Freud - Complete Works (525 page)

   The forgetting of names, however,
seems particularly facilitated psycho-physiologically, and for that
reason cases occur in which interference by the unpleasure motive
cannot be confirmed. If someone has a tendency to forget names,
analytic investigation will show that names escape him not only
because he does not like them themselves or because they remind him
of something disagreeable, but also because in his case the same
name belongs to another circle of associations with which he is
more intimately related. The name is, as it were, anchored there
and is kept from contact with the other associations which have
been momentarily activated. If you recall the tricks of
mnemotechnics, you will realize with some surprise that the same
chains of association which are deliberately laid down in order to
prevent
names from being forgotten can also
lead
to
our forgetting them. The most striking example of this is afforded
by the proper names of persons, which naturally possess quite
different psychical importance for different people. Let us, for
instance, take a first name such as Theodore. To one of you it will
have no special meaning, to another it will be the name of his
father or brother or of a friend, or his own name. Analytic
experience will then show you that the first of these people is in
no danger of forgetting that a particular stranger bears this name,
whereas the others will be constantly inclined to withhold from
strangers a name which seems to them reserved for intimate
connections. If you now bear in mind that this associative
inhibition may coincide with the operation of the unpleasure
principle and, besides that, with an indirect mechanism, you will
be in a position to form an adequate idea of the complications in
the causation of the temporary forgetting of a name. An appropriate
analysis will however unravel every one of these tangles for
you.

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The forgetting of impressions
and experiences
demonstrates much more clearly and exclusively
than the forgetting of names the operation of the purpose of
keeping disagreeable things out of memory. The whole field of this
kind of forgetting does not, of course, fall within the class of
parapraxes, but only such cases as, measured by the standard of our
usual experience, seem to us striking and unjustified: for
instance, when the forgetting affects impressions that are too
fresh or important, or when the missing memory tears a gap in what
is otherwise a well remembered chain of events. Why and in what way
we are able to forget in general, and among other things
experiences which have certainly left the deepest impression upon
us, such as the events of our earliest childhood years, - that is
quite another problem, in which fending off unpleasurable impulses
plays a certain part but is far from being the whole explanation.
It is an undoubted fact that disagreeable impressions are easily
forgotten. Various psychologists have noticed it and the great
Darwin was so much impressed by it that he made it ‘a golden
rule’ to note down with especial care any observations which
seemed unfavourable to his theory, since he had convinced himself
that precisely they would not remain in his memory.

   A person who hears for the first
time of this principle of the fending off of unpleasurable memories
by forgetting rarely fails to object that on the contrary it has
been his experience that distressing things are particularly hard
to forget but keep on returning to torment him against his will -
memories, for instance, of insults and humiliations. This is also a
true fact, but the objection is not to the point. It is important
to begin in good time to reckon with the fact that mental life is
the arena and battle-ground for mutually opposing purposes or, to
put it non-dynamically, that it consists of contradictions and
pairs of contraries. Proof of the existence of a particular purpose
is no argument against the existence of an opposite one; there is
room for both. It is only a question of the attitude of these
contraries to each other, and of what effects are produced by the
one and by the other.

  
Losing and mislaying
are
of particular interest to us owing to the many meanings they may
have - owing, that is, to the multiplicity of the purposes which
can be served by these parapraxes. All cases have in common the
fact that there was a wish to lose something; they differ in the
basis and aim of that wish. We lose a thing when it is worn out,
when we intend to replace it by a better one, when we no longer
like it, when it originates from someone with whom we are no longer
on good terms or when we acquired it in circumstances we no longer
want to recall. Dropping, damaging or breaking the object can serve
the same purpose. In the sphere of social life experience is said
to have shown that unwanted and illegitimate children are far more
frail than those legitimately conceived. The crude technique of
baby-farmers is not necessary for bringing about this result; a
certain amount of neglect in looking after the children should be
quite sufficient. The preserving of
things
may be subject to
the same influences as that of children.

   Things may, however, be condemned
to be lost without their value having suffered any diminution -
when, that is, there is an intention to sacrifice something to Fate
in order to ward off some other dreaded loss. Analysis tells us
that it is still quite a common thing among us to exorcize Fate in
this way; and thus our losing is often a voluntary sacrifice. In
the same way, losing may also serve the purpose of defiance or
self-punishment. In short, the more remote reasons for the
intention to get rid of a thing by losing it are beyond number.

