Freud - Complete Works (527 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3196

   Thus we must be prepared to admit
that internal stimuli can play the same part in dreams as external
ones. Any estimate of their importance is unfortunately open to the
same objections. In a large number of cases an interpretation
pointing to a somatic stimulus is uncertain or unprovable. Not all
dreams, but only a certain number of them give rise to a suspicion
that internal organic stimuli had a share in their origin. And
lastly, internal somatic stimuli are as little able as external
sensory stimuli to explain more of a dream than what corresponds in
it to a direct reaction to the stimulus. Where the rest of the
dream comes from remains obscure.

   Let us notice, however, one
peculiarity of dream-life which comes to light in this study of the
effects of stimuli. Dreams do not simply reproduce the stimulus;
they work it over, they make allusions to it, they include it in
some context, they replace it by something else. This is a side of
the dream-work which is bound to interest us since it may perhaps
bring us nearer to the essence of dreams. When a person constructs
something as a result of a stimulus, the stimulus need not on that
account exhaust the whole of the work. Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, for instance, was a
pièce
d’occasion
composed to celebrate the accession of the
king who first united the crowns of the three kingdoms. But does
this immediate historical occasion cover the content of the
tragedy? Does it explain its greatnesses and its enigmas? It may be
that the external and internal stimuli, too, impinging on the
sleeper, are only the
instigators
of the dream and will
accordingly betray nothing to us of its essence.

   The second thing that is common
to dreams, their psychical peculiarity, is on the one hand hard to
grasp and on the other offers us no starting-point for further
enquiry. We experience things in dreams as a rule in visual forms.
Can the stimuli throw any light on this? Is what we experience in
fact the stimulus? But, if so, why is the experience visual, while
it is only in the rarest cases that optical stimulation has
instigated the dream? Or if we dream spoken words, can it be shown
that during sleep a conversation, or some noise resembling one made
its way into our ears? I venture to dismiss that possibility
decisively.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   If we can get no further with
what is common to dreams, let us see whether their differences can
help us. Dreams are, of course, often senseless, confused and
absurd; but there are also sensible, matter-of-fact, and reasonable
ones. Let us enquire whether the latter, the sensible ones, can
throw any light on the senseless ones. Here is the latest
reasonable dream that I have had reported to me. It was dreamt by a
young man: ‘I went for a walk along the Kärntnerstrasse
and met Herr X. there and joined him for a time. Then I went into a
restaurant. Two ladies and a gentleman came and sat at my table. I
was annoyed at this to begin with and wouldn’t look at them.
Then I did look and found that they were quite nice.’ The
dreamer commented on this that on the evening before the dream he
had in fact walked along the Kärntnerstrasse, which is the way
he usually goes, and had met Herr X. there. The other part of the
dream was not a direct recollection, and only had some similarity
to an experience a considerable time earlier. Or here is another
matter-of-fact dream, this time a lady’s: ‘Her husband
asked her: "Don’t you think we ought to have the piano
tuned?" And she replied: "It’s not worth while; the
hammers need reconditioning in any case."' This dream
repeated, without much alteration, a conversation which had taken
place between her and her husband the day before the dream. What do
we learn from these two reasonable dreams? Nothing except that they
contain repetitions from daily life or things connected with it.
That would already be something, if it could be said of dreams
generally. But there is no question of that; it applies only to a
minority, and in most dreams there is no sign of a connection with
the day before, and no light is thrown by this on the senseless and
absurd dreams. It only shows that we have come upon a new task. We
not only want to know what a dream says, but, if it speaks clearly,
as it does in these examples of ours, we also want to know why and
for what purpose this familiar material, only recently experienced,
has been repeated in the dream.

   I think that, like me, you must
be tired of pursuing enquiries like those we have so far been
making. All one’s interest in a problem is evidently
insufficient unless one knows as well of a path of approach that
will lead to its solution. We have not yet found such a path.
Experimental psychology has brought us nothing but some very
valuable information on the significance of stimuli as instigators
to dreaming. We have nothing to expect from philosophy except that
it will once again haughtily point out to us the intellectual
inferiority of the object of our study. Nor have we any wish to
borrow anything from the occult sciences. History and popular
opinion tell us that dreams have a sense and a meaning: that they
look into the future - which is hard to accept and certainly
incapable of proof. So our first effort leaves us completely at a
loss.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Unexpectedly, a hint reaches us
from a direction in which we have not so far looked. Linguistic
usage, which is no chance thing, but the precipitate of old
discoveries, though, to be sure, it must not be employed
incautiously - our language, then, is acquainted with things that
bear the strange name of ‘day dreams’. Day-dreams are
phantasies (products of the imagination); they are very general
phenomena, observable, once more, in healthy as well as in sick
people, and are easily accessible to study in our own mind. The
most remarkable thing about these imaginative structures is that
they have been given the name of ‘day-dreams’, for
there is no trace in them of the two things that are common to
dreams. Their relation to sleep is already contradicted by their
name; and, as regards the second thing common to dreams, we do not
experience or hallucinate anything in them but imagine something,
we know that we are having a phantasy, we do not see but think.
These day-dreams appear in the prepubertal period, often in the
later part of childhood even; they persist until maturity is
reached and are then either given up or maintained till the end of
life. The content of these phantasies is dominated by a very
transparent motive. They are scenes and events in which the
subject’s egoistic needs of ambition and power or his erotic
wishes and satisfaction. In young men the ambitious phantasies are
the most prominent, in women, whose ambition is directed to success
in love, the erotic ones. But in men, too, erotic needs are often
enough present in the background: all their heroic deeds and
successes seem only to aim at courting the admiration and favour of
women. In other respects these day-dreams are of many different
kinds and pass through changing vicissitudes. They are either, each
one of them, dropped after a short time and replaced by a fresh
one, or they are retained, spun out into long stories and adapted
to the changes in the circumstances of the subject’s life.
They go along with the times, so to speak, and receive a
‘date stamp’ which bears witness to the influence of
the new situation. They are the raw material of poetic production,
for the creative writer uses his day-dreams, with certain
remodellings, disguises and omissions, to construct the situations
which he introduces into his short stories, his novels or his
plays. The hero of the day dreams is always the subject himself,
either directly or by an obvious identification with someone
else.

