Freud - Complete Works (173 page)

   We must not delude ourselves into
exaggerating the importance of these considerations. We have done
no more than give a name to an inexplicable phenomenon. We call it
‘regression’ when in a dream an idea is turned back
into the sensory image from which it was originally derived. But
even this step requires justification. What is the point of this
nomenclature if it teaches us nothing new? I believe the name
‘regression’ is of help to us in so far as it connects
a fact that was already known to us with our schematic picture, in
which the mental apparatus was given a sense or direction. And it
is at this point that that picture begins to repay us for having
constructed it. For an examination of it, without any further
reflection, reveals a further characteristic of dream-formation. If
we regard the process of dreaming as a regression occurring in our
hypothetical mental apparatus, we at once arrive at the explanation
of the empirically established fact that all the logical relations
belonging to the dream-thoughts disappear during the dream-activity
or can only find expression with difficulty. According to our
schematic picture, these relations are contained not in the
first Mnem
. systems but in
later
ones; and in case of
regression they would necessarily lose any means of expression
except in perceptual images.
In regression the fabric of the
dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material
.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

977

   What modification is it that
renders possible a regression which cannot occur in daytime? We
must be content with some conjectures on this point. No doubt it is
a question of changes in the cathexes of energy attaching to the
different systems, changes which increase or diminish the facility
with which those systems can be passed through by the excitatory
process. But in any apparatus of this kind the same results upon
the passage of excitations might be produced in more than one way.
Our first thoughts will of course be of the state of sleep and the
changes in cathexis which it brings about at the sensory end of the
apparatus. During the day there is a continuous current from the
Pcpt
.
Ψ
­-system
flowing in the direction of motor activity; but this current ceases
at night and could no longer form an obstacle to a current of
excitation flowing in the opposite sense. Here we seem to have the
‘shutting-out of the external world’, which some
authorities regard as the theoretical explanation of the
psychological characteristics of dreams. (See
p. 560
.)

   In explaining regression in
dreams, however, we must bear in mind the regressions which also
occur in pathological waking states; and here the explanation just
given leaves us in the lurch. For in those cases regression occurs
in spite of a sensory current flowing without interruption in a
forward direction. My explanation of hallucinations in hysteria and
paranoia and of visions in mentally normal subjects is that they
are in fact regressions - that is, thoughts transformed into images
- but that the only thoughts that undergo this transformation are
those which are intimately linked with memories that have been
suppressed of have remained unconscious.

   For instance, one of my youngest
hysterical patients, a twelve-year-old boy, was prevented from
falling asleep by ‘
green faces with red eyes
’
which terrified him. The source of this phenomenon was a
suppressed, though at one time conscious, memory of a boy whom he
had often seen four years earlier. This boy had presented him with
an alarming picture of the consequences of bad habits in children,
including masturbation - a habit with which my patient was now
reproaching himself in retrospect. His mother had pointed out at
the time that the ill-behaved boy had a
greenish face
and
red
(i.e. red-rimmed)
eyes
. Here was the origin of
his bogey, whose only purpose, incidentally, was to remind him of
another of his mother’s predictions - that boys of that sort
grow into idiots, can learn nothing at school and die young. My
little patient had fulfilled one part of the prophecy, for he was
making no progress at his school, and, as was shown from his
account of the involuntary thoughts that occurred to him, he was
terrified of the other part. I may add that after a short time the
treatment resulted in his being able to sleep, in his nervousness
disappearing and his being awarded a mark of distinction at the end
of his school-year.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

978

   In the same connection I will
give the explanation of a vision that was described to me by
another hysterical patient (a woman of forty) as having happened
before she fell ill. One morning she opened her eyes and saw her
brother in the room, though, as she knew, he was in fact in an
insane asylum. Her small son was sleeping in the bed beside her. To
save the child from having
a fright
and
falling into
convulsions
when he saw his
uncle
, she pulled the
sheet
over his face, whereupon the apparition vanished. This
vision was a modified version of a memory from the lady’s
childhood; and, though it was conscious, it was intimately related
to all the unconscious material in her mind. Her nurse had told her
that her mother (who had died very young, when my patient was only
eighteen months old) had suffered from epileptic or hysterical
convulsions
, which went back to a
fright
caused by
her brother (my patient’s uncle) appearing to her disguised
as a ghost with a
sheet
over his head. Thus the vision
contained the same elements as the memory: the brother’s
appearance, the sheet, the fright and its results. But the elements
had been arranged in a different context and transferred on to
other figures. The obvious motive of the vision, or of the thoughts
which it replaced, was her concern lest her little boy might follow
in the footsteps of his uncle, whom he greatly resembled
physically.

