Freud - Complete Works (184 page)

  
²
Dreams are not the only phenomena which
allow us to find a basis for psychopathology in psychology. In a
short series of papers (1898
b
and 1899
a
) which is not
yet completed, I have attempted to interpret number of phenomena of
daily life as evidence in favour of the same conclusions.
[
Added
1909:] These, together with some further papers on
forgetting, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, etc., have since
been collected under the title of
The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life
(1901
b
).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1036

(F)

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS -
REALITY

   It will be seen on closer
consideration that what the psychological discussion in the
preceding sections invites us to assume is not the existence of two
systems
near the motor end of the apparatus but the
existence of two kinds of
processes of excitation
or
modes of its discharge
. It is all one to us, for we must
always be prepared to drop our conceptual scaffolding if we feel
that we are in a position to replace it by something that
approximates more closely to the unknown reality. So let us try to
correct some conceptions which might be misleading so long as we
looked upon the two systems in the most literal and crudest sense
as two localities in the mental apparatus - conceptions which have
left their traces in the expressions ‘to repress’ and
‘to force a way through.’ Thus, we may speak of an
unconscious thought seeking to convey itself into the preconscious
so as to be able then to force its way through into consciousness.
What we have in mind here is not the forming of a second thought
situated in a new place, like a transcription which continues to
exist alongside the original; and the notion of forcing a way
through into consciousness must be kept carefully free from any
idea of a change of locality. Again, we may speak of a preconscious
thought being repressed or driven out and then taken over by the
unconscious. These images, derived from a set of ideas relating to
a struggle for a piece of ground, may tempt us to suppose that it
is literally true that a mental grouping in one locality has been
brought to an end and replaced by a fresh one in another locality.
Let us replace these metaphors by something that seems to
correspond better to the real state of affairs, and let us say
instead that some particular mental grouping has had a cathexis of
energy attached to it or withdrawn from it, so that the structure
in question has come under the sway of a particular agency or been
withdrawn from it. What we are doing here is once again to replace
a topographical way of representing things by a dynamic one. What
we regard as mobile is not the psychical structure itself but its
innervation.¹

   Nevertheless, I consider it
expedient and justifiable to continue to make use of the figurative
image of the two systems. We can avoid any possible abuse of this
method of representation by recollecting that ideas, thoughts and
psychical structures in general must never be regarded as localized
in organic elements of the nervous system but rather, as one might
say,
between
them, where resistances and facilitations
[
Bahnungen
] provide the corresponding correlates. Everything
that can be an object of our internal perception is
virtual
,
like the image produced in a telescope by the passage of
light-rays. But we are justified in assuming the existence of the
systems (which are not in any way psychical entities themselves and
can never be accessible to our psychical perception) like the
lenses of the telescope, which cast the image. And, if we pursue
this analogy, we may compare the censorship between two systems to
the refraction which takes place when a ray of light passes into a
new medium.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] It became
necessary to elaborate and modify thus view after it was recognized
that the essential feature of a preconscious idea was the fact of
its being connected with the residues of verbal presentations. Cf.
‘The Unconscious’ (1915
e
).

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1037

   So far we have been
psychologizing on our own account. It is time now to consider the
theoretical views which govern present-day psychology and to
examine their relation to our hypotheses. The problem of the
unconscious in psychology is, in the forcible words of Lipps
(1897), less
a
psychological problem than
the
problem
of psychology. So long as psychology dealt with this problem by a
verbal explanation to the effect that ‘psychical’
meant
‘conscious’ and that to speak of
‘unconscious psychical processes’ was palpable
nonsense, any psychological evaluation of the observations made by
physicians upon abnormal mental states was out of the question. The
physician and the philosopher can only come together if they both
recognize that the term ‘unconscious psychical
processes’ is ‘the appropriate and justified expression
of a solidly established fact’. The physician can only shrug
his shoulders when he is assured that ‘consciousness is an
indispensable characteristic of what is psychical’, and
perhaps, if he still feels enough respect for the utterances of
philosophers, he may presume that they have not been dealing with
the same thing or working at the same science. For even a single
understanding observation of a neurotic’s mental life or a
single analysis of a dream must leave him with an unshakeable
conviction that the most complicated and most rational
thought-processes, which can surely not be denied the name of
psychical processes, can occur without exciting the subject’s
consciousness.¹ It is true that the physical cannot learn of
these unconscious processes until they have produced some effect
upon consciousness which can be communicated or observed. But this
conscious effect may exhibit a psychical character quite different
from that of the unconscious process, so that internal perception
cannot possibly regard the one as a substitute for the other. The
physician must feel at liberty to proceed by
inference
from
the conscious effect to the unconscious psychical process. He thus
learns that the conscious effect is only a remote psychical result
of the unconscious process and that the latter has not become
conscious as such; and moreover that the latter was present and
operative even without betraying its existence in any way to
consciousness.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1914:] I am happy to
be able to point to an author who has drawn from the study of
dreams the same conclusions as I have on the relation between
conscious and unconscious activity. Du Prel (1885, 47) writes:
‘The problem of the nature of the mind evidently calls for a
preliminary investigation as to whether consciousness and mind are
identical. This preliminary question is answered in the negative by
dreams, which show that the concept of the mind is a wider one than
that of consciousness, in the same kind of way in which the
gravitational force of a heavenly body extends beyond its range of
luminosity.’ And again (ibid., 306): ‘It is a truth
which cannot be too distinctly borne in mind that consciousness is
not co-extensive with mind.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1038

