Freud - Complete Works (435 page)
(1) The thoughts have
undergone a change, a disguise and a distortion, which represents
the part of the unconscious helpmate.
(2) The thoughts have
occupied consciousness at a time when they ought not.
(3) Some part of the
unconscious, which could not otherwise have done so, has emerged
into consciousness.
We have learnt the art of finding
out the ‘residual thoughts’, the
latent thoughts of
the dream
, and, by comparing them with the apparent²
dream
, we are able to form a judgement on the changes they
underwent and the manner in which these were brought about.
The latent thoughts of the dream
differ in no respect from the products of our regular conscious
activity; they deserve the name of foreconscious thoughts, and may
indeed have been conscious at some moment of waking life. But by
entering into connection with the unconscious tendencies during the
night they have become assimilated to the latter, degraded as it
were to the condition of unconscious thoughts, and subjected to the
laws by which unconscious activity is governed. And here is the
opportunity to learn what we could not have guessed from
speculation, or from another source of empirical information - that
the laws of unconscious activity differ widely from those of the
conscious. We gather in detail what the peculiarities of the
Unconscious
are, and we may hope to learn still more about
them by a profounder investigation of the processes of
dream-formation.
¹
[In the 1925 English version the word
‘mental’ was inserted before ‘work’. In the
German translation the whole phrase is rendered
‘
Tagesreste
’, for which the usual English
equivalent is ‘day’s residues’.]
²
[This word was altered to
‘manifest’ in the 1925 English version.]
A Note On The Unconscious In Psycho-Analysis
2583
This inquiry is not yet half
finished, and an exposition of the results obtained hitherto is
scarcely possible without entering into the most intricate problems
of dream-analysis. But I would not break off this discussion
without indicating the change and progress in our comprehension of
the Unconscious which are due to our psycho-analytic study of
dreams.
Unconsciousness seemed to us at
first only an enigmatical characteristic of a definite psychical
act. Now it means more for us. It is a sign that this act partakes
of the nature of a certain psychical category known to us by other
and more important characters¹ and that it belongs to a system
of psychical activity which is deserving of our fullest attention.
The index-value of the unconscious has far outgrown its importance
as a property. The system revealed by the sign that the single acts
forming parts of it are unconscious we designate by the name
‘The Unconscious’, for want of a better and less
ambiguous term. In German, I propose to denote this system by the
letters
Ubw
, an abbreviation of the German word
‘Unbewusst’.² And this is the third and most
significant sense which the term ‘unconscious’ has
acquired in psycho-analysis.
¹ [This was
altered to ‘features’ in the 1925 English version.]
² [Equivalent
English abbreviation: ‘
Ucs
.’.]
2584
AN EVIDENTIAL DREAM
(1913)
2585
Intentionally left blank
2586
AN EVIDENTIAL DREAM
A lady suffering from doubting mania and
obsessive ceremonials insisted that her nurses should never let her
out of their sight for a single moment: otherwise she would begin
to brood about forbidden actions that she might have committed
while she was not being watched. One evening, while she was resting
on the sofa, she thought she saw that the nurse on duty had fallen
asleep. She called out: ‘Did you see me?’ The nurse
started up and replied: ‘Of course I did.’ This gave
the patient grounds for a fresh doubt, and after a time she
repeated her question, which the nurse met with renewed
protestations; just at that moment another attendant came in
bringing the patient’s supper.
This incident occurred one Friday
evening. Next morning the nurse recounted a dream which had the
effect of dispelling the patient’s doubts.
DREAM
. -
Someone had entrusted a
child to her. Its mother had left home, and she had lost it. As she
went along, she enquired from the people in the street whether they
had seen the child. Then she came to a large expanse of water and
crossed a narrow footbridge
. (There was an addendum:
Suddenly there appeared before her on the footbridge, like a
‘fata Morgana’, the figure of another nurse.) Then she
found herself in a familiar place, where she met a woman whom she
had known as a girl and who had in those days been a saleswoman in
a provision shop and later had got married. She asked the woman,
who was standing in front of her door: ‘Did you see the
child?’ The woman paid no attention to the question but
informed her that she was now divorced from her husband, adding
that marriage is not always happy either. She woke up feeling
reassured and thought that the child would turn up all right in a
neighbour’s house
.
ANALYSIS
. - The patient assumed that
this dream referred to the falling asleep which the nurse had
denied. From additional information volunteered by the latter, she
was able to interpret the dream in a fashion which, although
incomplete in some respects, was sufficient for all practical
purposes. I myself heard only the lady’s report and did not
interview the nurse. I shall first quote the patient’s
interpretation, and then supplement it with whatever our general
understanding of the laws governing dream-formation allows us to
add.
