Freud - Complete Works (175 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] I have tried
to penetrate further into an understanding of the state of things
prevailing during sleep and of the determining conditions of
hallucination in a paper entitled ‘A Metapsychological
Supplement to the Theory of Dreams’.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

988

   Let us take one of the dreams I
have already recorded - for instance, the one in which my friend
Otto appeared with the signs of Graves’ disease. (See
p. 746 ff.
) I had been worried
during the previous day by Otto’s looks; and, like everything
else concerned with him, this worry affected me closely. And it
pursued me, as I may assume, into my sleep. I was probably anxious
to discover what could be wrong with him. This worry found
expression during the night in the dream I have described, the
content of which was in the first place nonsensical and in the
second place was in no respect the fulfilment of a wish. I then
began to investigate the origin of this inappropriate expression of
the worry I had felt during the day, and by means of analysis I
found a connection through the fact of my having identified my
friend with a certain Baron L. and myself with Professor R. There
was only one explanation of my having been obliged to choose this
particular substitute for my daytime thought. I must have been
prepared at all times in my
Ucs
. to identify myself with
Professor R., since by means of that identification one of the
immortal wishes of childhood - the megalomaniac wish - was
fulfilled. Ugly thoughts hostile to my friend, which were certain
to be repudiated during the day, had seized the opportunity of
slipping through with the wish and getting themselves represented
in the dream; but my daytime worry had also found some sort of
expression in the content of the dream by means of a substitute.
The daytime thought, which was not in itself a wish but on the
contrary a worry, was obliged to find a connection in some way or
other with an infantile wish which was now unconscious and
suppressed, and which would enable it - suitably decocted, it is
true - to ‘originate’ in consciousness. The more
dominating was the worry, the more far-fetched a link could be
established; there was no necessity for there being any connection
whatever between the content of the wish and that of the worry, and
in fact no such connection existed in our example.

   It may perhaps be useful to
continue our examination of the same question by considering how a
dream behaves when the dream-thoughts present it with material
which is the complete reverse of a wish-fulfilment - well-justified
worries, painful reflections, distressing realizations. The many
possible outcome can be classed under the two following groups. (A)
The dream-work may succeed in replacing all the distressing ideas
by contrary ones and in suppressing the unpleasurable affects
attaching to them. The result will be a straightforward dream of
satisfaction, a palpable ‘wish-fulfilment’, about which
there seems no more to be said. (B) The distressing ideas may make
their way, more or less modified but none the less quite
recognizable, into the manifest content of the dream. This is the
case which raises doubts as to the validity of the wish theory of
dreams and needs further investigation. Dreams of this sort with a
distressing content may either be experienced with indifference, or
they may be accompanied by the whole of the distressing affect
which their ideational content seems to justify, or they may even
lead to the development of anxiety and to awakening.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

989

   Analysis is able to demonstrate
that these unpleasurable dreams are wish-fulfilments no less than
the rest. An unconscious and repressed wish, whose fulfilment the
dreamer’s ego could not fail to experience as something
distressing, has seized the opportunity offered to it by the
persisting cathexis of the distressing residues of the previous
day; it has lent them its support and by that means rendered them
capable of entering a dream. But whereas in Group A the unconscious
wish coincided with the conscious one, in Group B the gulf between
the unconscious and the conscious (between the repressed and the
ego) is revealed and the situation in the fairy tale of the three
wishes which were granted by the fairy to the husband and wife is
realized. (See below,
p. 1009 f. 
n
.
) 
The satisfaction at the fulfilment of the repressed wish may turn
out to be so great that it counterbalances the distressing feelings
attaching to the day’s residues; in that case the
feeling-tone of the dream is indifferent, in spite of its being on
the one hand the fulfilment of a wish and on the other the
fulfilment of a fear. Or it may happen that the sleeping ego takes
a still larger share in the construction of the dream, that it
reacts to the satisfying of the repressed wish with violent
indignation and itself puts an end to the dream with an outburst of
anxiety. Thus there is no difficulty in seeing that unpleasurable
dreams and anxiety-dreams are just as much wish-fulfilments in the
sense of our theory as are straightforward dreams of
satisfaction.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

990

   Unpleasurable dreams may also be
‘punishment-dreams’. It must be admitted that their
recognition means in a certain sense a new addition to the theory
of dreams. What is fulfilled in them is equally an unconscious
wish, namely a wish that the dreamer may be punished for a
repressed and forbidden wishful impulse. To that extent dreams of
this kind fall in with the condition that has been laid down here
that the motive force for constructing a dream must be provided by
a wish belonging to the unconscious. A closer psychological
analysis, however, shows how they differ from other wishful dreams.
In the cases forming Group B the dream-constructing wish is an
unconscious one and belongs to the repressed, while in
punishment-dreams, though it is equally an unconscious one, it must
be reckoned as belonging not to the repressed but to the
‘ego.’ Thus punishment-dreams indicate the possibility
that the ego may have a greater share than was supposed in the
construction of dreams. The mechanism of dream-formation would in
general be greatly clarified if instead of the opposition between
‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ we were to
speak of that between the ‘ego’ and the
‘repressed.’ This cannot be done, however, without
taking account of the processes underlying the psychoneuroses, and
for that reason it has not been carried out in the present work. I
will only add that punishment-dreams are not in general subject to
the condition that the day’s residues shall be of a
distressing kind. On the contrary, they occur most easily where the
opposite is the case - where the day’s residues are thoughts
of a satisfying nature but the satisfaction which they express is a
forbidden one. The only trace of these thoughts that appears in the
manifest dream is their diametric opposite, just as in the case of
dreams belonging to Group A. The essential characteristic of
punishment-dreams would thus be that in their case the
dream-constructing wish is not an unconscious wish derived from the
repressed (from the system
Ucs
.), but a punitive one
reacting against it and belonging to the ego, though at the same
time an unconscious (that is to say, preconscious)
one.¹

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1930:] This would be
the appropriate point for a reference to the
‘super-ego’, one of the later findings of
psycho-analysis.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

991

   I will report a dream of my own
in order to illustrate what I have just said, and in particular the
way in which the dream-work deals with a residue of distressing
anticipations from the previous day.

