Freud - Complete Works (178 page)

   Now that we know that all through
the night the preconscious is concentrated upon the wish to sleep,
we are in a position to carry our understanding of the process of
dreaming a stage further. But first let us summarize what we have
learnt so far.

   The situation is this. Either
residues of the previous day have been left over from the activity
of waking life and it has not been possible to withdraw the whole
cathexis of energy from them; or the activity of waking life during
the course of the day has led to the stirring up of an unconscious
wish; or these two events have happened to coincide. (We have
already discussed the various possibilities in this
connection.)  The unconscious wish links itself up with the
day’s residues and effects a transference on to them; this
may happen either in the course of the day or not until a state of
sleep has been established. A wish now arises which has been
transferred on to the recent material; or a recent wish, having
been suppressed, gains fresh life by being reinforced from the
unconscious. This wish seeks to force its way along the normal path
taken by thought processes, though the
Pcs
. (to which,
indeed, it in part belongs) to consciousness. But it comes up
against the censorship, which is still functioning and to the
influence of which it now submits. At this point it takes on the
distortion for which the way has already been paved by the
transference of the wish on to recent material. So far it is on the
way to becoming an obsessive idea or a delusion or something of the
kind - that is,
a thought
which has been intensified by
transference and distorted in its expression by censorship. Its
further advance is halted, however, by the sleeping state of the
preconscious. (The probability is that that system has protected
itself against the invasion by diminishing its own excitations.)
The dream-process consequently enters on a regressive path, which
lies open to it precisely owing to the peculiar nature of the state
of sleep, and it is led along that path by the attraction exercised
on it by groups of memories; some of these memories themselves
exist only in the form of visual cathexes and not as translations
into the terminology of the later systems. In the course of its
regressive path the dream-process acquires the attribute of
representability. (I shall deal later with the question of
compression.) It has now completed the second portion of its zigzag
journey. The first portion was a progressive one, leading from the
unconscious scenes or phantasies to the preconscious; the second
portion led from the frontier of the censorship back again to
perceptions. But when the content of the dream process has become
perceptual, by that fact it has, as it were, found a way of evading
the obstacle put in its way by the censorship and the state of
sleep in the
Pcs
. It succeeds in drawing attention to itself
and in being noticed by consciousness.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1003

   For consciousness, which we look
upon in the light of a sense organ for the apprehension of
psychical qualities, is capable in waking life of receiving
excitations from two directions. In the first place, it can receive
excitations from the periphery of the whole apparatus, the
perceptual system; and in addition to this, it can receive
excitations of pleasure and unpleasure, which prove to be almost
the only psychical quality attaching to transpositions of energy in
the inside of the apparatus. All other processes in the
Ψ
-systems,
including the
Pcs
., are lacking in any psychical quality and
so cannot be objects of consciousness, except in so far as they
bring pleasure or unpleasure to perception. We are thus driven to
conclude that
these releases of pleasure and unpleasure
automatically regulate the course of cathectic processes
. But,
in order to make more delicately adjusted performances possible, it
later became necessary to make the course of ideas less dependent
upon the presence or absence of unpleasure. For this purpose the
Pcs
. system needed to have qualities of its own which could
attract consciousness; and it seems highly probable that it
obtained them by linking the preconscious processes with the mnemic
system of indications of speech, a system which was not without
quality. By means of the qualities of that system, consciousness,
which had hitherto been a sense organ for perceptions alone. Now,
therefore, there are, as it were,
two
sensory surfaces, one
directed towards perception and the other towards the preconscious
thought-processes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1004

   I must assume that the state of
sleep makes the sensory surface of consciousness which is directed
towards the
Pcs
. far more insusceptible to excitation than
the surface directed towards the
Pcpt
. systems. Moreover,
this abandonment of interest in thought-processes during the night
has a purpose: thinking is to come to a standstill, for the
Pcs
. requires sleep. Once, however, a dream has become a
perception
, it is in a position to excite consciousness, by
means of the qualities it has now acquired. This sensory excitation
proceeds to perform what is its essential function: it directs a
part of the available cathectic energy in the
Pcs
. into
attention to what is causing the excitation. It must therefore be
admitted that every dream has an
arousing
effect, that it
sets a part of the quiescent force of the
Pcs
. in action.
The dream is then submitted by this force to the influence which we
have described as secondary revision with an eye to consecutiveness
and intelligibility. That is to say, the dream is treated by it
just like any other perceptual content; it is met by the same
anticipatory ideas, in so far as its subject-matter allows. So far
as this third portion of the dream-process has any direction it is
once again a progressive one.

