Freud - Complete Works (470 page)
The dream-work is a psychological
process the like of which has hitherto been unknown to psychology.
It has claims upon our interest in two main directions. In the
first place, it brings to our notice novel processes such as
‘condensation’ (of ideas) and
‘displacement’ (of psychical emphasis from one idea to
another), processes which we have never come across at all in our
waking life, or only as the basis of what are known as
‘errors in thought’. In the second place, it enables us
to detect the operation in the mind of a play of forces which was
concealed from our conscious perception. We find that there is a
‘censorship’, a testing agency, at work in us, which
decides whether an idea cropping up in the mind shall be allowed to
reach consciousness, and which, so far as lies within its power,
ruthlessly excludes anything that might produce or revive
unpleasure. And it will be recalled at this point that in our
analysis of parapraxes we found traces of this same intention to
avoid unpleasure in remembering things and of similar conflicts
between mental impulses.
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A study of the dream-work forces
on us irresistibly a view of mental life which appears to decide
the most controversial problems of psychology. The dream-work
compels us to assume the existence of an
unconscious
psychical activity which is more comprehensive and more important
than the familiar activity that is linked with consciousness. (I
shall have some more to say on this point when I come to discuss
the
philosophical
interest of psycho-analysis.) It enables
us to dissect the psychical apparatus into a number of different
agencies or systems, and shows us that in the system of unconscious
mental activity processes operate which are of quite another kind
from those perceived in consciousness.
The dream-work has only one
function - namely to maintain sleep. ‘Dreams are the
guardians of sleep.’ The dream-
thoughts
themselves may
serve the purposes of the most various mental functions. The
dream-work accomplishes its task by representing a wish that arises
from the dream-thoughts as fulfilled in a hallucinatory
fashion.
It may safely be said that the
psycho-analytic study of dreams has given us our first insight into
a ‘depth-psychology’ whose existence had not hitherto
been suspected.¹ Fundamental changes will have to be
introduced into normal psychology if it is to be brought into
harmony with these new findings.
It is quite impossible to exhaust
the psychological interest of dream-interpretation within the
limits of my present paper. Let us bear in mind that what I have so
far stressed is merely that dreams have a meaning and are objects
for psychological study, and let us now proceed with our
consideration of the new territory which has been annexed by
psychology in the domain of pathology.
¹
Psycho-analysis does not at present
postulate any relation between this psychical topography and
anatomical stratification or histological layers.
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The psychological novelties
inferred from dreams and parapraxes must be applicable as an
explanation of other phenomena if we are to believe in the value of
these novelties, or, indeed, in their existence. And we do in fact
find that psycho-analysis has shown that the hypotheses of
unconscious mental activity, of censorship and repression and of
distortion and substitution, at which we have arrived from our
study of these normal phenomena, also afford us a first
understanding of a number of
pathological
phenomena and, as
one might say, put into our hands the key to all the riddles of the
psychology of the neuroses. Thus dreams are to be regarded as the
normal prototypes of all psychopathological structures. Anyone who
understands dreams can also grasp the psychical mechanism of the
neuroses and psychoses.
Starting from dreams, the
investigations of psycho-analysis have enabled it to construct a
psychology of the neuroses which is being continuously built up
piece by piece. But what we are here concerned with - the
psychological
interest of psycho-analysis - obliges us to
enter more fully into only two sides of this far reaching subject:
the evidence that many pathological phenomena which had hitherto
been believed to require physiological explanations are in fact
psychical acts, and the evidence that the processes which lead to
abnormal consequences can be traced back to psychical motive
forces.
I will illustrate the first of
these theses by a few examples. Hysterical attacks have long been
recognized as signs of increased emotional excitement and equated
with outbreaks of affect. Charcot attempted to reduce the
multiplicity of their modes of manifestation by means of
descriptive formulas; Pierre Janet recognized the unconscious ideas
operating behind such attacks; while psycho-analysis has shown that
they are mimetic representations of scenes (whether actually
experienced or only invented ) with which the patient’s
imagination is occupied without his becoming conscious of them. The
meaning of these pantomimes is concealed from the spectators by
means of condensations and distortions of the acts which they
represent. And this applies equally to what are described as the
‘chronic’ symptoms of hysterical patients. All of them
are mimetic or hallucinatory representations of phantasies which
unconsciously dominate the subject’s emotional life and which
have the meaning of fulfilments of secret and repressed wishes. The
tormenting character of these symptoms is due to the internal
conflict into which these patients’ minds are driven by the
need to combat such unconscious wishes.
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In another neurotic disorder,
obsessional neurosis, the patients become the victims of
distressing and apparently senseless ceremonials which take the
form of the rhythmical repetition of the most trivial acts (such as
washing or dressing) or of carrying out meaningless injunctions or
of obeying mysterious prohibitions. It was nothing less than a
triumph of psycho-analytic research when it succeeded in showing
that all these obsessive acts, even the most insignificant and
trivial of them, have a meaning, and that they are reflections,
translated into indifferent terms, of conflicts in the
patients’ lives, of the struggle between temptations and
moral restraints - reflections of the proscribed wish itself and of
the punishment and atonement which that wish incurs. In another
form of the same disorder the victim suffers from tormenting ideas
(obsessions) which force themselves upon him and are accompanied by
affects whose character and intensity are often only quite
inadequately accounted for by the terms of the obsessive ideas
themselves. Analytic investigation has shown in their case that the
affects are entirely justified, since they correspond to
self-reproaches which are based on something that is at least
psychically
real. But the ideas to which these affects are
attached are not the original ones, but have found their way into
their present position by a process of displacement - by being
substituted for something that has been repressed. If these
displacements can be reversed, the way is open to the discovery of
the repressed ideas, and the relation between affect and idea is
found to be perfectly appropriate.