   ‘Indistinct beginning.
I
said to my wife that I had a piece of news for her, something quite
special. She was alarmed and refused to listen. I assured her that
on the contrary it was something that she would be very glad to
hear, and began to tell her that our son’s officer’s
mess had sent a sum of money (5000 Kronen?) . . .
something about distinction . . .
distribution. . . . Meanwhile I had gone with her
into a small room, like a storeroom, to look for something.
Suddenly I saw my son appear. He was not in uniform but in
tight-fitting sports clothes (like a seal?), with a little cap. He
climbed up on to a basket that was standing beside a cupboard, as
though he wanted to put something on the cupboard. I called out to
him: no reply. It seemed to me that his face or forehead was
bandaged. He was adjusting something in his mouth, pushing
something into it. And his hair was flecked with grey. I thought:
"Could he be as exhausted as all that? And has he got false
teeth?”
’ Before I could call out again I woke up,
feeling no anxiety but with my heart beating rapidly. My bedside
clock showed that it was two thirty.’

   Once again it is impossible for
me to present a complete analysis. I must restrict myself to
bringing out a few salient points. Distressing anticipations from
the previous day were what gave rise to the dream: we had once more
been without news of our son at the front for over a week. It is
easy to see that the content of the dream expressed a conviction
that he had been wounded or killed. Energetic efforts were clearly
being made at the beginning of the dream to replace the distressing
thoughts by their contrary. I had some highly agreeable news to
communicate - something about money being sent . . .
distinction . . . distribution. (The sum of money
was derived from an agreeable occurrence in my medical practice; it
was an attempt at a complete diversion from the topic.) But these
efforts failed. My wife suspected something dreadful and refused to
listen to me. The disguises were too thin and references to what it
was sought to repress pierced through them everywhere. If my son
had been killed, his fellow-officers would send back his belongings
and I should have to distribute what he left among his brothers and
sisters and other people. A ‘distinction’ is often
awarded to an officer who has fallen in battle. Thus the dream set
about giving direct expression to what it had first sought to deny,
though the inclination towards wish-fulfilment was still shown at
work in the distortions. (The change of locality during the dream
is no doubt to be understood as what Silberer has described as
‘threshold symbolism’. We cannot tell, it is true, what
it was that provided the dream with the motive force for thus
giving expression to my distressing thoughts. My son did not appear
as someone ‘falling’ but as someone
‘climbing.’ He had in fact been a keen mountaineer. He
was not in uniform but in sports clothes; this meant that the place
of the accident that I
now
feared had been taken by an
earlier
, sporting one; for he had had a fall during a skiing
expedition and broken his thigh. The way in which he was dressed,
on the other hand, which made him look like a seal, at once
recalled someone younger - our funny little grandson; while the
grey hair reminded me of the latter’s father, our son-in-law,
who had been hard hit by the war. What could this
mean? . . . but I have said enough of it. - The
locality in a store-closet and the cupboard from which he wanted to
take something (‘on which he wanted to put something’
in the dream) - these allusions reminded me unmistakably of an
accident of my own which I had brought on myself when I was between
two and three years old. I had climbed up on to a stool in the
store-closet to get something nice that was lying on a cupboard or
table. The stool had tipped over and its corner had struck me
behind my lower jaw; I might easily, I reflected, have knocked out
all my teeth. The recollection was accompanied by an admonitory
thought: ‘that serves you right’; and this seemed as
though it was a hostile impulse aimed at the gallant soldier.
Deeper analysis at last enabled me to discover what the concealed
impulse was which might have found satisfaction in the dreaded
accident to my son: it was the envy which is felt for the young by
those who have grown old, but which they believe they have
completely stifled. And there can be no question that it was
precisely the
strength
of the painful emotion which would
have arisen if such a misfortune had really happened that caused
that emotion to seek out a repressed wish-fulfilment of this kind
in order to find some consolation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

992

   I am now in a position to give a
precise account of the part played in dreams by the unconscious
wish. I am ready to admit that there is a whole class of dreams the
instigation
to which arises principally or even exclusively
from the residues of daytime life; and I think that even my wish
that I might at long last become a Professor Extraordinarius might
have allowed me to sleep through the night in peace if my worry
over my friend’s health had not still persisted from the
previous day. But the worry alone could not have made a dream. The
motive force
which the dream required had to be provided by
a wish; it was the business of the worry to get hold of a wish to
act as the motive force of the dream.

   The position may be explained by
an analogy. A daytime thought may very well play the part of
entrepreneur
for a dream; but the
entrepreneur
, who,
as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can
do nothing without capital; he needs a
capitalist
who can
afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical
outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may
be the thoughts of the previous day,
a wish from the
unconscious
.