Freud - Complete Works (544 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Among these forbidden wishes
special emphasis deserves to be further laid on the incestuous ones
- that is, on those aiming at sexual intercourse with parents and
brothers and sisters. You know what horror is felt, or at least
professed, in human society at such intercourse, and what stress is
laid on the prohibitions directed against it. Tremendous efforts
have been made to ex plain this horror of incest. Some people have
supposed that breeding considerations on the part of Nature have
found psychical representation in this prohibition, since
inbreeding would impair racial characters. Others have maintained
that, as a result of living together from early childhood onwards,
sexual desire has been diverted from the people in question. In
both these cases, it may be remarked, an avoidance of incest would
be secured automatically, and it would not be clear why such severe
prohibitions were called for, which would point rather to the
presence of a strong desire for it. Psycho-analytic researches have
shown unmistakably that the choice of an incestuous love-object is,
on the contrary, the first and invariable one, and that it is not
until later that resistance to it sets in; it is no doubt
impossible to trace back this resistance to
individual
psychology.

   Let us now bring together what
our researches into child psychology have contributed to our
understanding of dreams. We have not only found that the material
of the forgotten experiences of childhood is accessible to dreams,
but we have also seen that the mental life of children with all its
characteristics, its egoism, its incestuous choice of love-objects,
and so on, still persists in dreams - that is, in the unconscious,
and that dreams carry us back every night to this infantile level.
The fact is thus confirmed that
what is unconscious in mental
life is also what is infantile
. The strange impression of there
being so much evil in people begins to diminish. This frightful
evil is simply the initial, primitive, infantile part of mental
life, which we can find in actual operation in children, but which,
in part, we overlook in them on account of their small size, and
which in part we do not take seriously since we do not expect any
high ethical standard from children. Since dreams regress to this
level, they give the appearance of having brought to light the evil
in us. But this is a deceptive appearance, by which we have allowed
ourselves to be scared. We are not so evil as we were inclined to
suppose from the interpretation of dreams.

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   If these evil impulses in dreams
are merely infantile phenomena, a return to the beginnings of our
ethical development (since dreams simply make us into children once
more in our thoughts and feelings), we need not, if we are
reasonable, be ashamed of these evil dreams. But what is reasonable
is only a
part
of mental life, a number of other things take
place in the mind which are not sensible; and so it happens that we
are
ashamed of these dreams in an unreasonable way. We
subject them to the dream-censorship, we are ashamed and angry if,
as an exception, one of these wishes succeeds in making its was
into consciousness in such an undistorted form that we are obliged
to recognize it; indeed we are occasionally as ashamed of a
distorted
dream as if we understood it. Only think of the
indignant judgement which the excellent elderly lady passed on her
uninterpreted dream of the ‘love services’. So the
problem is not yet cleared up, and it is still possible that
further consideration of the evil in dreams may lead us to form
another judgement and arrive at another estimate of human
nature.

   As the outcome of our whole
enquiry, let us grasp two discoveries, though they only signify the
beginning of fresh enigmas and fresh doubts. First, the regression
of the dream-work is not only a formal but also a material one. It
not only translates our thoughts into a primitive form of
expression; but it also revives the characteristics of our
primitive mental life - the old dominance of the ego, the initial
impulses of our sexual life, and even, indeed, our old intellectual
endowment, if symbolic connections may be regarded as such. And
secondly, all this, which is old and infantile and was once
dominant and alone dominant, must to-day be ascribed to the
unconscious, our ideas of which are now becoming altered and
extended. ‘Unconscious’ is no longer the name of what
is latent at the moment; the unconscious is a particular realm of
the mind with its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression
and its peculiar mental mechanisms which are not in force
elsewhere. But the latent dream-thoughts which we have discovered
by interpreting dreams do not belong to this realm; they are on the
contrary thoughts just as we might have thought them in waking
life. Nevertheless, they are unconscious. How, then, is this
contradiction to be solved? We begin to suspect that a distinction
is to be drawn here. Something which is derived from our conscious
life and shares its characteristics - we call it ‘the
day’s residues’ - combines with something else coming
from the realm of the unconscious in order to construct a dream.
The dream-work is accomplished between these two components. The
influence exercised upon the day’s residues by the addition
of the unconscious is no doubt among the determinants of
regression. This is the deepest insight that we can reach here into
the essential nature of dreams - until we have investigated further
regions of the mind. But the time will soon have come to provide
another name for the unconscious character of the latent
dream-thoughts in order to distinguish it from the unconscious
which comes from the realm of the infantile.

