Freud - Complete Works (540 page)
Similarly, in the course of our
work of interpretation we learn what it is that corresponds to the
doubts and uncertainties which the dreamer so often expresses as to
whether a particular element occurred in a dream, whether it was
this or whether, on the contrary, it was something else. There is
as a rule nothing in the latent dream-thoughts corresponding to
these doubts and uncertainties; they are entirely due to the
activity of the dream-censorship and are to be equated with an
attempt at elimination which has not quite succeeded.
Among the most surprising
findings is the way in which the dream-work treats contraries that
occur in the latent dream. We know already that conformities in the
latent material are replaced by condensations in the manifest
dream. Well, contraries are treated in the same way as
conformities, and there is a special preference for expressing them
by the same manifest element. Thus an element in the manifest dream
which is capable of having a contrary may equally well be
expressing either itself or its contrary or both together: only the
sense can decide which translation is to be chosen. This connects
with the further fact that a representation of ‘no’ -
or at any rate an unambiguous one - is not to be found in
dreams.
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A welcome analogy to this strange
behaviour of the dream-work is provided for us in the development
of language. Some philologists have maintained that in the most
ancient languages contraries such as ‘strong-weak’,
‘light-dark’, ‘big-small’ are expressed by
the same verbal roots. (What we term ‘the antithetical
meaning of primal words.’) Thus in Ancient Egyptian
‘
ken
’ originally meant ‘strong’ and
‘weak’. In speaking, misunderstanding from the use of
such ambivalent words was avoided by differences of intonation and
by the accompanying gesture, and in writing, by the addition of
what is termed a ‘determinative’ - a picture which is
not itself intended to be spoken. For instance,
‘
ken
’ meaning ‘strong’ was written
with a picture of a little upright man after the alphabetic signs;
when ‘
ken
’ stood for ‘weak’, what
followed was the picture of a man squatting down limply. It was
only later, by means of slight modifications of the original
homologous word, that two distinct representations were arrived at
of the contraries included in it. Thus from
‘
ken
’ ‘strong-weak’ were derived
‘
ken
’ ‘strong’ and
‘
kan
’ ‘weak’. The remains of this
ancient antithetical meaning seem to have been preserved not only
in the latest developments of the oldest languages but also in far
younger ones and even in some that are still living. Here is some
evidence of this, derived from K. Abel (1884).
In Latin, words that remained
ambivalent in this way are ‘
altus
’
(‘high’ and ‘deep’) and
‘
sacer
’ (‘sacred’ and
‘accursed’).
As instances of modifications of
the same root I may mention ‘
clamare
’ (‘to
cry’), ‘
clam
’ (‘softly’,
‘quietly’, ‘secretly’);
‘
siccus
’ (‘dry’),
‘
succus
’ (‘juice’). And in German:
‘
Stimme
’ [‘voice’],
‘
stumm
’ [‘dumb’].
If we compare related languages,
there are numerous examples. In English, ‘to lock’; in
German, ‘
Loch
’ [‘hole’] and
‘
Lücke
[‘gap’]. In English, ‘to
cleave’; in German, ‘
kleben
’ [‘to
stick’].
The English word
‘without’ (which is really ‘with-without’)
is used to-day for ‘without’ alone. ‘With’,
in addition to its combining sense, originally had a removing one;
this is still to be seen in the compounds ‘withdraw and
‘withhold’. Similarly with the German
‘
wieder
’ [‘together with’ and
‘
wider
’ ‘against’].
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Another characteristic of the
dream-work also has its counterpart in the development of language.
In Ancient Egyptian, as well as in other, later languages, the
order of the sounds in a word can be reversed, while keeping the
same meaning. Examples of this in English and German are:
‘
Topf
’ [‘pot’]-’pot’;
‘boat’-’tub’;
‘hurry’-’
Ruhe
’ [‘rest’];
‘
Balken
’
[‘beam’]-’
Kloben
’
[‘log’] and ‘club’;
‘wait’-’
täuwen
’
[‘tarry’]. Similarly in Latin and German:
‘
capere
’-’
packen
’ [‘to
seize’]; ‘
ren
’-’
Niere
’
[’kidney’].
