Freud - Complete Works (747 page)

4615

PREFACE TO HERMANN NUNBERG’S

GENERAL THEORY OF THE NEUROSES ON A PSYCHO-ANALYTIC BASIS

(1932)

This volume by Hermann Nunberg contains the
most complete and conscientious presentation of a psycho-analytic
theory of neurotic processes which we at present possess. Anyone
who is anxious to have the relevant problems simplified and
smoothed away will scarcely find satisfaction in this work. But
anyone who prefers scientific thinking and can appreciate it as a
merit when speculation never abandons the guiding-line of
experience and anyone who can enjoy the beautiful diversity of
mental happenings - he will value this work and study it
assiduously.

VIENNA
,
October
1931.

4616

LETTER TO THE BURGOMASTER OF PRÍBOR

(1931)

I offer my thanks to the Burgomaster of the
town of Príbor-Freiberg, to the organizers of this
celebration and to all those who are attending it, for the honour
they have done me in marking the house of my birth with this
commemorative tablet from an artist’s hand - and this during
my lifetime and while the world around us is not yet agreed in its
estimate of my work.

   I left Freiberg at the age of
three and visited it when I was sixteen, during my school holidays,
as a guest of the Fluss family, and I have never returned to it
again. Since that time much has befallen me; my labours have been
many, I have experienced some suffering and happiness as well, and
I have had a share of success - the common medley of human life. At
seventy-five it is not easy for me to put myself back into those
early times; of their rich experiences but few relics remain in my
memory. But of one thing I can feel sure: deeply buried within me
there still lives the happy child of Freiberg, the first-born son
of a youthful mother, who received his first indelible impressions
from this air, from this soil. Thus I may be allowed to end my
words of thanks with a heartfelt wish for the happiness of this
place and of those who live in it.

4617

NEW INTRODUCTORY LECTURES ON PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

(1933)

4618

Intentionally left blank

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4619

PREFACE

My
Introductory Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis
were delivered during the two Winter Terms of
1915-16 and 1916-17 in a lecture room of the Vienna Psychiatric
Clinic before an audience gathered from all the Faculties of the
University. The first half of the lectures were improvised, and
written out immediately afterwards; drafts of the second half were
made during the intervening summer vacation at Salzburg, and
delivered word for word in the following winter. At that time I
still possessed the gift of a phonographic memory.

   These new lectures, unlike the
former ones, have never been delivered. My age had in the meantime
absolved me from the obligation of giving expression to my
membership of the University (which was in any case a peripheral
one) by delivering lectures; and a surgical operation had made
speaking in public impossible for me. If, therefore, I once more
take my place in the lecture room during the remarks that follow,
it is only by an artifice of the imagination; it may help me not to
forget to bear the reader in mind as I enter more deeply into my
subject.

   The new lectures are by no means
intended to take the place of the earlier ones. They do not in any
sense form an independent entity with an expectation of finding a
circle of readers of its own; they are continuations and
supplements, which, in relation to the former series, fall into
three groups. A first group contains fresh treatments of subjects
which were already dealt with fifteen years ago but which, as a
result of a deepening of our knowledge and an alteration in our
views, call for a different exposition to-day - that is to say,
critical revisions. The two other groups contain what are true
extensions, for they deal with things which either did not exist in
psycho-analysis at the time of the first lectures or which were too
little in evidence to justify a special chapter-heading. It is
inevitable, but not to be regretted, if some of the new lectures
unite the characteristics of more than one of these groups.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4620

   I have also given expression to
the dependence of these new lectures on the
Introductory
Lectures
by giving them a numbering continuous with theirs. The
first lecture in this volume is accordingly called No. XXIX. Like
their predecessors, they offer the professional analyst little that
is new; they are addressed to the multitude of educated people to
whom we may perhaps attribute a benevolent, even though cautious,
interest in the characteristics and discoveries of the young
science. This time once again it has been my chief aim to make no
sacrifice to an appearance of being simple, complete or
rounded-off, not to disguise problems and not to deny the existence
of gaps and uncertainties. In no other field of scientific work
would it be necessary to boast of such modest intentions. They are
universally regarded as self-evident; the public expects nothing
else. No reader of an account of astronomy will feel disappointed
and contemptuous of the science if he is shown the frontiers at
which our knowledge of the universe melts into haziness. Only in
psychology is it otherwise. There mankind’s constitutional
unfitness for scientific research comes fully into the open. What
people seem to demand of psychology is not progress in knowledge,
but satisfactions of some other sort; every unsolved problem, every
admitted uncertainty is made into a reproach against it.

