Freud - Complete Works (181 page)

   We have fully appreciated the
importance of the part ascribed by Scherner to
‘dream-imagination’, as well as Scherner’s own
interpretations, but we have been obliged to transport them, as it
were, to a different position in the problem. The point is not that
dreams create the imagination, but rather that the unconscious
activity of the imagination has a large share in the construction
of the dream-thoughts. We remain in Scherner’s debt for
having indicated the source of the dream-thoughts; but nearly
everything that he ascribes to the dream-work is really
attributable to the activity of the unconscious during daytime,
which is the instigating agent of dreams no less than of neurotic
symptoms. We have been obliged to distinguish the
‘dream-work’ as something quite different and with a
much narrower connotation.

   Finally, we have by no means
abandoned the relation between dreams and mental disorders, but
have established it more firmly on fresh ground.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

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   We have thus been able to find a
place in our structure for the most various and contradictory
findings of earlier writers, thanks to the novelty of our theory of
dreams, which combines them, as it were, into a higher unity. Some
of those findings we have put to other uses, but we have wholly
rejected only a few. Nevertheless our edifice is still uncompleted.
Apart from the many perplexing questions in which we have become
involved in making our way into the obscurities of psychology, we
seem to be troubled by a fresh contradiction. On the one hand we
have supposed that the dream-thoughts arise through entirely normal
mental activity; but on the other hand we have discovered a number
of quite abnormal processes of thought among the dream-thoughts,
which extend into the dream-content, and which we then repeat in
the course of our dream-interpretation. Everything that we have
described as the ‘dream-work’  seems to depart so
widely from what we recognize as rational thought-processes that
the most severe strictures passed by earlier writers on the low
level of psychical functioning in dreams must appear fully
justified.

   It may be that we shall only find
enlightenment and assistance in this difficulty by carrying our
investigation still further. And I will begin by picking out for
closer examination one of the conjunctures which may lead to the
formation of a dream.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1020

   A dream, as we have discovered,
takes the place of a number of thoughts which are derived from our
daily life and which form a completely logical sequence. We cannot
doubt, then, that these thoughts originate from our normal mental
life. All the attributes which we value highly in our trains of
thought, and which characterize them as complex achievements of a
high order, are to be found once more in dream-thoughts. There is
no need to assume, however, that this activity of thought is
performed during sleep - a possibility which would gravely confuse
what has hitherto been our settled picture of the psychical state
of sleep. On the contrary, these thoughts may very well have
originated from the previous day, they may have proceeded
unobserved by our consciousness from their start, and may already
have been completed at the onset of sleep. The most that we can
conclude from this is that it proves that
the most complicated
achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of
consciousness
- a fact which we could not fail to learn in any
case from every psycho-analysis of a patient suffering from
hysteria or from obsessional ideas. These dream-thoughts are
certainly not in themselves inadmissible to consciousness; there
may have been a number of reasons for their not having become
conscious to us during the day. Becoming conscious is connected
with the application of a particular psychical function, that of
attention - a function which, as it seems, is only available in a
specific quantity, and this may have been diverted from the train
of thought in question on to some other purpose. There is another
way, too, in which trains of thought of this kind may be withheld
from consciousness. The course of our conscious reflections shows
us that we follow a particular path in our application of
attention. If, as we follow this path, we come upon an idea which
will not bear criticism, we break off: we drop the cathexis of
attention. Now it seems that the train of thought which has thus
been initiated and dropped can continue to spin itself out without
attention being turned to it again, unless at some point or other
it reaches a specially high degree of intensity which forces
attention to it. Thus, if a train of thought is initially rejected
(consciously, perhaps) by a judgement that it is wrong or that it
is useless for the immediate intellectual purposes in view, the
result may be that this train of thought will proceed, unobserved
by consciousness, until the onset of sleep.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1021

   To sum up - we describe a train
of thought such as this as ‘preconscious’; we regard it
as completely rational and believe that it may either have been
simply neglected or broken off and suppressed. Let us add a frank
account of how we picture the occurrence of a train of ideas. We
believe that, starting from a purposive idea, a given amount of
excitation, which we term ‘cathectic energy’, is
displaced along the associative paths selected by that purposive
idea. A train of thought which is ‘neglected’ is one
which has
not received
this cathexis; a train of thought
which is ‘suppressed’ or ‘repudiated’ is
one from which this cathexis has been
withdrawn
. In both
cases they are left to their own excitations. Under certain
conditions a train of thought with a purposive cathexis is capable
of attracting the attention of consciousness to itself and in that
event, through the agency of consciousness, receives a
‘hypercathexis.’ We shall be obliged presently to
explain our view of the nature and function of consciousness.

