Freud - Complete Works (802 page)

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

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   It remains for us to give a
dynamic explanation of why the sleeping ego takes on the task of
the dream-work at all. The explanation is fortunately easy to find.
With the help of the unconscious, every dream that is in process of
formation makes a demand upon the ego - for the satisfaction of an
instinct, if the dream originates from the id; for the solution of
a conflict, the removal of a doubt or the forming of an intention,
if the dream originates from a residue of preconscious activity in
waking life. The sleeping ego, however, is focused on the wish to
maintain sleep; it feels this demand as a disturbance and seeks to
get rid of the disturbance. The ego succeeds in doing this by what
appears to be an act of compliance: it meets the demand with what
is in the circumstances a harmless
fulfilment of a wish
and
so gets rid of it. This replacement of the demand by the fulfilment
of a wish remains the essential function of the dream-work. It may
perhaps be worth while to illustrate this by three simple examples
- a hunger dream, a dream of convenience and a dream prompted by
sexual desire. A need for food makes itself felt in a dreamer
during his sleep: he has a dream of a delicious meal and sleeps on.
The choice, of course, was open to him either of waking up and
eating something or of continuing his sleep. He decided in favour
of the latter and satisfied his hunger by means of the dream - for
the time being, at all events, for if his hunger had persisted he
would have had to wake up nevertheless. Here is the second example.
A sleeper had to wake up so as to be in time for his work at the
hospital. But he slept on, and had a dream that he was already at
the hospital - but as a patient, who has no need to get up. Or
again, a desire becomes active during the night for the enjoyment
of a forbidden sexual object, the wife of a friend of the sleeper.
He has a dream of sexual intercourse - not, indeed, with this
person but with someone else of the same name to whom he is in fact
indifferent; or his struggle against the desire may find expression
in his mistress remaining altogether anonymous.

   Naturally, every case is not so
simple. Especially in dreams which have originated from
undealt-with residues of the previous day, and which have only
obtained an unconscious reinforcement during the state of sleep, it
is often no easy task to uncover the unconscious motive force and
its wish-fulfilment; but we may assume that it is always there. The
thesis that dreams are the fulfilments of wishes will easily arouse
scepticism when it is remembered how many dreams have an actually
distressing content or even wake the dreamer in anxiety, quite
apart from the numerous dreams without any definite feeling-tone.
But the objection based on anxiety dreams cannot be sustained
against analysis. It must not be forgotten that dreams are
invariably the product of a conflict, that they are a kind of
compromise-structure. Something that is a satisfaction for the
unconscious id may for that very reason be a cause of anxiety for
the ego.

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   As the dream-work proceeds,
sometimes the unconscious will press forward more successfully and
sometimes the ego will defend itself with greater energy. Anxiety
dreams are mostly those whose content has undergone the least
distortion. If the demand made by the unconscious is too great for
the sleeping ego to be in a position to fend it off by the means at
its disposal, it abandons the wish to sleep and returns to waking
life. We shall be taking every experience into account if we say
that a dream is invariably an
attempt
to get rid of a
disturbance of sleep by means of a wish-fulfilment, so that the
dream is a guardian of sleep. The attempt may succeed more or less
completely; it may also fail, and in that case the sleeper wakes
up, apparently woken precisely by the dream. So, too, there are
occasions when that excellent fellow the night-watchman, whose
business it is to guard the little township’s sleep, has no
alternative but to sound the alarm and waken the sleeping
townspeople.

   I will close this discussion with
a comment which will justify the length of time I have spent on the
problem of the interpretation of dreams. Experience has shown that
the unconscious mechanisms which we have come to know from our
study of the dream-work and which gave us the explanation of the
formation of dreams also help us to understand the puzzling
symptoms which attract our interest to neuroses and psychoses. A
conformity of such a kind cannot fail to excite high hopes in
us.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

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PART
II

THE
PRACTICAL TASK

CHAPTER VI

THE
TECHNIQUE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

A dream, then, is a psychosis, with all the
absurdities, delusions and illusions of a psychosis. A psychosis of
short duration, no doubt, harmless, even entrusted with a useful
function, introduced with the subject’s consent and
terminated by an act of his will. None the less it is a psychosis,
and we learn from it that even so deep-going an alteration of
mental life as this can be undone and can give place to the normal
function. Is it too bold, then, to hope that it must also be
possible to submit the dreaded spontaneous illnesses of mental life
to our influence and bring about their cure?

   We already know a number of
things preliminary to such an undertaking. According to our
hypothesis it is the ego’s task to meet the demands raised by
its three dependent relations to reality, to the id and to the
super-ego - and nevertheless at the same time to preserve its own
organization and maintain its own autonomy. The necessary
precondition of the pathological states under discussion can only
be a relative or absolute weakening of the ego which makes the
fulfilment of its tasks impossible. The severest demand on the ego
is probably the keeping down of the instinctual claims of the id,
to accomplish which it is obliged to maintain large expenditures of
energy on anticathexes. But the demands made by the super-ego too
may become so powerful and so relentless that the ego may be
paralysed, as it were, in the face of its other tasks. We may
suspect that, in the economic conflicts which arise at this point,
the id and the super-ego often make common cause against the
hard-pressed ego which tries to cling to reality in order to retain
its normal state. If the other two become too strong, they succeed
in loosening and altering the ego’s organization, so that its
proper relation to reality is disturbed or even brought to an end.
We have seen it happen in dreaming: when the ego is detached from
the reality of the external world, it slips down, under the
influence of the internal world, into psychosis.