   Whoever cares for the science of
mental life must accept these injustices along with it.

FREUD
 

VIENNA
,
Summer
1932

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4621

LECTURE XXIX

REVISION OF THE THEORY OF DREAMS

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - If, after an interval of more than fifteen
years, I have brought you together again to discuss with you what
novelties, and what improvements it may be, the intervening time
has introduced into psycho-analysis, it is right and fitting from
more than one point of view that we should turn our attention first
to the position of the theory of dreams. It occupies a special
place in the history of psycho-analysis and marks a turning-point;
it was with it that analysis took the step from being a
psychotherapeutic procedure to being a depth-psychology. Since
then, too, the theory of dreams has remained what is most
characteristic and peculiar about the young science, something to
which there is no counterpart in the rest of our knowledge, a
stretch of new country, which has been reclaimed from popular
beliefs and mysticism. The strangeness of the assertions it was
obliged to put forward has made it play the part of a shibboleth,
the use of which decided who could become a follower of
psycho-analysis and to whom it remained forever incomprehensible. I
myself found it a sheet-anchor during those difficult times when
the unrecognized facts of the neuroses used to confuse my
inexperienced judgement. Whenever I began to have doubts of the
correctness of my wavering conclusions, the successful
transformation of a senseless and muddled dream into a logical and
intelligible mental process in the dreamer would renew my
confidence of being on the right track.

   It is therefore of special
interest to us, in the particular instance of the theory of dreams,
on the one hand to follow the vicissitudes through which
psycho-analysis has passed during this interval, and on the other
hand to learn what advances it has made in being understood and
appreciated by the contemporary world. I may tell you at once that
you will be disappointed in both these directions.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4622

   Let us look through the volumes
of the
Internationale Zeitschrift für (ärztliche)
Psychoanalyse
, in which, since 1913, the authoritative writings
in our field of work have been brought together. In the earlier
volumes you will find a recurrent sectional heading ‘On
Dream-Interpretation’, containing numerous contributions on
various points in the theory of dreams. But the further you go the
rarer do these contributions become, and finally the sectional
heading disappears completely. The analysts behave as though they
had no more to say about dreams, as though there was nothing more
to be added to the theory of dreams. But if you ask how much of
dream-interpretation has been accepted by outsiders - by the many
psychiatrists and psychotherapists who warm their pot of soup at
our fire (incidentally without being very grateful for our
hospitality), by what are described as educated people, who are in
the habit of assimilating the more striking findings of science, by
the literary men and by the public at large - the reply gives
little cause for satisfaction. A few formulas have become generally
familiar, among them some that we have never put forward - such as
the thesis that all dreams are of a sexual nature - but really
important things like the fundamental distinction between the
manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, the
realization that the wish-fulfilling function of dreams is not
contradicted by anxiety-dreams, the impossibility of interpreting a
dream unless one has the dreamer’s associations to it at
one’s disposal, and, above all, the discovery that what is
essential in dreams is the process of the dream-work - all this
still seems about as foreign to general awareness as it was thirty
years ago. I am in a position to say this, since in the course of
that period I have received innumerable letters whose writers
present their dreams for interpretation or ask for information
about the nature of dreams and who declare that they have read my
Interpretation of Dreams
, though in every sentence they
betray their lack of understanding of our theory of dreams. But all
this shall not deter us from once more giving a connected account
of what we know about dreams. You will recall that last time we
devoted a whole number of lectures to showing how we came to
understand this hitherto unexplained mental phenomenon.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4623

