Freud - Complete Works (667 page)

   The situation takes a favourable
turn if the analysis of a corroborative dream of this sort, which
‘tags along behind’, is immediately followed by
feelings of remembering what has hitherto been forgotten. But even
then the sceptic can fall back upon an assertion that the
recollections are illusory. Moreover, such feelings are for the
most part absent. The repressed material is only allowed through
bit by bit; and every lack of completeness inhibits or delays the
forming of a sense of conviction. Furthermore, what we are dealing
with may not be the reproduction of a real and forgotten event but
the bringing forward of an unconscious phantasy, about which no
feeling of memory is ever to be expected, though the possibility
may sometimes remain of a sense of subjective conviction.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4037

   Is it possible, then, that
corroborative dreams are really the result of suggestion, that they
are ‘obliging’ dreams? The patients who produce only
corroborative dreams are the same patients in whom doubt plays the
principal part in resistance. One makes no attempt at shouting down
this doubt by means of one’s authority or at reducing it by
arguments. It must persist until it is brought to an end in the
further course of the analysis. The analyst, too, may himself
retain a doubt of the same kind in some particular instances. What
makes him certain in the end is precisely the complication of the
problem before him, which is like the solution of a jig-saw puzzle.
A coloured picture, pasted upon a thin sheet of wood and fitting
exactly into a wooden frame, is cut into a large number of pieces
of the most irregular and crooked shapes. If one succeeds in
arranging the confused heap of fragments, each of which bears upon
it an unintelligible piece of drawing, so that the picture acquires
a meaning, so that there is no gap anywhere in the design and so
that the whole fits into the frame - if all these conditions are
fulfilled, then one knows that one has solved the puzzle and that
there is no alternative solution.

   An analogy of this kind can of
course have no meaning for a patient while the work of analysis is
still uncompleted. At this point I recall a discussion which I was
led into with a patient whose exceptionally ambivalent attitude was
expressed in the most intense compulsive doubt. He did not dispute
my interpretations of his dreams and was very much struck by their
agreement with the hypotheses which I put forward. But he asked
whether these corroborative dreams might not be an expression of
his compliance towards me. I pointed out that the dreams had also
brought up a quantity of details of which I could have had no
suspicion and that his behaviour in the treatment apart from this
had not been precisely characterized by compliance. Whereupon he
switched over to another theory and asked whether his narcissistic
wish to be cured might not have caused him to produce these dreams,
since, after all, I had held out to him a prospect of recovery if
he were able to accept my constructions. I could only reply that I
had not yet come across any such mechanism of dream-formation. But
a decision was reached by another road. He recollected some dreams
which he had had before starting analysis and indeed before he had
known anything about it; and the analysis of these dreams, which
were free from all suspicion of suggestion, led to the same
interpretations as the later ones. It is true that his obsession
for contradiction once more found a way out in the idea that the
earlier dreams had been less clear than those that occurred during
the treatment; but I was satisfied with their similarity. I think
that in general it is a good plan occasionally to bear in mind the
fact that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was
such a thing as psycho-analysis.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4038

VIII

   It may well be that dreams during
psycho-analysis succeed in bringing to light what is repressed to a
greater extent than dreams outside that situation. But it cannot be
proved, since the two situations are not comparable; the employment
of dreams in analysis is something very remote from their original
purpose. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that within an
analysis far more of the repressed is brought to light in
connection with dreams than by any other method. In order to
account for this, there must be some motive power, some unconscious
force, which is better able to lend support to the purposes of
analysis during the state of sleep than at other times. What is
here in question cannot well be any factor other than the
patient’s compliance towards the analyst which is derived
from his parental complex - in other words, the positive portion of
what we call the transference; and in fact, in many dreams which
recall what has been forgotten and repressed, it is impossible to
discover any other unconscious wish to which the motive force for
the formation of the dream can be attributed. So that if anyone
wishes to maintain that most of the dreams that can be made use of
in analysis are obliging dreams and owe their origin to suggestion,
nothing can be said against that opinion from the point of view of
analytic theory. In that case I need only add a reference to what I
have said in my
Introductory Lectures
, where I have dealt
with the relation between transference and suggestion and shown how
little the trustworthiness of our results is affected by a
recognition of the operation of suggestion in our sense.

