Freud - Complete Works (534 page)

   Well, we can keep close to this
parallel. It is our view that the omitted pieces of the speeches in
the dream which were concealed by a mumble have likewise been
sacrificed to a censorship. We speak in so many words of a
‘
dream-censorship
’, to which some share in
dream-distortion is to be attributed. Wherever there are gaps in
the manifest dream the dream-censorship is responsible for them. We
should go further, and regard it as a manifestation of the
censorship wherever a dream-element is remembered especially
faintly, indefinitely and doubtfully among other elements that are
more clearly constructed. But it is only rarely that this
censorship manifests itself so undisguisedly - so naïvely, one
might say - as in this example of the dream of ‘love
services’. The censorship takes effect much more frequently
according to the second method, by producing softenings,
approximations and allusions instead of the genuine thing.

   I know of no parallel in the
operations of the press-censorship to a third manner of working by
the dream-censorship; but I am able to demonstrate it from
precisely the one example of a dream which we have analysed so far.
You will recall the dream of the ‘three bad theatre-tickets
for 1 florin 50'. In the latent thoughts of that dream the
element ‘over-hurriedly, too early’ stood in the
foreground. Thus: it was absurd to marry so
early
- it was
also absurd to take the theatre-tickets so
early
- it was
ridiculous of the sister-in-law to part with her money in such a
hurry
to buy jewellery with it. Nothing of this central
element of the dream-thoughts passed over into the manifest dream;
in it the central position is taken by the ‘going to the
theatre’ and ‘taking the tickets’. As a result of
this displacement of accent, this fresh grouping of the elements of
the content, the manifest dream has become so unlike the latent
dream-thoughts that no-one would suspect the presence of the latter
behind the former. This displacement of accent is one of the chief
instruments of dream-distortion and it is what gives the dream the
strangeness on account of which the dreamer himself is not inclined
to recognize it as his own production.

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   Omission, modification, fresh
grouping of the material - these, then, are the activities of the
dream-censorship and the instruments of dream-distortion. The
dream-censorship itself is the originator, or one of the
originators, of the dream-distortion which we are now engaged in
examining. We are in the habit of combining the concepts of
modification and re-arrangement under the term
‘displacement’.

   After these remarks on the
activities of the dream-censorship, we will now turn to its
dynamics. I hope you do not take the term too anthropomorphically,
and do not picture the ‘censor of dreams’ as a severe
little manikin or a spirit living in a closet in the brain and
there discharging his office; but I hope too that you do not take
the term in too ‘localizing’ a sense, and do not think
of a ‘brain-centre’, from which a censoring influence
of this kind issues, an influence which would be brought to an end
if the ‘centre’ were damaged or removed. For the time
being it is nothing more than a serviceable term for describing a
dynamic relation. The word does not prevent our asking by what
purposes this influence is exercised and against what purposes it
is directed. And we shall not be surprised to learn that we have
come up against the dream-censorship once already, though perhaps
without recognizing it.

   For that is in fact the case. You
will recall that when we began to make use of our technique of free
association we made a surprising discovery. We became aware that
our efforts at proceeding from the dream-element to the unconscious
element for which it is a substitute were being met by a
resistance
. This resistance, we said, could be of different
magnitudes, sometimes enormous and sometimes quite insignificant.
In the latter case we need to pass through only a small number of
intermediate links in our work of interpretation; but when the
resistance is large we have to traverse long chains of associations
from the dream-element, we are led far away from it and on our path
we have to overcome all the difficulties which represent themselves
as critical objections to the ideas that occur. What we met with as
resistance in our work of interpretation must now be introduced
into the dream-work in the form of the dream-censorship. The
resistance to interpretation is only a putting into effect of the
dream-censorship. It also proves to us that the force of the
censorship is not exhausted in bringing about the distortion of
dreams and thereafter extinguished, but that the censorship
persists as a permanent institution which has as its aim the
maintenance of the distortion. Moreover, just as the strength of
the resistance varies in the interpretation of each element in a
dream, so too the magnitude of the distortion introduced by the
censorship varies for each element in the same dream. If we compare
the manifest and the latent dream, we shall find that some
particular latent elements have been completely eliminated, others
modified to a greater or less extent, while yet others have been
carried over into the manifest content of the dream unaltered or
even perhaps strengthened.

