Freud - Complete Works (528 page)

   But for those who would like to
persist in the subject, I can point out that my two assumptions are
not on a par. The first, that dreams are psychical phenomena, is
the premiss which we seek to prove by the outcome of our work; the
second one has already been proved in another field, and I am
merely venturing to bring it over from there to our own
problems.

   Where, then, in what field, can
it be that proof has been found that there is knowledge of which
the person concerned nevertheless knows nothing, as we are
proposing to assume of dreamers? After all, this would be a
strange, surprising fact and one which would alter our view of
mental life and which would have no need to hide itself: a fact,
incidentally, which cancels itself in its very naming and which
nevertheless claims to be something real - a contradiction in
terms. Well, it does not hide itself. It is not its fault if people
know nothing about it of do not pay enough attention to it. Any
more than we are to blame because judgement is passed on all these
psychological problems by people who have kept at a distance from
all the observations and experiences which are decisive on the
matter.

  
¹
[‘For the use of the Dauphin’ -
an edition of the Classics prepared for his son by order of Louis
XIV: ‘bowdlerized’.]

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   The proof was found in the field
of hypnotic phenomena. When, in 1889, I took part in the
extraordinarily impressive demonstrations by Liébeault and
Bernheim at Nancy, I witnessed the following experiment among
others. If a man was put into a state of somnambulism, was made to
experience all kinds of things in a hallucinatory manner, and was
then woken up, he appeared at first to know nothing of what had
happened during his hypnotic sleep. Bernheim then asked him
straight out to report what had happened to him under hypnosis. The
man maintained that he could remember nothing. But Bernheim held
out against this, brought urgent pressure to bear on him, insisted
that he knew it and must remember it. And, lo and behold! the man
grew uncertain, began to reflect, and recalled in a shadowy way one
of the experiences that had been suggested to him, and then another
piece, and the memory be came clearer and clearer and more and more
complete, and finally came to light without a break. Since,
however, he knew afterwards what had happened and had learnt
nothing about it from anyone else in the interval, we are justified
in concluding that he had known it earlier as well. It was merely
inaccessible to him; he did not know that he knew it and thought he
did not know it. That is to say, the position was exactly the same
as what we suspected in our dreamer.

   I hope you will be surprised that
this fact has been established and will ask me: ‘Why did you
omit to bring this proof forward earlier, in connection with the
parapraxes, when we came to the point of attributing to a man who
had made a slip of the tongue an intention to say things of which
he knew nothing and which he denied? If a person thinks he knows
nothing of experiences the memory of which he nevertheless has
within him, it is no longer so improbable that he knows nothing of
other mental processes within him. This argument would certainly
have impressed us, and helped us to understand parapraxes.’
Of course I could have brought it forward then, but I reserved it
for another place, where it was more needed. The parapraxes
explained themselves in part, and in part left us with a suggestion
that, in order to preserve the continuity of the phenomena
concerned, it would be wise to assume the existence of mental
processes of which the subject knows nothing. In the case of dreams
we are compelled to bring in explanations from elsewhere and
moreover I expect that in their case you will find it easier to
accept my carrying over of the explanations from hypnosis. The
state in which a parapraxis occurs is bound to strike you as being
the normal one; it has no similarity with the hypnotic state. On
the other hand there an obvious kinship between the hypnotic state
and the state of sleep, which is a necessary condition of dreaming.
Hypnosis, indeed, is described as an artificial sleep. We tell the
person we are hypnotizing to sleep, and the suggestions we make are
comparable to the dreams of natural sleep. The psychical situations
in the two cases are really analogous. In natural sleep we withdraw
our interest from the whole external world; and in hypnotic sleep
we also withdraw it from the whole world, but with the single
exception of the person who has hypnotized us and with whom we
remain in rapport. Incidentally, the sleep of a nursing mother, who
remains in rapport with her child and can be woken only by him, is
a normal counterpart of hypnotic sleep. So it scarcely seems a very
bold venture to transpose a situation from hypnosis to natural
sleep. The assumption that in a dreamer too a knowledge about his
dreams is present, though it is inaccessible to him so that he
himself does not believe it, is not something entirely out of the
blue. It should be noticed, moreover, that a third line of approach
to the study of dreams is opened at this point: from the stimuli
which disturb sleep, from day-dreams, and now in addition from the
suggested dreams of the hypnotic state.

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   We may now go back to our task
with increased confidence perhaps. It is very probable, then, that
the dreamer knows about his dream; the only question is how to make
it possible for him to discover his knowledge and communicate it to
us. We do not require him to tell us straight away the sense of his
dream, but he will be able to find its origin, the circle of
thoughts and interests from which it sprang. You will recall that
in the case of the parapraxis the man was asked how he had arrived
at the wrong word ‘
Vorschwein
’ and the first
thing that occurred to him gave us the explanation. Our technique
with dreams, then, is a very simple one, copied from this example.
We shall once more ask the dreamer how he arrived at the dream, and
once more his first remark is to be looked on as an explanation.
Thus we disregard the distinction between his thinking or not
thinking that he knows something, and we treat both cases as one
and the same.

