Freud - Complete Works (97 page)

   Other writers, however, regard
this last conclusion as unjustifiable. Thus Jessen (1855) believes
that involuntary ideas, both in dreams and in waking, and in
feverish and other delirious conditions, ‘have the character
of a volitional activity that has been put to rest and of a more or
less mechanical succession of images and ideas provoked by internal
impulses’. All that an immoral dream proves as to the
dreamer’s mental life is, in Jessen’s view, that on
some occasion he had cognizance of the ideational content in
question; it is certainly no evidence of a mental impulse of the
dreamer’s own.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

580

  As regards another writer, Maury, it would almost seem as
though he too attributes to the dreaming condition a capacity, not
for the arbitrary destruction of mental activity, but for analysing
it into its components. He writes as follows of dreams which
transgress the bounds of morality: ‘Ce sont nos penchants qui
parlent et qui nous font agir, sans que la conscicnce nous
retienne, bien que parfois elle nous avertisse. J’ai mes
défauts et mes penchants vicieux; à
l’état de veille je tâche de lutter contre eux,
et il m’arrive assez souvent de n’y pas succomber. Mais
dans mes songes j’y succombe toujours ou pour mieux dire
j’agis par leur impulsion, sans crainte et sans
remords. . . . Evidemment les visions qui se
déroulent devant ma pensée et qui constituent le
rêve, me sont suggérées par les incitations que
je ressens et que ma volonté absente ne cherche pas à
refouler.’ (Maury, 1878, 113.)¹

   No one who believes in the
capacity of dreams to reveal an immoral tendency of the
dreamer’s which is really present though suppressed or
concealed, could express his view more precisely than in
Maury’s words: ‘En rêve l’homme se
révèle donc tout entier à soi-même dans
sa nudité et sa misère natives. Dès
qu’il suspend l’exercice de sa volonté, il
devient le jouet de toutes les passions contres lesquelles,
à l’état de veille, la conscience, le sentiment
de l’honneur, la crainte nous défendent.’
(Ibid., 165.)² In another passage we find these pertinent
sentences: ‘Dans le songe, c’est surtout l’homme
instinctif qui se révèle. . . .
L’homme revient pour ainsi dire à l’eéat
de nature quand il rêve; mais moins les idées acquises
ont pénétré dans son esprit, plus les
penchants en désaccord avec elles conservent encore sur lui
l’influence dans le rêve.’ (Ibid., 462.)³ He
goes on to relate by way of example how in his dreams he is not
infrequently the victim of the very superstition which he has been
attacking in his writings with particular vehemence.

  
¹
[‘It is our impulses that are
speaking and making us act, while our conscience does not hold us
back, though it sometimes warns us. I have my faults and my vicious
impulses; while I am awake I try to resist them, and quite often I
succeed in not yielding to them. But in my dreams I
always
yield to them, or rather I act under their pressure without fear or
remorse.  .  .  . The visions which unroll before my
mind and which constitute a dream are clearly suggested by the
urges which I feel and which my absent will does not attempt to
repress.’]

  
²
[‘Thus in dreams a man stands
self-revealed in all his native nakedness and poverty. As soon as
he suspends the exercise of his will, he becomes the plaything of
all the passions against which he is defended while he is awake by
his conscience, his sense of honour and his
fears.’]

  
³
[‘What is revealed in dreams is
primarily the man of instinct.  .  .  . Man may be
said to return in his dreams to a state of nature. But the less his
mind has been penetrated by acquired ideas, the more it remains
influenced in dreams by impulses of a contrary
nature.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

581

   These penetrating reflections of
Maury’s, however, lose their value in the investigation of
dream-life owing to the fact that he regards the phenomena which he
has observed with such accuracy as no more than proofs of an
‘
automatisme psychologique
’ which, in his view,
dominates dreams and which he looks upon as the exact opposite of
mental activity.

   Stricker (1879) writes:
‘Dreams do not consist solely of illusions. If, for instance,
one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are
imaginary - but the fear is real.’ This calls our attention
to the fact that
affects
in dreams cannot be judged in the
same way as the remainder of their content; and we are faced by the
problem of what part of the psychical processes occurring in dreams
is to be regarded as real, that is to say, has a claim to be
classed among the psychical processes of waking life.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

582

(G)

THEORIES OF DREAMING AND ITS
FUNCTION

   Any disquisition upon dreams
which seeks to explain as many as possible of their observed
characteristics from a particular point of view, and which at the
same time defines the position occupied by dreams in a wider sphere
of phenomena, deserves to be called a theory of dreams. The various
theories will be found to differ in that they select one or the
other characteristic of dreams as the essential one and take it as
the point of departure for their explanations and correlations. It
need not necessarily be possible to infer a
function
of
dreaming (whether utilitarian or otherwise) from the theory.
Nevertheless, since we have a habit of looking for teleological
explanations, we shall be more ready to accept theories which are
bound up with the attribution of a function to dreaming.

   We have already made the
acquaintance of several sets of views which deserve more or less to
be called theories of dreams in this sense of the term. The belief
held in antiquity that dreams were sent by the gods in order to
guide the actions of men was a complete theory of dreams, giving
information on everything worth knowing about them. Since dreams
have become an object of scientific research a considerable number
of theories have been developed, including some that are extremely
incomplete.

   Without attempting any exhaustive
enumeration, we may try to divide theories of dreams into the
following three rough groups, according to their underlying
assumptions as to the amount and nature of psychical activity in
dreams.

