Freud - Complete Works (382 page)

   This associative material, which
the patient contemptuously rejects when he is under the influence
of the resistance instead of under the doctor’s, serves the
psycho-analyst, as it were, as ore from which, with the help of
some simple interpretative devices, he extracts its content of
precious metal. If you are anxious to gain a rapid and provisional
knowledge of a patient’s repressed complexes, without as yet
entering into their arrangement and interconnection, you will
employ as a method of examination the ‘association
experiment’ as it has been developed by Jung (1906) and his
pupils. This procedure offers the psycho-analyst what qualitative
analysis offers the chemist. In the treatment of neurotic patients
it can be dispensed with; but it is indispensable for the objective
demonstration of complexes and in the examination of the psychoses,
which has been embarked on with so much success by the Zurich
school.

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   Working over the ideas that occur
to patients when they submit to the main rule of psycho-analysis is
not our only technical method of discovering the unconscious. The
same purpose is served by two other procedures: the interpretation
of patients’ dreams and the exploitation of their faulty and
haphazard actions.

   I must admit, Ladies and
Gentlemen, that I hesitated for a long time whether, instead of
giving you this condensed general survey of the whole field of
psycho-analysis, it might not be better to present you with a
detailed account of dream-interpretation.¹ I was held back by
a purely subjective and seemingly secondary motive. It seemed to me
almost indecent in a country which is devoted to practical aims to
make my appearance as a ‘dream-interpreter’, before you
could possibly know the importance that can attach to that
antiquated and derided art. The interpretation of dreams is in fact
the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious; it is the
securest foundation of psycho-analysis and the field in which every
worker must acquire his convictions and seek his training. If I am
asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reply: ‘By
studying one’s own dreams.’ Every opponent of
psycho-analysis hitherto has, with a nice discrimination, either
evaded any consideration of
The Interpretation of Dreams
, or
has sought to skirt over it with the most superficial objections.
If, on the contrary, you can accept the solutions of the problems
of dream-life, the novelties with which psycho-analysis confronts
your minds will offer you no further difficulties.

   You should bear in mind that the
dreams which we produce at night have, on the one hand, the
greatest external similarity and internal kinship with the
creations of insanity, and are, on the other hand, compatible with
complete health in waking life. There is nothing paradoxical in the
assertion that no one who regards these ‘normal’
illusions, delusions and character-changes with astonishment
instead of comprehension has the slightest prospect of
understanding the abnormal structures of pathological mental states
otherwise than as a layman. You may comfortably count almost all
psychiatrists among such laymen.

  
¹
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
).

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   I invite you now to follow me on
a brief excursion through the region of dream-problems. When we are
awake we are in the habit of treating dreams with the same contempt
with which patients regard the associations that are demanded of
them by the psycho-analyst. We dismiss them, too, by forgetting
them as a rule, quickly and completely. Our low opinion of them is
based on the strange character even of those dreams that are not
confused and meaningless, and on the obvious absurdity and
nonsensicalness of other dreams. Our dismissal of them is related
to the uninhibited shamelessness and immorality of the tendencies
openly exhibited in some dreams. It is well known that the ancient
world did not share this low opinion of dreams. Nor are the lower
strata of our own society to-day in any doubt about the value of
dreams; like the peoples of antiquity, they expect them to reveal
the future. I confess that I feel no necessity for making any
mystical assumptions in order to fill the gaps in our present
knowledge, and accordingly I have never been able to find anything
to confirm the prophetic nature of dreams. There are plenty of
other things - sufficiently wonderful too - to be said about
them.

   In the first place, not all
dreams are alien to the dreamer, incomprehensible and confused. If
you inspect the dreams of very young children, from eighteen months
upwards, you will find them perfectly simple and easy to explain.
Small children always dream of the fulfilment of wishes that were
aroused in them the day before but not satisfied. You will need no
interpretative art in order to find this simple solution; all you
need do is to enquire into the child’s experiences on the
previous day (the ‘dream-day’). Certainly the most
satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams would be to find that
adults’ dreams too were like those of children - fulfilments
of wishful impulses that had come to them on the dream-day. And
such in fact is the case. The difficulties in the way of this
solution can be overcome step by step if dreams are analysed more
closely.

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   The first and most serious
objection is that the content of adults’ dreams is as a rule
unintelligible and could not look more unlike the fulfilment of a
wish. And here is the answer. Such dreams have been subjected to
distortion; the psychical process underlying them might originally
have been expressed in words quite differently. You must
distinguish the
manifest content of the dream
, as you
vaguely recollect it in the morning and laboriously (and, as it
seems, arbitrarily) clothe it in words, and the
latent
dream-thoughts
, which you must suppose were present in the
unconscious. This distortion in dreams is the same process that you
have already come to know in investigating the formation of
hysterical symptoms. It indicates, too, that the same interplay of
mental forces is at work in the formation of dreams as in that of
symptoms. The manifest content of the dream is the distorted
substitute for the unconscious dream-thoughts and this distortion
is the work of the ego’s forces of defence - of resistances.
In waking life these resistances altogether prevent the repressed
wishes of the unconscious from entering consciousness; and during
the lowered state of sleep they are at least strong enough to
oblige them to adopt a veil of disguise. Thereafter, the dreamer
can no more understand the meaning of his dreams than the hysteric
can understand the connection and significance of his symptoms.

