Freud - Complete Works (801 page)

   Having now decided upon the
topographical dissection of the psychical apparatus into an ego and
an id, with which the difference in quality between preconscious
and unconscious runs parallel, and having agreed that this quality
is to be regarded only as an
indication
of the difference
and not as its essence, a further question faces us. What, if this
is so, is the true nature of the state which is revealed in the id
by the quality of being unconscious and in the ego by that of being
preconscious and in what does the difference between them
consist?

   But of that we know nothing. And
the profound obscurity of the background of our ignorance is
scarcely illuminated by a few glimmers of insight. Here we have
approached the still shrouded secret of the nature of the
psychical. We assume, as other natural sciences have led us to
expect, that in mental life some kind of energy is at work; but we
have nothing to go upon which will enable us to come nearer to a
knowledge of it by analogies with other forms of energy. We seem to
recognize that nervous or psychical energy occurs in two forms, one
freely mobile and another, by comparison, bound; we speak of
cathexes and hypercathexes of psychical material, and even venture
to suppose that a hypercathexis brings about a kind of synthesis of
different processes - a synthesis in the course of which free
energy is transformed into bound energy. Further than this we have
not advanced. At any rate, we hold firmly to the view that the
distinction between the unconscious and the preconscious state lies
in dynamic relations of this kind, which would explain how it is
that, whether spontaneously or with our assistance, the one can be
changed into the other.

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   Behind all these uncertainties,
however, there lies one new fact, whose discovery we owe to
psycho-analytic research. We have found that processes in the
unconscious or in the id obey different laws from those in the
preconscious ego. We name these laws in their totality the
primary process
, in contrast to the
secondary process
which governs the course of events in the preconscious, in the ego.
In the end, therefore, the study of psychical qualities has after
all proved not unfruitful.

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CHAPTER V

DREAM-INTERPRETATION AS AN ILLUSTRATION

An investigation of normal, stable states, in
which the frontiers of the ego are safeguarded against the id by
resistances (anticathexes) and have held firm, and in which the
super-ego is not distinguished from the ego, because they work
together harmoniously - an investigation of that kind would teach
us little. The only thing that can help us are states of conflict
and uproar, when the contents of the unconscious id have a prospect
of forcing their way into the ego and into consciousness and the
ego puts itself once more on the defensive against this invasion.
It is only under these conditions that we can make such
observations as will confirm or correct our statements about the
two partners. Now, our nightly sleep is precisely a state of this
sort, and for that reason psychical activity during sleep, which we
perceive as dreams, is our most favourable object of study. In that
way, too, we avoid the familiar reproach that we base our
constructions of normal mental life on pathological findings; for
dreams are regular events in the life of a normal person, however
much their characteristics may differ from the productions of our
waking life. Dreams, as everyone knows, may be confused,
unintelligible or positively nonsensical, what they say may
contradict all that we know of reality, and we behave in them like
insane people, since, so long as we are dreaming, we attribute
objective reality to the contents of the dream.

   We find our way to the
understanding (‘interpretation’) of a dream by assuming
that what we recollect as the dream after we have woken up is not
the true dream-process but only a
façade
behind which
that process lies concealed. Here we have our distinction between
the
manifest
content of a dream and the
latent
dream-thoughts. The process which produces the former out of the
latter is described as the
dream-work
. The study of the
dream-work teaches us by an excellent example the way in which
unconscious material from the id (originally unconscious and
repressed unconscious alike) forces its way into the ego, becomes
preconscious and, as a result of the ego’s opposition,
undergoes the changes which we know as
dream-distortion
.
There are no features of a dream which cannot be explained in this
way.

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   It is best to begin by pointing
out that the formation of a dream can be provoked in two different
ways. Either, on the one hand, an instinctual impulse which is
ordinarily suppressed (an unconscious wish) finds enough strength
during sleep to make itself felt by the ego, or, on the other hand,
an urge left over from waking life, a preconscious train of thought
with all the conflicting impulses attached to it, finds
reinforcement during sleep from an unconscious element. In short,
dreams may arise either from the id or from the ego. The mechanism
of dream-formation is in both cases the same and so also is the
necessary dynamic precondition. The ego gives evidence of its
original derivation from the id by occasionally ceasing its
functions and allowing a reversion to an earlier state of things.
This is logically brought about by its breaking off its relations
with the external world and withdrawing its cathexes from the sense
organs. We are justified in saying that there arises at birth an
instinct to return to the intra-uterine life that has been
abandoned - an instinct to sleep. Sleep is a return of this kind to
the womb. Since the waking ego governs motility, that function is
paralysed in sleep, and accordingly a good part of the inhibitions
imposed on the unconscious id become superfluous. The withdrawal or
reduction of these ‘anticathexes’ thus allows the id
what is now a harmless amount of liberty.

