Freud - Complete Works (179 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] Is this the
only function that can be assigned to dreams? I know of no other.
It is true that Maeder has attempted to show that dreams have
other, ‘secondary’, functions. He started out from the
correct observation that some dreams contain attempts at solving
conflicts, attempts which are later carried out in reality and
which thus behave as though they were trial practices for waking
actions. He therefore drew a parallel between dreams and the play
of animals and children, which may be regarded as practice in the
operation of innate instincts and as preparation for serious
activity later on, and put forward the hypothesis that dreams have
a ‘
fonction ludique
’ [‘play
function’]. Shortly before Maeder, Alfred Adler, too, had
insisted that dreams possessed a function of ‘thinking
ahead.’ (In an analysis which I published in 1905, a dream,
which could only be regarded as expressing an intention, was
repeated every night until it was carried out.)

   A
little reflection will convince us, however, that this
‘secondary’ function of dreams has no claim to be
considered as a part of the subject of dream-interpretation.
Thinking ahead, forming intentions, framing attempted solutions
which may perhaps be realized later in waking life, all these, and
many other similar things, are products of the unconscious and
preconscious activity of the mind; they may persist in the state of
sleep as ‘the day’s residues’ and combine with an
unconscious wish (cf.
p. 982 ff.
)
in forming a dream. Thus the dream’s function of
‘thinking ahead’ is rather a function of preconscious
waking thought, the products of which may be revealed to us by the
analysis of dreams or of other phenomena. It has long been the
habit to regard dreams as identical with their manifest content;
but we must now beware equally of the mistake of confusing dreams
with latent dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1008

   The qualification ‘in so
far as the two wishes are compatible with each other’ implies
a hint at the possible case in which the function of dreaming may
come to grief. The dream-process is allowed to begin as a
fulfilment of an unconscious wish; but if this attempted
wish-fulfilment jars upon the preconscious so violently that it is
unable to continue sleeping, then the dream has made a breach in
the compromise and has failed to carry out the second half of its
task. In that case the dream is immediately broken off and replaced
by a state of complete waking. Here again it is not really the
fault of the dream if it has now to appear in the role of a
disturber
of sleep instead of in its normal one of a
guardian
of sleep; and this fact need not prejudice us
against its having a useful purpose. This is not the only instance
in the organism of a contrivance which is normally useful becoming
useless and disturbing as soon as the conditions that give rise to
it are somewhat modified; and the disturbance at least serves the
new purpose of drawing attention to the modification and of setting
the organism’s regulative machinery in motion against it.
What I have in mind is of course the case of anxiety-dreams, and in
order that I may not be thought to be evading this evidence against
the theory of wish-fulfilment whenever I come across it, I will at
all events give some hints of their explanation.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1009

   There is no longer anything
contradictory to us in the notion that a psychical process which
develops anxiety can nevertheless be the fulfilment of a wish. We
know that it can be explained by the fact that the wish belongs to
one system, the
Ucs
., while it has been repudiated and
suppressed by the other system, the
Pcs
.¹ Even where
psychical health is perfect, the subjugation of the
Ucs
. by
the
Pcs
. is not complete; the measure of suppression
indicates the degree of our psychical normality. Neurotic symptoms
show that the two systems are in conflict with each other; they are
the products of a compromise which brings the conflict to an end
for the time being. On the one hand, they allow the
Ucs
. an
outlet for the discharge of its excitation, and provide it with a
kind of sally-port, while, on the other hand they make it possible
for the
Pcs
. to control the
Ucs
. to some extent. It
is instructive to consider, for instance, the significance of a
hysterical phobia or an agoraphobia. Let us suppose that a neurotic
patient is unable to cross the street alone - a condition which we
rightly regard as a ‘symptom.’ If we remove this
symptom by compelling him to carry out the act of which he believes
himself incapable, the consequence will be an attack of anxiety;
and indeed the occurrence of an anxiety-attack in the street is
often the precipitating cause of the onset of an agoraphobia. We
see, therefore, that the symptom has been constructed in order to
avoid an outbreak of anxiety; the phobia is erected like a frontier
fortification against the anxiety.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1919:] ‘A
second factor, which is much more important and far-reaching, but
which is equally overlooked by laymen is the following. No doubt a
wish-fulfilment must bring pleasure; but the question then arises
"To whom?" To the person who has the wish, of course.
But, as we know, a dreamer’s relation to his wishes is a
quite peculiar one. He repudiates them and censors them - he has no
liking for them, in short. So that their fulfilment will give him
no pleasure, but just the opposite; and experience shows that this
opposite appears in the form of anxiety, a fact which has still to
be explained. Thus a dreamer in his relation to his dream-wishes
can only be compared to an amalgamation of two separate people who
are linked by some important common element. Instead of enlarging
on this, I will remind you of a familiar fairy tale in which you
will find the same situation repeated. A good fairy promised a poor
married couple to grant them the fulfilment of their first three
wishes. They were delighted, and made up their minds to choose
their three wishes carefully. But a smell of sausages being fried
in the cottage next door tempted the woman to wish for a couple of
them. They were there in a flash; and this was the first
wish-fulfilment. But the man was furious, and in his rage wished
that the sausages were hanging on his wife’s nose. This
happened too; and the sausages were not to be dislodged from their
new position. This was the second wish-fulfilment; but the wish was
the man’s, and its fulfilment was most disagreeable for his
wife. You know the rest of the story. Since after all they were in
fact one - man and wife - the third wish was bound to be that the
sausages should come away from the woman’s nose. This fairy
tale might be used in many other connections; but here it serves
only to illustrate the possibility that if two people are not at
one with each other the fulfilment of a wish of one of them may
bring nothing but unpleasure to the other.’ (
Introductory
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
, Lecture XIV.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1010