   Let us suppose, then, that
someone - a patient in analysis, for instance - tells us one of his
dreams. We shall assume that in this way he is making us one of the
communications to which he has pledged himself by the fact of
having started an analytic treatment. It is, to be sure, a
communication made by inappropriate means, for dreams are not in
themselves social utterances, not a means of giving information.
Nor, indeed, do we understand what the dreamer was trying to say to
us, and he himself is equally in the dark. And now we have to make
a quick decision. On the one hand, the dream may be, as
non-analytic doctors assure us, a sign that the dreamer has slept
badly, that not every part of his brain has come to rest equally,
that some areas of it, under the influence of unknown stimuli,
endeavoured to go on working but were only able to do so in a very
incomplete fashion. If that is the case, we shall be right to
concern ourselves no further with the product of a nocturnal
disturbance which has no psychical value: for what could we expect
to derive from investigating it that would be of use for our
purposes? Or on the other hand - but it is plain that we have from
the first decided otherwise. We have - quite arbitrarily, it must
be admitted - made the assumption, adopted as a postulate, that
even this unintelligible dream must be a fully valid psychical act,
with sense and worth, which we can use in analysis like any other
communication. Only the outcome of our experiment can show whether
we are right. If we succeed in turning the dream into an utterance
of value of that kind, we shall evidently have a prospect of
learning something new and of receiving communications of a sort
which would otherwise be inaccessible to us.

   Now, however, the difficulties of
our task and the enigmas of our subject rise before our eyes. How
do we propose to transform the dream into a normal communication
and how do we explain the fact that some of the patient’s
utterances have assumed a form that is unintelligible both to him
and to us?

   As you see, Ladies and Gentlemen,
this time I am taking the path not of a genetic but of a dogmatic
exposition. Our first step is to establish our new attitude to the
problem of dreams by introducing two new concepts and names. What
has been called the dream we shall describe as the text of the
dream or the
manifest
dream, and what we are looking for,
what we suspect, so to say, of lying behind the dream, we shall
describe as the
latent
dream-thoughts. Having done this, we
can express our two tasks as follows. We have to transform the
manifest dream into the latent one, and to explain how, in the
dreamer’s mind, the latter has become the former. The first
portion is a
practical
task, for which dream-interpretation
is responsible; it calls for a technique. The second portion is a
theoretical
task, whose business it is to explain the
hypothetical dream-work; and it can only be a theory. Both of them,
the technique of dream-interpretation and the theory of the
dream-work, have to be newly created.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4624

   With which of the two, then,
shall we start? With the technique of dream-interpretation, I
think; it will present a more concrete appearance and make a more
vivid impression on you.

   Well then, the patient has told
us a dream, which we are to interpret. We have listened passively,
without putting our powers of reflection into action. What do we do
next? We decide to concern ourselves as little as possible with
what we have heard, with the
manifest
dream. Of course this
manifest dream exhibits all sorts of characteristics which are not
entirely a matter of indifference to us. It may be coherent,
smoothly constructed like a literary composition, or it may be
confused to the point of unintelligibility, almost like a delirium;
it may contain absurd elements or jokes and apparently witty
conclusions; it may seem to the dreamer clear and sharp or obscure
and hazy; its pictures may exhibit the complete sensory strength of
perceptions or may be shadowy like an indistinct mist; the most
diverse characteristics may be present in the same dream,
distributed over various portions of it; the dream, finally, may
show an indifferent emotional tone or be accompanied by feelings of
the strongest joy or distress. You must not suppose that we think
nothing of this endless diversity in manifest dreams. We shall come
back to it later and we shall find a great deal in it that we can
make use of in our interpretations. But for the moment we will
disregard it and follow the main road that leads to the
interpretation of dreams. That is to say, we ask the dreamer, too,
to free himself from the impression of the manifest dream, to
divert his attention from the dream as a whole on to the separate
portions of its content and to report to us in succession
everything that occurs to him in relation to each of these portions
- what associations present themselves to him if he focuses on each
of them separately.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis