
prospects of marriage, handed her up the coal ‘because she
had not known
it would be so long
’. The dream did not
specify
what
would be so long. If it were a story, we should
say ‘the performance’; but since it is a dream, we may
take the phrase as an independent entity, decide that it was used
ambiguously and add the words ‘before she got
married.’  Our interpretation of ‘secret
love’ is further supported by the mention of the
dreamer’s cousin sitting with his wife in the stalls, and by
the
open
love-affair attributed to the latter. The dream was
dominated by the antithesis between secret and open love and
between the dreamer’s own fire and the coldness of the young
wife. In both cases, moreover, there was someone
‘highly-placed’ - a term applying equally to the
aristocrat and to the musician on whom such high hopes had been
pinned.