Freud - Complete Works (169 page)

  
¹
[‘Is the matter laudable?’ -
Old medical terminology for ‘Is the excretion healthy?’
- The next phrase is in English in the original.]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

955

   Moreover I am in a position to
offer an ocular demonstration of the fact that the forgetting of
dreams is to a great extent a product of resistance. One of my
patients will tell me he has had a dream but has forgotten every
trace of it: it is therefore just as though it had never happened.
We proceed with our work. I come up against a resistance; I
therefore explain something to the patient and help him by
encouragement and pressure to come to terms with some disagreeable
thought. Hardly have I succeeded in this than he exclaims:
‘Now I remember what it was I dreamt.’ The same
resistance which interfered with our work that day also made him
forget the dream. By overcoming this resistance I have recalled the
dream to his memory.

   In just the same way, when a
patient reaches some particular point in his work, he may be able
to remember a dream which he had dreamt three or four or even more
days before and which had hitherto remained forgotten.¹

   Psycho-analytic experience has
provided us with yet an other proof that the forgetting of dreams
depends far more upon resistance than upon the fact, stressed by
the authorities, that the waking and sleeping states are alien to
each other. It not infrequently happens to me, as well as to other
analysts and to patients under treatment, that, having been woken
up, as one might say, by a dream, I immediately afterwards, and in
full possession of my intellectual powers, set about interpreting
it. In such cases I have often refused to rest till I have arrived
at a complete understanding of the dream; yet it has sometimes been
my experience that after finally waking up in the morning I have
entirely forgotten both my interpretative activity and the content
of the dream, though knowing that I have had a dream and
interpreted it. It happens far more often that the dream draws the
findings of my interpretative activity back with it into oblivion
than that my intellectual activity succeeds in preserving the dream
in my memory. Yet there is no such psychical gulf between my
interpretative activity and my waking thoughts as the authorities
suppose to account for the forgetting of dreams.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Ernest Jones
has described an analogous case which often occurs: while a dream
is being analysed the patient may recollect a second one which was
dreamt during the same night but whose very existence had not been
suspected.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

956

   Morton Prince (1910) has objected
to my explanation of the forgetting of dreams on the ground that
that forgetting is only a special case of the amnesia attaching to
dissociated mental states, that it is impossible to extend my
explanation of this special amnesia to other types and that my
explanation is consequently devoid of value even for its immediate
purpose. His readers are thus reminded that in the course of all
his descriptions of these dissociated states he has never attempted
to discover a dynamic explanation of such phenomena. If he had, he
would inevitably have found that repression (or, more precisely,
the resistance created by it) is the cause both of the
dissociations and of the amnesia attaching to their psychical
content.

   An observation which I have been
able to make in the course of preparing this manuscript has shown
me that dreams are no more forgotten than other mental acts and can
be compared, by no means to their disadvantage, with other mental
functions in respect of their retention in the memory. I had kept
records of a large number of my own dreams which for one reason or
another I had not been able to interpret completely at the time or
had left entirely uninterpreted. And now, between one and two years
later, I have attempted to interpret some of them for the purpose
of obtaining more material in illustration of my views. These
attempts have been successful in every instance; indeed the
interpretation may be said to have proceeded more easily after this
long interval than it did at the time when the dream was a recent
experience. A possible explanation of this is that in the meantime
I have overcome some of the internal resistances which previously
obstructed me. When making these subsequent interpretations I have
compared the dream-thoughts that I elicited at the time of the
dream with the present, usually far more copious, yield, and I have
always found that the old ones are included among the new. My
astonishment at this was quickly halted by the reflection that I
had long been in the habit of getting my patients, who sometimes
tell me dreams dating from earlier years, to interpret them - by
the same procedure and with the same success - as though they had
dreamt them the night before. When I come to discuss anxiety-dreams
I shall give two examples of postponed interpretations like these.
I was led into making my first experiment of this kind by the
justifiable expectation that in this as in other respects dreams
would behave like neurotic symptoms. When I treat a psychoneurotic
- a hysteric, let us say - by psycho-analysis, I am obliged to
arrive at an explanation for the earliest and long since vanished
symptoms of his illness no less than for the contemporary ones
which brought him to me for treatment; and I actually find the
earlier problem easier to solve than the immediate one. As long ago
as in 1895 I was able to give an explanation in
Studies on
Hysteria
of the first hysterical attack which a woman of over
forty had had in her fifteenth year.¹

  
¹
[Added in the text in 1919 and transferred
to a footnote in 1930:] Dreams which occur in the earliest years of
childhood and are retained in the memory for dozens of years, often
with complete sensory vividness, are almost always of great
importance in enabling us to understand the history of the
subject’s mental development and of his neurosis. Analysis of
such dreams protects the physician from errors and uncertainties
which may lead, among other things, to theoretical
confusion.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

957

   And here I will mention a number
of further, somewhat disconnected, points on the subject of
interpreting dreams, which may perhaps help to give readers their
bearings should they feel inclined to check my statements by
subsequent work upon their own dreams.

   No one should expect that an
interpretation of his dreams will fall into his lap like manna from
the skies. Practice is needed even for perceiving endoptic
phenomena or other sensations from which our attention is normally
withheld; and this is so even though there is no psychical motive
fighting against such perceptions. It is decidedly more difficult
to get hold of ‘involuntary ideas.’ Anyone who seeks to
do so must familiarize himself with the expectations raised in the
present volume and must, in accordance with the rules laid down in
it, endeavour during the work to refrain from any criticism, any
parti pris
, and any emotional or intellectual bias. He must
bear in mind Claude Bernard’s advice to experimenters in a
physiological laboratory: ‘travailler comme une
bête’ - he must work, that is, with as much persistence
as an animal and with as much disregard of the result. If this
advice is followed, the task will no longer be a hard one.