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Bungled actions
, like
other errors, are often used to fulfil wishes which one ought to
deny oneself. Here the intention disguises itself as a lucky
accident. For instance, as happened to one of my friends, a man may
be due, obviously against his will, to go by train to visit someone
near the town where he lives, and then, at a junction where he has
to change, may by mistake get into a train that takes him back to
where he came from. Or someone on a journey may be anxious to make
a stop at an intermediate station but may be forbidden from doing
so by other obligations, and he may then overlook or miss some
connection so that he is after all obliged to break his journey in
the way he wished. Or what happened to one of my patients: I had
forbidden him to telephone to the girl he was in love with, and
then, when he meant to telephone to me, he asked for the wrong
number ‘by mistake’ or ‘while he was thinking of
something else’ and suddenly found himself connected to the
girl’s number. A good example of an outright blunder, and one
of practical importance, is provided by an observation made by an
engineer in his account of what preceded a case of material
damage:

   ‘Some time ago I worked
with several students in the laboratory of the technical college on
a series of complicated experiments in elasticity, a piece of work
which we had undertaken voluntarily but which was beginning to take
up more time than we had expected. One day as I returned to the
laboratory with my friend F., he remarked how annoying it was to
him to lose so much time on that particular day as he had so much
else to do at home. I could not help agreeing with him and added
half jokingly, referring to an incident the week before: "Let
us hope that the machine will go wrong again so that we can stop
work and go home early."

   ‘In arranging the work it
happened that F. was given the regulation of the valve of the
press; that is to say, he was, by cautiously opening the valve, to
let the fluid under pressure flow slowly out of the accumulator
into the cylinder of the hydraulic press. The man conducting the
experiment stood by the manometer and when the right pressure was
reached called out a loud "Stop!" At the word of command
F. seized the valve and turned it with all his might - to the left!
(All valves without exception are closed by being turned to the
right.) This caused the full pressure of the accumulator to come
suddenly on to the press, a strain for which the connecting-pipes
are not designed, so that one of them immediately burst - quite a
harmless accident to the machine, but enough to oblige us to
suspend work for the day and go home.

   ‘It is characteristic, by
the way, that when we were discussing the affair some time later my
friend F. had no recollection whatever of my remark, which I
recalled with certainty.’

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   This may lead you to suspect that
it is not always just an innocent chance that turns the hands of
your domestic servants into dangerous enemies of your household
belongings. And you may also raise the question whether it is
always a matter of chance when people injure themselves and risk
their own safety. These are notions whose value you may care to
test, if occasion arises, by analysing observations of your
own.

   This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is
far from being all that might be said about parapraxes. Much
remains that might be examined and discussed. But I am satisfied if
our discussion of the subject so far has to some extent shaken your
previous views and has made you a little prepared to accept new
ones. I am content, for the rest, to leave you faced with an
unclarified situation. We cannot establish all our doctrines from a
study of parapraxes and we are not obliged to draw our evidence
from that material alone. The great value of parapraxes for our
purposes lies in their being very common phenomena which, moreover,
can easily be observed in oneself, and which can occur without the
slightest implication of illness. There is only one of your
unanswered questions which I should like to put into words before I
end. If, as we have found from many instances, people come so close
to an understanding of parapraxes and so often behave as though
they grasped their sense, how is it possible that they none the
less set down these same phenomena as being in general chance
events without sense or meaning, and that they can oppose the
psycho-analytic elucidation of them with so much vigour?

   You are right. This is a
remarkable fact and it calls for an explanation. But I will not
give you one. Instead, I will introduce you by degrees to fields of
knowledge from which the explanation will force itself upon you
without any contribution of mine.

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PART II

DREAMS

(1916)

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LECTURE V

DIFFICULTIES AND FIRST APPROACHES

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - It was discovered one day that the pathological
symptoms of certain neurotic patients have a sense.¹ On this
discovery the psycho-analytic method of treatment was founded. It
happened in the course of this treatment that patients, instead of
bringing forward their symptoms, brought forward dreams. A
suspicion thus arose that the dreams too had a sense.

   We will not, however, follow this
historical path, but will proceed in the opposite direction. We
will demonstrate the sense of dreams by way of preparing for the
study of the neuroses. This reversal is justified, since the study
of dreams is not only the best preparation for the study of the
neuroses, but dreams are themselves a neurotic symptom, which,
moreover, offers us the priceless advantage of occurring in all
healthy people. Indeed, supposing all human beings were healthy, so
long as they dreamt we could arrive from their dreams at almost all
the discoveries which the investigation of the neuroses has led
to.

  
¹
By Josef Breuer in the years 1880-2. Cf.
the lectures delivered by me in America in 1909 (
Five Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis
) and ‘On the History of the
Psycho-Analytic Movement’.