   To avoid misunderstandings, a
word about the chronological relations of these dream-processes
will not be out of place. A very attractive conjecture has been put
forward by Goblot, suggested, no doubt, by the riddle of
Maury’s guillotine dream. He seeks to show that a dream
occupies no more than the transition period between sleeping and
waking. The process of awakening takes a certain amount of time,
and during that time the dream occurs. We imagine that the final
dream-image was so powerful that it compelled us to wake; whereas
in fact it was only so powerful because at that moment we were
already on the point of waking. ‘Un rêve c’est un
réveil qui commence.’¹

   It has already been pointed out
by Dugas that Goblot would have to disregard many facts before he
could assert his thesis generally. Dreams occur from which we do
not awaken for instance, some in which we dream that we are
dreaming. With our knowledge of the dream-work, we could not
possibly agree that it only covers the period of awakening. It
seems probable, on the contrary, that the first portion of the
dream-work has already begun during the day, under the control of
the preconscious. Its second portion - the modification imposed by
the censorship, the attraction exercised by unconscious scenes, and
the forcing of its way to perception - no doubt proceeds all
through the night; and in this respect we may perhaps always be
right when we express a feeling of having been dreaming all night
long, though we cannot say what.

  
¹
[‘A dream is an awakening that is
beginning.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1005

   But it seems to me unnecessary to
suppose that dream-processes really maintain, up to the moment of
becoming conscious, the chronological order in which I have
described them: that the first thing to appear is the transferred
dream-wish, that distortion by the censorship follows, then the
regressive change in direction, and so on. I have been obliged to
adopt this order in my description; but what happens in reality is
no doubt a simultaneous exploring of one path and another, a
swinging of the excitation now this way and now that, until at last
it accumulates in the direction that is most opportune and one
particular grouping becomes the permanent one. Certain personal
experiences of my own lead me to suspect that the dream-work often
requires more than a day and a night in order to achieve its
result; and if this is so, we need no longer feel any amazement at
the extraordinary ingenuity shown in the construction of the dream.
In my opinion even the demand for the dream to be made intelligible
as a perceptual event may be put into effect before the dream
attracts consciousness to itself. From then onwards, however, the
pace is accelerated, for at that point a dream is treated in the
same fashion as anything else that is perceived. It is like a
firework, which takes hours to prepare but goes off in a
moment.

   The dream-process has by now
either acquired sufficient intensity though the dream-work to
attract consciousness to itself and arouse the preconscious,
irrespectively of the time and depth of sleep; or its intensity is
insufficient to achieve this and it must remain in a state of
readiness until, just before waking, attention becomes more mobile
and comes to meet it. The majority of dreams appear to operate with
comparatively low psychical intensities, for they mostly wait until
the moment of waking. But this also explains the fact that, if we
are suddenly woken from deep sleep, we usually perceive something
that we have dreamt. In such cases, just as when we wake of our own
accord, the first thing we see is the perceptual content that has
been constructed by the dream-work and immediately afterwards we
see the perceptual content that is offered to us from outside
ourselves.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1006

   Greater theoretical interest,
however, attaches to the dreams which have the power to rouse us in
the middle of our sleep. Bearing in mind the expediency which is
everywhere else the rule, we may ask why a dream, that is, an
unconscious wish, is given the power to interfere with sleep, that
is, with the fulfilment of the preconscious wish. The explanation
no doubt lies in relations of energy of which we have no knowledge.
If we possessed such knowledge, we should probably find that
allowing the dream to take its course and expending a certain
amount of more or less detached attention on it is an economy of
energy compared with holding the unconscious as tightly under
control at night as in the daytime. Experience shows that dreaming
is compatible with sleeping, even if it interrupts sleep several
times during the night. One wakes up for an instant and then falls
asleep again at once. It is like brushing away a fly in one’s
sleep: a case of
ad hoc
awakening. If one falls asleep
again, the interruption has been disposed of. As is shown by such
familiar examples as the sleep of a nursing mother or wet nurse,
the fulfilment of the wish to sleep is quite compatible with
maintaining a certain expenditure of attention in some particular
direction.