An Evidential Dream
2587
‘The nurse told me that the
child in the dream reminded her of a case the nursing of which had
given her the most lively satisfaction. It was that of a child who
was unable to see on account of inflammation of the eyes
(blennorrhoea). The mother, however, did not leave home: she helped
to nurse the child. On the other hand I remember too that when my
husband, who thinks highly of this nurse, went away, he left me in
her care and she promised to look after me as she would after a
child.’
Furthermore, we know from the
patient’s analysis that by insisting on never being let out
of sight she had put herself back in the position of being a child
once more.
‘Her having lost the
child’, continued the patient, ‘signified that she had
not seen me; she had lost sight of me. This was her admission that
she had actually gone to sleep for a time and had not told me the
truth afterwards.’
She was in the dark about the
meaning of the small piece of the dream in which the nurse enquired
from the people in the street whether they had seen the child; on
the other hand, she was able to elucidate the later details of the
manifest dream.
‘The large expanse of water
made the nurse think of the Rhine; she added, however, that it was
much larger than the Rhine. Then she remembered that on the
previous evening I had read her the story of Jonah and the whale,
and had told her that I myself once saw a whale in the English
Channel. I fancy that the large expanse of water was the sea and
was an allusion to the story of Jonah.
‘I think, too, the narrow
footbridge came from the same story, which was amusingly written in
dialect. The anecdote related how a religious instructor described
to his pupils the wonderful adventures of Jonah; whereupon a boy
objected that it could not be true, since the teacher himself had
told them before that whales could swallow only the smallest
creatures owing to the narrowness of their gullets. The teacher got
out of the difficulty by saying that Jonah was a Jew, and that Jews
would squeeze in anywhere. My nurse is very pious but inclined to
religious doubts, and I reproached myself in case what I had read
to her might have stirred them up.
An Evidential Dream
2588
‘On this narrow footbridge
she now saw the apparition of another nurse, whom she knew. She
told me the story of this nurse: she had drowned herself in the
Rhine because she had been discharged from a case owing to
something she had been guilty of.¹ She herself had feared,
therefore, that she would be discharged for having fallen asleep.
Moreover, on the day following the incident and after relating the
dream, the nurse cried bitterly, and when I asked her why, replied
quite rudely: "You know why as well as I do; and now you
won’t trust me any more!"‘
Since the apparition of the
drowned nurse was an addendum and an especially distinct one, we
would have advised the lady to begin her dream-interpretation at
that point. According to the dreamer’s report, too, this
first half of her dream was accompanied by acute anxiety; the
second part paved the way for the feeling of reassurance with which
she awoke.
‘I regard the next part of
the dream’, said the lady, continuing her analysis, ‘as
certain corroboration of my view that the dream had to do with what
happened on Friday evening, for the person who had formerly been a
saleswoman in a provision shop can only have referred to the
attendant who brought in the supper on that occasion. I noticed,
too, that the nurse had complained of nausea all day long. The
question she put to this woman: "Did you see the child?"
is obviously traceable to my question: "Did you see me!"
which I had put to her for the second time just as the attendant
came in with the dishes.’
¹
At this point I have been guilty of making
a condensation of the material, which I have been able to put right
after going through my draft with the lady who told me the story.
The nurse who met the dreamer as an apparition on the footbridge
had not been guilty of anything in her nursing. She was discharged
because the child’s mother, who had to leave home at the
time, wanted to leave her child in charge of an older attendant -
thus in point of fact a more trustworthy one. This was followed by
a second story about another nurse who had actually been discharged
on account of neglect, but who did not on that account drown
herself. The material necessary for the interpretation of the
dream-element came, as is so often the way, from two sources. My
memory carried out the synthesis that led to the interpretation.
For the rest, this story of the drowned nurse contains the factor
of the mother leaving home, which the lady connected with the
departure of her husband. We thus have here an overdetermination
which detracts somewhat from the elegance of the
interpretation.
An Evidential Dream
2589
In the dream, too, enquiry after
the child was made on two occasions. The fact that the woman did
not reply - paid no attention - we may regard as a depreciation of
this other attendant made in the dreamer’s favour: she
represented herself in the dream as being superior to the other
woman, precisely because she herself had to face reproaches on
account of her own lack of attention.
‘The woman who appeared in
the dream was not in actual fact divorced from her husband. The
situation was taken from an incident in the life of the other
attendant, who had been separated - "divorced" - from a
man by her parents’ command. The remark that "marriage
does not always run smoothly either" was probably a
consolation used in the course of conversation between the two
women. This consolation prefigured another, with which the dream
ended: "The child will turn up all right."
‘I concluded from this
dream that on the evening in question the nurse really did fall
asleep and that she was afraid of being dismissed on that account.