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   We can, of course, raise another
question besides: ‘What is it that forces psychical activity
during sleep to make this regression? Why does it not dispose of
the mental stimuli that disturb sleep without doing this? And if,
for the purposes of the dream censorship, it has to make use of
disguise by means of the old and now unintelligible mode of
expression, what is the point of reviving as well the old mental
impulses, wishes and character traits, which are superseded to-day
- of making use of material regression in addition to the formal
kind?’ The only answer that could satisfy us would be that in
this way alone can a dream be constructed, that it is not otherwise
dynamically possible to get rid of the stimulus to the dream. But
so far we have no right to give such an answer.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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LECTURE XIV

WISH-FULFILMENT

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - Shall I remind you once more of the ground we
have covered so far? Of how, when we began applying our technique,
we came up against the distortion in dreams, of how we thought we
would begin by evading it and obtained our first decisive
information on the essential nature of dreams from the dreams of
children? Of how, after that, armed with what we had learnt from
that enquiry, we made a direct assault on dream-distortion and, as
I hope, overcame it step by step? We are bound to admit, however,
that the things we have discovered by the one path and by the other
do not entirely correspond. It will be our task to piece the two
sets of findings together and reconcile them with each other.

   We found from both sources that
the dream-work consists essentially in the transformation of
thoughts into a hallucinatory experience. How this can happen is
sufficiently mysterious; but it is a problem of general psychology
with which we are not properly concerned here. We learnt from
children’s dreams that it is the intention of the dream-work
to get rid of a mental stimulus, which is disturbing sleep, by
means of the fulfilment of a wish. We were unable to say anything
similar of distorted dreams till we found out how to interpret
them. But it was from the first our expectation that we should be
able to regard distorted dreams in the same light as those of
children. The first confirmation of this expectation was brought to
us by the discovery that in point of fact
all
dreams are
children’s dreams, that they work with the same infantile
material, with the mental impulses and mechanisms of childhood. Now
that we believe we have overcome dream-distortion, we must go on to
enquire whether the view of dreams as the fulfilment of wishes is
also valid of distorted dreams.

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   A short time ago we submitted a
series of dreams to interpretation, but we left wish-fulfilment
completely out of account. I feel sure that you must have
repeatedly been driven to ask yourselves: ‘But where is the
wish-fulfilment, which is supposed to be the aim of the
dream-work?’ The question is an important one, for it has
become the question raised by our lay critics. Human beings, as you
know, have an instinctive tendency to fend off intellectual
novelties. One of the ways in which this tendency is manifested is
by immediately reducing the novelty to the smallest proportions, by
compressing it if possible into a single catch-word.
‘Wish-fulfilment’ has become the catch word for the new
theory of dreams. The layman asks: ‘Where is the
wish-fulfilment?’ And instantly, having heard that dreams are
supposed to be wish-fulfilments, and in the very act of asking the
question, he answers it with a rejection. He immediately thinks of
countless experiences of his own with dreams, in which the dream
has been accompanied by feelings ranging from the unpleasurable to
severe anxiety, so that the assertion made by the psycho-analytic
theory of dreams seems to him most improbable. We have no
difficulty in replying that in distorted dreams the wish-fulfilment
cannot be obvious but must be looked for, so that it cannot be
pointed out until the dream has been interpreted. We know too that
the wishes in these distorted dreams are forbidden ones - rejected
by the censorship - whose existence was precisely the cause of the
dream’s distortion, the reason for the intervention of the
dream censorship. But it is difficult to make the lay critic
understand that before a dream has been interpreted one cannot
enquire about the fulfilment of its wish. He will keep on
forgetting this. His rejection of the theory of wish-fulfilment is
actually nothing other than a consequence of the dream-censorship,
a substitute for the rejection of the censored dream-wishes and an
effluence from it.

