Freud - Complete Works (748 page)

4625

   That is a curious technique, is
it not? - not the usual way of dealing with a communication or
utterance. And no doubt you guess that behind this procedure there
are assumptions which have not yet been expressly stated. But let
us proceed. In what order are we to get the patient to take up the
portions of his dream? There are various possibilities open to us.
We can simply follow the chronological order in which they appeared
in the account of the dream. That is what may be called the
strictest, classical method. Or we can direct the dreamer to begin
by looking out for the ‘day’s residues’ in the
dream; for experience has taught us that almost every dream
includes the remains of a memory or an allusion to some event (or
often to several events) of the day before the dream, and, if we
follow these connections, we often arrive with one blow at the
transition from the apparently far remote dream-world to the real
life of the patient. Or, again, we may tell him to start with those
elements of the dream’s content which strike him by their
special clarity and sensory strength; for we know that he will find
it particularly easy to get associations to these. It makes no
difference by which of these methods we approach the associations
we are in search of.

   And next, we obtain these
associations. What they bring us is of the most various kinds:
memories from the day before, the ‘dream-day’, and from
times long past, reflections, discussions, with arguments for and
against, confessions and enquiries. Some of them the patient pours
out; when he comes to others he is held up for a time. Most of them
show a clear connection to some element of the dream; no wonder,
since those elements were their starting-point. But it also
sometimes happens that the patient introduces them with these
words: ‘This seems to me to have nothing at all to do with
the dream, but I tell it you because it occurs to me.’

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   If one listens to these copious
associations, one soon notices that they have more in common with
the content of the dream than their starting-points alone. They
throw a surprising light on all the different parts of the dream,
fill in gaps between them, and make their strange juxtapositions
intelligible. In the end one is bound to become clear about the
relation between them and the dream’s content. The dream is
seen to be an abbreviated selection from the associations, a
selection made, it is true, according to rules that we have not yet
understood: the elements of the dream are like representatives
chosen by election from a mass of people. There can be no doubt
that by our technique we have got hold of something for which the
dream is a substitute and in which lies the dream’s psychical
value, but which no longer exhibits its puzzling peculiarities, its
strangeness and its confusion.

   Let there be no misunderstanding,
however. The associations to the dream are not yet the latent
dream-thoughts. The latter are contained in the associations like
an alkali in the mother liquor, but yet not quite completely
contained in them. On the one hand, the associations give us far
more than we need for formulating the latent dream-thoughts -
namely all the explanations, transitions, and connections which the
patient’s intellect is bound to produce in the course of his
approach to the dream-thoughts. On the other hand, an association
often comes to a stop precisely before the genuine dream-thought:
it has only come near to it and has only had contact with it
through allusions. At that point we intervene on our own; we fill
in the hints, draw undeniable conclusions, and give explicit
utterance to what the patient has only touched on in his
associations. This sounds as though we allowed our ingenuity and
caprice to play with the material put at our disposal by the
dreamer and as though we misused it in order to interpret
into
his utterances what cannot be interpreted
from
them. Nor is it easy to show the legitimacy of our procedure in an
abstract description of it. But you have only to carry out a
dream-analysis yourselves or study a good account of one in our
literature and you will be convinced of the cogent manner in which
interpretative work like this proceeds.

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   If in general and primarily we
are dependent, in interpreting dreams, on the dreamer’s
associations, yet in relation to certain elements of the
dream’s content we adopt a quite independent attitude,
chiefly because we have to, because as a rule associations fail to
materialize in their case. We noticed at an early stage that it is
always in connection with the same elements that this happens; they
are not very numerous, and repeated experience has taught us that
they are to be regarded and interpreted as
symbols
of
something else. As contrasted with the other dream-elements, a
fixed meaning may be attributed to them, which, however, need not
be unambiguous and whose range is determined by special rules with
which we are unfamiliar. Since
we
know how to translate
these symbols and the dreamer does not, in spite of having used
them himself, it may happen that the sense of a dream may at once
become clear to us as soon as we have heard the text of the dream,
even before we have made any efforts at interpreting it, while it
still remains an enigma to the dreamer himself. But I have said so
much to you in my earlier lectures about symbolism, our knowledge
of it and the problems it poses us, that I need not repeat it
to-day.

   That, then, is our method of
interpreting dreams. The first and justifiable question is:
‘Can we interpret
all
dreams by its help?’ And
the answer is: ‘No, not all; but so many that we feel
confident in the serviceability and correctness of the
procedure.’ ‘But why not all?’ The answer to this
has something important to teach us, which at once introduces us
into the psychical determinants of the formation of dreams:
‘Because the work of interpreting dreams is carried out
against a resistance, which varies between trivial dimensions and
invincibility (at least so far as the strength of our present
methods reaches).’ It is impossible during our work to
overlook the manifestations of this resistance. At some points the
associations are given without hesitation and the first or second
idea that occurs to the patient brings an explanation. At other
points there is a stoppage and the patient hesitates before
bringing out an association, and, if so, we often have to listen to
a long chain of ideas before receiving anything that helps us to
understand the dream. We are certainly right in thinking that the
longer and more roundabout the chain of associations the stronger
the resistance. We can detect the same influence at work in the
forgetting of dreams. It happens often enough that a patient,
despite all his efforts, cannot remember one of his dreams. But
after we have been able in the course of a piece of analytic work
to get rid of a difficulty which had been disturbing his relation
to the analysis, the forgotten dream suddenly re-emerges. Two other
observations are also in place here. It very frequently comes about
that, to begin with, a portion of a dream is omitted and added
afterwards as an addendum. This is to be regarded as an attempt to
forget that portion. Experience shows that it is that particular
piece which is the most important; there was a greater resistance,
we suppose, in the path of communicating it than the other parts of
the dream. Furthermore, we often find that a dreamer endeavours to
prevent himself from forgetting his dreams by fixing them in
writing immediately after waking up. We can tell him that that is
no use. For the resistance from which he has extorted the
preservation of the text of the dream will then be displaced on to
its associations and will make the manifest dream inaccessible to
interpretation. In view of these facts we need not feel surprised
if a further increase in the resistance suppresses the associations
altogether and thus brings the interpretation of the dream to
nothing.