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In another neurotic disorder,
dementia praecox (paraphrenia or schizophrenia), a condition which
is in fact incurable, the patient is left, in the most severe
cases, in a state of apparently complete apathy. Often his sole
remaining actions are certain movements and gestures which are
repeated monotonously and have been given the name of
‘stereotypies’. An analytic investigation of residues
of this kind, made by Jung, has shown that they are the remains of
perfectly significant mimetic actions, which at one time gave
expression to the subject’s ruling wishes. The craziest
speeches and the queerest poses and attitudes adopted by these
patients become intelligible and can be given a place in the chain
of their mental processes if they are approached on the basis of
psycho-analytic hypotheses.
Similar considerations apply to
the deliria and hallucinations, as well as to the delusional
systems, exhibited by various psychotic patients. Where hitherto
nothing but the most freakish capriciousness has seemed to prevail,
psycho-analytic research has introduced law, order and connection,
or has at least allowed us to suspect their presence where its work
is still incomplete. The most heterogeneous forms of mental
disorder are revealed as the results of processes which are at
bottom identical and which can be understood and described by means
of psychological concepts. What had already been discovered in the
formation of dreams is operative everywhere - psychical conflict,
the repression of certain instinctual impulses which have been
pushed back into the unconscious by other mental forces, reaction
formations set up by the repressing forces, and substitutes
constructed by the instincts which have been repressed but have not
been robbed of all their energy. The accompanying processes of
condensation and displacement, so familiar to us in dreams, are
also to be found everywhere. The multiplicity of clinical pictures
observed by psychiatrists depends upon two other things: the
multiplicity of the psychical mechanisms at the disposal of the
repressive process and the multiplicity of developmental
dispositions which give the repressed impulses an opportunity for
breaking through into substitutive structures.
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Psycho-analysis points to
psychology for the solution of a good half of the problems of
psychiatry. It would nevertheless be a serious mistake to suppose
that analysis favours or aims at a
purely
psychological view
of mental disorders. It cannot overlook the fact that the other
half of the problems of psychiatry are concerned with the influence
of organic factors (whether mechanical, toxic or infective) on the
mental apparatus. Even in the case of the mildest of these
disorders, the neuroses, it makes no claim that their origin is
purely psychogenic but traces their aetiology to the influence upon
mental life of an unquestionably organic factor to which I shall
refer later.
The number of detailed
psycho-analytic findings which cannot fail to be of importance for
general psychology is too great for me to enumerate them here. I
will only mention two other points: psycho-analysis unhesitatingly
ascribes the primacy in mental life to affective processes, and it
reveals an unexpected amount of affective disturbance and blinding
of the intellect in normal no less than in sick people.
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PART II
THE
CLAIMS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS TO THE INTEREST OF
THE
NON-PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES
(A) THE PHILOLOGICAL INTEREST OF
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
I shall no doubt be overstepping
common linguistic usage in postulating an interest in
psycho-analysis on the part of philologists, that is of experts in
speech
. For in what follows ‘speech’ must be
understood not merely to mean the expression of thought in words
but to include the speech of gesture and every other method, such,
for instance, as writing, by which mental activity can be
expressed. That being so, it may be pointed out that the
interpretations made by psycho-analysis are first and foremost
translations from an alien method of expression into the one which
is familiar to us. When we interpret a dream we are simply
translating a particular thought-content (the latent
dream-thoughts) from the ‘language of dreams’ into our
waking speech. In the course of doing so we learn the peculiarities
of this dream language and it is borne in upon us that it forms
part of a highly archaic system of expression. Thus, to take an
instance, there is no special indication for the negative in the
language of dreams. Contraries may stand for each other in the
dream’s content and may be represented by the same element.
Or we may put it like this: concepts are still ambivalent in
dream-language, and unite within themselves contrary meanings - as
is the case, according to the hypotheses of philologists, in the
oldest roots of historical languages.¹ Another striking
feature of our dream-language is its extremely frequent use of
symbols, which make us able to some extent to translate the content
of dreams without reference to the associations of the individual
dreamer. Our researches have not yet sufficiently elucidated the
essential nature of these symbols. They are in part substitutes and
analogies based upon obvious similarities; but in some of these
symbols the
tertium comparationis
which is presumably
present escapes our conscious knowledge. It is precisely this
latter class of symbols which must probably originate from the
earliest phases of linguistic development and conceptual
construction. In dreams it is above all the sexual organs and
sexual activities which are represented symbolically instead of
directly. A philologist, Hans Sperber, of Uppsala, has only
recently (1912) attempted to prove that words which originally
represented sexual activities have, on the basis of analogies of
this kind, undergone an extraordinarily far-reaching change in
their meaning.