   We too, of course, feel the need
to explain to ourselves why there are so many dreams with a
distressing content and, especially why there are anxiety-dreams.
Here for the first time we come upon the problem of affects in
dreams; it would deserve a monograph of its own, but unfortunately
we cannot enter into it. If dreams are the fulfilment of wishes,
distressing feelings should be impossible in them: the lay critics
would appear to be right there. But three kinds of complications
must be taken into account which they have not thought of.

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   Firstly, it may be that the
dream-work has not completely succeeded in creating a
wish-fulfilment; so that a portion of the distressing affect in the
dream-thoughts has been left over in the manifest dream. In that
case analysis would have to show that these dream-thoughts were far
more distressing than the dream-constructed out of them. That much
can always be proved. If so, we must admit that the dream-work has
not achieved its aim any more than the dream of drinking, formed in
response to the stimulus of thirst, succeeded in quenching the
thirst. The dreamer remains thirsty and has to wake up in order to
drink. Nevertheless it was a genuine dream, and had lost nothing of
a dream’s essential nature. We can only say: ‘Ut desint
vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas.’¹ The intention, at
least, which can clearly be recognized, remains praiseworthy. Such
instances of failure are no rare event. This is helped by that fact
that it is so much harder for the dream-work to alter the sense of
a dream’s
affects
than of its
content
; affects
are some times highly resistant. What then happens is that the
dream-work transforms the distressing content of the dream-thoughts
into the fulfilment of a wish, while the distressing affect
persists unaltered. In dreams of this kind the affect is quite
inappropriate to the content, and our critics can say that dreams
are so far from being wish-fulfilments that even one with a
harmless content can be felt as distressing. We can answer this
foolish remark by pointing out that it is precisely in dreams like
this that the wish-fulfilling purpose of the dream-work appears
most clearly, because in isolation. The error arises because those
who are unfamiliar with the neuroses picture the link between
content and affect as too intimate and therefore cannot imagine the
content being altered without a simultaneous alteration of the
expression of affect attached to it.

  
¹
[‘Though the strength is lacking, the
will deserves to be praised.’]

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   A second factor, which is much
more important and far reaching, but which is equally overlooked by
laymen, is the following. No doubt a wish-fulfilment must bring
pleasure; but the question then arises ‘To whom?’ To
the person who has the wish, of course. But, as we know, a
dreamer’s relation to his wishes is a quite peculiar one. He
repudiates them and censors them - he has no liking for them, in
short. So that their fulfilment will give him no pleasure, but just
the opposite; and experience shows that this opposite appears in
the form of anxiety, a fact which has still to be explained. Thus a
dreamer in his relation to his dream-wishes can only be compared to
an amalgamation of two separate people who are linked by some
strong element in common. Instead of enlarging on this, I will
remind you of a familiar fairy tale in which you will find the same
situation repeated. A good fairy promised a poor married couple to
grant them the fulfilment of their first three wishes. They were
delighted, and made up their minds to choose their three wishes
carefully. But a smell of sausages being fried in the cottage next
door tempted the woman to wish for a couple of them. They were
there in a flash; and this was the first wish-fulfilment. But the
man was furious, and in his rage wished that the sausages were
hanging on his wife’s nose. This happened too; and the
sausages were not to be dislodged from their new position. This was
the second wish-fulfilment; but the wish was the man’s, and
its fulfilment was most disagreeable for his wife. You know the
rest of the story. Since after all they were in fact one - man and
wife - the third wish was bound to be that the sausages should come
away from the woman’s nose. This fairy tale might be used in
many other connections; but here it serves only to illustrate the
possibility that if two people are not at one with each other the
fulfilment of a wish of one of them may bring nothing but
unpleasure to the other.