Because of this I no longer felt any doubt about the correctness of
my observation. Incidentally, after relating the dream, she added
that she was very sorry she had not got a dream-book with her. To
my comment that such books were full of the most ignorant
superstitions, she replied that, although she was not at all
superstitious, still all the unpleasant happenings of her life had
taken place on a Friday. I must add that at the present time her
treatment of me is not at all satisfactory, and she is touchy and
irritable and makes scenes about nothing.’
I think we must credit the lady
with having correctly interpreted and evaluated her nurse’s
dream. As so often happens with dream-interpretation during
analysis, the translation of the dream does not depend solely on
the products of association, but we have also to take into account
the circumstances of its narration, the behaviour of the dreamer
before and after the analysis of the dream, as well as every remark
or disclosure made by the dreamer at about the same time - during
the same analytic session. If we take into consideration the
nurse’s touchiness, her attitude to unlucky Fridays, etc., we
shall confirm the conclusion that the dream contained an admission
that, in spite of her denial, she had actually dozed off, and was
afraid she would be sent away from the ‘child’ in her
care.¹
¹
A few days later, indeed, the nurse
confessed to a third person that she had fallen asleep that
evening, and thus confirmed the lady’s
interpretation.
An Evidential Dream
2590
While, however, for the lady who
reported it to me this dream had practical significance, for us it
stimulates theoretical interest in two directions. It is true that
it ended in a consolation, but in the main it represented an
important
admission
in regard to the nurse’s relation
to her patient. How does it come about that a dream, which is
supposed, after all, to serve as the fulfilment of a wish, could
take the place of an admission which was not even of any advantage
to the dreamer? Must we really concede that in addition to wishful
(and anxiety) dreams, there are also dreams of admission, as well
as of warning, reflection, adaptation, and so on?
I must confess that I still do
not quite understand why the stand I took against any such
temptation in my
Interpretation of Dreams
has given rise to
misgivings in the minds of so many psycho-analysts, among them some
well-known ones. It seems to me that the differentiation between
dreams of wishing, admission, warning, adaptation, and so on, has
not much more sense than the differentiation, which is accepted
perforce, of medical specialists into gynaecologists,
paediatricians, and dentists. Let me recapitulate here as briefly
as possible what I have said on this question in my
Interpretation of Dreams
.¹
The so-called ‘day’s
residues’ can act as disturbers of sleep and constructors of
dreams; they are affectively cathected thought-processes from the
dream-day, which have resisted the general lowering through sleep.
These day’s residues are uncovered by tracing back the
manifest dream to the latent dream-thoughts; they constitute
portions of the latter and are thus among the activities of waking
life - whether conscious or unconscious - which have been able to
persist into the period of sleep. In accordance with the
multiplicity of thought-processes in the conscious and
preconscious, these day’s residues have the most numerous and
varied meanings: they may be wishes or fears that have not been
disposed of, or intentions, reflections, warnings, attempts at
adaptation to current tasks, and so on. To this extent the
classification of dreams that is under consideration seems to be
justified by the content which is uncovered by interpretation.
These day’s residues, however, are not the dream itself: they
lack the main essential of a dream. Of themselves they are not able
to construct a dream. They are, strictly speaking, only the
psychical material for the dream-work, just as sensory and somatic
stimuli, whether accidental or produced under experimental
conditions, constitute the
somatic
material for the
dream-work. To attribute to them the main part in the construction
of dreams is simply to repeat at a new point the pre-analytic error
which explained dreams by referring them to bad digestion or to
pressure on the skin. Scientific errors, indeed, are tenacious of
life, and even when they have been refuted are ready to creep in
again under new disguises.
An Evidential Dream
2591
The present state of our
knowledge leads us to conclude that the essential factor in the
construction of dreams is an unconscious wish - as a rule an
infantile wish, now repressed - which can come to expression in
this somatic or psychical material (in the day’s residues
too, therefore) and can thus supply these with a force which
enables them to press their way through to consciousness even
during the suspension of thought at night. The dream is in every
case a fulfilment of
this
unconscious wish, whatever else it
may contain - warning, reflection, admission, or any other part of
the rich content of preconscious waking life that has persisted
undealt-with into the night. It is
this
unconscious wish
that gives the dream-work its peculiar character as an unconscious
revision of preconscious material. A psycho-analyst can
characterize as dreams only the products of the dream-work: in
spite of the fact that the latent dream-thoughts are only arrived
at from the interpretation of the dream, he cannot reckon them as
part of the dream, but only as part of preconscious reflection.
(Secondary revision by the conscious agency is here reckoned as
part of the dream-work. Even if one were to separate it, this would
not involve any alteration in our conception. We should then have
to say: dreams in the analytic sense comprise the dream-work proper
together with the secondary revision of its products.) The
conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that one cannot
put the wish-fulfilling character of dreams on a par with their
character as warnings, admissions, attempts at solution, etc.,
without denying the concept of a psychical dimension of depth -
that is to say, without denying the standpoint of
psycho-analysis.