Reversals like this, which occur
here with individual words, take place in various ways in the
dream-work. We already know reversal of meaning, replacement of
something by its opposite. Besides this we find in dreams reversals
of situation, of the relation between two people - a
‘topsy-turvy’ world. Quite often in dreams it is the
hare that shoots the sportsman. Or again we find a reversal in the
order of events, so that what precedes an event causally comes
after it in the dream - like a theatrical production by a
third-rate touring company, in which the hero falls down dead and
the shot that killed him is not fired in the wings till afterwards.
Or there are dreams where the whole order of the elements is
reversed, so that to make sense in interpreting it we must take the
last one first and the first one last. You will remember too from
our study of dream symbolism that going or falling into the water
means the same as coming out of it - that is, giving birth or being
born, and that climbing up a staircase or a ladder is the same
thing as coming down it. It is not hard to see the advantage that
dream-distortion can derive from this freedom of
representation.
These features of the dream-work
may be described as
archaic
. They are equally characteristic
of ancient systems of expression by speech and writing and they
involve the same difficulties, which we shall have to discuss again
later in a critical sense.
And now a few more
considerations. In the case of the dream-work it is clearly a
matter of transforming the latent thoughts which are expressed in
words into sensory images, mostly of a visual sort. Now our
thoughts originally arose from sensory images of that kind: their
first material and their preliminary stages were sense impressions,
or, more properly, mnemic images of such impressions. Only later
were words attached to them and the words in turn linked up into
thoughts. The dream-work thus submits thoughts to a
regressive
treatment and undoes their development; and in
the course of the regression everything has to be dropped that had
been added as a new acquisition in the course of the development of
the mnemic images into thoughts.
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Such then, it seems, is the
dream-work. As compared with the processes we have come to know in
it, interest in the manifest dream must pale into insignificance.
But I will devote a few more remarks to the latter, since it is of
it alone that we have immediate knowledge.
It is natural that we should lose
some of our interest in the manifest dream. It is bound to be a
matter of indifference to us whether it is well put together, or is
broken up into a series of disconnected separate pictures. Even if
it has an apparently sensible exterior, we know that this has only
come about through dream-distortion and can have as little organic
relation to the internal content of the dream as the façade
of an Italian church has to its structure and plan. There are other
occasions when this façade of the dream
has
its
meaning, and reproduces an important component of the latent
dream-thoughts with little or no distortion. But we cannot know
this before we have submitted the dream to interpretation and have
been able to form a judgement from it as to the amount of
distortion that has taken place. A similar doubt arises when two
elements in a dream appear to have been brought into a close
relation to each other. This may give us a valuable hint that we
may bring together what corresponds to these elements in the latent
dream as well; but on other occasions we can convince ourselves
that what belongs together in the dream-thoughts has been torn
apart in the dream.
In general one must avoid seeking
to explain one part of the manifest dream by another, as though the
dream had been coherently conceived and was a logically arranged
narrative. On the contrary, it is as a rule like a piece of
breccia, composed of various fragments of rock held together by a
binding medium, so that the designs that appear on it do not belong
to the original rocks imbedded in it. And there is in fact one part
of the dream-work, known as ‘secondary revision’, whose
business it is to make something whole and more or less coherent
out of the first products of the dream-work. In the course of this,
the material is arranged in what is often a completely misleading
sense and, where it seems necessary, interpolations are made in
it.
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3273
On the other hand, we must not
over-estimate the dream-work and attribute too much to it. The
achievements I have enumerated exhaust its activity; it can do no
more than condense, displace, represent in plastic form and subject
the whole to a secondary revision. What appear in the dream as
expressions of judgement, of criticism, of astonishment or of
inference - none of these are achievements of the dream-work and
they are very rarely expressions of afterthoughts about the dream;
they are for the most part portions of the latent dream-thoughts
which have passed over into the manifest dream with a greater or
less amount of modification and adaptation to the context. Nor can
the dream-work compose speeches. With a few assignable exceptions,
speeches in dreams are copies and combinations of speeches which
one has heard or spoken one self on the day before the dream and
which have been included in the latent thoughts either as material
or as the instigator of the dream. The dream-work is equally unable
to carry out calculations. Such of them as appear in the manifest
dream are mostly combinations of numbers, sham calculations which
are quite senseless
quâ
calculations and are once
again only copies of calculations in the latent dream-thoughts. In
these circumstances it is not to be wondered at that the interest
which had turned to the dream-work soon tends to move away from it
to the latent dream-thoughts, which are revealed, distorted to a
greater or less degree, by the manifest dream. But there is no
justification for carrying this shift of interest so far that, in
looking at the matter theoretically, one replaces the dream
entirely by the latent dream-thoughts and makes some assertion
about the former which only applies to the latter. It is strange
that the findings of psycho-analysis could be misused to bring
about this confusion. One cannot give the name of
‘dream’ to anything other than the product of the
dream-work - that is to say, the
form
into which the latent
thoughts have been transmuted by the dream-work.
