Freud - Complete Works (168 page)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

950

   The explanation is in our favour,
though without putting the other writers in the wrong. In the light
of our newly-won understanding of the origin of dreams the
contradiction disappears completely. It is true that we distort
dreams in attempting to reproduce them; here we find at work once
more the process which we have described as the secondary (and
often ill-conceived) revision of the dream by the agency which
carries out normal thinking. But this distortion is itself no more
than a part of the revision to which the dream-thoughts are
regularly subjected as a result of the dream-censorship. The other
writers have at this point noticed or suspected the part of
dream-distortion which operates manifestly;
we
are less
interested, since we know that a much more far-reaching process of
distortion, though a less obvious one, has already developed the
dream out of the hidden dream-thoughts. The only mistake made by
previous writers has been in supposing that the modification of the
dream in the course of being remembered and put into words is an
arbitrary
one and cannot be further resolved and that it is
therefore calculated to give us a misleading picture of the dream.
They have underestimated the extent to which psychical events are
determined. There is nothing arbitrary about them. It can be shown
quite generally that if an element is left undetermined by one
train of thought, its determination is immediately effected by a
second one. For instance. I may try to think of a number
arbitrarily. But this is impossible: the number that occurs to me
will be unambiguously and necessarily determined by thoughts of
mine, though they may be remote from my immediate intention.¹
The modifications to which dreams are submitted under the
editorship of waking life are just as little arbitrary. They are
associatively linked to the material which they replace, and serve
to show us the way to that material, which may in its turn be a
substitute for something else.

   In analysing the dreams of my
patients I sometimes put this assertion to the following test,
which has never failed me. If the first account given me by a
patient of a dream is too hard to follow I ask him to repeat it. In
doing so he rarely uses the same words. But the parts of the dream
which he describes in different terms are by that fact revealed to
me as the weak spot in the dream’s disguise: they serve my
purpose just as Hagen’s was served by the embroidered mark on
Siegfried’s cloak. That is the point at which the
interpretation of the dream can be started. My request to the
patient to repeat his account of the dream has warned him that I
was proposing to take special pains in solving it; under pressure
of the resistance, therefore, he hastily covers the weak spots in
the dream’s disguise by replacing any expressions that
threaten to betray its meaning by other less revealing ones. In
this way he draws my attention to the expression which he has
dropped out. The trouble taken by the dreamer in preventing the
solution of the dream gives me a basis for estimating the care with
which its cloak has been woven.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] See my
Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