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   But we wanted to enquire what are
the purposes which exercise the censorship and against what
purposes it is directed. Now this question, which is fundamental
for the understanding of dreams and perhaps, indeed, of human life,
is easy to answer if we look through the series of dreams which
have been interpreted. The purposes which exercise the censorship
are those which are acknowledged by the dreamer’s waking
judgement, those with which he feels himself at one. You may be
sure that if you reject an interpretation of one of your own dreams
which has been correctly carried out, you are doing so for the same
motives for which the dream-censorship has been exercised, the
dream-distortion brought about and the interpretation made
necessary. Take the dream of our fifty-year-old lady. She thought
her dream disgusting without having analysed it, and she would have
been still more indignant if Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth had told her
anything of its inevitable interpretation; it was precisely because
of this condemnation by the dreamer that the objectionable passages
in her dream were replaced by a mumble.

   The purposes
against
which
the dream-censorship is directed must be described in the first
instance from the point of view of that agency itself. If so, one
can only say that they are invariably of a reprehensible nature,
repulsive from the ethical, aesthetic and social point of view -
matters of which one does not venture to think at all or thinks
only with disgust. These wishes, which are censored and given a
distorted expression in dreams, are first and foremost
manifestations of an unbridled and ruthless egoism. And, to be
sure, the dreamer’s own ego appears in every dream and plays
the chief part in it, even if it knows quite well how to hide
itself so far as the manifest content goes. This ‘
sacro
egoisimo
’ of dreams is certainly not unrelated to the
attitude we adopt when we sleep, which consists in our withdrawing
our interest from the whole external world.

   The ego, freed from all ethical
bonds, also finds itself at one with all the demands of sexual
desire, even those which have long been condemned by our aesthetic
upbringing and those which contradict all the requirements of moral
restraint. The desire for pleasure - the ‘libido’, as
we call it - chooses its objects without inhibition, and by
preference, indeed, the forbidden ones: not only other men’s
wives, but above all incestuous objects, objects sanctified by the
common agreement of mankind, a man’s mother and sister, a
woman’s father and brother. (The dream of our fifty-year-old
lady, too, was incestuous; her libido was unmistakably directed to
her son.) Lusts which we think of as remote from human nature show
themselves strong enough to provoke dreams. Hatred, too, rages
without restraint. Wishes for revenge and death directed against
those who are nearest and dearest in waking life, against the
dreamer’s parents, brothers and sisters, husband or wife, and
his own children are nothing unusual. These censored wishes appear
to rise up out of a positive Hell; after they have been interpreted
when we are awake, no censorship of them seems to us too
severe.

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   But you must not blame the dream
itself on account of its evil content. Do not forget that it
performs the innocent and indeed useful function of preserving
sleep from disturbance. This wickedness is not part of the
essential nature of dreams. Indeed you know too that there are
dreams which can be recognized as the satisfaction of justified
wishes and of pressing bodily needs. These, it is true, have no
dream-distortion; but they have no need of it, for they can fulfil
their function without insulting the ethical and aesthetic purposes
of the ego. Bear in mind, too, that dream-distortion is
proportionate to two factors. On the one hand it becomes greater
the worse the wish that has to be censored; but on the other hand
it also becomes greater the more severe the demands of the
censorship at the moment. Thus a strictly brought-up and prudish
young girl, with a relentless censorship, will distort
dream-impulses which we doctors, for instance, would have to regard
as permissible, harmless, libidinal wishes, and on which in ten
years’ time the dreamer herself will make the same
judgement.

