Freud - Complete Works (750 page)

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4636

   In a very interesting series of
experiments, Herbert Silberer has shown that one can catch the
dream-work red-handed, as it were, in the act of turning abstract
thoughts into visual pictures. If he tried to force himself to do
intellectual work while he was in a state of fatigue and
drowsiness, the thought would often vanish and be replaced by a
vision, which was obviously a substitute for it.

   Here is a simple example.
‘I thought’, says Silberer, ‘of having to revise
an uneven passage in an essay.’ The vision: ‘I saw
myself planing a piece of wood.’ It often happened during
these experiments that the content of the vision was not the
thought that was being dealt with but his own subjective state
while he was making the effort - the state instead of the object.
This is described by Silberer as a ‘functional
phenomenon’. An example will show you at once what is meant.
The author was endeavouring to compare the opinions of two
philosophers on a particular question. But in his sleepy condition
one of these opinions kept on escaping him and finally he had a
vision that he was asking for information from a disobliging
secretary who was bent over his writing-table and who began by
disregarding him and then gave him a disagreeable and uncomplying
look. The conditions under which the experiments were made probably
themselves explain why the vision that was induced represented so
often an event of self-observation.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4637

   We have not yet finished with
symbols. There are some which we believed we recognized but which
nevertheless worried us because we could not explain how
this
particular symbol had come to have
that
particular meaning. In such cases confirmations from elsewhere -
from philology, folklore, mythology or ritual - were bound to be
especially welcome. An instance of this sort is the symbol of an
overcoat or cloak. We have said that in a woman’s dreams this
stands for a man. I hope it will impress you when you hear that
Theodor Reik (1920) gives us this information: ‘During the
extremely ancient bridal ceremonial of the Bedouins, the bridegroom
covers the bride with a special cloak known as "Aba" and
speaks the following ritual words: "Henceforth none save I
shall cover thee!" (Quoted from Robert Eisler). We have also
found several fresh symbols, at least two of which I will tell you
of. According to Abraham (1922) a spider in dreams is a symbol of
the mother, but of the
phallic
mother, of whom we are
afraid; so that the fear of spiders expresses dread of
mother-incest and horror of the female genitals. You know, perhaps,
that the mythological creation, Medusa’s head, can be traced
back to the same
motif
of fright at castration. The other
symbol I want to talk to you about is that of the
bridge
,
which has been explained by Ferenczi (1921 and 1922). First it
means the male organ, which unites the two parents in sexual
intercourse; but afterwards it develops further meanings which are
derived from this first one. In so far as it is thanks to the male
organ that we are able to come into the world at all, out of the
amniotic fluid, a bridge becomes the crossing from the other world
(the unborn state, the womb) to this world (life); and, since men
also picture death as a return to the womb (to the water), a bridge
also acquires the meaning of something that leads to death, and
finally, at a further remove from its original sense, it stands for
transitions or changes in condition generally. It tallies with
this, accordingly, if a woman who has not overcome her wish to be a
man has frequent dreams of bridges that are too short to reach the
further shore.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4638

   In the manifest content of dreams
we very often find pictures and situations recalling familiar
themes in fairy tales, legends and myths. The interpretation of
such dreams thus throws a light on the original interests which
created these themes, though we must at the same time not forget,
of course, the change in meaning by which this material has been
affected in the course of time. Our work of interpretation
uncovers, so to say, the raw material, which must often enough be
described as sexual in the widest sense, but has found the most
varied application in later adaptations. Derivations of this kind
are apt to bring down on us the wrath of all non-analytically
schooled workers, as though we were seeking to deny or undervalue
everything that was later erected on the original basis.
Nevertheless, such discoveries are instructive and interesting. The
same is true of tracing back the origin of particular themes in
plastic art, as, for instance, when M. J. Eisler (1919), following
indications in his patients’ dreams, gave an analytic
interpretation of the youth playing with a little boy represented
in the Hermes of Praxiteles. And lastly I cannot resist pointing
out how often light is thrown by the interpretation of dreams on
mythological themes in particular. Thus, for instance, the legend
of the Labyrinth can be recognized as a representation of anal
birth: the twisting paths are the bowels and Ariadne’s thread
is the umbilical cord.

   The methods of representation
employed by the dream-work - fascinating material, scarcely capable
of exhaustion - have been made more and more familiar to us by
closer study. I will give you a few examples of them. Thus, for
instance, dreams represent the relation of frequency by a
multiplication of similar things. Here is a young girl’s
remarkable dream. She dreamt she came into a great hall and found
some one in it sitting on a chair; this was repeated six or eight
times or more, but each time it was her father. This is easy to
understand when we discover, from accessory details in the
interpretation, that this room stood for the womb. The dream then
becomes equivalent to the phantasy, familiarly found in girls, of
having met their rather already during their intra-uterine life
when he visited the womb while their mother was pregnant. You
should not be confused by the fact that something is reversed in
the dream - that her father’s ‘coming-in’ is
displaced on to herself; incidentally, this has a special meaning
of its own as well. The multiplication of the figure of the father
can only express the fact that the event in question occurred
repeatedly. After all, it must be allowed that the dream is not
taking very much on itself in expressing frequency by multiplicity.
It has only needed to go back to the original significance of the
former word; to-day it means to us a repetition in time, but it is
derived from an accumulation in space. In general, indeed, where it
is possible, the dream-work changes temporal relations into spatial
ones and represents them as such. In a dream, for instance, one may
see a scene between two people who look very small and a long way
off, as though one were seeing them through the wrong end of a pair
of opera-glasses. Here, both the smallness and the remoteness in
space have the same significance: what is meant is remoteness in
time
and we are to understand that the scene is from the
remote past.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4639