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3274
The dream-work is a process of
quite a singular kind, of which the like has not yet become known
in mental life. Condensations, displacements, regressive
transformations of thoughts into images - such things are novelties
whose discovery has already richly rewarded the labours of
psycho-analysis. And you can see once more, from the parallels to
the dream-work, the connections which have been revealed between
psycho-analytic studies and other fields - especially those
concerned in the development of speech and thought. You will only
be able to form an idea of the further significance of these
discoveries when you learn that the mechanism of dream-construction
is the model of the manner in which neurotic symptoms arise.
I am also aware that we are not
yet able to make a survey of the whole of the new acquisitions
which these studies have brought to psychology. I will only point
out the fresh proofs they have provided of the existence of
unconscious mental acts - for this is what the latent
dream-thoughts are - and what an unimaginably broad access to a
knowledge of unconscious mental life we are promised by the
interpretation of dreams.
But now the time has no doubt
come for me to demonstrate to you from a variety of small examples
of dreams what I have been preparing you for in the course of these
remarks.
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LECTURE XII
SOME
ANALYSES OF SAMPLE DREAMS
LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - You must not be disappointed if I once again
put before you fragments of dream-interpretations instead of
inviting you to take part in the interpretation of a nice big
dream. You will argue that after so many preparations you have a
right to it, and you will express your conviction that after so
many thousands of dreams have been successfully interpreted, it
should have been possible long since to have brought together a
collection of excellent sample dreams on which all our assertions
about the dream-work and the dream-thoughts could be demonstrated.
Just so. But the difficulties that stand in the way of the
fulfilment of your wish are too many.
In the first place I must admit
that no one carries on the interpretation of dreams as his main
occupation. How does it come about, then, that people do interpret
them? Occasionally, with no particular end in view, one may
interest oneself in the dreams of an acquaintance, or one may work
through one’s own dreams for a time in order to train oneself
in psycho-analytic work; but for the most part what one has to deal
with are the dreams of neurotic patients who are under
psycho-analytic treatment. These latter dreams are excellent
material and are in no way inferior to those of healthy people; but
the technique of the treatment necessitates our subordinating
dream-interpretation to therapeutic aims, and we have to allow a
whole number of dreams to drop after we have extracted something
from them that is of service to the treatment. Some dreams that
occur during treatment entirely escape any full analysis: since
they have arisen out of the great mass of psychical material which
is still unknown to us, it is impossible to understand them before
the treatment is finished. If I were to report dreams of this kind,
it would oblige me to uncover all the secrets of a neurosis as
well; and that will not do for us, since it is precisely to prepare
us for the study of the neuroses that we have attacked the problem
of dreams.
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You, however, would be glad to
dispense with this material and would prefer to be given an
explanation of the dreams of healthy people or of your own dreams.
But this cannot be done, on account of their content. It is
impossible to submit either oneself or anyone else whose confidence
one enjoys to the ruthless exposure that would be involved in a
detailed analysis of his dreams, which, as you already know, are
concerned with the most intimate part of one’s personality.
