Freud - Complete Works (171 page)

  
¹
The same considerations apply equally, of
course, to cases in which the superficial associations appear
openly in the content of the dream, as, for instance, in the two
dreams of Maury’s quoted above on page 59.
(
Pélerinage - Pelletier- pelle; kilomètre -
kilogramme - Gilolo - Lobelia - Lopez - lotto
.) My work with
neurotic patients has taught me the nature of the memories of which
this is a favourite method of representation. They are occasions on
which the subject has turned over the pages of encyclopaedias or
dictionaries in order (like most people at the inquisitive age of
puberty) to satisfy their craving for an answer to the riddles of
sex.

  
²
[
Footnote added
1909:] These two
theorems, which sounded most unplausible at the time they were
made, have since been experimentally employed and confirmed by Jung
and his pupils in their studies in word association.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

965

   There is one true conclusion that
we may glean from these objections, namely that we need not suppose
that every association that occurs during the work of
interpretation had a place in the dream-work during the night. It
is true that in carrying out the interpretation in the waking state
we follow a path which leads back from the elements of the dream to
the dream-thoughts and that the dream-work followed one in the
contrary direction. But it is highly improbable that these paths
are passable both ways. It appears, rather, that in the daytime we
drive shafts which follow along fresh chains of thought and that
these shafts make contact with the intermediate thoughts and the
dream-thoughts now at one point and now at another. We can see how
in this manner fresh daytime material inserts itself into the
interpretative chains. It is probable, too, that the increase in
resistance that has set in since the night makes new and more
devious detours necessary. The number and nature of the collaterals
that we spin in this way during the day is of no psychological
importance whatever, so long as they lead us to the dream-thoughts
of which we are in search.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

966

(B)

REGRESSION

   Having now repelled the
objections that have been raised against us, or having at least
indicated where our defensive weapons lie, we must no longer
postpone the task of setting about the psychological investigations
for which we have so long been arming ourselves. Let us summarize
the principal findings of our enquiry so far as it has gone. Dreams
are psychical acts of as much significance as any others; their
motive force is in every instance a wish seeking fulfilment; the
fact of their not being recognizable as wishes and their many
peculiarities and absurdities are due to the influence of the
psychical censorship to which they have been subjected during the
process of their formation; apart from the necessity of evading
this censorship, other factors which have contributed to their
formation are a necessity for the condensation of their psychical
material, a regard for the possibility of its being represented in
sensory images and - though not invariably - a demand that the
structure of the dream shall have a rational and intelligible
exterior. Each of these propositions opens a way to fresh
psychological postulates and speculations; the mutual relations
between the wish which is the dream’s motive force and the
four conditions to which the dream’s formation is subject, a
well as the interrelations between the latter, require to be
investigated; and the place of dreams in the nexus of mental life
has to be assigned.

   It was with a view to reminding
us of the problems which have still to be solved that I opened the
present chapter with an account of a dream. There was no difficulty
in interpreting that dream - the dream of the burning child - even
though it interpretation was not given fully in our sense. I raised
the question of why the dreamer dreamt it at all instead of waking
up, and recognized that one of his motives was a wish to represent
his child as still alive. Our further discussions will show us that
yet another wish also played a part. Thus it was in the first
instance for the sake of fulfilling a wish that the process of
thought during sleep was transformed into a dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

967

   If we eliminate the
wish-fulfilment, we shall see that only one feature is left to
distinguish the two forms of psychical event. The dream-thought
would have run: ‘I see a glare coming from the room where the
dead body is lying. Perhaps a candle has fallen over and my child
may be burning.’ The dream repeated these reflections
unaltered, but it represented them in a situation which was
actually present and which could be perceived through the senses
like a waking experience. Here we have the most general and the
most striking psychological characteristic of the process of
dreaming: a thought, and as a rule a thought of something that is
wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or,
as it seems to us, is experienced.

   How, then, are we to explain this
characteristic peculiarity of the dream-work, or, to put the
question more modestly, how are we to find a place for it in the
nexus of psychical processes?

   If we look into the matter more
closely we shall observe that two almost independent features stand
out as characteristic of the form taken by this dream. One is the
fact that the thought is represented as an immediate situation with
the ‘perhaps’ omitted, and the other is the fact that
the thought is transformed into visual images and speech.

