Freud - Complete Works (530 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3211

   These objections are obviously a
threat to the success of our work. We must guard against them, and
in our own case we do so by firmly resolving not to give way to
them. If we are analysing someone else’s dream, we do so by
laying it down as an inviolable rule that he must not hold back any
idea from us, even if it gives rise to one of the four objections -
of being too unimportant or too senseless or of being irrelevant or
too distressing to be reported. The dreamer promises to obey the
rule, and we may be annoyed afterwards to find how badly he keeps
his promise when the occasion arises. We may explain this to
ourselves to begin with by supposing that, in spite of our
authoritative assurance, he has not yet realized the justification
for free association, and we may perhaps have the notion of first
convincing him theoretically by giving him books to read or by
sending him to lectures which may convert him into a supporter of
our views on free association. But we shall be held back from
blunders like this when we consider that in the case of ourselves,
as to the strength of whose convictions we can, after all, hardly
be in doubt, the same objections arise to certain ideas and are
only set aside subsequently - by a court of appeal, as it were.

   Instead of being annoyed by the
dreamer’s disobedience, we may take advantage of these
experiences by learning something new from them - something which
is all the more important the less we are expecting it. We perceive
that the work of interpreting dreams is carried out in the face of
a
resistance
, which opposes it and of which the critical
objections are manifestations. This resistance is independent of
the dreamer’s theoretical conviction. We learn still more,
indeed. We discover that a critical objection of this kind never
turns out to be justified. On the contrary, the ideas which people
try to suppress in this way turn out
invariably
to be the
most important ones and those which are decisive in our search for
the unconscious material. It amounts, in fact, to a special
distinguishing mark, if an idea is accompanied by an objection like
this.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3212

   This resistance is something
entirely new: a phenomenon which we have come upon in connection
with our premisses, but one which was not included among them. The
appearance of this new factor in our reckoning comes to us as a not
altogether pleasant surprise. We suspect at once that it is not
going to make our work any easier. It might mislead us into
abandoning our whole concern with dreams: something so unimportant
as a dream and, on top of that, all these difficulties instead of a
simple straightforward technique! But, on the other hand, the
difficulties might act precisely as a stimulus and make us suspect
that the work will be worth the trouble. We regularly come up
against resistance when we try to make our way forward from the
substitute which is the dream-element to the unconscious material
hidden behind it. So we may conclude that there must be something
of importance concealed behind the substitute. Otherwise, what is
the point of the difficulties that are trying to keep the
concealment going? If a child refuses to open his clenched fist to
show what he has in it, we may feel sure that it is something wrong
- something he ought not to have.

   The moment we introduce the
dynamic idea of a resistance into the facts of the case, we must
simultaneously reflect that this factor is something variable in
quantity. There may be greater and smaller resistances, and we are
prepared to find these differences showing themselves during our
work as well. We may perhaps be able to link with this another
experience we also meet with during the work of interpreting
dreams: sometimes it requires only a single response, or no more
than a few, to lead us from a dream-element to the unconscious
material behind it, while on other occasions long chains of
associations and the overcoming of many critical objections are
required for bringing this about. We shall conclude that these
differences relate to the changing magnitude of the resistance, and
we shall probably turn out to be right. If the resistance is small,
the substitute cannot be far distant from the unconscious material;
but a greater resistance means that the unconscious material will
be greatly distorted and that the path will be a long one from the
substitute back to the unconscious material.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3213

   And now perhaps it is time to
take a dream and try our technique upon it and see whether our
expectations are confirmed. Yes, but what dream are we to choose
for the purpose: You cannot imagine how hard I find it to decide;
nor can I yet make the nature of my difficulties plain to you.
There must obviously be dreams which have on the whole been
subjected to only a little distortion, and the best plan would be
to begin with them. But what dreams have been least distorted? The
ones that are intelligible and not confused, two examples of which
I have already put before you? That would be leading us quite
astray. Investigation shows that such dreams have been subjected to
an extraordinarily high degree of distortion. If, however, I were
to disregard particular requirements and were to select a dream at
haphazard, you would probably be greatly disappointed. We might
have to notice or record such a profusion of ideas in response to
the separate dream-elements that we should be unable to make head
or tail of the work. If we write down a dream and then make a note
of all the ideas that emerge in response to it, these may prove to
be many times longer than the text of the dream. The best plan
would therefore seem to be to choose out a number of short dreams
for analysis, each of which will at least tell us something or
confirm some point. So we will make up our minds to take that
course, unless experience may perhaps show us where we can really
find dreams that have been only slightly distorted.

   I can however think of something
else that will make things easier for us - something, moreover,
which lies along our path. Instead of starting on the
interpretation of
whole
dreams, we will restrict ourselves
to a few dream-elements, and we will trace out in a number of
examples how these can be explained by applying our technique to
them.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3214

   (
a
) A lady reported that
she very often dreamt when she was a child that
God wore a paper
cocked-hat on his head
. What can you make of that without the
dreamer’s help? It sounds completely nonsensical. But it
ceases to be nonsense when we hear from the lady that she used to
have a hat of that sort put on her head at meals when she was a
child, because she could never resist taking furtive glances at her
brothers’ and sisters’ plates to see whether they had
been given larger helpings than she had. So the hat was intended to
act like a pair of blinkers. This, incidentally, was a piece of
historical information and was given without any difficulty. The
interpretation of this element and at the same time of the whole
short dream was easily made with the help of a further idea that
occurred to the dreamer: ‘As I had heard that God was
omniscient and saw everything’, she said, ‘the dream
can only mean that I knew everything and saw everything, even
though they tried to prevent me.’ Perhaps this example is too
simple.

