Freud - Complete Works (174 page)

   Nor can we leave the subject of
regression in dreams without setting down in words a notion by
which we have already repeatedly been struck and which will recur
with fresh intensity when we have entered more deeply into the
study of the psycho-neuroses: namely that dreaming is on the whole
an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition,
a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which
dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then
available to him. Behind this childhood of the individual we are
promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood - a picture of the
development of the human race, of which the individual’s
development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation influenced by
the chance circumstances of life. We can guess how much to the
point is Nietzsche’s assertion that in dreams ‘some
primaeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely
reach any longer by a direct path’; and we may expect that
the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s
archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and
neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we
could have imagined possible; so that psycho-analysis may claim a
high place among the sciences which are concerned with the
reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the
beginnings of the human race.

   It may well be that this first
portion of our psychological study of dreams will leave us with a
sense of dissatisfaction. But we can console ourselves with the
thought that we have been obliged to build our way out into the
dark. If we are not wholly in error, other lines of approach are
bound to lead us into much the same region and the time may then
come when we shall find ourselves more at home in it.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

982

(C)

WISH-FULFILMENT

   The dream of the burning child at
the beginning of this chapter gives us a welcome opportunity of
considering the difficulties with which the theory of
wish-fulfilment is faced. It will no doubt have surprised all of us
to be told that dreams are nothing other than fulfilments of
wishes, and not only on account of the contradiction offered by
anxiety-dreams. When analysis first revealed to us that a meaning
and a psychical value lay concealed behind dreams, we were no doubt
quite unprepared to find that that meaning was of such a uniform
character. According to Aristotle’s accurate but bald
definition, a dream is thinking that persists (in so far as we are
asleep) in the state of sleep. Since, then, our daytime thinking
produces psychical acts of such various sorts - judgements,
inferences, denials, expectations, intentions, and so on - why
should it be obliged during the night to restrict itself to the
production of wishes alone? Are there not, on the contrary,
numerous dreams which show us psychical acts of other kinds -
worries, for instance - transformed into dream-shape? And was not
the dream with which we began this chapter (a quite particularly
transparent one) precisely a dream of this sort? When the glare of
light fell on the eyes of the sleeping father, he drew the worrying
conclusion that a candle had fallen over and might have set the
dead body on fire. He turned this conclusion into a dream by
clothing it in a sensory situation and in the present tense. What
part was played in this by wish-fulfilment? Can we fail to see in
it the predominating influence of a thought persisting from waking
life or stimulated by a new sense-impression? All this is quite
true and compels us to enter more closely into the part played by
wish-fulfilment in dreams and into the importance of waking
thoughts which persist into sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

983

   We have already been led by
wish-fulfilment itself to divide dreams into two groups. We have
found some dreams which appeared openly as wish-fulfilments, and
others in which the wish-fulfilment was unrecognizable and often
disguised by every possible means. In the latter we have perceived
the dream censorship at work. We found the undistorted wishful
dreams principally in children; though
short
, frankly
wishful dreams
seemed
(and I lay emphasis upon this
qualification) to occur in adults as well.

   We may next ask where the wishes
that come true in dreams originate. What contrasting possibilities
or what alternatives have we in mind in raising this question? It
is the contrast, I think, between the consciously perceived life of
daytime and a psychical activity which has remained unconscious and
of which we can only become aware at night. I can distinguish three
possible origins for such a wish. (1) It may have been aroused
during the day and for external reasons may not have been
satisfied; in that case an acknowledged wish which has not been
dealt with is left over for the night. (2) It may have arisen
during the day but been repudiated; in that case what is left over
is a wish which has not been dealt with but has been suppressed.
(3) It may have no connection with daytime life and be one of those
wishes which only emerge from the suppressed part of the mind and
become active in us at night. If we turn again to our schematic
picture of the psychical apparatus, we shall localize wishes of the
first kind in the system
Pcs
.; we shall suppose that wishes
of the second kind have been driven out of the system
Pcs
.
into the
Ucs
., where, if at all, they continue to exist; and
we shall conclude that wishful impulses of the third kind are
altogether incapable of passing beyond the system
Ucs
. The
question then arises whether wishes derived from these different
sources are of equal importance for dreams and have equal power to
instigate them.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