   This technique is certainly very
simple, but I fear it will rouse your liveliest opposition. You
will say: ‘A fresh assumption! the third! And the most
unlikely of all! If I ask the dreamer what occurs to him in
connection with the dream, is precisely the first thing that occurs
to him going to bring the explanation we are hoping for? But
nothing at all may occur to him, or heaven knows what may occur to
him. I cannot see what an expectation of that kind is based on.
That is really showing too much trust in Providence at a point
where rather more exercise of the critical faculty would be
appropriate. Besides, a dream is not a single wrong word; it
consists of a number of elements. So which association are we to
take up?’

   You are correct on all your minor
points. A dream differs from a slip of the tongue, among other
things, in the multiplicity of its elements. Our technique must
take this into account. I therefore suggest to you that we should
divide the dream-into its elements and start a separate enquiry
into each element; if we do this, the analogy with a slip of the
tongue is re-established. You are also right in thinking that when
the dreamer is questioned about the separate elements of the dream
he may reply that nothing occurs to him. There are some instances
in which we let this reply pass, and you will later hear which
these are; strangely enough, they are instances in which definite
ideas may occur to us ourselves. But in general if the dreamer
asserts that nothing occurs to him we contradict him; we bring
urgent pressure to bear on him, we insist that something must occur
to him - and we turn out to be right. He will produce an idea -
some idea, it is a matter of indifference to us which. He will give
us certain pieces of information, which may be described as
‘historical’, with particular ease. He may say:
‘That’s something that happened yesterday’ (as
was the case in our two ‘matter-of-fact’ dreams), or:
‘That reminds me of something that happened a short time
ago’ - and we shall discover in this way that dreams are
connected with impressions of the last day or two much more often
than we thought to begin with. And finally he will also recall,
starting from the dream, events from further back and even perhaps
from the far distant past.

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   But on your main point you are
wrong. If you think it is arbitrary to assume that the first thing
that occurs to the dreamer is bound to bring what we are looking
for or to lead us to it, if you think that what occurs to him might
be anything in the world and might have no connection with what we
are looking for, and that it is only exhibiting my trust in
Providence if I expect something different - then you are making a
great mistake. Once before I ventured to tell you that you nourish
a deeply rooted faith in undetermined psychical events and in free
will, but that this is quite unscientific and must yield to the
demand of a determinism whose rule extends over mental life. I beg
you to respect it as a fact that
that
is what occurred to
the man when he was questioned and nothing else. But I am not
opposing one faith with another. It can be proved that the idea
produced by the man was not arbitrary nor indeterminable nor
unconnected with what we were looking for. Indeed, not long ago I
learnt - without, I may say, attaching too much importance to the
fact - that experimental psychology too had brought up evidence to
that effect.

   In view of the importance of the
matter, I will ask for your special attention. If I ask someone to
tell me what occurs to him in response to a particular element of a
dream, I am asking him to surrender himself to free association
while keeping an idea in mind as a starting point
. This
calls for a special attitude of the attention which is quite
different from reflection and which excludes reflection. Some
people achieve this attitude with ease; others show an incredibly
high degree of clumsiness when they attempt it. There is, however,
a higher degree of freedom of association: that is to say, I may
drop the insistence on keeping an initial idea in mind and only lay
down the sort or kind of association I want - I may, for instance,
require the experimenter to allow a proper name or a number to
occur to him freely. What then occurs to him would presumably be
even more arbitrary and more indeterminable than with our own
technique. It can be shown, however, that it is always strictly
determined by important internal attitudes of mind which are not
known to us at the moment at which they operate - which are as
little known to us as the disturbing purposes of parapraxes and the
provoking ones of chance actions.

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   I and many others after me have
repeatedly made such experiments with names and numbers thought of
at random, and a few of these have been published. Here the
procedure is to produce a series of associations to the name which
has emerged; these latter associations are accordingly no longer
completely free but have a link, like the associations to the
elements of dreams. One continues doing this until one finds the
impulse exhausted. But by then light will have been thrown both on
the motive and the meaning of the random choice of the name. These
experiments always lead to the same result; reports on them often
cover a wealth of material and call for extensive expositions. The
associations to
numbers
chosen at random are perhaps the
most convincing; they run off so quickly and proceed with such
incredible certainty to a hidden goal that the effect is really
staggering. I will give you only one example of an analysis like
this of a name, since dealing with it calls for a conveniently
small amount of material.

   In the course of treating a young
man I had occasion to discuss this topic, and mentioned the thesis
that, in spite of an apparently arbitrary choice, it is impossible
to think of a name at random which does not turn out to be closely
determined by the immediate circumstances, the characteristics of
the subject of the experiment and his situation at the moment.
Since he was sceptical, I suggested that he should make an
experiment of the kind himself on the spot. I knew that he carried
on particularly numerous relationships of every kind with married
women and girls, so I thought he would have a specially large
choice open to him if it were to be a woman’s name that he
was asked to choose. He agreed to this. To my astonishment, or
rather, perhaps, to his, no avalanche of women’s names broke
over me; he remained silent for a moment and then admitted that
only a single name had come into his head and none other besides:
‘Albine’. - How curious! But what does that name mean
to you? How many ‘Albines’ do you know? - Strange to
say, he knew no one called ‘Albine’ and nothing further
occurred to him in response to the name. So it might be thought
that the analysis had failed. But not at all: it was already
complete, and no further associations were needed. The man had an
unusually fair complexion and in conversation during the treatment
I had often jokingly called him an albino. We were engaged at the
time in determining the feminine part of his constitution. So it
was he himself who was this ‘Albine’, the woman who was
the most interesting to him at the moment.