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   Dreams, then, have become a
subject of psycho-analytic research: once again ordinary phenomena,
with little value set on them, and apparently of no practical use -
like parapraxes, with which indeed they have in common the fact of
occurring in healthy people. But apart from this the conditions for
our work are a good deal less favourable here. Parapraxes had
merely been neglected by science, little attention had been paid to
them; but at least there was no harm in concerning oneself with
them. ‘No doubt’, people would say, ‘there are
more important things. But something may possibly come of
it.’ But to concern oneself with dreams is not merely
unpractical and uncalled-for, it is positively disgraceful. It
brings with it the odium of being unscientific and rouses the
suspicion of a personal inclination to mysticism. Imagine a medical
man going in for dreams when there are so many more serious things
even in neuropathology and psychiatry - tumours as big as apples
compressing the organ of the mind, haemorrhages, chronic
inflammation, in all of which the changes in the tissues can be
demonstrated under the microscope! No, dreams are much too trivial,
and unworthy to be an object of research.

   And there is something else which
from its very nature frustrates the requirements of exact research.
In investigating dreams one is not even certain about the object of
one’s research. A delusion, for instance, meets one squarely
and with definite outlines. ‘I am the Emperor of
China’, says the patient straight out. But dreams? As a rule
no account at all can be given of them. If anyone gives an account
of a dream, has he any guarantee that his account has been correct,
or that he may not, on the contrary, have altered his account in
the course of giving it and have been obliged to invent some
addition to it to make up for the indistinctness of his
recollection? Most dreams cannot be remembered at all and are
forgotten except for small fragments. And is the interpretation of
material of this kind to serve as the basis of a scientific
psychology or as a method for treating patients?

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   An excess of criticism may make
us suspicious. These objections to dreams as an object of research
are obviously carried too far. We have already dealt with the
question of unimportance in connection with parapraxes. We have
told ourselves that big things can show themselves by small
indications. As regards their indistinctness - that is one of the
characteristics of dreams, like any other: we cannot lay down for
things what their characteristics are to be. And incidentally there
are clear and distinct dreams as well. There are, more over, other
objects of psychiatric research which suffer from the same
characteristic of indistinctness - in many instances, for example,
obsessions, and these have been dealt with, after all, by respected
and esteemed psychiatrists. I recall the last such case that I came
across in my medical practice. This was a woman patient who
introduced herself with these words: ‘I have a sort of
feeling as though I had injured or had wanted to injure some living
creature - a child? - no, more like a dog - as though I may have
thrown it off a bridge, or something else.’ We can help to
overcome the defect of the uncertainty in remembering dreams if we
decide that whatever the dreamer tells us must count as his dream,
without regard to what he may have forgotten or have altered in
recalling it. And finally it cannot even be maintained so
sweepingly that dreams are unimportant things. We know from our own
experience that the mood in which one wakes up from a dream may
last for the whole day; doctors have observed cases in which a
mental disease has started with a dream and in which a delusion
originating in the dream has persisted; historical figures are
reported to have embarked on momentous enterprises in response to
dreams. We may therefore ask what may be the true source of the
contempt in which dreams are held in scientific circles.

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   It is, I believe, a reaction
against the overvaluation of dreams in earlier days. The
reconstruction of the past is, as we know, no easy matter, but we
may assume with certainty, if I may put it as a joke, that our
ancestors three thousand or more years ago already had dreams like
ours. So far as we know, all the peoples of antiquity attached
great significance to dreams and thought they could be used for
practical purposes. They deduced signs for the future from them and
searched in them for auguries. For the Greeks and other oriental
nations, there may have been times when a campaign without
dream-interpreters seemed as impossible as one without
air-reconnaissance seems to-day. When Alexander the Great started
on his conquests, his train included the most famous
dream-interpreters. The city of Tyre, which at that time still
stood on an island, offered the king such a stiff resistance that
he considered the possibility of raising the siege. Then one night
he had a dream of a satyr who seemed to be dancing in triumph, and
when he reported it to his dream-interpreters they informed him
that it foretold his conquest of the city. He ordered an assault
and captured Tyre. Among the Etruscans and Romans other methods of
foretelling the future were in use; but throughout the whole of the
Hellenistic-Roman period the interpretation of dreams was practised
and highly esteemed. Of the literature dealing with the subject the
principal work at least has survived: the book by Artemidorus of
Daldis, who probably lived during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian.
How it came about after this that the art of interpreting dreams
declined and that dreams fell into discredit I cannot tell you. The
spread of enlightenment cannot have had much to do with it, for
many things more absurd than the dream-interpretation of antiquity
were faithfully preserved in the obscurity of the Middle Ages. The
fact remains that interest in dreams gradually sank to the level of
superstition and could survive only among the uneducated classes.
The final abuse of dream-interpretation was reached in our days
with attempts to discover from dreams the numbers fated to be drawn
in the game of lotto. On the other hand the exact science of to-day
has repeatedly concerned itself with dreams but always with the
sole aim of applying its physiological theories to them. Medical
men, of course, looked on dreams as non-psychical acts, as the
expression in mental life of somatic stimuli. Binz (1878)
pronounced that dreams are ‘somatic processes, which are in
every case useless and in many cases positively pathological, to
which the soul of the universe and immortality are as sublimely
superior as the blue sky above some weed-grown, low-lying stretch
of sand.’ Maury compares dreams to the disordered twitchings
of St. Vitus’s dance as contrasted with the co-ordinated
movements of a healthy man. According to an old analogy, the
contents of a dream are like the sounds produced when ‘the
ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music wander over the
keys of a piano’.