   The evidence of the share taken
by the unconscious id in the formation of dreams is abundant and
convincing. (
a
) Memory is far more comprehensive in dreams
than in waking life. Dreams bring up recollections which the
dreamer has forgotten, which are inaccessible to him when he is
awake. (
b
) Dreams make an unrestricted use of linguistic
symbols, the meaning of which is for the most part unknown to the
dreamer. Our experience, however, enables us to confirm their
sense. They probably originate from earlier phases in the
development of speech. (
c
) Memory very often reproduces in
dreams impressions from the dreamer’s early childhood of
which we can definitely assert not only that they had been
forgotten but that they had become unconscious owing to repression.
That explains the help - usually indispensable - given us by dreams
in the attempts we make during the analytic treatment of neuroses
to reconstruct the dreamer’s early life. (
d
)
Furthermore, dreams bring to light material which cannot have
originated either from the dreamer’s adult life or from his
forgotten childhood. We are obliged to regard it as part of the
archaic heritage
which a child brings with him into the
world, before any experience of his own, influenced by the
experiences of his ancestors. We find the counterpart of this
phylogenetic material in the earliest human legends and in
surviving customs. Thus dreams constitute a source of human
prehistory which is not to be despised.

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   But what makes dreams so
invaluable in giving us insight is the circumstance that, when the
unconscious material makes its way into the ego, it brings its own
modes of working along with it. This means that the preconscious
thoughts in which the unconscious material has found its expression
are handled in the course of the dream-work as though they were
unconscious portions of the id; and, in the case of the alternative
method of dream-formation, the preconscious thoughts which have
obtained reinforcement from an unconscious instinctual impulse are
brought down to the unconscious state. It is only in this way that
we learn the laws which govern the passage of events in the
unconscious and the respects in which they differ from the rules
that are familiar to us in waking thought. Thus the dream-work is
essentially an instance of the unconscious working-over of
preconscious thought-processes. To take an analogy from history:
invading conquerors govern a conquered country, not according to
the judicial system which they find in force there, but according
to their own. It is, however, an unmistakable fact that the outcome
of the dream-work is a compromise. The ego-organization is not yet
paralysed, and its influence is to be seen in the distortion
imposed on the unconscious material and in what are often very
ineffective attempts at giving the total result a form not too
unacceptable to the ego (
secondary revision
). In our analogy
this would be an expression of the continued resistance of the
defeated people.

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   The laws that govern the passage
of events in the unconscious, which come to light in this manner,
are remarkable enough and suffice to explain most of what seems
strange to us about dreams. Above all there is a striking tendency
to
condensation
, an inclination to form fresh unities out of
elements which in our waking thought we should certainly have kept
separate. As a consequence of this, a single element of the
manifest dream often stands for a whole number of latent
dream-thoughts as though it were a combined allusion to all of
them; and in general the compass of the manifest dream is
extraordinarily small in comparison with the wealth of material
from which it has sprung. Another peculiarity of the dream-work,
not entirely independent of the former one, is the ease with which
psychical intensities (cathexes) are
displaced
from one
element to another, so that it often happens that an element which
was of little importance in the dream-thoughts appears as the
clearest and accordingly most important feature of the manifest
dream, and,
vice versa
, that essential elements of the
dream-thoughts are represented in the manifest dream only by slight
allusions. Moreover, as a rule the existence of quite insignificant
points in common between two elements is enough to allow the
dream-work to replace one by the other in all further operations.
It will easily be imagined how greatly these mechanisms of
condensation and displacement can increase the difficulty of
interpreting a dream and of revealing the relations between the
manifest dream and the latent dream-thoughts. From the evidence of
the existence of these two tendencies to condensation and
displacement our theory infers that in the unconscious id the
energy is in a freely mobile state and that the id sets more store
by the possibility of discharging quantities of excitation than by
any other consideration;¹ and our theory makes use of these
two peculiarities in defining the character of the primary process
we have attributed to the id.

  
¹
An analogy may be seen in the behaviour of
a non-commissioned officer who accepts a reprimand from his
superior in silence but vents his anger on the first innocent
private he comes across.

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   The study of the dream-work has
taught us many other characteristics of the processes in the
unconscious which are as remarkable as they are important; but we
must only mention a few of them here. The governing rules of logic
carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of
the Illogical. Urges with contrary aims exist side by side in the
unconscious without any need arising for an adjustment between
them. Either they have no influence whatever on each other, or, if
they have, no decision is reached, but a compromise comes about
which is nonsensical since it embraces mutually incompatible
details. With this is connected the fact that contraries are not
kept apart but treated as though they were identical, so that in
the manifest dream any element may also have the meaning of its
opposite. Certain philologists have found that the same held good
in the most ancient languages and that contraries such as
‘strong-weak’, ‘light-dark’ and
‘high-deep’ were originally expressed by the same
roots, until two different modifications of the primitive word
distinguished between the two meanings. Residues of this original
double meaning seem to have survived even in a highly developed
language like Latin in its use of words such as
‘
altus
’ (‘high’ and
‘deep’) and ‘
sacer
’
(‘sacred’ and ‘infamous’).

   In view of the complication and
ambiguity of the relations between the manifest dream and the
latent content lying behind it, it is of course justifiable to ask
how it is at all possible to deduce the one from the other and
whether all we have to go on is a lucky guess, assisted perhaps by
a translation of the symbols that occur in the manifest dream. It
may be said in reply that in the great majority of cases the
problem can be satisfactorily solved, but only with the help of the
associations provided by the dreamer himself to the elements of the
manifest content. Any other procedure is arbitrary and can yield no
certain result. But the dreamer’s associations bring to light
intermediate links which we can insert in the gap between the two
and by aid of which we can reinstate the latent content of the
dream and ‘interpret’ it. It is not to be wondered at
if this work of interpretation (acting in a direction opposite to
the dream-work) fails occasionally to arrive at complete
certainty.