   You can convince yourself that
there are such things as latent dream-thoughts and that the
relation between them and the manifest content of the dream is
really as I have described it, if you carry out an analysis of
dreams, the technique of which is the same as that of
psycho-analysis. You entirely disregard the apparent connections
between the elements in the manifest dream and collect the ideas
that occur to you in connection with each separate element of the
dream by free association according to the psycho-analytic rule of
procedure. From this material you arrive at the latent
dream-thoughts, just as you arrived at the patient’s hidden
complexes from his associations to his symptoms and memories. The
latent dream-thoughts which have been reached in this way will at
once show you how completely justified we have been in tracing back
adults’ dreams to children’s dreams. The true meaning
of the dream, which has now taken the place of its manifest
content, is always clearly intelligible; it has its starting-point
in experiences of the previous day, and proves to be a fulfilment
of unsatisfied wishes. The manifest dream, which you know from your
memory when you wake up, can therefore only be described as a
disguised
fulfilment of
repressed
wishes.

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   You can also obtain a view, by a
kind of synthetic work, of the process which has brought about the
distortion of the unconscious dream-thoughts into the manifest
content of the dream. We call this process the
‘dream-work’. It deserves our closest theoretical
interest, since we are able to study in it, as nowhere else, what
unsuspected psychical processes can occur in the unconscious, or
rather, to put it more accurately,
between
two separate
psychical systems like the conscious and unconscious. Among these
freshly discovered psychical processes those of
condensation
and
displacement
are especially noticeable. The dream-work
is a special case of the effects produced by two different mental
groupings on each other - that is, of the consequences of mental
splitting; and it seems identical in all essentials with the
process of distortion which transforms the repressed complexes into
symptoms where there is unsuccessful repression.

   You will also learn with
astonishment from the analysis of dreams (and most convincingly
from that of your own) what an unsuspectedly great part is played
in human development by impressions and experiences of early
childhood. In dream-life the child that is in man pursues its
existence, as it were, and retains all its characteristics and
wishful impulses, even such as have become unserviceable in later
life. There will be brought home to you with irresistible force the
many developments, repressions, sublimations and
reaction-formations, by means of which a child with a quite other
innate endowment grows into what we call a normal man, the bearer,
and in part the victim, of the civilization that has been so
painfully acquired.

   I should like you to notice, too,
that the analysis of dreams has shown us that the unconscious makes
use of a particular symbolism, especially for representing sexual
complexes. This symbolism varies partly from individual to
individual; but partly it is laid down in a typical form and seems
to coincide with the symbolism which, as we suspect, underlies our
myths and fairy tales. It seems not impossible that these creations
of the popular mind might find an explanation through the help of
dreams.

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   Lastly, I must warn you not to
let yourselves be put out by the objection that the occurrence of
anxiety-dreams contradicts our view of dreams as the fulfilments of
wishes. Apart from the fact that these anxiety-dreams, like the
rest, require interpretation before any judgement can be formed on
them, it must be stated quite generally that the anxiety does not
depend on the content of the dream in such a simple manner as one
might imagine without having more knowledge and taking more account
of the determinants of neurotic anxiety. Anxiety is one of the
ego’s reactions in repudiation of repressed wishes that have
become powerful; and its occurrence in dreams as well is very
easily explicable when the formation of the dream has been carried
out with too much of an eye to the fulfilment of these repressed
wishes.

   As you see, research into dreams
would be justified for its own sake merely by the information it
gives us on matters that can with difficulty be discovered in other
ways. But we were in fact led to the subject in connection with the
psycho-analytic treatment of neurotics. You will easily understand
from what I have already said how it is that dream-interpretation,
if it is not made too difficult by the patient’s resistances,
leads to a knowledge of his hidden and repressed wishes and of the
complexes nourished by them; and I can now pass on to the third
group of mental phenomena whose study has become one of the
technical instruments of psycho-analysis.

   The phenomena in question are the
small faulty actions performed by both normal and neurotic people,
to which as a rule no importance is attached: forgetting things
that might be known and sometimes in fact
are
known (e.g.
the occasional difficulty in recalling proper names), slips of the
tongue in talking, by which we ourselves are so often affected,
analogous slips of the pen and misreadings, bungling the
performance of actions, losing objects or breaking them. All of
these are things for which as a rule no psychological determinants
are sought and which are allowed to pass without criticism as
consequences of distraction or inattention or similar causes.
Besides these there are the actions and gestures which people carry
out without noticing them at all, to say nothing of attributing any
psychological importance to them: playing about and fiddling with
things, humming tunes, fingering parts of one’s own body or
one’s clothing and so on.¹ These small things, faulty
actions and symptomatic or haphazard actions alike, are not so
insignificant as people, by a sort of conspiracy of silence, are
ready to suppose. They always have a meaning, which can usually be
interpreted with ease and certainty from the situation in which
they occur. And it turns out that once again they give expression
to impulses and intentions which have to be kept back and hidden
from one’s own consciousness, or that they are actually
derived from the same repressed wishful impulses and complexes
which we have already come to know as the creators of symptoms and
the constructors of dreams. They therefore deserve to be rated as
symptoms, and if they are examined they may lead, just as dreams
do, to the uncovering of the hidden part of the mind. A man’s
most intimate secrets are as a rule betrayed by their help. If they
occur particularly easily and frequently even in healthy people in
whom the repression of unconscious impulses has on the whole been
quite successful, they have their triviality and inconspicuousness
to thank for it. But they can claim a high theoretical value, since
they prove that repression and the formation of substitutes occur
even under healthy conditions.