Freud - Complete Works (749 page)

   This was what I wanted to say to
you, Ladies and Gentlemen, about dream-interpretation, whose task
it is to lead the way from the manifest dream to the latent
dream-thoughts. When this has been achieved, interest in a dream,
so far as practical analysis is concerned, is for the most part at
an end. We add the communication we have received in the form of a
dream to the rest of the patient’s communications and proceed
with the analysis. We, however, have an interest in dwelling a
little longer on the dream. We are tempted to study the process by
which the latent dream-thoughts were transformed into the manifest
dream. We call this the ‘dream-work’. As you will
recall, I described it in such detail in my earlier lectures that I
can restrict my present survey to the most concise summary.

   The process of the dream-work,
then, is something entirely new and strange, nothing resembling
which was known before. It has given us our first glimpse of the
processes which take place in the unconscious system and has shown
us that they are quite other than what we know from our conscious
thinking and are bound to appear to the latter preposterous and
incorrect. The importance of this finding was then increased by the
discovery that in the construction of neurotic symptoms the same
mechanisms (we do not venture to say ‘processes of
thought’) are operative as those which have transformed the
latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream.

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   In what follows I shall not be
able to avoid a schematic method of exposition. Let us assume that
in a particular case we have before us all the latent thoughts,
charged with a greater or less amount of affect, by which the
manifest dream has been replaced after its interpretation has been
completed. We shall then be struck by one difference among these
latent thoughts, and that difference will take us a long way.
Almost all these dream-thoughts are recognized by the dreamer or
acknowledged by him; he admits that he has thought this, now or at
some other time, or that he might have thought it. There is only
one single thought that he refuses to accept; it is strange to him
or even perhaps repellent; he may possibly reject it with
passionate feeling. It now becomes evident to us that the other
thoughts are portions of a conscious, or, more accurately, a
preconscious train of thinking. They might have been thought in
waking life too, and indeed they were probably formed during the
previous day. This one repudiated thought, however, or, properly
speaking, this one impulse, is a child of night; it belongs to the
dreamer’s unconscious and on that account it is repudiated
and rejected by him. It had to wait for the nightly relaxation of
repression in order to arrive at any kind of expression. And in any
case this expression is a weakened, distorted and disguised one;
without our work of dream-interpretation we should not have found
it. This unconscious impulse has to thank its link with the other,
unobjectionable, dream-thoughts for the opportunity of slipping
past the barrier of the censorship in an inconspicuous disguise. On
the other hand, the preconscious dream-thoughts have to thank this
same link for the power to occupy mental life during sleep as well.
For there is no doubt about it: this unconscious impulse is the
true creator of the dream; it is what produces the psychical energy
for the dream’s construction. Like any other instinctual
impulse, it cannot strive for anything other than its own
satisfaction; and our experience in interpreting dreams shows us
too that that is the sense of all dreaming. In every dream an
instinctual wish has to be represented as fulfilled. The
shutting-off of mental life from reality at night and the
regression to primitive mechanisms which this makes possible enable
this wished-for instinctual satisfaction to be experienced in a
hallucinatory manner as occurring in the present. As a result of
this same regression, ideas are transformed in the dream into
visual pictures: the latent dream-thoughts, that is to say, are
dramatized and illustrated.

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   This piece of the dream-work
gives us information about some of the most striking and peculiar
features of dreams. I will repeat the course of events in
dream-formation. As an introduction: the wish to sleep and
intentional turning away from the external world. Next, two
consequences of this for the mental apparatus: first, the
possibility for older and more primitive methods of working to
emerge in it - regression; secondly, the lowering of the resistance
due to repression which weighs down upon the unconscious. As a
result of this last factor the possibility arises for the formation
of a dream and this is taken advantage of by the precipitating
causes, the internal and external stimuli which have become active.
The dream which originates in this way is already a
compromise-structure. It has a double function; on the one hand it
is ego-syntonic, since, by getting rid of the stimuli which are
interfering with sleep, it serves the wish to sleep; on the other
hand it allows a repressed instinctual impulse to obtain the
satisfaction that is possible in these circumstances, in the form
of the hallucinated fulfilment of a wish. The whole process of
forming a dream which is permitted by the sleeping ego is, however,
subject to the condition of the censorship, which is exercised by
the residue of the repression still in operation. I cannot present
the process more simply: it is not more simple. But I can proceed
now with my description of the dream-work.

   Let us go back once more to the
latent dream-thoughts. Their most powerful element is the repressed
instinctual impulse which has created in them an expression for
itself on the basis of the presence of chance stimuli and by
transference on to the day’s residues - though an expression
that is toned down and disguised. Like every instinctual impulse,
it too presses for satisfaction by action; but its path to motility
is blocked by the physiological regulations implied in the state of
sleep; it is compelled to take the backwards course in the
direction of perception and to be content with a hallucinated
satisfaction. The latent dream-thoughts are thus transformed into a
collection of sensory images and visual scenes. It is as they
travel on this course that what seems to us so novel and so strange
occurs to them. All the linguistic instruments by which we express
the subtler relations of thought - the conjunctions and
prepositions, the changes in declension and conjugation - are
dropped, because there are no means of representing them; just as
in a primitive language without any grammar, only the raw material
of thought is expressed and abstract terms are taken back to the
concrete ones that are at their basis. What is left over after this
may well appear disconnected. The copious employment of symbols,
which have become alien to conscious thinking, for representing
certain objects and processes is in harmony alike with the archaic
regression in the mental apparatus and with the demands of the
censorship.

