Freud - Complete Works (685 page)

   The theories of resistance and of
repression, of the unconscious, of the aetiological significance of
sexual life and of the importance of infantile experiences - these
form the principal constituents of the theoretical structure of
psycho-analysis. In these pages, unfortunately, I have been able to
describe only the separate elements and not their interconnections
and their bearing upon one another. But I am obliged now to turn to
the alterations which gradually took place in the technique of the
analytic method.

   The means which I first adopted
for overcoming the patient’s resistance, by insistence and
encouragement, had been indispensable for the purpose of giving me
a first general survey of what was to be expected. But in the long
run it proved to be too much of a strain on both sides, and
further, it seemed open to certain obvious criticisms. It therefore
gave place to another method which was in one sense its opposite.
Instead of urging the patient to say something upon some particular
subject, I now asked him to abandon himself to a process of
free
association
- that is, to say whatever came into his head,
while ceasing to give any conscious direction to his thoughts. It
was essential, however, that he should bind himself to report
literally everything that occurred to his self-perception and not
to give way to critical objections which sought to put certain
associations on one side on the ground that they were not
sufficiently important or that they were irrelevant or that they
were altogether meaningless. There was no necessity to repeat
explicitly the demand for candour on the patient’s part in
reporting his thoughts, for it was the precondition of the whole
analytic treatment.

An Autobiographical Study

4216

   It may seem surprising that this
method of free association, carried out subject to the observation
of the
fundamental rule of psycho-analysis
, should have
achieved what was expected of it, namely the bringing into
consciousness of the repressed material which was held back by
resistances. We must, however, bear in mind that free association
is not really free. The patient remains under the influence of the
analytic situation even though he is not directing his mental
activities on to a particular subject. We shall be justified in
assuming that nothing will occur to him that has not some reference
to that situation. His resistance against reproducing the repressed
material will now be expressed in two ways. Firstly it will be
shown by critical objections; and it was to deal with these that
the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis was invented. But if the
patient observes that rule and so overcomes his reticences, the
resistance will find another means of expression. It will so
arrange it that the repressed material itself will never occur to
the patient but only something which approximates to it in an
allusive way; and the greater the resistance, the more remote from
the actual idea that the analyst is in search of will be the
substitutive association which the patient has to report. The
analyst, who listens composedly but without any constrained effort
to the stream of associations and who, from his experience, has a
general notion of what to expect, can make use of the material
brought to light by the patient according to two possibilities. If
the resistance is slight he will be able from the patient’s
allusions to infer the unconscious material itself; or if the
resistance is stronger he will be able to recognize its character
from the associations, as they seem to become more remote from the
topic in hand, and will explain it to the patient. Uncovering the
resistance, however, is the first step towards overcoming it. Thus
the work of analysis involves an
art of interpretation
, the
successful handling of which may require tact and practice but
which is not hard to acquire. But it is not only in the saving of
labour that the method of free association has an advantage over
the earlier method. It exposes the patient to the least possible
amount of compulsion, it never allows of contact being lost with
the actual current situation, it guarantees to a great extent that
no factor in the structure of the neurosis will be overlooked and
that nothing will be introduced into it by the expectations of the
analyst. It is left to the patient in all essentials to determine
the course of the analysis and the arrangement of the material; any
systematic handling of particular symptoms or complexes thus
becomes impossible. In complete contrast to what happened with
hypnotism and with the urging method, interrelated material makes
its appearance at different times and at different points in the
treatment. To a spectator, therefore - though in fact there must be
none - an analytic treatment would seem completely obscure.

An Autobiographical Study

4217

   Another advantage of the method
is that it need never break down. It must theoretically always be
possible to have an association, provided that no conditions are
made as to its character. Yet there is one case in which in fact a
breakdown occurs with absolute regularity; from its very
uniqueness, however, this case too can be interpreted.

   I now come to the description of
a factor which adds an essential feature to my picture of analysis
and which can claim, alike technically and theoretically, to be
regarded as of the first importance. In every analytic treatment
there arises, without the physician’s agency, an intense
emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst which is
not to be accounted for by the actual situation. It can be of a
positive or of a negative character and can vary between the
extremes of a passionate, completely sensual love and the unbridled
expression of an embittered defiance and hatred. This
transference
- to give it its short name - soon replaces in
the patient’s mind the desire to be cured, and, so long as it
is affectionate and moderate, becomes the agent of the
physician’s influence and neither more nor less than the
mainspring of the joint work of analysis. Later on, when it has
become passionate or has been converted into hostility, it becomes
the principal tool of the resistance. It may then happen that it
will paralyse the patient’s powers of associating and
endanger the success of the treatment. Yet it would be senseless to
try to evade it; for an analysis without transference is an
impossibility. It must not be supposed, however, that transference
is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it.
Transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a
universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of
all medical influence, and in fact dominates the whole of each
person’s relations to his human environment. We can easily
recognize it as the same dynamic factor which the hypnotists have
named ‘suggestibility’, which is the agent of hypnotic
rapport
and whose incalculable behaviour led to difficulties
with the cathartic method as well. When there is no inclination to
a transference of emotion such as this, or when it has become
entirely negative, as happens in dementia praecox or paranoia, then
there is also no possibility of influencing the patient by
psychological means.