   In
Beyond the Pleasure
Principle
(1920
g
) I have dealt with the economic problem
of how what are in every respect distressing experiences of the
early infantile sexual period can succeed in forcing their way
through to some kind of reproduction. I was obliged to ascribe to
them an extraordinarily strong upward drive in the shape of the
‘compulsion to repeat’ - a force able to overcome the
repression which, in obedience to the pleasure principle, weighs
down upon them - though not until ‘the work of treatment has
gone half-way to meet it and has loosened the repression’.
Here we may add that it is the positive transference that gives
this assistance to the compulsion to repeat. Thus an alliance has
been made between the treatment and the compulsion to repeat, an
alliance which is directed in the first instance against the
pleasure principle but of which the ultimate purpose is the
establishment of the dominion of the reality principle. As I have
shown in the passage to which I am referring, it happens only too
often that the compulsion to repeat throws over its obligations
under this alliance and is not content with the return of the
repressed merely in the form of dream-pictures.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4039

IX

   So far as I can at present see,
dreams that occur in a traumatic neurosis are the only
genuine
exceptions, and punishment dreams are the only
apparent
exceptions, to the rule that dreams are directed
towards wish-fulfilment. In the latter class of dreams we are met
by the remarkable fact that actually nothing belonging to the
latent dream-thoughts is taken up into the manifest content of the
dream. Something quite different appears instead, which must be
described as a reaction-formation against the dream-thoughts, a
rejection and complete contradiction of them. Such offensive action
as this against the dream can only be ascribed to the critical
agency of the ego and it must therefore be assumed that the latter,
provoked by the unconscious wish-fulfilment, has been temporarily
re-established even during the sleeping state. It might have
reacted to the undesirable content of the dream by waking up; but
it has found a means, by the construction of the punishment dream,
of avoiding an interruption of sleep.

   For instance, in the case of the
well-known dreams of the poet Rosegger which I discussed in
The
Interpretation of Dreams
, we must suspect the existence of a
suppressed version with an arrogant and boastful text, whereas the
actual dream said to him: ‘You are an incompetent journeyman
tailor.’ It would, of course, be useless to look for a
repressed wishful impulse as the motive power for a manifest dream
such as this; one must be content with the fulfilment of the wish
for self-criticism.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4040

   A dream-structure of this kind
will excite less astonishment if one considers how frequently
dream-distortion, acting in the service of the censorship, replaces
a particular element by something that is in some sense or other
its opposite or contrary. It is only a short step from there to the
replacement of a characteristic portion of the content of the dream
by a defensive contradiction, and one further step will lead to the
whole objectionable dream-content being replaced by the punishment
dream. I should like to give a couple of characteristic examples of
the intermediate phase in the falsification of the manifest
content.

   Here is an extract from the dream
of a girl with a strong fixation to her father, who had difficulty
in talking during the analysis. She was sitting in a room with a
girl friend, and dressed only in a kimono. A gentleman came in and
she felt embarrassed. But the gentleman said: ‘Why, this is
the girl we saw once before dressed so nicely!’ - The
gentleman stood for me, and, further back, for her father. But we
can make nothing of the dream unless we make up our mind to replace
the most important element in the gentleman’s speech by its
contrary: ‘This is the girl I saw once before
undressed
and who looked so nice then!’ When she was a
child of three or four she had for some time slept in the same room
as her father and everything goes to suggest that she used then to
throw back her clothes in her sleep to please her father. The
subsequent repression of her pleasure in exhibiting herself was the
motive for her secretiveness in the treatment, her dislike of
showing herself openly.