   Again, you may remember that in
my earlier lectures I already told you (and illustrated the fact by
examples) that we had learnt to make use for our interpretations
even of the purely
formal
features of the manifest dream -
that is, to transform them into material coming from the latent
dream-thoughts. As you already know, all dreams that are dreamt in
a single night belong in a single context. But it is not a matter
of indifference whether these dreams appear to the dreamer as a
continuum or whether he divides them into several parts and into
how many. The number of such parts often corresponds to an equal
number of separate focal points in the structural formation of the
latent dream-thoughts or to contending trends in the
dreamer’s mental life, each of which finds a dominant, even
though never an exclusive, expression in one particular part of the
dream. A short introductory dream and a longer main dream following
it often stand in the relation of protasis and apodosis, of which a
very clear instance will be found in the old lectures. A dream
which is described by the dreamer as ‘somehow
interpolated’ will actually correspond to a dependent clause
in the dream-thoughts. Franz Alexander (1925) has shown in a study
on pairs of dreams that it not infrequently happens that two dreams
in one night share the carrying-out of the dream’s task by
producing a wish-fulfilment in two stages if they are taken
together, though each dream separately would not effect that
result. Suppose, for instance, that the dream-wish had as its
content some illicit action in regard to a particular person. Then
in the first dream the person will appear undisguised, but the
action will be only timidly hinted at. The second dream will behave
differently. The action will be named without disguise, but the
person will either be made unrecognizable or replaced by someone
indifferent. This, you will admit, gives one an impression of
actual cunning. Another and similar relation between the two
members of a pair of dreams is found where one represents a
punishment and the other the sinful wish-fulfilment. It amounts to
this: ‘if one accepts the punishment for it, one can go on to
allow oneself the forbidden thing.’

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4640

   I cannot detain you any longer
over such minor discoveries or over the discussions relating to the
employment of dream-interpretation in the work of analysis. I feel
sure you are impatient to hear what changes have been made in our
fundamental views on the nature and significance of dreams. I have
already warned you that precisely on this there is little to report
to you. The most disputed point in the whole theory was no doubt
the assertion that all dreams are the fulfilments of wishes. The
inevitable and ever recurring objection raised by the layman that
there are nevertheless so many anxiety-dreams was, I think I may
say, completely disposed of in my earlier lectures. With the
division into wishful dreams, anxiety-dreams and punishment dreams,
we have kept our theory intact.

   Punishment-dreams, too, are
fulfilments of wishes, though not of wishes of the instinctual
impulses but of those of the critical, censoring and punishing
agency in the mind. If we have a pure punishment-dream before us,
an easy mental operation will enable us to restore the wishful
dream to which the punishment-dream was the correct rejoinder and
which, owing to this repudiation, was replaced as the manifest
dream. As you know, Ladies and Gentlemen, the study of dreams was
what first helped us to understand the neuroses, and you will find
it natural that our knowledge of the neuroses was later able to
influence our view of dreams. As you will hear, we have been
obliged to postulate the existence in the mind of a special
critical and prohibiting agency which we have named the
‘super-ego’. Since recognizing that the censorship of
dreams is also a function of this agency, we have been led to
examine the part played by the super-ego in the construction of
dreams more carefully.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4641

   Only two serious difficulties
have arisen against the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams. A
discussion of them leads far afield and has not yet, indeed,
brought us to any wholly satisfying conclusion.

   The first of these difficulties
is presented in the fact that people who have experienced a shock,
a severe psychical trauma - such as happened so often during the
war and such as affords the basis for traumatic hysteria - are
regularly taken back in their dreams into the traumatic situation.
According to our hypotheses about the function of dreams this
should not occur. What wishful impulse could be satisfied by
harking back in this way to this exceedingly distressing traumatic
experience? It is hard to guess.

   We meet with the second of these
facts almost every day in the course of our analytic work; and it
does not imply such an important objection as the other does. One
of the tasks of psycho-analysis, as you know, is to lift the veil
of amnesia which hides the earliest years of childhood and to bring
to conscious memory the manifestations of early infantile sexual
life which are contained in them. Now these first sexual
experiences of a child are linked to painful impressions of
anxiety, prohibition, disappointment and punishment. We can
understand their having been repressed; but, that being so, we
cannot understand how it is that they have such free access to
dream-life, that they provide the pattern for so many
dream-phantasies and that dreams are filled with reproductions of
these scenes from childhood and with allusions to them. It must be
admitted that their unpleasurable character and the
dream-work’s wish-fulfilling purpose seem far from mutually
compatible. But it may be that in this case we are magnifying the
difficulty. After all, these same infantile experiences have
attached to them all the imperishable, unfulfilled instinctual
wishes which throughout life provide the energy for the
construction of dreams, and to which we may no doubt credit the
possibility, in their mighty uprush, of forcing to the surface,
along with the rest, the material of distressing events. And on the
other hand the manner and form in which this material is reproduced
shows unmistakably the efforts of the dream-work directed to
denying the unpleasure by means of distortion and to transforming
disappointment into attainment.