   It is essential to abandon the
overvaluation of the property of being conscious before it becomes
possible to form any correct view of the origin of what is mental.
In Lipps’s words, the unconscious must be assumed to be the
general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the larger
sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the
conscious. Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary
stage; whereas what is unconscious may remain at that stage and
nevertheless claim to be regarded as having the full value of a
psychical process. The unconscious is the true psychical reality;
in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the
reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented
by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the
communications of our sense organs
.

   Now that the old antithesis
between conscious life and dream life has been reduced to its
proper proportions by the establishment of unconscious psychical
reality, a number of dream-problems with which earlier writers were
deeply concerned have lost their significance. Thus some of the
activities whose successful performance in dreams excited
astonishment are now no longer to be attributed to dreams but to
unconscious thinking, which is active during the day no less than
at night. If, as Scherner has said, dreams appear to engage in
making symbolic representations of the body, we now know that those
representations are the product of certain unconscious phantasies
(deriving, probably, from sexual impulses) which find expression
not only in dreams but also in hysterical phobias and other
symptoms. If a dream carries on the activities of the day and
completes them and even brings valuable fresh ideas to light, all
we need do is to strip it of the dream disguise, which is the
product of dream-work and the mark of assistance rendered by
obscure forces from the depths of the mind (cf. the Devil in
Tartini’s sonata dream); the intellectual achievement is due
to the same mental forces which produce every similar result during
the daytime. We are probably inclined greatly to over-estimate the
conscious character of intellectual and artistic production as
well. Accounts given us by some of the most highly productive men,
such as Goethe and Helmholtz, show rather that what is essential
and new in their creations came to them without premeditation and
as an almost ready-made whole. There is nothing strange if in other
cases, where a concentration of every intellectual faculty was
needed, conscious activity also contributed its share. But it is
the much-abused privilege of conscious activity, wherever it plays
a part, to conceal every other activity from our eyes.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

1039

   It would scarcely repay the
trouble if we were to treat the historical significance of dreams
as a separate topic. A dream may have impelled some chieftain to
embark upon a bold enterprise the success of which has changed
history. But this only raises a fresh problem so long as a dream is
regarded as an alien power in contrast to the other more familiar
forces of the mind; no such problem remains if a dream is
recognized as a
form of expression
of impulses which are
under the pressure of resistance during the day but which have been
able to find reinforcement during the night from deep-lying sources
of excitation.¹ The respect paid to dreams in antiquity is,
however, based upon correct psychological insight and is the homage
paid to the uncontrolled and indestructible forces in the human
mind, to the ‘daemonic’ power which produces the
dream-wish and which we find at work in our unconscious.

   It is not without intention that
I speak of ‘our’ unconscious. For what I thus describe
is not the same as the unconscious of the philosophers or even the
unconscious of Lipps. By them the term is used merely to indicate a
contrast with the conscious: the thesis which they dispute with so
much heat and defend with so much energy is the thesis that apart
from conscious there are also unconscious psychical processes.
Lipps carries things further with his assertion that the whole of
what is psychical exists unconsciously and that a part of it also
exists consciously. But it is not in order to establish
this
thesis that we have summoned up the phenomena of dreams and of the
formation of hysterical symptoms; the observation of normal waking
life would by itself suffice to prove it beyond any doubt. The new
discovery that we have been taught by the analysis of
psychopathological structures and of the first member of that class
- the dream - lies in the fact that the unconscious (that is, the
psychical) is found as a function of two separate systems and that
this is the case in normal as well as in pathological life. Thus
there are two kinds of unconscious, which have not yet been
distinguished by psychologists. Both of them are unconscious in the
sense used by psychology; but in our sense one of them, which we
term the
Ucs
., is also
inadmissible to consciousness
,
while we term the other the
Pcs
. because its excitations -
after observing certain rules, it is true, and perhaps only after
passing a fresh censorship, though nonetheless without regard to
the
Ucs
. - are able to reach consciousness. The fact that
excitations in order to reach consciousness must pass through a
fixed series or hierarchy of agencies (which is revealed to us by
the modifications made in them by censorship) has enabled us to
construct a spatial analogy. We have described the relations of the
two systems to each other and to consciousness by saying that the
system
Pcs
. stands like a screen between the system
Ucs
. and consciousness. The system
Pcs
. not merely
bars access to consciousness, it also controls access to the power
of voluntary movement and has at its disposal for distribution a
mobile cathectic energy, a part of which is familiar to us in the
form of attention.²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] Cf. in this
connection AIexander the Great’s dream during his siege of
Tyre ( ).