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   But other changes made in the
elements of the dream-thoughts go far beyond this. Such of those
elements as allow any point of contact to be found between them are
condensed
into new unities. In the process of transforming
the thoughts into pictures, preference is unmistakably given to
such as permit of this putting-together, this condensation; it is
as though a force were at work which was subjecting the material to
compression and concentration. As a result of condensation, one
element in the manifest dream may correspond to numerous elements
in the latent dream-thoughts; but, conversely too, one element in
the dream-thoughts may be represented by several images in the
dream.

   Still more remarkable is the
other process -
displacement
or shifting of accent - which
in conscious thinking we come across only as faulty reasoning or as
means for a joke. The different ideas in the dream-thoughts are,
indeed, not all of equal value; they are cathected with quotas of
affect of varying magnitude and are correspondingly judged to be
important and deserving of interest to a greater or less degree. In
the dream-work these ideas are separated from the affects attaching
to them. The affects are dealt with independently; they may be
displaced on to something else, they may be retained, they may
undergo alterations, or they may not appear in the dream at all.
The importance of the ideas that have been stripped of their affect
returns in the dream as sensory strength in the dream-pictures; but
we observe that this accent has passed over from important elements
to indifferent ones. Thus something that played only a minor part
in the dream-thoughts seems to be pushed into the foreground in the
dream as the main thing, while, on the contrary, what was the
essence of the dream-thoughts finds only passing and indistinct
representation in the dream. No other part of the dream-work is so
much responsible for making the dream strange and incomprehensible
to the dreamer. Displacement is the principal means used in the
dream-distortion
to which the dream-thoughts must submit
under the influence of the censorship.

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   After these influences have been
brought to bear upon the dream-thoughts the dream is almost
complete. A further, somewhat variable, factor also comes into play
- known as ‘secondary revision’ - after the dream has
been presented before consciousness as an object of perception. At
that point we treat it as we are in general accustomed to treat the
contents of our perception: we fill in gaps and introduce
connections, and in doing so are often guilty of gross
misunderstandings. But this activity, which might be described as a
rationalizing one and which at best provides the dream with a
smooth façade that cannot fit its true content, may also be
omitted or only be expressed to a very modest degree - in which
case the dream will display all its rents and cracks openly. It
must not be forgotten, on the other hand, that the dream-work does
not always operate with equal energy either; it often restricts
itself to certain portions of the dream-thoughts only and others of
them are allowed to appear in the dream unaltered. In such cases an
impression is given of the dream having carried out the most
delicate and complex intellectual operations, of its having
speculated, made jokes, arrived at decisions and solved problems,
whereas all this is a product of our normal mental activity, may
have been performed equally well during the day before the dream as
during the night, has nothing to do with the dream-work and brings
nothing to light that is characteristic of dreams. Nor is it
superfluous to insist once more on the contrast within the
dream-thoughts themselves between the unconscious instinctual
impulse and the day’s residues. While the latter exhibit all
the multiplicity of our mental acts, the former, which becomes the
motive force proper of the forming of the dream, finds its outlet
invariably in the fulfilment of a wish.

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   I could have told you all this
fifteen years ago, and indeed I believe I did in fact tell it you
then. And now let me bring together such changes and new
discoveries as may have been made during the interval. I have said
already that I am afraid you will find that it amounts to very
little, and you will fail to understand why I obliged you to listen
to the same thing twice over, and obliged myself to say it. But
fifteen years have passed meanwhile and I hope that this will be my
easiest way of re-establishing contact with you. Moreover, these
are such fundamental things, of such decisive importance for
understanding psycho-analysis, that one may be glad to hear them a
second time, and it is in itself worth knowing that they have
remained so much the same for fifteen years.

   In the literature of this period
you will of course find a large quantity of confirmatory material
and of presentation of details, of which I intend only to give you
samples. I shall also, incidentally, be able to tell you a few
things that were in fact already known earlier. What is in question
is principally the symbolism in dreams and the other methods of
representation in them. Now listen to this. Only quite a short
while ago the medical faculty in an American University refused to
allow psycho-analysis the status of a science, on the ground that
it did not admit of any experimental proof. They might have raised
the same objection to astronomy; indeed, experimentation with the
heavenly bodies is particularly difficult. There one has to fall
back on observation. Nevertheless, some Viennese investigators have
actually made a beginning with experimental confirmation of our
dream symbolism. As long ago as in 1912 a Dr. Schrötter found
that if instructions to dream of sexual matters are given to deeply
hypnotized subjects, then in the dream that is thus provoked the
sexual material emerges with its place taken by the symbols that
are familiar to us. For instance, a woman was told to dream of
sexual intercourse with a female friend. In her dream this friend
appeared with a travelling-bag on which was pasted the label
‘Ladies Only’. Still more impressive experiments were
carried out by Betlheim and Hartmann in 1924. They worked with
patients suffering from what is known as the Korsakoff confusional
psychosis. They told these patients stories of a grossly sexual
kind and observed the distortions which appeared when the patients
were instructed to reproduce what they had been told. Once more
there emerged the symbols for sexual organs and sexual intercourse
that are familiar to us - among them the symbol of the staircase
which, as the writers justly remark, could never have been reached
by a conscious wish to distort.