   And here is another scene from
the same dream. She was reading her own case history, which she had
before her in print. In it was a statement that ‘a young man
murdered his
fiancée
- cocoa - that comes under anal
erotism.’ This last phrase was a thought that she had in the
dream at the mention of cocoa. - The interpretation of this piece
of the dream was even more difficult than the former one. It
emerged at last that before going to sleep she had been reading my
‘History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918
b
), the
central point of which is the real or imagined observation by a
patient of his parents copulating. She had already once before
related this case history to her own, and this was not the only
indication that in her case as well there was a question of an
observation of the same kind. The young man murdering his
fiancée was a clear reference to a sadistic view of the
scene of copulation. But the next element, the cocoa, was very
remote from it. Her only association to cocoa was that her mother
used to say that cocoa gave one a headache, and she maintained that
she had heard the same thing from other women. Moreover, she had at
one time identified herself with her mother by means of headaches
like hers. Now I could find no link between the two elements of the
dream except by supposing that she wanted to make a diversion from
the consequences of the observation of coitus. No, she was saying,
coitus had nothing to do with the procreation of children; children
came from something one ate (as they do in fairy tales); and the
mention of anal erotism, which looks like an attempt in the dream
at interpretation, supplemented the infantile theory which she had
called to her help, by adding anal birth to it.

Remarks On The Theory And Practice Of Dream-Interpretation

4041

X

   Astonishment is sometimes
expressed at the fact that the dreamer’s ego can appear two
or more times in the manifest dream, once as himself and again
disguised behind the figures of other people. During the course of
the construction of the dream, the secondary revision has evidently
sought to obliterate this multiplicity of the ego, which cannot fit
in with any possible scenic situation; but it is re-established by
the work of interpretation. In itself this multiplicity is no more
remarkable than the multiple appearance of the ego in a waking
thought, especially when the ego divides itself into subject and
object, puts one part of itself as an observing and critical agency
in contrast to the other, or compares its present nature with its
recollected past, which was also ego once; for instance, in such
sentences as ‘When
I
think what
I
’ve done
to this man’ or ‘When
I
think that
I
too
was a child once’. But I should reject as a meaningless and
unjustifiable piece of speculation the notion that
all
figures that appear in a dream are to be regarded as fragmentations
and representatives of the dreamer’s own ego. It is enough
that we should keep firmly to the fact that the separation of the
ego from an observing, critical, punishing agency (an ego ideal)
must be taken into account in the interpretation of dreams as
well.

4042

SOME
ADDITIONAL NOTES ON DREAM-INTERPRETATION AS A WHOLE

(1925)

4043

Intentionally left blank

4044

SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES ON
DREAM-INTERPRETATION AS A WHOLE

(A) THE LIMITS TO THE POSSIBILITY OF
INTERPRETATION

   It may be asked whether it is
possible to give a complete and assured translation into the
language of waking life (that is, an interpretation) of every
product of dream-life. This question will not be treated here in
the abstract but with reference to the conditions under which one
works at interpreting dreams.

   Our mental activities pursue
either a useful aim or an immediate yield of pleasure. In the
former case what we are dealing with are intellectual judgements,
preparations for action or the conveyance of information to other
people. In the latter case we describe these activities as play or
phantasy. What is useful is itself (as is well known) only a
circuitous path to pleasurable satisfaction. Now, dreaming is an
activity of the second kind, which is indeed, from the point of
view of evolution, the earlier one. It is misleading to say that
dreams are concerned with the tasks of life before us or seek to
find a solution for the problems of our daily work. That is the
business of preconscious thought. Useful work of this kind is as
remote from dreams as is any intention of conveying information to
another person. When a dream deals with a problem of actual life,
it solves it in the manner of an irrational wish and not in the
manner of a reasonable reflection. There is only one useful task,
only one function, that can be ascribed to a dream, and that is the
guarding of sleep from interruption. A dream may be described as a
piece of phantasy working on behalf of the maintenance of
sleep.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4045

   It follows from this that it is
on the whole a matter of indifference to the sleeping ego what may
be dreamt during the night so long as the dream performs its task,
and that those dreams best fulfil their function about which one
knows nothing after waking. If it so often happens otherwise, if we
remember dreams - even after years and decades - it always means
that there has been an irruption of the repressed unconscious into
the normal ego. Without this concession to it the repressed would
not have consented to lend its help to the removal of the threat of
disturbance to sleep. We know that it is the fact of this irruption
that gives dreams their importance for psychopathology. If we can
uncover a dream’s motivating force, we shall obtain
unsuspected information about the repressed impulses in the
unconscious; and on the other hand, if we can undo its distortions,
we shall overhear preconscious thought taking place in states of
internal reflection which would not have attracted consciousness to
themselves during the day-time.