984

   If we cast our minds over the
dreams that are at our disposal for answering this question, we
shall at once be reminded that we must add a fourth source of
dream-wishes, namely the current wishful impulses that arise during
the night (e.g. those stimulated by thirst or sexual needs). In the
next place, we shall form the opinion that the place of origin of a
dream-wish probably has no influence on its capacity for
instigating dreams. I may recall the little girl’s dream
which prolonged a trip on the lake that had been interrupted during
the day and the other children’s dreams which I have
recorded. They were explained as being due to unfulfilled, but
unsuppressed, wishes from the previous day. Instances of a wish
that has been suppressed in the daytime finding its way out in a
dream are exceedingly numerous. I will add a further very simple
example of this class. The dreamer was a lady who was rather fond
of making fun of people and one of whose friends, a woman younger
than herself, had just become engaged. All day long she had been
asked by her acquaintances whether she knew the young man and what
she thought of him. She had replied with nothing but praises, with
which she had silenced her real judgement; for she would have liked
to tell the truth - that he was a
‘
Dutzendmensch
’ [literally a ‘dozen
man’, a very commonplace sort of person - people like him are
turned out by the
dozen
]. She dreamt that night that she was
asked the same question, and replied with the formula: ‘
In
the case of repeat orders it is sufficient to quote the
number
.’ We have learnt, lastly, from numerous analyses
that wherever a dream has undergone distortion the wish has arisen
from the unconscious and was one which could not be perceived
during the day. Thus it seems at a first glance as though all
wishes are of equal importance and equal power in dreams.

   I cannot offer any proof here
that the truth is nevertheless otherwise; but I may say that I am
strongly inclined to suppose that dream-wishes are more strictly
determined. It is true that children’s dreams prove beyond a
doubt that a wish that has not been dealt with during the day can
act as a dream-instigator. But it must not be forgotten that it is
a
child’s
wish, a wishful impulse of the strength
proper to children. I think it is highly doubtful whether in the
case of an adult a wish that has not been fulfilled during the day
would be strong enough to produce a dream. It seems to me, on the
contrary, that, with the progressive control exercised upon our
instinctual life by our thought-activity, we are more and more
inclined to renounce as unprofitable the formation or retention of
such intense wishes as children know. It is possible that there are
individual differences in this respect, and that some people retain
an infantile type of mental process longer than others, just as
there are similar differences in regard to the diminution of visual
imagery, which is so vivid in early years. But in general, I think,
a wish that has been left over unfulfilled from the previous day is
insufficient to produce a dream in the case of an adult. I readily
admit that a wishful impulse originating in the conscious will
contribute
to the instigation of a dream, but it will
probably not do more than that. The dream would not materialize if
the preconscious wish did not succeed in finding reinforcement from
elsewhere.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

985

   From the unconscious, in fact.
My supposition is that a conscious wish can only become a
dream-instigator if it succeeds in awakening an unconscious wish
with the same tenor and in obtaining reinforcement from it
.
From indications derived from the psycho-analysis of the neuroses,
I consider that these unconscious wishes are always on the alert,
ready at any time to find their way to expression when an
opportunity arises for allying themselves with an impulse from the
conscious and for transferring their own great intensity on to the
latter’s lesser one.¹ It will then
appear
as
though the conscious wish alone had been realized in the dream;
only some small peculiarity in the dream’s configuration will
serve as a finger-post to put us on the track of the powerful ally
from the unconscious. These wishes in our unconscious, ever on the
alert and, so to say, immortal, remind one of the legendary Titans,
weighed down since primaeval ages by the massive bulk of the
mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods
and which are still shaken from time to time by the convulsion of
their limbs. But these wishes, held under repression, are
themselves of infantile origin, as we are taught by psychological
research into the neuroses. I would propose, therefore, to set
aside the assertion made just now, that the place of origin of
dream-wishes is a matter of indifference and replace it by another
one to the following effect:
a wish which is represented in a
dream must be an infantile one
. In the case of adults it
originates from the
Ucs
., in the case of children, where
there is as yet no division or censorship between the
Ucs
.
and the
Pcs
., or where that division is only gradually being
set up, it is an unfulfilled, unrepressed wish from waking life. I
am aware that this assertion cannot be proved to hold universally;
but it can be proved to hold frequently, even in unsuspected cases,
and it cannot be
contradicted
as a general proposition.