   The two instances that I have
quoted are neither of them entirely devoid of connection with the
state of sleep and for that reason are perhaps not well chosen for
what I want them to prove. I will therefore refer the reader to my
analysis of a woman suffering from hallucinatory paranoia (Freud,
1896
b
) as well as to the findings in my still unpublished
studies on the psychology of the psychoneuroses, for evidence that
in such instances of the regressive transformation of thoughts we
must not overlook the influence of memories, mostly from childhood,
which have been suppressed or have remained unconscious. The
thoughts which are connected with a memory of this kind and which
are forbidden expression by the censorship are, as it were,
attracted by the memory into regression as being the form of
representation in which the memory itself is couched. I may also
recall that one of the facts arrived at in the
Studies on
Hysteria
was that when it was possible to bring infantile
scenes (whether they were memories or phantasies) into
consciousness, they were seen like hallucinations and lost that
characteristic only in the process of being reported. It is
moreover a familiar observation that, even in those whose memory is
not normally of a visual type, the earliest recollections of
childhood retain far into life the quality of sensory
vividness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

979

   If we now bear in mind how great a
part is played in the dream-thoughts by infantile experiences or by
phantasies based upon them, how frequently portions of them
re-emerge in the dream-content and how often the dream-wishes
themselves are derived from them, we cannot dismiss the probability
that in dreams too the transformation of thoughts into visual
images may be in part the result of the attraction which memories
couched in visual form and eager for revival bring to bear upon
thoughts cut off from consciousness and struggling to find
expression. On this view a dream might be described as
a
substitute for an infantile scene modified by being transferred on
to a recent experience
. The infantile scene is unable to bring
about its own revival and has to be content with returning as a
dream.

   This indication of the way in
which infantile scenes (or their reproductions as phantasies)
function in a sense as models for the content of dreams, removes
the necessity for one of the hypotheses put forward by Scherner and
his followers in regard to internal sources of stimulation.
Scherner supposes that, when dreams exhibit particularly vivid or
particularly copious visual elements, there is present a state of
‘visual stimulation’, that is, of internal excitation
in the organ of vision. We need not dispute this hypothesis, but
can content ourselves with assuming that this state of excitation
applies merely to the
psychical
perceptual system of the
visual organ; we may, however, further point out that the state of
excitation has been set up by a
memory
, that it is a
revival
of a visual excitation which was originally an
immediate one. I cannot produce any good example from my own
experience of an
infantile
memory producing this kind of
result. My dreams are in general less rich in sensory elements than
I am led to suppose is the case in other people. But in the case of
my most vivid and beautiful dream of the last few years I was
easily able to trace back the hallucinatory clarity of the
dream’s content to the sensory qualities of recent or fairly
recent impressions. On
p. 907 ff.
I recorded a dream in which the deep blue colour of the water, the
brown of the smoke coming from the ship’s funnels, and the
dark brown and red of the buildings left behind a profound
impression on me. This dream, if any, should be traceable, to a
visual stimulus. What was it that had brought my visual organ into
this state of stimulation? A recent impression, which attached
itself to a number of earlier ones. The colours which I saw were in
the first instance those of a box of toy bricks with which, on the
day before the dream, my children had put up a fine building and
shown it off for my admiration. The big bricks were of the same
dark red and the small ones were of the same blue and brown. This
was associated with colour impressions from my last travels in
Italy: the beautiful blue of the Isonzo and the lagoons and the
brown of the Carso. The beauty of the colours in the dream was only
a repetition of something seen in my memory.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

980

   Let us bring together what we
have found out about the peculiar propensity of dreams to recast
their ideational content into sensory images. We have not explained
this feature of the dream-work, we have not traced it back to any
known psychological laws; but we have rather picked it out as
something that suggests unknown implications and we have
characterized it with the word ‘regressive.’ We have
put forward the view that in all probability this regression,
wherever it may occur, is an effect of a resistance opposing the
progress of a thought into consciousness along the normal path, and
of a simultaneous attraction exercised upon the thought by the
presence of memories possessing great sensory force.¹ In the
case of dreams, regression may perhaps be further facilitated by
the cessation of the progressive current - which streams in during
the daytime from the sense organs; in other forms of regression,
the absence of this accessory factor must be made up for by a
greater intensity of the other motives for regression. Nor must we
forget to observe that in these pathological cases of regression as
well as in dreams the process of transference of energy must differ
from what it is in regressions occurring in normal mental life,
since in the former cases that process makes possible a complete
hallucinatory cathexis of the perceptual systems. What we have
described, in our analysis of the dream-work, as ‘regard for
representability’ might be brought into connection with the
selective attraction
exercised by the visually recollected
scenes touched upon by the dream-thoughts.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] In any
account of the theory of repression it would have to be laid down
that a thought become repressed as a result of the combined
influence upon it of
two
factors. It is pushed from the one
side (by the censorship of the
Cs
.) and pulled from the
other (by the
Ucs
.), in the same kind of way in which people
are conveyed to the top of the Great Pyramid. [
Added
1919:]
Cf. my paper on repression (Freud, 1915
d
).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

981

   It is further to be remarked that
regression plays a no less important part in the theory of the
formation of neurotic symptoms than it does in that of dreams.
Three kinds of regression are thus to be distinguished: (
a
)
topographical
regression, in the sense of the schematic
picture of the ­
Ψ
­-systems
which we have explained above; (
b
)
temporal
regression, in so far as what is in question is a harking back to
older psychical structures; and (
c
)
formal
regression, where primitive methods of expression and
representation take the place of the usual ones. All these three
kinds of regression are, however, one at bottom and occur together
as a rule; for what is older in time is more primitive in form and
in psychical topography lies nearer to the perceptual end.