Freud - Complete Works (94 page)
The Interpretation Of Dreams
563
The authorities display unusual
unanimity - exceptions will be treated later - in expressing
opinions of this kind on dreams; and these judgements lead directly
to a particular theory or explanation of dream-life. But it is time
for me to leave generalities and to give instead a series of
quotations from various writers - philosophers and physicians -
upon the psychological characteristics of dreams.
According to Lemoine (1855), the
‘incoherence’ of dream images is the one essential
characteristic of dreams.
Maury (1878, 163) agrees with
him: ‘II n’y a pas de rêves absolument
raisonnables et qui ne contiennent quelque incohérence,
quelque anachronisme, quelque absurdité.’ ¹
Spitta quotes Hegel as saying
that dreams are devoid of all objectives and reasonable
coherence.
Dugas writes: ‘Le
rêve c’est l’anarchie psychique affective et
mentale, c’est le jeu des fonctions livrées à
ellesmêmes et s’exerçant sans contrôle et
sans but; dans le rêve l’esprit est un automate
spirituel.’ ²
Even Volkelt (1875, 14), whose
theory is far from regarding psychical activity during sleep as
purposeless, speaks of ‘the relaxing, disconnecting and
confusing of ideational life, which in the waking state is held
together by the logical force of the central ego.’
The
absurdity
of the
associations of ideas that occur in dreams could scarcely be
criticized more sharply than it was by Cicero (
De
divinatione
, II): ‘Nihil tam praepostere, tam in condite,
tam monstruose cogitari potest, quod non possimus somniare.’
³
Fechner (1889,
2
, 522)
writes: ‘It is as though psychological activity had been
transported from the brain of a reasonable man into that of a
fool.’
¹
[‘There are no dreams that are
absolutely
reasonable and that do not contain
some
incoherence, anachronism or absurdity.’]
²
[‘A dream is psychical, emotional and
mental anarchy; it is the play of functions left to their own
devices and acting without control or purpose; in dreams the spirit
becomes a spiritual automaton.’]
³
[‘There is no imaginable thing too
absurd, too involved, or too abnormal for us to dream about
it.’]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
564
Radestock (1879, 145): ‘In
fact it seems impossible to detect any fixed laws in this crazy
activity. After withdrawing from the strict policing exercised over
the course of waking ideas by the rational will and the attention,
dreams melt into a mad whirl of kaleidoscopic confusion.’
Hildebrandt (1875, 45):
‘What astonishing leaps a dreamer may make, for instance, in
drawing inferences! How calmly he is prepared to see the most
familiar lessons of experience turned upside down. What laughable
contradictions he is ready to accept in the laws of nature and
society before, as we say, things get beyond a joke and the
excessive strain of nonsense wakes him up. We calculate without a
qualm that three times three make twenty; we are not in the least
surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry, or when a dead man
walks to his grave on his own legs, or when we see a rock floating
on the water; we proceed gravely on an important mission to the
Duchy of Bernburg or to the Principality of Liechtenstein to
inspect their naval forces; or we are persuaded to enlist under
Charles XII shortly before the battle of Poltava.’
Binz (1878, 33), having in mind
the theory of dreams which is based upon such impressions as these,
writes: ‘The content of at least nine out of ten dreams is
nonsensical. We bring together in them people and things that have
no connection whatever with one another. Next moment there is a
shift in the kaleidoscope and we are faced by a new grouping, more
senseless and crazy, if possible, than the last. And so the
changing play of the incompletely sleeping brain goes on, till we
awake and clasp our forehead and wonder whether we still possess
the capacity for rational ideas and thoughts.’
Maury (1878, 50) finds a parallel
to the relation between dream-images and waking thoughts which will
be highly significant to physicians: ‘La production de ces
images que chez l’homme éveillé fait le plus
souvent naître la volonté, correspond, pour
l’intelligence, à ce que sont pour la motilité
certains mouvements que nous offre la choreé et les
affections paralytiques. . .’ He further regards
dreams as ‘toute une série de dégradations de
la faculté pensante et raisonnante.’ (Ibid., 27.)