But there is another difficulty in the way apart from that of
providing the material. You are aware that dreams present an alien
appearance to the dreamer himself, and much more so to anyone who
is unacquainted with him personally. Our literature is not poor in
good and detailed dream-analyses. I myself have published a few
within the framework of case histories. Perhaps the best example of
the interpretation of a dream is the one reported by Otto Rank
consisting of two interrelated dreams dreamt by a young girl, which
occupy about two pages of print: but their analysis extends to
seventy-six pages. So I should need something like a whole term to
conduct you through a piece of work of the sort. If one takes up
any comparatively long and much distorted dream, one has to give so
many explanations of it, to bring up so much material in the way of
associations and memories, to follow up so many by-paths, that a
lecture about it would be quite confusing and unsatisfactory. I
must therefore ask you to be content with what can be had more
easily - an account of small pieces of the dreams of neurotic
patients, in which it is possible to recognize this or that point
in isolation. What is easiest to demonstrate are dream-symbols and,
after them, some characteristics of the regressive representation
in dreams. In the case of each of the dreams that follow, I will
indicate why it is that I think it worth reporting.
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3277
(1) This dream consisted only of
two short pictures:
His uncle was smoking a cigarette although
it was Saturday. - A woman was caressing and fondling him
as
though he were her child
.
In regard to the first picture
the dreamer (a Jew) remarked that his uncle was a pious man who
never had done and never could do anything sinful like that. In
regard to the woman in the second picture nothing occurred to him
except his mother. These two pictures or thoughts must obviously be
seen in connection with each other. But how? Since he expressly
disputed the reality of his uncle’s action, it is plausible
to insert an ‘if’: ‘If my uncle, that pious man,
were to smoke a cigarette on a Saturday, then I might let myself,
too, be cuddled by my mother.’ This clearly means that
cuddling with his mother was something impermissible, like smoking
on a Saturday to a pious Jew. - You will recall that I told you
that in the course of the dream-work all the relations between the
dream-thoughts drop out; these are resolved into their raw material
and it is the task of the interpretation to re-insert the omitted
relations.
(2) As a result of my
publications on dreams I have in a sense become a public consultant
on matters relating to them, and for many years I have been
receiving communications from the most various sources in which
dreams are reported to me or submitted to my judgement. I am of
course grateful to anyone who adds enough material to the dream to
make an interpretation possible or who gives an interpretation
himself. The following dream, dreamt by a medical student in Munich
and dating from the year 1910, falls into this category. I am
bringing it up in order to show you how impossible it is in general
to understand a dream till the dreamer has given us his information
about it. For I suspect that at bottom you consider that the ideal
method of dream-interpretation is by filling in the meaning of the
symbols and that you would like to discard the technique of
obtaining associations to the dream; and I am anxious to disabuse
you of this damaging mistake.
‘July 13, 1910 - Towards
morning I had this dream:
I was bicycling down the street in
Tübingen when a brown dachshund rushed up behind me and seized
me by the heel. After a little I got off, sat down on a step, and
began to hit at the beast, which had bitten firm hold of me
. (I
had no disagreeable feelings either from the bite or from the scene
as a whole.)
Some elderly ladies were sitting opposite me and
grinning at me. Then I woke up and, as has often happened before,
at the moment of transition to waking, the whole dream was clear to
me
.’
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Symbols are of little help here.
But the dreamer reported: ‘I have recently fallen in love
with a girl, but only from seeing her in the street, and I have had
no means of getting in contact with her. The dachshund might have
been the pleasantest way of doing so, especially as I am a great
animal-lover and I liked this same characteristic in the
girl.’ He added that he had repeatedly intervened in furious
dog-fights with great skill and often to the astonishment of the
onlookers. We learn then that the girl he was attracted by was
always to be seen in the company of this particular dog. As far as
the manifest dream was concerned, however, the girl was omitted and
only the dog associated with her was left. The elderly ladies who
grinned at him may perhaps have taken the girl’s place. His
further remarks threw no adequate light on this point. The fact
that he was bicycling in the dream is a direct repetition of the
remembered situation. He never met the girl with the dog except
when he was on his bicycle.
(3) When anyone has lost someone
near and dear to him, he produces dreams of a special sort for some
time afterwards, in which knowledge of the death arrives at the
strangest compromises with the need to bring the dead person to
life again. In some of these dreams the person who has died is dead
and at the same time still alive, because he does not know he is
dead; only if he did know would he die completely. In others, he is
half dead and half alive, and each of these states is indicated in
a particular way. We must not describe these dreams as simply
nonsensical; for being brought to life again is no more
inconceivable in dreams than it is, for instance, in fairy tales,
in which it occurs as a very usual event. So far as I have been
able to analyse such dreams, it has turned out that they are
capable of a reasonable solution, but that the pious wish to bring
the dead person back to life has been able to operate by the
strangest means. I will now put before you a dream of this kind
which sounds sufficiently queer and senseless and the analysis of
which will show you much for which our theoretical discussions will
have prepared you. It is the dream of a man who had lost his father
several years before:
His father was dead but had
been exhumed and looked bad. He had been living since then and the
dreamer was doing all he could to prevent him noticing it
. (The
dream then went on to other and apparently very remote
matters.)