   The interpretation of a dream
cannot always be accomplished at a single sitting. When we have
followed a chain of associations, it not infrequently happens that
we feel our capacity exhausted; nothing more is to be learnt from
the dream that day. The wisest plan then is to break off and resume
our work another day: another part of the dream’s content may
then attract our attention and give us access to another stratum of
dream-thoughts. This procedure might be described as
‘fractional’ dream-interpretation.

   It is only with the greatest
difficulty that the beginner in the business of interpreting dreams
can be persuaded that his task is not at an end when he has a
complete interpretation in his hands - an interpretation which
makes sense, is coherent and throws light upon every element of the
dream’s content. For the same dream may perhaps have another
interpretation as well, an ‘over-interpretation’, which
has escaped him. It is, indeed, not easy to form any conception of
the abundance of the unconscious trains of thought, all striving to
find expression, which are active in our minds. Nor is it easy to
credit the skill shown by the dream-work in always hitting upon
forms of expression that can bear several meanings - like the
Little Tailor in the fairy story who hit seven flies at a blow. My
readers will always be inclined to accuse me of introducing an
unnecessary amount of ingenuity into my interpretations; but actual
experience would teach them better.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

958

   On the other hand, I cannot
confirm the opinion, first stated by Silberer, that all dreams (or
many dreams, or certain classes of dreams) require two different
interpretations, which are even stated to bear a fixed relation to
each other. One of these interpretations, which Silberer calls the
‘psycho-analytic’ one, is said to give the dream some
meaning or other, usually of an infantile-sexual kind; the other
and more important interpretation, to which he gives the name of
‘anagogic’, is said to reveal the more serious
thoughts, often of profound import, which the dream-work has taken
as its material. Silberer has not given evidence in support of this
opinion by reporting a series of dreams analysed in the two
directions. And I must object that the alleged fact is
non-existent. In spite of what he says, the majority of dreams
require no ‘over-interpretation’ and, more
particularly, are insusceptible to an anagogic interpretation. As
in the case of many other theories put forward in recent years, it
is impossible to overlook the fact that Silberer’s views are
influenced to some extent by a purpose which seeks to disguise the
fundamental circumstances in which dreams are formed and to divert
interest from their instinctual roots. In a certain number of cases
I have been able to confirm Silberer’s statements. Analysis
showed that in such cases the dream-work found itself faced with
the problem of transforming into a dream a series of highly
abstract thoughts from waking life which were incapable of being
given any direct representation. It endeavoured to solve the
problem by getting hold of another group of intellectual material,
somewhat loosely related (often in a manner which might be
described as ‘allegorical’) to the abstract thoughts,
and at the same time capable of being represented with fewer
difficulties. The
abstract
interpretation of a dream that
has arisen in this way is given by the dreamer without any
difficulty; the
correct
interpretation of the material that
has been interpolated must be looked for by the technical methods
which are now familiar to us.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

959

   The question whether it is
possible to interpret
every
dream must be answered in the
negative. It must not be forgotten that in interpreting a dream we
are opposed by the psychical forces which were responsible for its
distortion. It is thus a question of relative strength whether our
intellectual interest, our capacity for self-discipline, our
psychological knowledge and our practice in interpreting dreams
enable us to master our internal resistances. It is always possible
to go
some
distance: far enough, at all events, to convince
ourselves that the dream is a structure with a meaning, and as a
rule far enough to get a glimpse of what that meaning is. Quite
often an immediately succeeding dream allows us to confirm and
carry further the interpretation we have tentatively adopted for
its predecessor. A whole series of dreams, continuing over a period
of weeks or months, is often based upon common ground and must
accordingly be interpreted in connection with one another. In the
case of two consecutive dreams it can often be observed that one
takes as its central point something that is only on the periphery
of the other and
vice versa
, so that their interpretations
too are mutually complementary. I have already given instances
which show that different dreams dreamt on the same night are, as a
quite general rule, to be treated in their interpretation as a
single whole.

   There is often a passage in even
the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure;
this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation
that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot
be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of
the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot
where it reaches down into the unknown. The dream-thoughts to which
we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things,
have any definite endings; they are found to branch out in every
direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is
at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the
dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

960

   But we must return to the facts
concerning the forgetting of dreams, for we have failed to draw one
important conclusion from them. We have seen that waking life shows
an unmistakable inclination to forget any dream that has been
formed in the course of the night - whether as a whole directly
after waking, or bit by bit in the course of the day; and we have
recognized that the agent chiefly responsible for this forgetting
is the mental resistance to the dream which has already done what
it could against it during the night. But if all this is so, the
question arises how it comes about that a dream can be formed at
all in the face of this resistance. Let us take the most extreme
case, in which waking life has got rid of a dream as though it had
never occurred. A consideration of the interplay of psychical
forces in this case must lead us to infer that the dream would in
fact not have occurred at all if the resistance had been as strong
during the night as during the day. We must conclude that during
the night the resistance loses some of its power, though we know it
does not lose the whole of it, since we have shown the part it
plays in the formation of dreams as a distorting agent. But we are
driven to suppose that its power may be diminished at night and
that this makes the formation of dreams possible. This makes it
easy to understand how, having regained its full strength at the
moment of waking, it at once proceeds to get rid of what it was
obliged to permit while it was weak. Descriptive psychology tells
us that the principal
sine qua non
for the formation of
dreams is that the mind shall be in a state of sleep; and we are
now able to explain this fact:
the state of sleep makes the
formation of dreams possible because it reduces the power of the
endopsychic censorship
.