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   Interpreting means finding a
hidden sense in something; there can of course be no question of
doing that if we adopt this last estimate of the function of
dreams. Look at the description of dreams given by Wundt, Jodl, and
other more recent philosophers. They content themselves with
enumerating the respects in which dream-life differs from waking
thought, always in a sense depreciatory to dreams - emphasizing the
fact that associations are broken apart, that the critical faculty
ceases to work, that all knowledge is eliminated, as well as other
signs of diminished functioning. The only valuable contribution to
the knowledge of dreams for which we have to thank exact science
relates to the effect produced on the content of dreams by the
impact of somatic stimuli during sleep. A recently deceased
Norwegian author, J. Mourly Vold, published two stout volumes of
experimental researches into dreams (German edition, 1910 and
1912), which are devoted almost exclusively to the consequences of
alterations in the posture of the limbs. They have been recommended
to us as models of exact research into dreams. Can you imagine what
exact science would say if it learnt that we want to make an
attempt to discover the
sense
of dreams? Perhaps it has
already said it. But we will not let ourselves be frightened off.
If it was possible for parapraxes to have a sense, dreams can have
one too; and in a great many cases parapraxes
have
a sense,
which has escaped exact science. So let us embrace the prejudice of
the ancients and of the people and let us follow in the footsteps
of the dream-interpreters of antiquity.

   We must begin by finding our
bearings in the task before us and taking a general survey of the
field of dreams. What, then, is a dream? It is hard to answer in a
single sentence. But we will not attempt a definition when it is
enough to point to something familiar to everyone. We should,
however, bring the essential feature of dreams into prominence.
Where is that to be found, though? There are such immense
differences within the frame that comprises our subject -
differences in every direction. The essential feature will
presumably be something that we can point to as common to all
dreams.

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   The first thing common to all
dreams would seem to be, of course, that we are asleep during them.
Dreaming is evidently mental life during sleep - something which
has certain resemblances to waking mental life but which, on the
other hand, is distinguished from it by large differences. This
was, long ago, Aristotle’s definition. It may be that there
are still closer connections between dreams and sleep. We can be
woken by a dream; we very often have a dream when we wake up
spontaneously or if we are forcibly aroused from sleep. Thus dreams
seem to be an intermediate state between sleeping and waking. So
our attention is turned to sleep. Well, then, what is sleep?

   That is a physiological or
biological problem about which much is still in dispute. On that we
can come to no conclusion; but we ought, I think, to try to
describe the psychological characteristics of sleep. Sleep is a
state in which I want to know nothing of the external world, in
which I have taken my interest away from it. I put myself to sleep
by withdrawing from the external world and keeping its stimuli away
from me. I also go to sleep when I am fatigued by it. So when I go
to sleep I say to the external world: ‘Leave me in peace: I
want to go to sleep.’ On the contrary, children say:
‘I’m not going to sleep yet; I’m not tired, and I
want to have some more experiences.’ The biological purpose
of sleep seems therefore to be rehabilitation, and its
psychological characteristic suspense of interest in the world. Our
relation to the world, into which we have come so unwillingly,
seems to involve our not being able to tolerate it uninterruptedly.
Thus from time to time we withdraw into the premundane state, into
existence in the womb. At any rate, we arrange conditions for
ourselves very like what they were then: warm, dark and free from
stimuli. Some of us roll ourselves up into a tight package and, so
as to sleep, take up a posture much as it was in the womb. The
world, it seems, does not possess even those of us who are adults
completely, but only up to two thirds; one third of us is still
quite unborn. Every time we wake in the morning it is like a new
birth. Indeed, in speaking of our state after sleep, we say that we
feel as though we were newly born. (In saying this, incidentally,
we are making what is probably a very false assumption about the
general sensations of a new-born child, who seems likely, on the
contrary, to be feeling very uncomfortable.) We speak, too, of
being born as ‘first seeing the light of day’.