951

   Previous writers have had less
justification in devoting so much space to the
doubt
with
which our judgement receives accounts of dreams. For this doubt has
no intellectual warrant. There is in general no guarantee of the
correctness of our memory; and yet we yield to the compulsion to
attach belief to its data far more often than is objectively
justified. Doubt whether a dream or certain of its details have
been correctly reported is once more a derivative of the
dream-censorship, of resistance to the penetration of the
dream-thoughts into consciousness. This resistance has not been
exhausted even by the displacements and substitutions it has
brought about; it persists in the form of doubt attaching to the
material which has been allowed through. We are especially inclined
to misunderstand this doubt since it is careful never to attack the
more intense elements of a dream but only the weak and indistinct
ones. As we already know, however, a complete reversal of all
psychical values takes place between the dream-thoughts and the
dream. Distortion is only made possible by a withdrawal of
psychical value; it habitually expresses itself by that means and
is occasionally content to require nothing more. If, then, an
indistinct element of a dream’s content is in addition
attacked by doubt, we have a sure indication that we are dealing
with a comparatively direct derivative of one of the proscribed
dream-thoughts. The state of things is what it was after some
sweeping revolution in one of the republics of antiquity or the
Renaissance. The noble and powerful families which had previously
dominated the scene were sent into exile and all the high offices
were filled by newcomers. Only the most impoverished and powerless
members of the vanquished families, or their remote dependants,
were allowed to remain in the city; and even so they did not enjoy
full civic rights and were viewed with distrust. The distrust in
this analogy corresponds to the doubt in the case we are
considering. That is why in analysing a dream I insist that the
whole scale of estimates of certainty shall be abandoned and that
the faintest possibility that something of this or that sort may
have occurred in the dream shall be treated as complete certainty.
In tracing any element of a dream it will be found that unless this
attitude is firmly adopted the analysis will come to a standstill.
If any doubt is thrown upon the value of the element in question,
the psychical result in the patient is that none of the involuntary
ideas underlying that element comes into his head. This result is
not a self-evident one. It would not make nonsense if someone were
to say: ‘I don’t know for certain whether such and such
a thing came into the dream, but here is what occurs to me in
connection with it.’ But in fact no one ever does say this;
and it is precisely the fact that doubt produces this interrupting
effect upon an analysis that reveals it as a derivative and tool of
psychical resistance. Psycho-analysis is justly suspicious. One of
its rules is that
whatever interrupts the progress of analytic
work is a resistance
.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] The
proposition laid down in these peremptory terms - ‘whatever
interrupts the progress of analytic work is a resistance’ is
easily open to misunderstanding. It is of course only to be taken
as a technical rule, as a warning to analysts. It cannot be
disputed that in the course of an analysis various events may occur
the responsibility for which cannot be laid upon the
patient’s intentions. His father may die without his having
murdered him; or a war may break out which brings the analysis to
an end. But behind its obvious exaggeration the proposition is
asserting something both true and new. Even if the interrupting
event is a real one and independent of the patient, it often
depends on him how great an interruption it causes; and resistance
shows itself unmistakably in the readiness with which he accepts an
occurrence of this kind or the exaggerated use which he make of
it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

952

   The
forgetting
of dreams,
too, remains inexplicable unless the power of the psychical
censorship is taken into account. In a number of cases the feeling
of having dreamt a great deal during the night and of only having
retained a little of it may in fact have some other meaning, such
as that the dream-work has been perceptibly proceeding all through
the night but has only left a short dream behind. It is no doubt
true that we forget dreams more and more as time passes after
waking; we often forget them in spite of the most painstaking
efforts to recall them. But I am of opinion that the extent of this
forgetting is as a rule overestimated; and there is a similar
overestimation of the extent to which the gaps in a dream limit our
knowledge of it. It is often possible by means of analysis to
restore all that has been lost by the forgetting of the
dream’s content; at least, in quite a number of cases one can
reconstruct from a single remaining fragment not, it is true, the
dream - which is in any case a matter of no importance - but all
the dream-thoughts. This demands a certain amount of attention and
self-discipline in carrying out the analysis; that is all - but it
shows that there was no lack of a hostile purpose at work in the
forgetting of the dream.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] I may quote
the following dream from my
Introductory Lectures
as an
example of the meaning of doubt and uncertainty in a dream and of
its content being at the same time shrunk down to a single element;
in spite of this the dream was successfully analysed after a short
delay:

  
‘A sceptical woman patient had a longish dream in the course
of which some people told her about my book on jokes and praised it
highly. Something came in then about a
"channel",
perhaps it was another book that mentioned a channel, or something
else about a channel . . . she didn’t
know . . . it was all so indistinct
.

  
‘No doubt you will be inclined to expect that the element
"channel," since it was so indistinct, would be
inaccessible to interpretation. You are right in suspecting a
difficulty; but the difficulty did not arise from the
indistinctness: both the difficulty and the indistinctness arose
from another cause. Nothing occurred to the dreamer in connection
with "channel," and
I
could of course throw no
light on it. A little later - it was the next day, in point of fact
- she told me that she had thought of something that
might
have something to do with it. It was a joke, too - a joke she had
heard. On the steamer between Dover and Calais a well-known author
fell into conversation with an Englishman. The latter had occasion
to quote the phrase: "Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a
qu’un pas. [It is only a step from the sublime to the
ridiculous.]" Yes, replied the author, "
le Pas de
Calais
" - meaning that he thought France sublime and
England ridiculous. But the
Pas de Calais
is a channel - the
English Channel. You will ask whether I think this had anything to
do with the dream. Certainly I think so; and it provides the
solution of the puzzling element of the dream. Can you doubt that
this joke was already present before the dream occurred, as the
unconscious thought behind the element "channel"? Can you
suppose that it was introduced as a subsequent invention? The
association betrayed the scepticism which lay concealed behind the
patient’s ostensible admiration; and her resistance against
revealing this was no doubt the common cause both of her delay in
producing the association and of the indistinctness of the
dream-element concerned. Consider the relation of the dream-element
to its unconscious background: it was, as it were, a fragment of
that background, an allusion to it, but it was made quite
incomprehensible by being isolated.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