   No one can practise the
interpretation of dreams as an isolated activity: it remains a part
of the work of analysis. In analysis we direct our interest
according to necessity, now to the preconscious content of the
dream and now to the unconscious contribution to its formation; and
we often neglect the one element in favour of the other. Nor would
it be of any avail for anyone to endeavour to interpret dreams
outside analysis. He would not succeed in escaping the conditions
of the analytic situation; and if he worked at his own dreams, he
would be undertaking a self-analysis. This comment would not apply
to someone who did without the dreamer’s collaboration and
sought to interpret dreams by intuitive insight. But
dream-interpretation of such a kind, without reference to the
dreamer’s associations, would in the most favourable case
remain a piece of unscientific virtuosity of very doubtful
value.

   If one practises
dream-interpretation according to the sole justifiable technical
procedure, one soon notices that success depends entirely upon the
tension of resistance between the awakened ego and the repressed
unconscious. Work under a ‘high pressure of resistance’
demands (as I have explained elsewhere) a different attitude on the
part of the analyst from work under a low pressure. In analysis one
has for long periods at a time to deal with strong resistances
which are still unknown to one and which it will in any case be
impossible to overcome so long as they remain unknown. It is
therefore not to he wondered at that only a certain portion of a
patient’s dream-products can be translated and made use of,
and, even at that, most often incompletely. Even if, owing to
one’s own experience, one is in a position to understand many
dreams to the interpretation of which the dreamer has contributed
little, one must always remember that the certainty of such
interpretations remains in doubt and one hesitates to press
one’s conjectures upon the patient.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4046

   Critical voices will now be
raised. It will be objected that, since it is not possible to
interpret every dream that is dealt with, one should cease
asserting more than one can establish and should be content to say
that
some
dreams can be shown by interpretation to have a
meaning but that as to the rest we are in ignorance. But the very
fact that success in interpretation depends upon the resistance
absolves the analyst from the necessity for such modesty. He may
have the experience of a dream that was at first unintelligible
becoming clear during the very same hour after some fortunate
remark has got rid of one of the dreamer’s resistances. A
portion of the dream which the patient had hitherto forgotten may
suddenly occur to him and may bring the key to the interpretation;
or a new association may emerge which may throw light upon the
darkness. It sometimes happens, too, that, after months or years of
analytic labour, one returns to a dream which at the beginning of
the treatment seemed meaningless and incomprehensible but which is
now, in the light of knowledge obtained in the meantime, completely
elucidated. And if one further takes into consideration the
argument from the theory of dreams that the model dream-products of
children invariably have a clear meaning and are easy to interpret,
then it will be justifiable to assert that dreams are quite
generally mental structures that are capable of interpretation,
though the situation may not always allow of an interpretation
being reached.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4047

   When the interpretation of a
dream has been discovered, it is not always easy to decide whether
it is a ‘complete’ one - that is, whether further
preconscious thoughts may not also have found expression in the
same dream. In that case we must consider the meaning proved which
is based on the dreamer’s associations and our estimate of
the situation, without on that account feeling bound to reject the
other meaning. It remains possible, though unproven; one must
become accustomed to a dream being thus capable of having many
meanings. Moreover, the blame for this is not always to be laid
upon incompleteness of the work of interpretation; it may just as
well be inherent in the latent dream-thoughts themselves. Indeed it
may happen in waking life, quite apart from the situation of
dream-interpretation, that one is uncertain whether some remark
that one has heard or some piece of information that one has
received is open to construction this way or that, or whether it is
hinting at something else beyond its obvious meaning.

   One interesting occurrence which
has been insufficiently investigated is to be seen where the same
manifest dream-content gives simultaneous expression to a set of
concrete ideas and to an abstract line of thought based upon them.
It is of course difficult for the dream-work to find a means for
representing abstract thoughts.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4048

(B) MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENT OF
DREAMS

   In the introductory chapter of
this book (which discusses ‘The Scientific Literature Dealing
with the Problem of Dreams’) I have shown the way in which
writers have reacted to what is felt as the distressing fact that
the unbridled content of dreams is so often at odds with the moral
sense of the dreamer. (I deliberately avoid speaking of
‘criminal’ dreams, as such a description, which would
overstep the limits of psychological interest, seems to me quite
uncalled-for.) The immoral character of dreams has naturally
provided a fresh motive for denying them any psychical value: if
dreams are the meaningless product of disordered mental activity,
then there can be no ground for assuming responsibility for their
apparent content.