  
¹
They share this character of
indestructibility with all other mental acts which are truly
unconscious, i.e. which belong to the system
Ucs
. only.
These are paths which have been laid down once and for all, which
never fall into disuse and which, whenever an unconscious
excitation re-cathects them, are always ready to conduct the
excitatory process to discharge. If I may use a simile, they are
only capable of annihilation in the same sense as the ghosts in the
underworld of the Odyssey - ghosts which awoke to new life as soon
as they tasted blood. Processes which are dependent on the
preconscious system are destructible in quite another sense. The
psychotherapy of the neuroses is based on this
distinction.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

986

   In my view, therefore, wishful
impulses left over from conscious waking life must be relegated to
a secondary position in respect to the formation of dreams. I
cannot allow that, as contributors to the content of dreams, they
play any other part than by the material of sensations which become
currently active during sleep. (See
pp. 707‑708
.) I shall follow the
same line of thought in now turning to consider those psychical
instigations to dreaming, left over from waking life, which are
other than wishes. When we decide to go to sleep, we may succeed in
temporarily bringing to an end the cathexes of energy attaching to
our waking thoughts. Anyone who can do this easily is a good
sleeper; the first Napoleon seems to have been a model of this
class. But we do not always succeed in doing so, nor do we always
succeed completely. Unsolved problems, tormenting worries,
overwhelming impressions - all these carry thought-activity over
into sleep and sustain mental processes in the system that we have
named the preconscious. If we wish to classify the thought-impulses
which persist in sleep, we may divide them into the following
groups: (1) what has not been carried to a conclusion during the
day owing to some chance hindrance; (2) what has not been dealt
with owing to the insufficiency of our intellectual power - what is
unsolved; (3) what has been rejected and suppressed during the
daytime. To these we must add (4) a powerful group consisting of
what has been set in action in our
Ucs
. by the activity of
the preconscious in the course of the day; and finally (5) the
group of daytime impressions which are indifferent and have for
that reason not been dealt with.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

987

   There is no need to underestimate
the importance of the psychical intensities which are introduced
into the state of sleep by these residues of daytime life, and
particularly of those in the group of unsolved problems. It is
certain that these excitations continue to struggle for expression
during the night; and we may assume with equal certainty that the
state of sleep makes it impossible for the excitatory process to be
pursued in the habitual manner in the preconscious and brought to
an end by becoming conscious. In so far as our thought-processes
are able to become conscious in the normal way at night, we are
simply not asleep. I am unable to say what modification in the
system
Pcs
. is brought about by the state of sleep;¹
but there can be no doubt that the psychological characteristics of
sleep are to be looked for essentially in modifications in the
cathexis of this particular system - a system that is also in
control of access to the power of movement, which is paralysed
during sleep. On the other hand, nothing in the psychology of
dreams gives me reason to suppose that sleep produces any
modifications other than secondary ones in the state of things
prevailing in the
Ucs
. No other course, then, lies open to
excitations occurring at night in the
Pcs
. than that
followed by wishful excitations arising from the
Ucs
.; the
preconscious excitations must find reinforcement from the
Ucs
. and must accompany the unconscious excitations along
their circuitous paths. But what is the relation of the
preconscious residues of the previous day to
dreams
? There
is no doubt that they find their way into dreams in great quantity,
and that they make use of the content of dreams in order to
penetrate into consciousness even during the night. Indeed they
occasionally dominate the content of a dream and force it to carry
on the activity of daytime. It is certain, too, that the
day’s residues may be of any other character just as easily
as wishes; but it is highly instructive in this connection, and of
positively decisive importance for the theory of wish-fulfilment,
to observe the condition to which they must submit in order to be
received into a dream.