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   Our plan of cure is based on
these discoveries. The ego is weakened by the internal conflict and
we must go to its help. The position is like that in a civil war
which has to be decided by the assistance of an ally from outside.
The analytic physician and the patient’s weakened ego, basing
themselves on the real external world, have to band themselves
together into a party against the enemies, the instinctual demands
of the id and the conscientious demands of the super-ego. We form a
pact with each other. The sick ego promises us the most complete
candour - promises, that is, to put at our disposal all the
material which its self-perception yields it; we assure the patient
of the strictest discretion and place at his service our experience
in interpreting material that has been influenced by the
unconscious. Our knowledge is to make up for his ignorance and to
give his ego back its mastery over lost provinces of his mental
life. This pact constitutes the analytic situation.

   No sooner have we taken this step
than a first disappointment awaits us, a first warning against
over-confidence. If the patient’s ego is to be a useful ally
in our common work, it must, however hard it may be pressed by the
hostile powers, have retained a certain amount of coherence and
some fragment of understanding for the demands of reality. But this
is not to be expected of the ego of a psychotic; it cannot observe
a pact of this kind, indeed it can scarcely enter into one. It will
very soon have tossed us away and the help we offer it and sent us
to join the portions of the external world which no longer mean
anything to it. Thus we discover that we must renounce the idea of
trying our plan of cure upon psychotics - renounce it perhaps for
ever or perhaps only for the time being, till we have found some
other plan better adapted for them.

   There is, however, another class
of psychical patients who clearly resemble the psychotics very
closely - the vast number of people suffering severely from
neuroses. The determinants of their illness as well as its
pathogenic mechanisms must be the same or at least very similar.
But their ego has proved more resistant and has become less
disorganized. Many of them, in spite of their maladies and the
inadequacies resulting from them, have been able to maintain
themselves in real life. These neurotics may show themselves ready
to accept our help. We will confine our interest to
them
and
see how far and by what methods we are able to ‘cure’
them.

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   With the neurotics, then, we make
our pact: complete candour on one side and strict discretion on the
other. This looks as though we were only aiming at the post of a
secular father confessor. But there is a great difference, for what
we want to hear from our patient is not only what he knows and
conceals from other people; he is to tell us too what he does
not
know. With this end in view we give him a more detailed
definition of what we mean by candour. We pledge him to obey the
fundamental rule
of analysis, which is henceforward to
govern his behaviour towards us. He is to tell us not only what he
can say intentionally and willingly, what will give him relief like
a confession, but everything else as well that his self-observation
yields him, everything that comes into his head, even if it is
disagreeable
for him to say it, even if it seems to him
unimportant
or actually
nonsensical
. If he can
succeed after this injunction in putting his self-criticism out of
action, he will present us with a mass of material - thoughts,
ideas, recollections - which are already subject to the influence
of the unconscious, which are often its direct derivatives, and
which thus put us in a position to conjecture his repressed
unconscious material and to extend, by the information we give him,
his ego’s knowledge of his unconscious.

   But it is far from being the case
that his ego is content to play the part of passively and
obediently bringing us the material we require and of believing and
accepting our translation of it. A number of other things happen, a
few of which we might have foreseen but others of which are bound
to surprise us. The most remarkable thing is this. The patient is
not satisfied with regarding the analyst in the light of reality as
a helper and adviser who, moreover, is remunerated for the trouble
he takes and who would himself be content with some such role as
that of a guide on a difficult mountain climb. On the contrary, the
patient sees in him the return, the reincarnation, of some
important figure out of his childhood or past, and consequently
transfers on to him feelings and reactions which undoubtedly
applied to this prototype. This fact of transference soon proves to
be a factor of undreamt-of importance, on the one hand an
instrument of irreplaceable value and on the other hand a source of
serious dangers. This transference is
ambivalent
: it
comprises positive (affectionate) as well as negative (hostile)
attitudes towards the analyst, who as a rule is put in the place of
one or other of the patient’s parents, his father or mother.
So long as it is positive it serves us admirably. It alters the
whole analytic situation; it pushes to one side the patient’s
rational aim of becoming healthy and free from his ailments.
Instead of it there emerges the aim of pleasing the analyst and of
winning his applause and love. It becomes the true motive force of
the patient’s collaboration; his weak ego becomes strong;
under its influence he achieves things that would ordinarily be
beyond his power; he leaves off his symptoms and seems apparently
to have recovered - merely for the sake of the analyst. The analyst
may shamefacedly admit to himself that he set out on a difficult
undertaking without any suspicion of the extraordinary powers that
would be at his command.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

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   Moreover, the relation of
transference brings with it two further advantages. If the patient
puts the analyst in the place of his father (or mother), he is also
giving him the power which his super-ego exercises over his ego,
since his parents were, as we know, the origin of his super-ego.
The new super-ego now has an opportunity for a sort of
after-education
of the neurotic; it can correct mistakes for
which his parents were responsible in educating him. But at this
point a warning must be given against misusing this new influence.
However much the analyst may be tempted to become a teacher, model
and ideal for other people and to create men in his own image, he
should not forget that that is not his task in the analytic
relationship, and indeed that he will be disloyal to his task if he
allows himself to be led on by his inclinations. If he does, he
will only be repeating a mistake of the parents who crushed their
child’s independence by their influence, and he will only be
replacing the patient’s earlier dependence by a new one. In
all his attempts at improving and educating the patient the analyst
should respect his individuality. The amount of influence which he
may legitimately allow himself will be determined by the degree of
developmental inhibition present in the patient. Some neurotics
have remained so infantile that in analysis too they can only be
treated as children.