An Autobiographical Study

4218

   It is perfectly true that
psycho-analysis, like other psychotherapeutic methods, employs the
instrument of suggestion (or transference). But the difference is
this: that in analysis it is not allowed to play the decisive part
in determining the therapeutic results. It is used instead to
induce the patient to perform a piece of psychical work - the
overcoming of his transference resistances - which involves a
permanent alteration in his mental economy. The transference is
made conscious to the patient by the analyst, and it is resolved by
convincing him that in his transference-attitude he is
re-experiencing
emotional relations which had their origin
in his earliest object-attachments during the repressed period of
his childhood. In this way the transference is changed from the
strongest weapon of the resistance into the best instrument of the
analytic treatment. Nevertheless its handling remains the most
difficult as well as the most important part of the technique of
analysis.

   With the help of the method of
free association and of the related art of interpretation,
psycho-analysis succeeded in achieving one thing which appeared to
be of no practical importance but which in fact necessarily led to
a totally fresh attitude and a fresh scale of values in scientific
thought. It became possible to prove that
dreams
have a
meaning, and to discover it. In classical antiquity great
importance was attached to dreams as foretelling the future; but
modern science would have nothing to do with them, it handed them
over to superstition, declaring them to be purely
‘somatic’ processes - a kind of twitching of a mind
that is otherwise asleep. It seemed quite inconceivable that anyone
who had done serious scientific work could make his appearance as
an ‘interpreter of dreams’. But by disregarding the
excommunication pronounced upon dreams, by treating them as
unexplained neurotic symptoms, as delusional or obsessional ideas,
by neglecting their apparent content and by making their separate
component images into subjects for free association,
psycho-analysis arrived at a different conclusion. The numerous
associations produced by the dreamer led to the discovery of a
thought-structure which could no longer be described as absurd or
confused, which ranked as a completely valid psychical product, and
of which the
manifest
dream was no more than a distorted,
abbreviated, and misunderstood translation, and for the most part a
translation into visual images. These
latent dream-thoughts
contained the meaning of the dream, while its manifest content was
simply a make-believe, a façade, which could serve as a
starting-point for the associations but not for the
interpretation.

An Autobiographical Study

4219

   There were now a whole series of
questions to be answered, among the most important of them being
whether the formation of dreams had a motive, under what conditions
it took place, by what methods the dream-thoughts (which are
invariably full of sense) become converted into the dream (which is
often senseless), and others besides. I attempted to solve all of
these problems in
The Interpretation of Dreams
, which I
published in the year 1900. I can only find space here for the
briefest abstract of my investigation. When the latent
dream-thoughts that are revealed by the analysis of a dream are
examined, one of them is found to stand out from among the rest,
which are intelligible and well known to the dreamer. These latter
thoughts are residues of waking life (the
day’s
residues
, as they are called technically); but the isolated
thought is found to be a wishful impulse, often of a very repellent
kind, which is foreign to the waking life of the dreamer and is
consequently disavowed by him with surprise or indignation. This
impulse is the actual constructor of the dream: it provides the
energy for its production and makes use of the day’s residues
as material. The dream which thus originates represents a situation
of satisfaction for the impulse, it is the fulfilment of its wish.
It would not be possible for this process to take place without
being favoured by the presence of something in the nature of a
state of sleep. The necessary mental precondition of sleep is the
concentration of the ego upon the wish to sleep and the withdrawal
of psychical energy from all the interests of life. Since at the
same time all the paths of approach to motility are blocked, the
ego is also able to reduce the expenditure by which at other times
it maintains the repressions. The unconscious impulse makes use of
this nocturnal relaxation of repression in order to push its way
into consciousness with the dream. But the repressive resistance of
the ego is not abolished in sleep but merely reduced. Some of it
remains in the shape of a
censorship of dreams
and forbids
the unconscious impulse to express itself in the forms which it
would properly assume. In consequence of the severity of the
censorship of dreams, the latent dream-thoughts are obliged to
submit to being altered and softened so as to make the forbidden
meaning of the dream unrecognizable. This is the explanation of
dream-distortion
, which accounts for the most striking
characteristics of the manifest dream. We are therefore justified
in asserting that
a dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a
(repressed) wish
. It will now be seen that dreams are
constructed like a neurotic symptom: they are compromises between
the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a
censoring force in the ego. Since they have a similar origin they
are equally unintelligible and stand in equal need of
interpretation.

An Autobiographical Study

4220

   There is no difficulty in
discovering the general function of dreaming. It serves the purpose
of fending off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal
stimuli which would tend to arouse the sleeper, and thus of
securing sleep against interruption. External stimuli are fended
off by being given a new interpretation and by being woven into
some harmless situation; internal stimuli, caused by instinctual
demands, are given free play by the sleeper and allowed to find
satisfaction in the formation of dreams, so long as the latent
dream-thoughts submit to the control of the censorship. But if they
threaten to break free and the meaning of the dream becomes too
plain, the sleeper cuts short the dream and wakes in a fright.
(Dreams of this class are known as
anxiety-dreams
.) A
similar failure in the function of dreaming occurs if an external
stimulus becomes too strong to be fended off. (This is the class of
arousal-dreams
.) I have given the name of
dream-work
to the process which, with the co-operation of the censorship,
converts the latent thoughts into the manifest content of the
dream. It consists of a peculiar way of treating the preconscious
material of thought, so that its component parts become
condensed
, its psychical emphasis becomes
displaced
,
and the whole of it is translated into visual images or
dramatized
, and completed by a deceptive
secondary
revision
. The dream-work is an excellent example of the
processes occurring in the deeper, unconscious layers of the mind,
which differ considerably from the familiar normal processes of
thought. It also displays a number of archaic characteristics, such
as the use of a
symbolism
(in this case of a predominantly
sexual kind) which it has since also been possible to discover in
other spheres of mental activity.