   Furthermore, we have not got
nearly far enough yet to be able to feel indignant at this result
of our work of interpretation. We do not yet, I think, understand
it properly; but our first duty is to defend it against certain
aspersions. There is no difficulty in finding a weak point in it.
Our dream-interpretations are made on the basis of the premisses
which we have already accepted - that dreams in general have a
sense, that it is legitimate to carry across from hypnotic to
normal sleep the fact of the existence of mental processes which
are at the time unconscious, and that everything that occurs to the
mind is determined. If on the basis of these premisses we had
arrived at plausible findings from dream-interpretation, we should
have been justified in concluding that the premisses were valid.
But how about it if these findings seem to be as I have pictured
them? We should then be tempted to say: ‘These are
impossible, senseless or at the least most improbable findings; so
there was something wrong about the premisses. Either dreams are
not psychical phenomena, or there is nothing unconscious in the
normal state, or our technique has a flaw in it. Is it not simpler
and more satisfactory to suppose this rather than accept all the
abominations which we are supposed to have discovered on the basis
of our premisses?’

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   Yes, indeed! Both simpler and
more satisfactory - but not necessarily on that account more
correct. Let us give ourselves time: the matter is not yet ripe for
judgement. And first we can further strengthen the criticism of our
dream-interpretations. The fact that the findings from them are so
disagreeable and repellent need not, perhaps, carry very great
weight. A stronger argument is that the dreamers to whom we are led
to attribute such wishful purposes by the interpretation of their
dreams reject them most emphatically and for good reasons.
‘What?’ says one of them, ‘you want to convince
me from this dream that I regret the money I have spent on my
sister’s dowry and my brother’s education? But that
cannot be so. I work entirely for my brothers and sisters; I have
no other interest in life but to fulfil my duties to them, which,
as the eldest of the family, I promised our departed mother I would
do.’ Or a woman dreamer would say: ‘You think I wish my
husband was dead? That is a shocking piece of nonsense! It is not
only that we are most happily married - you would probably not
believe me if I said that - but his death would rob me of
everything I possess in the world.’ Or another man would
answer us: ‘You say that I have sensual desires for my
sister? That is ridiculous! She means nothing at all to me. We are
on bad terms with each other and I have not exchanged a word with
her for years.’ We might still take it lightly, perhaps, if
these dreamers neither confirmed nor denied the purposes we
attribute to them; we might say that these were just things they
did not know about themselves. But when they feel in themselves the
precise contrary of the wish we have interpreted to them and when
they are able to prove to us by the lives they lead that they are
dominated by this contrary wish, it must surely take us aback. Has
not the time come to throw aside the whole work we have done on
dream-interpretation as something which its findings have reduced
ad absurdum
?

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   No, not even now. Even this
stronger argument collapses if we examine it critically. Granted
that there are unconscious purposes in mental life, nothing is
proved by showing that purposes opposed to these are dominant in
conscious life. Perhaps there is room in the mind for contrary
purposes, for contradictions, to exist side by side. Possibly,
indeed, the dominance of one impulse is precisely a necessary
condition of its contrary being unconscious. We are after all left,
then, with the first objections that were raised: the findings of
dream-interpretation are not simple and they are very disagreeable.
We may reply to the first that all your passion for what is simple
will not be able to solve a single one of the problems of dreams.
You must get accustomed here to assuming a complicated state of
affairs. And we may reply to the second that you are plainly wrong
to use a liking or disliking that you may feel as the ground for a
scientific judgement. What difference does it make if the findings
of dream-interpretation seem disagreeable to you or, indeed,
embarrassing and repulsive. ‘
Ça
n’empêche pas d’exister
’¹, as I
heard my teacher Charcot say in a similar case when I was a young
doctor. One must be humble and hold back one’s sympathies and
antipathies if one wants to discover what is real in this world. If
a physicist were able to prove to you that in a short period
organic life on this earth would be brought to an end by freezing,
would you venture to make the same reply to him: ‘That cannot
be so, the prospect is too disagreeable’? You would, I think,
be silent, until another physicist came and pointed out to the
first one an error in his premisses or calculations. When you
reject something that is disagreeable to you, what you are doing is
repeating
the mechanism of constructing dreams rather than
understanding it and surmounting it.