    (1) There are the theories,
such as that of Delboeuf, according to which the whole of psychical
activity continues in dreams. The mind, they assume, does not sleep
and its apparatus remains intact; but, since it falls under the
conditions of the state of sleep, which differ from those of waking
life, its normal functioning necessarily produces different results
during sleep. The question arises in regard to these theories
whether they are capable of deriving all the distinctions between
dreams and waking thought from the conditions of the state of
sleep. Moreover, there is no possibility of their being able to
suggest any function for dreaming; they offer no reason why we
should dream, why the complicated mechanism of the mental apparatus
should continue to operate even when set in circumstances for which
it appears undesigned. Either dreamless sleep or, if disturbing
stimuli intervene, awakening, would seem to be the only expedient
reactions - rather than the third alternative of dreaming.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

583

   (2) There are the theories which,
on the contrary, presuppose that dreams imply a lowering of
psychical activity, a loosening of connections, and an
impoverishment of the material accessible. These theories must
imply the attribution to sleep of characteristics quite different
from those suggested, for instance, by Delboeuf. Sleep, according
to such theories, has a far reaching influence upon the mind; it
does not consist merely in the mind being shut off from the
external world; it forces its way, rather, into the mental
mechanism and throws it temporarily out of use. If I may venture on
a simile from the sphere of psychiatry, the first group of theories
construct dreams on the model of paranoia, while the second group
make them resemble mental deficiency or confusional states.

   The theory according to which
only a fragment of mental activity finds expression in dreams,
since it has been paralysed by sleep, is by far the most popular
with medical writers and in the scientific world generally. In so
far as any general interest may be supposed to exist in the
explanation of dreams, this may be described as the ruling theory.
It is to be remarked how easily this theory avoids the worst
stumbling-block in the way of any explanation of dreams - the
difficulty of dealing with the contradictions involved in them. It
regards dreams as a result of a partial awakening  - ‘a
gradual, partial and at the same time highly abnormal
awakening’, to quote a remark of Herbart’s upon dreams
(1892, 307). Thus, this theory can make use of a series of
conditions of ever-increasing wakefulness, culminating in the
completely waking state, in order to account for the series of
variations in efficiency of mental functioning in dreams, ranging
from the inefficiency revealed by their occasional absurdity up to
fully concentrated intellectual functioning.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

584

   Those who find that they cannot
dispense with a statement in terms of physiology, or to whom a
statement in such terms seems more scientific, will find what they
want in the account given by Binz (1878, 43): ‘This
condition’ (of torpor) ‘comes to an end in the early
hours of the morning, but only by degrees. The products of fatigue
which have accumulated in the albumen of the brain gradually
diminish; more and more of them are decomposed or eliminated by the
unceasing flow of the blood stream. Here and there separate groups
of cells begin to emerge into wakefulness, while the torpid state
still persists all around them. The isolated work of these separate
groups now appears before our clouded consciousness, unchecked by
other portions of the brain which govern the process of
association. For that reason the images produced, which correspond
for the most part to material impressions of the more recent past,
are strung together in a wild and irregular manner. The number of
the liberated brain-cells constantly grows and the senselessness of
the dreams correspondingly diminishes.’

   This view of dreaming as an
incomplete, partial waking state is no doubt to be found in the
writings of every modern physiologist and philosopher. The most
elaborate exposition of it is given by Maury (1878, 6 f.). It often
appears as though that author imagined that the waking or sleeping
state could be shifted from one anatomical region to another, each
particular anatomical region being linked to one particular
psychical function. I will merely remark at this point that, even
if the theory of partial waking were confirmed, its details would
still remain very much open to discussion.

   This view naturally leaves no
room for assigning any function to dreaming. The logical conclusion
that follows from it as to the position and significance of dreams
is correctly stated by Binz (1878, 35): ‘Every observed fact
forces us to conclude that dreams must be characterized as
somatic
processes, which are in every case useless and in
many cases positively pathological. . . .’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

585

   The application to dreams of the
term ‘somatic’, which is italicized by Binz himself,
has more than one bearing. It alludes, in the first place, to the
aetiology
of dreams which seemed particularly plausible to
Binz when he studied the experimental production of dreams by the
use of toxic substances. For theories of this kind involve a
tendency to limit the instigation of dreams so far as possible to
somatic causes. Put in its most extreme form the view is as
follows. Once we have put ourselves to sleep by excluding all
stimuli, there is no need and no occasion for dreaming until the
morning, when the process of being gradually awakened by the impact
of fresh stimuli might be reflected in the phenomenon of dreaming.
It is impracticable, however, to keep our sleep free from stimuli;
they impinge upon the sleeper from all sides - like the germs of
life of which Mephistopheles complained - from without and from
within and even from parts of his body which are quite unnoticed in
waking life. Thus sleep is disturbed; first one corner of the mind
is shaken into wakefulness and then another; the mind functions for
a brief moment with its awakened portion and is then glad to fall
asleep once more. Dreams are a reaction to the disturbance of sleep
brought about by a stimulus - a reaction, incidentally, which is
quite superfluous.

   But the description of dreaming -
which, after all is said and done, remains a function of the mind -
as a somatic process implies another meaning as well. It is
intended to show that dreams are unworthy to rank as psychical
processes. Dreaming has often been compared with ‘the ten
fingers of a man who knows nothing of music wandering over the keys
of a piano’ ; and this simile shows as well as anything the
sort of opinion that is usually held of dreaming by representatives
of the exact sciences. On this view a dream is something wholly and
completely incapable of interpretation; for how could the ten
fingers of an unmusical player produce a piece of music?