   At this point an objection
arises, which is based on a better knowledge of unconscious
processes. I myself have asserted that unconscious wishes are
always active. But in spite of this they seem not to be strong
enough to make themselves perceptible during the day. If, however,
while a state of sleep prevails, an unconscious wish has shown
itself strong enough to construct a dream and arouse the
preconscious with it, why should this strength fail after the dream
has been brought to knowledge? Should not the dream continue to
recur perpetually, precisely as the vexatious fly keeps on coming
back after it has been driven away? What right have we to assert
that dreams get rid of the disturbance of sleep?

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1007

   It is perfectly true that
unconscious wishes always remain active. They represent paths which
can always be traversed, whenever a quantity of excitation makes
use of them. Indeed it is a prominent feature of unconscious
processes that they are indestructible. In the unconscious nothing
can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten. This is
brought most vividly home to one in studying the neuroses, and
especially hysteria. The unconscious path of thoughts, which leads
to discharge in a hysterical attack, immediately becomes
traversable once more, when sufficient excitation has accumulated.
A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly
like a fresh one throughout the thirty years, as soon as it has
obtained access to the unconscious sources of emotion. As soon as
the memory of it is touched, it springs into life again and shows
itself cathected with excitation which finds a motor discharge in
an attack. This is precisely the point at which psychotherapy has
to intervene. Its task is to make it possible for the unconscious
processes to be dealt with finally and be forgotten. For the fading
of memories and the emotional weakness of impressions which are no
longer recent, which we are inclined to regard as self-evident and
to explain as a primary effect of time upon mental memory-traces,
are in reality secondary modifications which are only brought about
by laborious work. What performs this work is the preconscious, and
psychotherapy can pursue no other course than to bring the Ucs.
under the domination of the Pcs
.

   Thus there are two possible
outcomes for any particular unconscious excitatory process. Either
it may be left to itself, in which case it eventually forces its
way through at some point and on this single occasion finds
discharge for its excitation in movement; or it may come under the
influence of the preconscious, and its excitation, instead of being
discharged
, may be
bound
by the preconscious.
This
second alternative is the one which occurs in the process of
dreaming
. The cathexis from the
Pcs
. which goes halfway
to meet the dream after it has become perceptual, having been
directed on to it by the excitation in consciousness, binds the
dream’s unconscious excitation and makes it powerless to act
as a disturbance. If it is true that the dreamer wakes for an
instant, yet he really
has
brushed away the fly that was
threatening to disturb his sleep. It begins to dawn on us that it
actually
is
more expedient and economical to allow the
unconscious wish to take its course, to leave the path to
regression open to it so that it can construct a dream, and then to
bind the dream and dispose of it with a small expenditure of
preconscious work - rather than to continue keeping a tight rein on
the unconscious throughout the whole period of sleep. It was indeed
to be expected that dreaming, even though it may originally have
been a process without a useful purpose, would have procured itself
some function in the interplay of mental forces. And we can now see
what that function is. Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing
back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the
Ucs
. which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges
the
Ucs
. excitation, serves it as a safety valve and at the
same time preserves the sleep of the preconscious in return for a
small expenditure of waking activity. Thus, like all the other
psychical structures in the series of which it is a member, it
constitutes a compromise; it is in the service of both of the
two systems since it fulfils the two wishes in so far as they are
compatible with each other. If we turn back to the ‘excretion
theory’ of dreams put forward by Robert, which I explained on
p. 586 ff.
, we shall see at a
glance that in its essence we must accept his account of the
function
of dreams, though differing from him in his
premises and in his view of the dream-process itself.¹