   In this particular dream the
change made in the thoughts by the conversion of the expectation
expressed by them into the present tense may not seem particularly
striking. This is because of what can only be described as the
unusually subordinate part played in this dream by wish-fulfilment.
Consider instead another one, in which the dream-wish was not
detached from the waking thoughts that were carried over into sleep
- for instance, the dream of Irma’s injection. There the
dream-thought that was represented was in the optative: ‘If
only Otto were responsible for Irma’s illness!’ The
dream repressed the optative and replaced it by a straightforward
present: ‘Yes, Otto is responsible for Irma’s
illness.’ This, then, is the first of the transformations
which is brought about in the dream-thoughts even by a
distortionless dream. We need not linger long over this first
peculiarity of dreams. We can deal with it by drawing attention to
conscious phantasies - to day-dreams - which treat their ideational
content in just the same manner. While Daudet’s Monsieur
Joyeuse was wandering, out of work, through the streets of Paris
(though his daughters believed that he had a job and was sitting in
an office), he was dreaming of developments that might bring him
influential help and lead to his finding employment - and he was
dreaming in the present tense. Thus dreams make use of the present
tense in the same manner and by the same right as day-dreams. The
present tense is the one in which wishes are represented as
fulfilled.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

968

   But dreams differ from day-dreams
in their second characteristic: namely, in the fact of their
ideational content being transformed from thoughts into sensory
images, to which belief is attached and which appear to be
experienced. I must add at once that not every dream exhibits this
transformation from idea into sensory image. There are dreams which
consist only of thoughts but which cannot on that account be denied
the essential nature of dreams. My ‘Autodidasker’ dream
was of that kind; it included scarcely more sensory elements than
if I had thought its content in the daytime. And in every dream of
any considerable length there are elements which have not, like the
rest, been given a sensory form, but which are simply thought or
known, in the kind of way in which we are accustomed to think or
know things in waking life. It should also be remembered here that
it is not only in dreams that such transformations of ideas into
sensory images occur: they are also found in hallucinations and
visions, which may appear as independent entities, so to say, in
health or as symptoms in the psychoneuroses. In short, the relation
which we are examining now is not in any respect an exclusive one.
Nevertheless it remains true that it would be impossible for us to
imagine the dream-world without it. But in order to arrive at an
understanding of it we must embark upon a discussion that will take
us far afield.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

969

   As the starting-point for our
enquiry, I should like to pick out one from among many remarks made
upon the theory of dreaming by those who have written on the
subject. In the course of a short discussion on the topic of
dreams, the great Fechner (1889,
2
, 520-1) puts forward the
idea that
the scene of action of dreams is different from that
of waking ideational life
. This is the only hypothesis that
makes the special peculiarities of dream-life intelligible.

   What is presented to us in these
words is the idea of
psychical locality
. I shall entirely
disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are here
concerned is also known to us in the form of an anatomical
preparation, and I shall carefully avoid the temptation to
determine psychical locality in any anatomical fashion. I shall
remain upon psychological ground, and I propose simply to follow
the suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries
out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a
photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis,
psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus
at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into
being. In the microscope and telescope, as we know, these occur in
part at ideal points, regions in which no tangible component of the
apparatus is situated. I see no necessity to apologize for the
imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this
kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the
complications of mental functioning intelligible by dissecting the
function and assigning its different constituents to different
component parts of the apparatus. So far as I know, the experiment
has not hitherto been made of using this method of dissection in
order to investigate the way in which the mental instrument is put
together, and I can see no harm in it. We are justified, in my
view, in giving free rein to our speculations so long as we retain
the coolness of our judgement and do not mistake the scaffolding
for the building. And since at our first approach to something
unknown all that we need is the assistance of provisional ideas, I
shall give preference in the first instance to hypotheses of the
crudest and most concrete description.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

970

   Accordingly, we will picture the
mental apparatus as a compound instrument, to the components of
which we will give the name of ‘agencies’, or (for the
sake of greater clarity) ‘systems.’ It is to be
anticipated, in the next place, that these systems may perhaps
stand in a regular spatial relation to one another, in the same
kind of way in which the various systems of lenses in a telescope
are arranged behind one another. Strictly speaking there is no need
for the hypothesis that the psychical systems are actually arranged
in a
spatial
order. It would be sufficient if a fixed order
were established by the fact that in a given psychical process the
excitation passes through the systems in a particular
temporal
sequence. In other processes the sequence may
perhaps be a different one; that is a possibility that we shall
leave open. For the sake of brevity we will in future speak of the
components of the apparatus as ‘­
Ψ
­-systems.’

   The first thing that strikes us
is that this apparatus, compounded of
Ψ
­-systems,
has a sense or direction. All our psychical activity starts from
stimuli (whether internal or external) and ends in innervations.
Accordingly, we shall ascribe a sensory and a motor end to the
apparatus. At the sensory end there lies a system which receives
perceptions; at the motor end there lies another, which opens the
gateway to motor activity. Psychical processes advance in general
from the perceptual end to the motor end. Thus the most general
schematic picture of the psychical apparatus may be represented
thus (Fig. 1):