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   From all this we infer that the
resistance which we come across in the work of interpreting dreams
must also have had a share in their origin. We can actually
distinguish between dreams that arose under a slight and under a
high pressure of resistance. But this pressure varies as well from
place to place within one and the same dream; it is responsible for
the gaps, obscurities and confusions which may interrupt the
continuity of even the finest of dreams.

   But what is creating the
resistance and against what is it aimed? Well, the resistance is
the surest sign to us of a conflict. There must be a force here
which is seeking to express something and another which is striving
to prevent its expression. What comes about in consequence as a
manifest dream may combine all the decisions into which this
struggle between two trends has been condensed. At one point one of
these forces may have succeeded in putting through what it wanted
to say, while at another point it is the opposing agency which has
managed to blot out the intended communication completely or to
replace it by something that reveals not a trace of it. The
commonest and most characteristic cases of dream-construction are
those in which the conflict has ended in a compromise, so that the
communicating agency has, it is true, been able to say what it
wanted but not in the way it wanted - only in a softened down,
distorted and unrecognized form. If, then, dreams do not give a
faithful picture of the dream-thoughts and if the work of
interpretation is required in order to bridge the gap between them,
that is the outcome of the opposing, inhibiting and restricting
agency which we have inferred from our perception of the resistance
while we interpret dreams. So long as we studied dreams as isolated
phenomena independent of the psychical structures akin to them, we
named this agency the
censor of dreams
.

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   You have long been aware that
this censorship is not an institution peculiar to dream-life. You
know that the conflict between the two psychical agencies, which we
- inaccurately - describe as the ‘unconscious
repressed’ and the ‘conscious’, dominates our
whole mental life and that the resistance against the
interpretation of dreams, the sign of the dream-censorship, is
nothing other than the resistance due to repression by which the
two agencies are separated. You know too that the conflict between
these two agencies may under certain conditions produce other
psychical structures which, like dreams, are the outcome of
compromises; and you will not expect me to repeat to you here
everything that was contained in my introduction to the theory of
the neuroses in order to demonstrate to you what we know of the
determinants of the formation of such compromises. You have
realized that the dream is a pathological product, the first member
of the class which includes hysterical symptoms, obsessions and
delusions, but that it is distinguished from the others by its
transitoriness and by its occurrence under conditions which are
part of normal life. For let us bear firmly in mind that, as was
already pointed out by Aristotle, dream life is the way in which
our mind works during the state of sleep. The state of sleep
involves a turning-away from the real external world, and there we
have the necessary condition for the development of a psychosis.
The most careful study of the severe psychoses will not reveal to
us a single feature that is more characteristic of those
pathological conditions. In psychoses, however, the turning-away
from reality is brought about in two kinds of way: either by the
unconscious repressed becoming excessively strong so that it
overwhelms the conscious, which is attached to reality, or because
reality has become so intolerably distressing that the threatened
ego throws itself into the arms of the unconscious instinctual
forces in a desperate revolt. The harmless dream-psychosis is the
result of a withdrawal from the external world which is consciously
willed and only temporary, and it disappears when relations to the
external world are resumed. During the isolation of the sleeping
individual an alteration in the distribution of his psychical
energy also sets in; a part of the expenditure on repression, which
is normally required in order to hold the unconscious down, can be
saved, for if the unconscious makes use of its relative liberation
for active purposes, it finds its path to motility closed and the
only path open to it is the harmless one leading to hallucinatory
satisfaction. Now, therefore, a dream can be formed; but the fact
of the dream-censorship shows that even during sleep enough of the
resistance due to repression is retained.

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   Here we are presented with a
means of answering the question of whether dreams have a function
too, whether they are entrusted with any useful achievement. The
condition of rest free from stimulus, which the state of sleep
wishes to establish, is threatened from three directions: in a
relatively accidental manner by external stimuli during sleep, and
by interests of the previous day which cannot be broken off, and in
an unavoidable manner by unsated repressed instinctual impulses
which are on the watch for an opportunity of finding expression. In
consequence of the diminishing of repressions at night there would
be a risk that the rest afforded by sleep would be interrupted
whenever an instigation from outside or from inside succeeded in
linking up with an unconscious instinctual source. The process of
dreaming allows the product of a collaboration of this kind to find
an outlet in a harmless hallucinatory experience and in that way
assures a continuation of sleep. The fact that a dream occasionally
awakens the sleeper, to the accompaniment of a generation of
anxiety, is no contradiction of this function but rather, perhaps,
a signal that the watchman regards the situation as too dangerous
and no longer feels able to control it. And very often then, while
we are still asleep, a consolation occurs to us which seeks to
prevent our waking up: ‘But after all it’s only a
dream!’