   Our discussion cannot be carried
any further without examining the part played by the affects in
these processes; but we can only do so imperfectly in the present
connection. Let us assume, then, that the suppression of the
Ucs
. is necessary above all because, if the course of ideas
in the
Ucs
. were left to itself, it would generate an affect
which was originally of a pleasurable nature, but became
unpleasurable after the process of ‘repression’
occurred. The purpose, and the result too, of suppression is to
prevent this release of unpleasure. The suppression extends over
the ideational content of the
Ucs
., since the release of
unpleasure might start from that content. This presupposes a quite
specific assumption as to the nature of the generation of affect.
It is viewed as a motor or secretory function, the key to whose
innervation lies in the ideas in the
Ucs
. Owing to the
domination established by the
Pcs
. these ideas are, as it
were, throttled, and inhibited from sending out impulses which
would generate affect. If, therefore, the cathexis from the
Pcs
. ceases, the danger is that the unconscious excitations
may release affect of a kind which (as a result of the repression
which has already occurred) can only be experienced as unpleasure,
as anxiety.

   This danger materializes if the
dream-process is allowed to take its course. The conditions which
determine its realization are that repressions must have occurred
and that the suppressed wishful impulses shall be able to grow
sufficiently strong. These determinants are thus quite outside the
psychological framework of dream-formation. If it were not for the
fact that our topic is connected with the subject of the generation
of anxiety by the single factor of the liberation of the
Ucs
. during sleep, I should be able to omit any discussion
of anxiety-dreams and avoid the necessity for entering in these
pages into all the obscurities surrounding them.

   The theory of anxiety-dreams, as
I have already repeatedly declared, forms part of the psychology of
the neuroses. We have nothing more to do with it when once we have
indicated its point of contact with the topic of the dream-process.
There is only one thing more that I can do. Since I have asserted
that neurotic anxiety arises from sexual sources, I can submit some
anxiety-dreams to analysis in order to show the sexual material
present in their dream-thoughts.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1011

   I have good reasons for leaving
on one side in the present discussion the copious examples afforded
by my neurotic patients, and for preferring to quote some
anxiety-dreams dreamt by young people.

   It is dozens of years since I
myself had a true anxiety-dream, but I remember one from my seventh
or eighth year, which I submitted to interpretation some thirty
years later. It was a very vivid one, and in it I saw
my beloved
mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her
features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with
bird’s beaks and laid upon the bed
. I awoke in tears and
screaming, and interrupted my parents’ sleep. The strangely
draped and unnaturally tall figures with birds’ beaks were
derived from the illustrations to Philippson’s Bible. I fancy
they must have been gods with falcons’ heads from an ancient
Egyptian funerary relief. Besides this, the analysis brought to
mind an ill-mannered boy, a son of a
concierge
, who used to
play with us on the grass in front of the house when we were
children, and who I am inclined to think was called Philipp. It
seems to me that it was from this boy that I first heard the vulgar
term for sexual intercourse, instead of which educated people
always use a Latin word, ‘to copulate’, and which was
clearly enough indicated by the choice of the falcons’ heads.
I must have guessed the sexual significance of the word from the
face of my young instructor, who was well acquainted with the facts
of life. The expression on my mother’s features in the dream
was copied from the view I had had of any grandfather a few days
before his death as he lay snoring in a coma. The interpretation
carried out in the dream by the ‘secondary revision’
must therefore have been that my mother was dying; the funerary
relief fitted in with this. I awoke in anxiety, which did not cease
till I had woken my parents up. I remember that I suddenly grew
calm when I saw my mother’s face, as though I had needed to
be reassured that she was not dead. But this
‘secondary’ interpretation of the dream had already
been made under the influence of the anxiety which had developed. I
was not anxious because I had dreamt that my mother was dying; but
I interpreted the dream in that sense in my preconscious revision
of it because I was already under the influence of the anxiety. The
anxiety can be traced back, when repression is taken into account,
to an obscure and evidently sexual craving that had found
appropriate expression in the visual content of the dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1012

   A twenty-seven-year-old man, who
had been seriously ill for a year, reported that when he was
between eleven and thirteen he had repeatedly dreamt (to the
accompaniment of severe anxiety) that
a man with a hatchet was
pursuing him; he tried to run away, but seemed to be paralysed and
could not move from the spot
. This is a good example of a very
common sort of anxiety-dream, which would never be suspected of
being sexual. In analysis, the dreamer first came upon a story
(dating from a time later than the dream) told him by his uncle, of
how he had been attacked in the street one night by a
suspicious-looking individual; the dreamer himself concluded from
this association that he may have heard of some similar episode at
the time of the dream. In connection with the hatchet, he
remembered that at about that time he had once injured his hand
with a hatchet while he was chopping up wood. He then passed
immediately to his relations with his younger brother. He used to
ill-treat this brother and knock him down; and he particularly
remembered an occasion when he had kicked him on the head with his
boot and had drawn blood, and how his mother had said:
‘I’m afraid he’ll be the death of him one
day.’ While he still seemed to be occupied with the subject
of violence, a recollection from his ninth year suddenly occurred
to him. His parents had come home late and had gone to bed while he
pretended to be asleep; soon he had heard sounds of panting and
other noises which had seemed to him uncanny, and he had also been
able to make out their position in the bed. Further thoughts showed
that he had drawn an analogy between this relation between his
parents and his own relation to his younger brother. He had
subsumed what happened between his parents under the concept of
violence and struggling; and he had found evidence in favour of
this view in the fact that he had often noticed blood in his
mother’s bed.