   The problem of responsibility for
the manifest content of dreams has been fundamentally shifted and
indeed disposed of by the explanations given in my
Interpretation of Dreams
.

   We know now that the manifest
content is a deception, a
façade
. It is not worth
while to submit it to an ethical examination or to take its
breaches of morality any more seriously than its breaches of logic
or mathematics. When the ‘content’ of the dream is
spoken of, what must be referred to can only be the content of the
preconscious thoughts and of the repressed wishful impulse which
are revealed behind the
façade
of the dream by the
work of interpretation. Nevertheless, this immoral
façade
has a question to put to us. We have heard
that the latent dream-thoughts have to submit to a severe
censorship before they are allowed access to the manifest content.
How can it happen, then, that this censorship, which makes
difficulties over more trivial things, breaks down so completely
over these manifestly immoral dreams?

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4049

   The answer is not easy to come by
and may perhaps not seem completely satisfying. If, in the first
place, one submits these dreams to interpretation, one finds that
some of them have given no offence to the censorship because
au
fond
the have no bad meaning. They are innocent boastings or
identifications that put up a mask of pretence; they have not been
censored because they do not tell the truth. But others of them -
and, it must be admitted, the majority - really mean what they say
and have undergone no distortion from the censorship. They are an
expression of immoral, incestuous and perverse impulses or of
murderous and sadistic lusts. The dreamer reacts to many of these
dreams by waking up in a fright, in which case the situation is no
longer obscure to us. The censorship has neglected its task, this
has been noticed too late, and the generation of anxiety is a
substitute for the distortion that has been omitted. In still other
instances of such dreams, even that expression of affect is absent.
The objectionable matter is carried along by the height of the
sexual excitement that has been reached during sleep, or it is
viewed with the same tolerance with which even a waking person can
regard a fit of rage, an angry mood or the indulgence in cruel
phantasies.

   But our interest in the genesis
of these
manifestly
immoral dreams is greatly reduced when
we find from analysis that the majority of dreams - innocent
dreams, dreams without affect and anxiety-dreams - are revealed,
when the distortions of the censorship have been undone, as the
fulfilments of immoral - egoistic, sadistic, perverse or incestuous
- wishful impulses. As in the world of waking life, these masked
criminals are far commoner than those with their vizors raised. The
straightforward dream of sexual relations with one’s mother,
which Jocasta alludes to in the
Oedipus Rex
, is a rarity in
comparison with all the multiplicity of dreams which
psycho-analysis must interpret in the same sense.

Some Additional Notes On Dream-Interpretation As A Whole

4050

   I have dealt so exhaustively in
these pages with this characteristic of dreams, which indeed
provides the motive for their distortion, that I can pass at once
from this topic to the problem that lies before us: Must one assume
responsibility for the content of one’s dreams? For the sake
of completeness, it should, however, be added that dreams do not
always offer immoral wish-fulfilments, but often energetic
reactions against them in the form of ‘punishment
dreams’. In other words, the dream-censorship cannot only
express itself in distortions and the generation of anxiety, but
can go so far as to blot out the immoral subject-matter completely
and replace it by something else that serves as an atonement,
though it allows one to see what lies behind. But the problem of
responsibility for the immoral content of dreams no longer exists
for us as it formerly did for writers who knew nothing of latent
dream-thoughts and the repressed part of our mental life. Obviously
one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of
one’s dreams. What else is one to do with them? Unless the
content of the dream (rightly understood) is inspired by alien
spirits, it is a part of my own being. If I seek to classify the
impulses that are present in me according to social standards into
good and bad, I must assume responsibility for both sorts; and if,
in defence, I say that what is unknown, unconscious and repressed
in me is not my ‘ego’, then I shall not be basing my
position upon psycho-analysis, I shall not have accepted its
conclusions - and I shall perhaps be taught better by the
criticisms of my fellow-men, by the disturbances in my actions and
the confusion of my feelings. I shall perhaps learn that what I am
disavowing not only ‘is’ in me but sometimes
‘acts’ from out of me as well.