The Interpretation Of Dreams
565
It is scarcely necessary to quote
the writers who repeat Maury’s opinion in relation to the
various higher mental functions. Strümpell (1877, 26), for
instance, remarks that in dreams - even, of course, where there is
no manifest nonsense - there is an eclipse of all the logical
operations of the mind which are based on relations and
connections. Spitta (1882, 148) declares that ideas that occur in
dreams seem to be completely withdrawn from the law of causality.
Radestock (1879, ) and other writers insist upon the weakness of
judgement and inference characteristic of dreams. According to Jodl
(1896, 123), there is no critical faculty in dreams, no power of
correcting one set of perceptions by reference to the general
content of consciousness. The same author remarks that ‘every
kind of conscious activity occurs in dreams, but only in an
incomplete, inhibited and isolated fashion.’ The
contradictions with our waking knowledge in which dreams are
involved are explained by Stricker (1879, 98) and many others as
being due to facts being forgotten in dreams or to logical
relations between ideas having disappeared. And so on, and so
on.
Nevertheless, the writers who in
general take so unfavourable a view of psychical functioning in
dreams allow that a certain remnant of mental activity still
remains in them. This is explicitly admitted by Wundt, whose
theories have had a determining influence on so many other workers
in this field. What, it may be asked, is the nature of the remnant
of normal mental activity which persists in dreams? There is fairly
general agreement that the reproductive faculty, the memory, seems
to have suffered least, and indeed that it shows a certain
superiority to the same function in waking life (see Section B
above), though some part of the absurdities of dreaming seems to be
explicable by its forgetfulness. In the opinion of Spitta (1882, 84
f.) the part of the mind which is not affected by sleep is the life
of the sentiments and it is this which directs dreams. By
‘sentiment’ [‘
Gemüt
’] he means
‘the stable assemblage of feelings which constitutes the
innermost subjective essence of a human being’.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
566
Scholz (1893, 64) believes that
one of the mental activities operating in dreams is a tendency to
subject the dream material to ‘re-interpretation in
allegorical terms’. Siebeck too (1877, 11) sees in dreams a
faculty of the mind for ‘wider interpretation’, which
is exercised upon all sensations and perceptions. There is
particular difficulty in assessing the position in dreams of what
is ostensibly the highest of the psychical functions, that of
consciousness. Since all that we know of dreams is derived from
consciousness, there can be no doubt of its persisting in them; yet
Spitta (1882, 84-5) believes that what persists in dreams is only
consciousness and not
self
-consciousness. Delboeuf (1885,
19), however, confesses that he is unable to follow the
distinction.
The laws of association governing
the sequence of ideas hold good of dream-images, and indeed their
dominance is even more clearly and strongly expressed in dreams.
‘Dreams’, says Strümpell (1877, 70), ‘run
their course, as it seems, according to the laws either of bare
ideas or of organic stimuli accompanying such ideas - that is,
without being in any way affected by reflection or common-sense or
aesthetic taste or moral judgement.’
The authors whose views I am now
giving picture the process of forming dreams in some such way as
this. The totality of the sensory stimuli generated during sleep
from the various sources which I have already enumerated arouse in
the mind in the first place a number of ideas, which are
represented in the form of hallucinations or more properly,
according to Wundt, of illusions, in view of their derivation from
external and internal stimuli. These ideas become linked together
according to the familiar laws of association and, according to the
same laws, call up a further series of ideas (or images). The whole
of this material is then worked over, so far as it will allow, by
what still remain in operation of the organizing and thinking
faculties of the mind. (See, for instance, Wundt and Weygandt.) All
that remain undiscovered are the motives which decide whether the
calling up of images arising from non-external sources shall
proceed along one chain of associations or another.