   (
b
) A sceptical woman
patient had a longish dream in the course of which some people told
her about my book on jokes and praised it highly. Something came in
then about a ‘
a ‘channel’, perhaps it was
another book that mentioned a channel, or something else about a
channel . . . she didn’t
know . . . it was all so indistinct
.

   No doubt you will be inclined to
expect that the element ‘channel’, since it was so
indistinct, would be inaccessible to interpretation. You are right
in suspecting a difficulty; but the difficulty did not arise from
the indistinctness: both the difficulty and the indistinctness
arose from another cause. Nothing occurred to the dreamer in
connection with ‘channel’, and
I
could of course
throw no light on it. A little later - it was the next day, in
point of fact - she told me that she had thought of something that
might
have something to do with it. It was a joke, too, - a
joke she had heard. On the steamer between Dover and Calais a
well-known author fell into conversation with an Englishman. The
latter had occasion to quote the phrase: ‘Du sublime au
ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas. [It is only a step from
the sublime to the ridiculous.]’ ‘Yes,’ replied
the author, ‘
le Pas de Calais
’ - meaning that he
thought France sublime and England ridiculous. But the
Pas de
Calais
is a channel - the English Channel. You will ask whether
I think this had anything to do with the dream. Certainly I think
so; and it provides the solution of the puzzling element of the
dream. Can you doubt that this joke was already present before the
dream occurred, as the unconscious thought behind the element
‘channel’? Can you suppose that it was introduced as a
subsequent invention? The association betrayed the scepticism which
lay concealed behind the patient’s ostensible admiration; and
her resistance against revealing this was no doubt the common cause
both of her delay in producing the association and of the
indistinctness of the dream-element concerned. Consider the
relation of the dream-element to its unconscious background: it
was, as it were, a fragment of the background, an allusion to it,
but it was made quite incomprehensible by being isolated.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3215

   (
c
) As part of a longish
dream a patient dreamt that
several members of his family were
sitting round a table of peculiar shape
, etc. It occurred to
him in connection with the table that he had seen a piece of
furniture of the kind when he was on a visit to a particular
family. His thoughts then went on to say that there was a peculiar
relationship between the father and son in this family; and he soon
added that the same thing was true of the relationship between
himself and his own father. So the table had been taken into the
dream in order to point out this parallel.

   This dreamer had been long
familiar with the requirement of dream-interpretation. Another
person might perhaps have taken objection to such a trivial detail
as the shape of a table being made the subject of investigation.
But in fact we regard nothing in a dream as accidental or
indifferent, and we expect to obtain information precisely from the
explanation of such trivial and pointless details. You may perhaps
also feel surprised that the thought that ‘the same thing was
true of us and of them’ should have been expressed by, in
particular, the choice of a table [
Tisch
]. But this too
becomes clear when you learn that the name of the family in
question was
Tischler
[literally, ‘carpenter’].
By making his relations sit at this
Tisch
, he was saying
that they too were
Tischlers
. Incidentally, you will notice
how inevitably one is led into being indiscreet when one reports
these dream-interpretations. And you will guess that this is one of
the difficulties I have hinted at over the choice of examples. I
could easily have taken another example in place of this one, but I
should probably merely have avoided
this
indiscretion at the
price of committing another.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3216

   The moment seems to me to have
arrived for introducing two terms, which we could have made use of
long ago. We will describe what the dream actually tells us as the
manifest dream-content
, and the concealed material, which we
hope to reach by pursuing the ideas that occur to the dreamer, as
the
latent dream-thoughts
. Thus we are here considering the
relations between the manifest content of the dream and the latent
dream-thoughts as shown in these examples. These relations may be
of very many different kinds. In examples (
a
) and (
b
)
the manifest element is also a constituent of the latent thoughts,
though only a small fragment of them. A small piece of the large
and complicated psychical structure of unconscious dream-thoughts
has made its way into the manifest dream as well - a fragment of
them, or, in other cases, an allusion to them, a caption, as it
were, or an abbreviation in telegraphic style. It is the business
of the work of interpretation to complete these fragments or this
allusion into a whole - which was achieved particularly nicely in
the case of example (
b
). Thus one form of the distortion
which constitutes the dream-work is replacement by a fragment or an
allusion. In example (
c
) another kind of relation is to be
observed in addition; and we shall find this expressed in a purer
and clearer form in the examples which follow.

   (
d
) The dreamer
was
pulling a lady
(a particular one, of his acquaintance)
out
from behind a bed
. He himself found the meaning of this
dream-element from the first idea that occurred to him. It meant
that he was giving this lady preference.¹

  
¹
[This example, like the next, depends on a
purely verbal point: the resemblance between the German words for
‘pulling out’ (
hervor ziehen
) and
‘preferring’ (
vorziehen
).]