953

   Convincing evidence of the fact
that the forgetting of dreams is tendentious and serves the purpose
of resistance¹ is afforded when it is possible to observe in
analyses a preliminary stage of forgetting. It not infrequently
happens that in the middle of the work of interpretation an omitted
portion of the dream comes to light and is described as having been
forgotten till that moment. Now a part of a dream that has been
rescued from oblivion in this way is invariably the most important
part; it always lies on the shortest road to the dream’s
solution and has for that reason been exposed to resistance more
than any other part. Among the specimen dreams scattered through
this volume, there is one in which a part of its content was added
like this as an after-thought. It is the travel dream in which I
revenged myself on two disagreeable fellow-travellers and which I
had to leave almost uninterpreted on account of its gross
indecency. The omitted portion ran as follows: ‘
I said,
referring to one of Schiller’s works: "It is from . .
." but, noticing the mistake, I corrected myself: "It is
by . . ." "Yes", the man commented to his sister,
"he said that right
."‘²

  
¹
On the purposes of forgetting in general
see my short paper on the psychical mechanism of forgetting (Freud,
1898
b
). [
Added
1909:] Later included as the first
chapter in my
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(Freud,
1901
b
)

  
²
[
Footnote added
1914:] Corrections
such as this in the usages of foreign languages are not infrequent
in dreams but are more often attributed to other people. Maury
(1878, 143) once dreamt, at a time when he was learning English,
that, in telling someone that he had visited him the day before, he
used the words ‘I called for you yesterday.’ Whereupon
the other answered correctly: ‘You should have said "I
called
on
you yesterday".’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

954

   Self-corrections in dreams, which
seem so marvellous to some writers, need not occupy our attention.
I will indicate instead the recollection which served as the model
for my verbal error in this dream. When I was nineteen years old I
visited England for the first time and spent a whole day on the
shore of the Irish Sea. I naturally revelled in the opportunity of
collecting the marine animals left behind by the tide and I was
occupied with a starfish - the words ‘
Hollthurn
’
and ‘
holothurians
[sea-slugs]’ occurred at the
beginning of the dream - when a charming little girl came up to me
and said: ‘Is it a starfish? Is it alive?’
‘Yes’, I replied, ‘he is alive’, and at
once, embarrassed at my mistake, repeated the sentence correctly
[‘It is alive’]. The dream replaced the verbal error
which I then made by another into which a German is equally liable
to fall. ‘
Das Buch ist von Schiller
’ should be
translated not with a ‘from’ but with a
‘by.’ After all that we have heard of the purposes of
the dream-work and its reckless choice of methods for attaining
them, we shall not be surprised to hear that it effected this
replacement because of the magnificent piece of condensation that
was made possible by the identity of sound of the English
‘from’ and the German adjective
‘
fromm
’ [‘pious’]. But how did my
blameless memory of the sea-shore come to be in the dream? It
served as the most innocent possible example of my using a word
indicating gender or sex in the wrong place - of my bringing in sex
(the word ‘he’) where it did not belong. This,
incidentally, was one of the keys to the solution of the dream. No
one who has heard, furthermore, the origin attributed to the title
of Clerk-Maxwell’s ‘
Ma
tter and
Mo
tion’ will have any difficulty in filling in the
gaps:
Mo
liere’s ‘Le
Ma
lade
Imaginaire’ - ‘La
ma
tière est-elle
laudable?’¹ - A
mo
tion of the bowels.