   A train of thought that has been
set going like this in the preconscious may either cease
spontaneously or persist. We picture the first of these outcomes as
implying that the energy attaching to the train of thought is
diffused along all the associative paths that radiate from it; this
energy sets the whole network of thoughts in a state of excitation
which lasts for a certain time and then dies away as the excitation
in search of discharge becomes transformed into a quiescent
cathexis. If this first outcome supervenes, the process is of no
further significance so far as dream-formation is concerned.
Lurking in our preconscious, however, there are other purposive
ideas, which are derived from sources in our unconscious and from
wishes which are always on the alert. These may take control of the
excitation attaching to the group of thoughts which has been left
to its own devices, they may establish a connection between it and
an unconscious wish, and they may  ‘transfer’ to
it the energy belonging to the unconscious wish. Thenceforward the
neglected or suppressed train of thought is in a position to
persist, though the reinforcement it has received gives it no right
of entry into consciousness. We may express this by saying that
what has hitherto been a preconscious train of thought has now been
‘drawn into the unconscious.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1022

   There are other conjunctures
which may lead to the formation of a dream. The preconscious train
of thought may have been linked to the unconscious wish from the
first and may for that reason have been repudiated by the dominant
purposive cathexis; or an unconscious wish may become active for
other reasons (from somatic causes, perhaps) and may seek to effect
a transference on to the psychical residues that are uncathected by
the Pcs. without their coming halfway to meet it. But all three
cases have the same final outcome: a train of thought comes into
being in the preconscious which is without a preconscious cathexis
but has received a cathexis from an unconscious wish.

   From this point onwards the train
of thought undergoes a series of transformations which we can no
longer recognize as normal psychical processes and which lead to a
result that bewilders us - a psychopathological structure. I will
enumerate these processes and classify them.

   (1) The intensities of the
individual ideas become capable of discharge
en bloc
and
pass over from one idea to another, so that certain ideas are
formed which are endowed with great intensity. And since this
process is repeated several times, the intensity of a whole train
of thought may eventually be concentrated in a single ideational
element. Here we have the fact of ‘compression’ or
‘condensation’, which has become familiar in the
dream-work. It is this that is mainly responsible for the
bewildering impression made on us by dreams, for nothing at all
analogous to it is known to us in mental life that is normal and
accessible to consciousness. In normal mental life too, we find
ideas which, being the nodal points or end results of whole chains
of thought, possess a high degree of psychical significance; but
their significance is not expressed by any feature that is obvious
in a
sensory
manner to internal perception; their perceptual
presentation is not in any respect more intense on account of their
psychical significance. In the process of condensation, on the
other hand, every psychical interconnection is transformed into an
intensification
of its ideational content. The case is the
same as when, in preparing a book for the press, I have some word
which is of special importance for understanding the text printed
in spaced or heavy type; or in speech I should pronounce the same
word loudly and slowly and with special emphasis. The first of
these two analogies reminds us at once of an example provided by
the dream-work itself: the word ‘
trimethylamin
’
in the dream of Irma’s injection. Art historians have drawn
our attention to the fact that the earliest historical sculptures
obey a similar principle: they express the rank of the persons
represented by their size. A king is represented twice or three
times as large as his attendants or as his defeated enemies. A
sculpture of Roman date would make use of subtler means for
producing the same result. The figure of the Emperor would be
placed in the middle, standing erect, and would be modelled with
especial care, while his enemies would be prostrate at his feet;
but he would no longer be a giant among dwarfs. The bows with which
inferiors greet their superiors among ourselves to-day are an echo
of the same ancient principle of representation.

   The direction in which
condensations in dreams proceed is determined on the one hand by
the rational preconscious relations of the dream-thoughts, and on
the other by the attraction exercised by visual memories in the
unconscious. The outcome of the activity of condensation is the
achievement of the intensities required for forcing a way through
into the perceptual systems.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1023

   (2) Owing, once more, to the
freedom with which the intensities can be transferred,
‘intermediate ideas’, resembling compromises, are
constructed under the sway of condensation. (Cf. the numerous
instances I have given of this.) This is again something unheard-of
in normal chains of ideas, where the main stress is laid on the
selection and retention of the ‘right’ ideational
element. On the other hand, composite structures and compromises
occur with remarkable frequency when we try to express preconscious
thoughts in speech. They are then regarded as species of
‘slips of the tongue.’

   (3) The ideas which transfer
their intensities to each other stand in the loosest mutual
relations. They are linked by associations of a kind that is
scorned by our normal thinking and relegated to the use of jokes.
In particular, we find associations based on homonyms and verbal
similarities treated as equal in value to the rest.

   (4)  Thoughts which are
mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other,
but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations,
just as though there were no contradiction between them, or arrive
at compromises such as our conscious thoughts would never tolerate
but such as are often admitted in our actions.

   These are some of the most
striking of the abnormal processes to which the dream-thoughts,
previously constructed on rational lines, are subjected in the
course of the dream-work. It will be seen that the chief
characteristic of these processes is that the whole stress is laid
upon making the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge;
the content and the proper meaning of the psychical elements to
which the cathexes are attached are treated as of little
consequence. It might have been supposed that condensation and the
formation of compromises is only carried out for the sake of
facilitating regression, that is, when it is a question of
transforming thoughts into images. But the analysis - and still
more the synthesis - of dreams which include no such regression to
images, e.g. the dream of ‘Autodidasker’, exhibits the
same processes of displacement and condensation as the rest.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1024

   Thus we are driven to conclude
that two fundamentally different kinds of psychical process are
concerned in the formation of dreams. One of these produces
perfectly rational dream-thoughts, of no less validity than normal
thinking; while the other treats these thoughts in a manner which
is in the highest degree bewildering and irrational. We have
already in Chapter VI segregated this second psychical process as
being the dream-work proper. What light have we now to throw upon
its origin?