The Interpretation Of Dreams
567
It has often been remarked,
however, that the associations connecting dream-images with one
another are of a quite special kind and differ from those which
operate in waking thought. Thus Volkelt (1875, 15) writes:
‘In dreams the associations seem to play at
catch-as-catch-can in accordance with chance similarities and
connections that are barely perceptible. Every dream is stuffed
full of slovenly and perfunctory associations of this kind.’
Maury (1878, 126) attaches very great importance to this feature of
the way in which ideas are linked in dreams, since it enables him
to draw a close analogy between dream-life and certain mental
disorders. He specifies two main features of a
‘
délire
’: ‘(1) une action
spontanée et comme automatique de l’esprit; (2) une
association vicieuse et irrégulière des
idées.’ ¹ Maury himself gives two excellent
instances of dreams of his own in which dream-images were linked
together merely through a similarity in the sound of words. He once
dreamt that he was on a pilgrimage (
pélerinage
) to
Jerusalem or Mecca; after many adventures he found himself visiting
Pell
etier, the chemist, who, after some conversation, gave
him a zinc shovel (
pelle
); in the next part of the dream
this turned into a great broad-sword. (Ibid., 137.) In another
dream he was walking along a highway and reading the number of
kilo
metres on the milestones; then he was in a
grocer’s shop where there was a big pair of scales, and a man
was putting
kilo
gramme weights into the scale in order to
weigh Maury; the grocer then said to him: ‘You’re not
in Paris but on the island of
Gilolo
.’ Several other
scenes followed, in which he saw a
Lo
belia flower, and then
General
Lo
pez, of whose death he had read shortly before.
Finally, while he was playing a game of
lo
tto, he woke up.
(Ibid., 126.)²
We shall no doubt be prepared to
find, however, that this low estimate of psychical functioning in
dreams has not been allowed to pass without contradiction - though
contradiction on this point would seem to be no easy matter. For
instance, Spitta (1882, 118), one of the disparagers of dream-life,
insists that the same psychological laws which regulate waking life
also hold good in dreams; and another, Dugas (1897
a
),
declares that ‘le rêve n’est pas déraison
ni même irraison pure’.³ But such assertions carry
little weight so long as their authors make no attempt to reconcile
them with their own descriptions of the psychical anarchy and
disruption of every function that prevail in dreams. It seems,
however, to have dawned upon some other writers that the madness of
dreams may not be without method and may even be simulated, like
that of the Danish prince on whom this shrewd judgement was passed.
These latter writers cannot have judged by appearances; or the
appearance presented to them by dreams must have been a different
one.
¹
[‘(1) A mental act which is
spontaneous and as it were automatic; (2) an invalid and irregular
association of ideas.’]
²
[
Footnote added
1909:] At later
stage we shall come to understand the meaning of dreams such as
this which are filled with alliterations and similar-sounding first
syllables.
³
[`Dreams are not contrary to reason or even
entirely lacking in reason.’]
The Interpretation Of Dreams
568
Thus Havelock Ellis (1899, 721),
without dwelling on the apparent absurdity of dreams, speaks of
them as ‘an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect
thoughts’, the study of which might reveal to us primitive
stages in the evolution of mental life.
The same view is expressed by
James Sully (1893, 362) in a manner that is both more sweeping and
more penetrating. His words deserve all the more attention when we
bear in mind that he was more firmly convinced, perhaps, than any
other psychologist that dreams have a disguised meaning. ‘Now
our dreams are a means of conserving these successive
personalities.
When asleep we go back to the old ways of looking
at things and of feeling about them, to impulses and activities
which long ago dominated us
.’
The sagacious Delboeuf (1885,
222) declares (though he puts himself in the wrong by not giving
any refutation of the material which contradicts his thesis):
‘Dans le sommeil, hormis la perception, toutes les
facultés de l’esprit, intelligence, imagination,
mêmoire, volonté, moralité, restent intactes
dans leur essence; seulement elles s’appliquent à des
objets imaginaires et mobiles. Le songeur est un acteur qui joue
à volontà les fous et les sages, les bourreaux et les
victimes, les nains et les géants, les démons et les
anges.’ ¹