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His father was dead; we know
that. His having been exhumed did not correspond to reality; and
there was no question of reality in anything that followed. But the
dreamer reported that after he had come away from his
father’s funeral, one of his teeth began to ache. He wanted
to treat the tooth according to the precept of Jewish doctrine:
‘If thy tooth offend thee, pluck it out!’ And he went
off to the dentist. But the dentist said: ‘One doesn’t
pluck out a tooth. One must have patience with it. I’ll put
something into it to kill it; come back in three days and
I’ll take it out.’
‘That "take
out",’ said the dreamer suddenly, ‘that’s
the exhuming!’
Was the dreamer right about this?
It only fits more or less, not completely; for the
tooth
was
not taken out, but only something in it that had died. But
inaccuracies of this kind can, on the evidence of other
experiences, well be attributed to the dream-work. If so, the
dreamer had condensed his dead father and the tooth that had been
killed but retained; he had fused them into a unity. No wonder,
then, that something senseless emerged in the manifest dream, for,
after all, not everything that was said about the tooth could fit
his father. Where could there possibly be a
tertium
comparationis
between the tooth and his father, to make the
condensation possible?
But no doubt he must have been
right, for he went on to say that he knew that if one dreams of a
tooth falling out it means that one is going to lose a member of
one’s family.
This popular interpretation, as
we know, is incorrect or at least is correct only in a scurrilous
sense. We shall be all the more surprised to find the topic thus
touched upon re-appearing behind other portions of the
dream’s content.
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The dreamer now began, without
any further encouragement, to talk about his father’s illness
and death as well as about his own relations with him. His father
was ill for a long time, and the nursing and treatment had cost him
(the son) a lot of money. Yet it was never too much, he was never
impatient, he never wished that after all it might soon come to an
end. He was proud of his truly Jewish filial piety towards his
father, of his strict obedience to Jewish Law. And here we are
struck by a contradiction in the thoughts belonging to the dream.
He had identified the tooth and his father. He wanted to proceed
with the tooth in accordance with Jewish Law, which commanded him
to pluck it out if it caused him pain or offence. He also wanted to
proceed with his father, too, in accordance with the precepts of
the Law, but in this case it commanded him to spare no expense or
trouble, to take every burden on himself and to allow no hostile
intention to emerge against the object that was causing him pain.
Would not the two attitudes have agreed much more convincingly if
he had really developed feelings towards his sick father similar to
those towards his sick tooth - that is, if he had wished that an
early death would put an end to his unnecessary, painful and costly
existence?
I do not doubt that this was
really his attitude towards his father during the tedious illness
and that his boastful assurances of his filial piety were meant to
distract him from these memories. Under such conditions the
death-wish against a father is apt to become active and to hide
itself under the mask of such sympathetic reflections as that
‘it would be a happy release for him’. But please
observe that here we have passed a barrier in the latent
dream-thoughts themselves. No doubt the first portion of them was
unconscious only temporarily - that is, during the construction of
the dream; but his hostile impulses against his father must have
been permanently unconscious. They may have originated from scenes
in his childhood and have occasionally slipped into consciousness,
timidly and disguised, during his father’s illness. We can
assert this with greater certainty of other latent thoughts which
have made unmistakable contributions to the content of the dream.
Nothing, indeed, is to be discovered in the dream of his hostile
impulses towards his father. But if we look for the roots of such
hostility to a father in childhood, we shall recall that fear of a
father is set up because, in the very earliest years, he opposes a
boy’s sexual activities, just as he is bound to do once more
from social motives after the age of puberty. This relation to his
father applies to our dreamer as well: his love for him included a
fair admixture of awe and anxiety, which had their source in his
having been early deterred by threats from sexual activity.