   It may be that day-dreams bear
their name on account of having the same relation to reality - in
order to indicate that their content is to be looked on as no less
unreal than that of dreams. But perhaps they share this name
because of some psychical characteristic of dreams which is still
unknown to us, one which we are in search of. It is also possible
that we are being quite wrong in trying to make use of this
similarity of name as something significant. Only later will it be
possible to clear this up.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3199

LECTURE VI

THE
PREMISSES AND TECHNIQUE OF INTERPRETATION

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - What we need, then, is a new path, a method
which will enable us to make a start in the investigation of
dreams. I will put a suggestion to you which presents itself. Let
us take it as a premiss from this point onwards that
dreams are
not somatic but psychical phenomena
. You know what that means,
but what justifies our making the assumption? Nothing: but there is
nothing either to prevent our making it. Here is the position: if
dreams are somatic phenomena they are no concern of ours, they can
only interest us on the assumption that they are mental phenomena.
We will therefore work on the assumption that they really are, to
see what comes of it. The outcome of our work will decide whether
we are to hold to this assumption and whether we may then go on to
treat it in turn as a proved finding. But what is it actually that
we want to arrive at? What is our work aiming at? We want something
that is sought for in all scientific work - to understand the
phenomena, to establish a correlation between them and, in the
latter end, if it is possible, to enlarge our power over them.

   We proceed with our work,
accordingly, on the supposition that dreams are psychical
phenomena. In that case they are products and utterances of the
dreamer’s, but utterances which tell us nothing, which we do
not understand. Well, what do you do if I make an unintelligible
utterance to you? You question me, is that not so? Why should we
not do the same thing to the dreamer -
question him as to what
his dream means
?

   As you will remember, we found
ourselves in this situation once before. It was while we were
investigating certain parapraxes - a case of a slip of the tongue.
Someone had said: ‘Then facts came to
Vorschwein
’ and we thereupon asked him - no, it was
luckily not we but some other people who had no connection at all
with psycho-analysis - these other people, then, asked him what he
meant by this unintelligible remark. And he replied at once that he
had intended to say ‘these facts were
Schweinereien
[disgusting]’, but had forced this intention back in favour
of the milder version ‘then facts came to
Vorschein
[light]’. I pointed out to you at the time that this piece of
information was the model for every psycho-analytic investigation,
and you will understand now that psycho-analysis follows the
technique of getting the people under examination so far as
possible themselves to produce the solution of their riddles. Thus,
too, it is the dreamer himself who should tell us what his dream
means.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3200

   But, as we know, things are not
so simple with dreams. With parapraxes it worked all right in a
number of cases; but then others came along in which the person who
was questioned would say nothing, and even indignantly rejected the
answer we proposed to him. With dreams cases of the first sort are
entirely lacking; the dreamer always says he knows nothing. He
cannot reject our interpretation as we have none to offer him. Are
we to give up our attempt then? Since he knows nothing and we know
nothing and a third person could know even less, there seems to be
no prospect of finding out. If you feel inclined, then, give up the
attempt! But if you feel otherwise, you can accompany me further.
For I can assure you that it is quite possible, and highly probable
indeed, that the dreamer
does
know what his dream means:
only that he does not know that he knows it and for that reason
thinks that he does not know it
.

   You will point out to me that I
am once more introducing an assumption, the second already in this
short argument, and that in doing so I am enormously reducing my
procedure’s claim to credibility: ‘Subject to the
premiss that dreams are psychical phenomena, and subject to the
further premiss that there are mental things in a man which he
knows without knowing that he knows them.’ and so on. If so,
one has only to consider the internal improbability of each of
these two premisses, and one can quietly divert one’s
interest from any conclusions that may be based on them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3201

   I have not brought you here,
Ladies and Gentlemen, to delude you or to conceal things from you.
In my prospectus, it is true, I announced a course of
‘Elementary Lectures to Serve as an Introduction to
Psycho-Analysis’, but what I had in mind was nothing in the
nature of a presentation
in usum Delphini
,¹ which would
give you a smooth account with all the difficulties carefully
concealed, with the gaps filled in and the doubts glossed over, so
that you might believe with an easy mind that you had learnt
something new. No, for the very reason of your being beginners. I
wanted to show you our science as it is, with its unevennesses and
roughnesses, its demands and hesitations. For I know that it is the
same in all sciences and cannot possibly be otherwise, especially
in their beginnings. I know also that ordinarily instruction is at
pains to start out by concealing such difficulties and
incompletenesses from the learner. But that will not do for
psycho-analysis. So I have in fact laid down two premisses, one
within the other; and if anyone finds the whole thing too laborious
and too insecure, or if anyone is accustomed to higher certainties
and more elegant deductions, he need go no further with us. I
think, however, that he should leave psychological problems
entirely alone, for it is to be feared that in this quarter he will
find impassable the precise and secure paths which he is prepared
to follow. And, for a science which has something to offer, there
is no necessity to sue for a hearing and for followers. Its
findings are bound to canvass on its behalf and it can wait until
these have compelled attention to it.