Freud - Complete Works (686 page)

An Autobiographical Study

4221

   We have explained that the
unconscious instinctual impulse of the dream connects itself with a
residue of the day, with some interest of waking life which has not
been disposed of; it thus gives the dream which it constructs a
double value for the work of analysis. For on the one hand a dream
that has been analysed reveals itself as the fulfilment of a
repressed wish; but on the other hand it may be a continuation of
some preconscious activity of the day before and may contain every
kind of subject-matter and give expression to an intention, a
warning, a reflection, or once more to the fulfilment of a wish.
Analysis exploits the dream in both directions, as a means of
obtaining knowledge alike of the patient’s conscious and of
his unconscious processes. It also profits from the fact that
dreams have access to the forgotten material of childhood, and so
it happens that infantile amnesia is for the most part overcome in
connection with the interpretation of dreams. In this respect
dreams achieve a part of what was previously the task of hypnotism.
On the other hand, I have never maintained the assertion which has
so often been ascribed to me that dream-interpretation shows that
all dreams have a sexual content or are derived from sexual motive
forces. It is easy to see that hunger, thirst, or the need to
excrete, can produce dreams of satisfaction just as well as any
repressed sexual or egoistic impulse. The case of young children
affords us a convenient test of the validity of our theory of
dreams. In them the various psychical systems are not yet sharply
divided and the repressions have not yet grown deep, so that we
often come upon dreams which are nothing more than undisguised
fulfilments of wishful impulses left over from waking life. Under
the influence of imperative needs, adults may also produce dreams
of this infantile type.¹

  
¹
(
Footnote added
1935:) When it is
considered how frequently the function of dreaming miscarries, the
dream may aptly be characterized as an
attempt
at the
fulfilment of a wish. Aristotle’s old definition of the dream
as mental life during sleep still holds good. There was a reason
for my choosing as the title of my book not
The Dream
but
The Interpretation of Dreams
.

An Autobiographical Study

4222

   In the same way that
psycho-analysis makes use of dream-interpretation, it also profits
by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people
make - symptomatic actions, as they are called. I investigated this
subject in a series of papers which were published for the first
time in book form in 1904 under the title of
The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life
. In this widely circulated work I have pointed
out that these phenomena are not accidental, that they require more
than physiological explanations, that they have a meaning and can
be interpreted, and that one is justified in inferring from them
the presence of restrained or repressed impulses and intentions.
But what constitutes the enormous importance of
dream-interpretation, as well as of this latter study, is not the
assistance they give to the work of analysis but another of their
attributes. Previously psycho-analysis had only been concerned with
solving pathological phenomena and in order to explain them it had
often been driven into making assumptions whose comprehensiveness
was out of all proportion to the importance of the actual material
under consideration. But when it came to dreams, it was no longer
dealing with a pathological symptom, but with a phenomenon of
normal mental life which might occur in any healthy person. If
dreams turned out to be constructed like symptoms, if their
explanation required the same assumptions - the repression of
impulses, substitutive formation, compromise-formation, the
dividing of the conscious and the unconscious into various
psychical systems - then psycho-analysis was no longer an auxiliary
science in the field of psychopathology, it was rather the
starting-point of a new and deeper science of the mind which would
be equally indispensable for the understanding of the normal. Its
postulates and findings could be carried over to other regions of
mental happening; a path lay open to it that led far afield, into
spheres of universal interest.

An Autobiographical Study

4223

V

   I must interrupt my account of
the internal growth of psycho-analysis and turn to its external
history. What I have so far described of its discoveries has
related for the most part to the results of my own work; but I have
also filled in my story with material from later dates and have not
distinguished between my own contributions and those of my pupils
and followers.

   For more than ten years after my
separation from Breuer I had no followers. I was completely
isolated. In Vienna I was shunned; abroad no notice was taken of
me. My
Interpretation of Dreams
, published in 1900, was
scarcely reviewed in the technical journals. In my paper ‘On
the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ I mentioned as
an instance of the attitude adopted by psychiatric circles in
Vienna a conversation with an assistant at the clinic, who had
written a book against my theories but had never read my
Interpretation of Dreams
. He had been told at the clinic
that it was not worth while. The man in question, who has since
become a professor, has gone so far as to repudiate my report of
the conversation and to throw doubts in general upon the accuracy
of my recollection. I can only say that I stand by every word of
the account I then gave.

   As soon as I realized the
inevitable nature of what I had come up against, my sensitiveness
greatly diminished. Moreover my isolation gradually came to an end.
To begin with, a small circle of pupils gathered round me in
Vienna; and then, after 1906, came the news that the psychiatrists
at Zurich, E. Bleuler, his assistant C. G. Jung, and others, were
taking a lively interest in psycho-analysis. We got into personal
touch with one another, and at Easter 1908 the friends of the young
science met at Salzburg, agreed upon the regular repetition of
similar informal congresses and arranged for the publication of a
journal which was edited by Jung and was given the title of
Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische
Forschungen
. It was brought out under the direction of Bleuler
and myself and ceased publication at the beginning of the World
War. At the same time that the Swiss psychiatrists joined the
movement, interest in psycho-analysis began to be aroused all over
Germany as well; it became the subject of a large number of written
comments and of lively discussions at scientific congresses. But
its reception was nowhere friendly or even benevolently
non-committal. After the briefest acquaintance with psycho-analysis
German science was united in rejecting it.

An Autobiographical Study

4224

   Even to-day it is of course
impossible for me to foresee the final judgment of posterity upon
the value of psycho-analysis for psychiatry, psychology, and the
mental sciences in general. But I fancy that, when the history of
the phase we have lived through comes to be written, German science
will not have cause to be proud of those who represented it. I am
not thinking of the fact that they rejected psycho-analysis or of
the decisive way in which they did so; both of these things were
easily intelligible, they were only to be expected and at any rate
they threw no discredit on the character of the opponents of
analysis. But for the degree of arrogance which they displayed, for
their conscienceless contempt of logic, and for the coarseness and
bad taste of their attacks there could be no excuse. It may be said
that it is childish of me to give free rein to such feelings as
these now, after fifteen years have passed; nor would I do so
unless I had something more to add. Years later, during the World
War, when a chorus of enemies were bringing against the German
nation the charge of barbarism, a charge which sums up all that I
have written above, it none the less hurt deeply to feel that my
own experience would not allow me to contradict it.

   One of my opponents boasted of
silencing his patients as soon as they began to talk of anything
sexual and evidently thought that this technique gave him a right
to judge the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the
neuroses. Apart from emotional resistances, which were so easily
explicable by the psycho-analytic theory that it was impossible to
be misled by them, it seemed to me that the main obstacle to
agreement lay in the fact that my opponents regarded
psycho-analysis as a product of my speculative imagination and were
unwilling to believe in the long, patient and unbiased work which
had gone to its making. Since in their opinion analysis had nothing
to do with observation or experience, they believed that they
themselves were justified in rejecting it without experience.
Others again, who did not feel so strongly convinced of this,
repeated in their resistance the classical manoeuvre of not looking
through the microscope so as to avoid seeing what they had denied.
It is remarkable, indeed, how incorrectly most people act when they
are obliged to form a judgement of their own on some new subject.
For years I have been told by ‘benevolent’ critics -
and I hear the same thing even to-day - that psycho-analysis is
right up to such-and-such a point but that there it begins to
exaggerate and to generalize without justification. And I know
that, though nothing is more difficult than to decide where such a
point lies, these critics had been completely ignorant of the whole
subject only a few weeks or days earlier.

An Autobiographical Study

4225

   The result of the official
anathema against psycho-analysis was that the analysts began to
come closer together. At the second Congress, held at Nuremberg in
1910, they formed themselves, on the proposal of Ferenczi, into an
‘International Psycho-Analytical Association’ divided
into a number of local societies but under a common President. The
Association survived the Great War and still exists, consisting
to-day of branch societies in Austria, Germany, Hungary,
Switzerland, Great Britain, Holland, Russia, and India, as well as
two in the United States. I arranged that C. G. Jung should be
appointed as the first President, which turned out later to have
been a most unfortunate step. At the same time a second journal
devoted to psycho-analysis was started, the
Zentralblatt
für Psychoanalyse
, edited by Adler and Stekel, and a
little later a third,
Imago
, edited by two non-medical
analysts, H. Sachs and O. Rank, and intended to deal with the
application of analysis to the mental sciences. Soon afterwards
Bleuler published a paper in defence of psycho-analysis. Though it
was a relief to find honesty and straightforward logic for once
taking part in the dispute, yet I could not feel completely
satisfied by Bleuler’s essay. He strove too eagerly after an
appearance of impartiality; nor is it a matter of chance that it is
to him that our science owes the valuable concept of
ambivalence
. In later papers Bleuler adopted such a critical
attitude towards the theoretical structure of analysis and rejected
or threw doubts upon such essential parts of it that I could not
help asking myself in astonishment what could be left of it for him
to admire. Yet not only has he subsequently uttered the strongest
pleas in favour of ‘depth psychology’ but he based his
comprehensive study of schizophrenia upon it. Nevertheless Bleuler
did not for long remain a member of the International
Psycho-Analytical Association; he resigned from it as a result of
misunderstandings with Jung, and the Burghölzli was lost to
analysis.

An Autobiographical Study

4226

   Official disapproval could not
hinder the spread of psycho-analysis either in Germany or in other
countries. I have elsewhere followed the stages of its growth and
given the names of those who were its first representatives. In
1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Jung and me to America to go to Clark
University, Worcester, Mass., of which he was President, and to
spend a week giving lectures (in German) at the celebration of the
twentieth anniversary of that body’s foundation. Hall was
justly esteemed as a psychologist and educationalist, and had
introduced psycho-analysis into his courses several years earlier;
there was a touch of the ‘king-maker’ about him, a
pleasure in setting up authorities and in then deposing them. We
also met James J. Putnam there, the Harvard neurologist, who in
spite of his age was an enthusiastic supporter of psycho-analysis
and threw the whole weight of a personality that was universally
respected into the defence of the cultural value of analysis and
the purity of its aims. He was an estimable man, in whom, as a
reaction against a predisposition to obsessional neurosis, an
ethical bias predominated; and the only thing in him that was
disquieting was his inclination to attach psycho-analysis to a
particular philosophical system and to make it the servant of moral
aims. Another event of this time which made a lasting impression on
me was a meeting with William James the philosopher. I shall never
forget one little scene that occurred as we were on a walk
together. He stopped suddenly, handed me a bag he was carrying and
asked me to walk on, saying that he would catch me up as soon as he
had got through an attack of angina pectoris which was just coming
on. He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished
that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching
death.