Freud - Complete Works (98 page)

   Even in the distant past there
was no lack of critics of the theory of partial waking. Thus
Burdach (1838, 508 f.) wrote: ‘When it is said that dreams
are a partial waking, in the first place this throws no light
either on waking or on sleeping, and in the second place it says no
more than that some mental forces are active in dreams while others
are at rest. But variability of this kind occurs throughout
life.’

The Interpretation Of Dreams

586

   This ruling theory, which regards
dreams as a somatic process, underlies a most interesting
hypothesis put forward for the first time by Robert in 1886. It is
particularly attractive since it is able to suggest a function, a
utilitarian purpose, for dreaming. Robert takes as the groundwork
of his theory two facts of observation which we have already
considered in the course of our examination of the material of
dreams (see above,
p. 532 ff.
),
namely that we dream so frequently of the most trivial daily
impressions and that we so rarely carry over into our dreams our
important daily interests. Robert (1886, 10) asserts that it is
universally true that things which we have thoroughly thought out
never become instigators of dreams but only things which are in our
minds in an uncompleted shape or which have merely been touched
upon by our thoughts in passing: ‘The reason why it is
usually impossible to explain dreams is precisely because they are
caused by sensory impressions of the preceding day which failed to
attract enough of the dreamer’s attention.’ Thus the
condition which determines whether an impression shall find its way
into a dream is whether the process of working over the impression
was interrupted or whether the impression was too unimportant to
have a right to be worked over at all.

   Robert describes dreams as
‘a somatic process of excretion of which we become aware in
our mental reaction to it’. Dreams are excretions of thought
that have been stifled at birth. ‘A man deprived of the
capacity for dreaming would in course of time become mentally
deranged, because a great mass of uncompleted, unworked-out
thoughts and superficial impressions would accumulate in his brain
and would be bound by their bulk to smother the thoughts which
should be assimilated into his memory as completed wholes.’
Dreams serve as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain. They
possess the power to heal and relieve. (Ibid., 32.)

   We should be misunderstanding
Robert if we were to ask him how it can come about that the mind is
relieved through the presentation of ideas in dreams. What Robert
is clearly doing is to infer from these two features of the
material of dreams that by some means or other an expulsion of
worthless impressions is accomplished during sleep as a somatic
process, and that dreaming is not a special sort of psychical
process but merely the information we receive of that expulsion.
Moreover, excretion is not the only event which occurs in the mind
at night. Robert himself adds that, besides this, the suggestions
arising during the previous day are worked out and that
‘whatever parts of the undigested thoughts are not excreted
are bound together into a rounded whole by threads of thought
borrowed from the imagination and thus inserted in the memory as a
harmless imaginative picture.’ (Ibid., 23.)

The Interpretation Of Dreams

587

   But Robert’s theory is
diametrically opposed to the ruling one in its estimate of the
nature of the
sources
of dreams. According to the latter,
there would be no dreaming at all if the mind were not being
constantly wakened by external and internal sensory stimuli. But in
Robert’s view the impulsion to dreaming arises in the mind
itself - in the fact of its becoming overloaded and requiring
relief; and he concludes with perfect logic that causes derived
from somatic conditions play a subordinate part as determinants of
dreams, and that such causes would be quite incapable of provoking
dreams in a mind in which there was no material for the
construction of dreams derived from waking consciousness. The only
qualification he makes is to admit that the phantasy-images arising
in dreams out of the depths of the mind may be affected by nervous
stimuli. (Ibid., 48.) After all, therefore, Robert does not regard
dreams as so completely dependent upon somatic events.
Nevertheless, in his view dreams are not psychical processes, they
have no place among the psychical processes of waking life; they
are somatic processes occurring every night in the apparatus that
is concerned with mental activity, and they have as their function
the task of protecting that apparatus from excessive tension - or,
to change the metaphor - of acting as scavengers of the mind.

   Another writer, Yves Delage,
bases his theory on the same features of dreams, as revealed in the
choice of their material; and it is instructive to notice the way
in which a slight variation in his view of the same things leads
him to conclusions of a very different bearing.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

588

   Delage (1891, 41) tells us that
he experienced in his own person, on the occasion of the death of
someone of whom he was fond, the fact that we do
not
dream
of what has occupied all our thoughts during the day, or not until
it has begun to give place to other daytime concerns. His
investigations among other people confirmed him in the general
truth of this fact. He makes what would be an interesting
observation of this kind, if it should prove to have general
validity, on the dreams of young married couples:
‘S’ils ont été fortement épris,
presque jamais ils n’ont rêvé l’un de
l’autre avant le mariage ou pendant la lune de miel; et
s’ils ont rêvé d’amour c’est pour
être infidèles avec quelque personne
indifférente ou odieuse.’ What, then, do we dream of?
Delage identifies the material that occurs in our dreams as
consisting of fragments and residues of the preceding days and of
earlier times. Everything that appears in our dreams, even though
we are inclined at first to regard it as a creation of our
dream-life, turns out, when we have examined it more closely, to be
unrecognized reproduction - ‘souvenir inconscient’. But
this ideational material possesses a common characteristic: it
originates from impressions which probably affected our senses more
strongly than our intelligence or from which our attention was
diverted very soon after they emerged. The less conscious and at
the same time the more powerful an impression has been, the more
chance it has of playing a part in the next dream.

   Here we have what are essentially
the same two categories of impressions as are stressed by Robert:
the trivial ones and those that have not been dealt with. Delage,
however, gives the situation a different turn, for he holds that it
is because these impressions have not been dealt with that they are
capable of producing dreams, not because they are trivial. It is
true in a certain sense that trivial impressions, too, have not
been dealt with completely; being in the nature of fresh
impressions, they are ‘autant de ressorts tendus’ which
are released during sleep. A powerful impression which happens to
have met with some check in the process of being worked over or
which has been purposely held under restraint has more claim to
play a part in dreams than an impression which is weak and almost
unnoticed. The psychical energy which has been stored up during the
daytime by being inhibited and suppressed becomes the motive force
for dreams at night. Psychical material that has been suppressed
comes to light in dreams.¹

   At this point, unluckily, Delage
interrupts his train of thought. He can attribute only the smallest
share in dreams to any independent psychical activity; and thus he
brings his theory into line with the ruling theory of the partial
awakening of the brain: ‘En somme le rêve est le
produit de la pensée errante, sans but et sans direction, se
fixant successivement sur les souvenirs, qui ont gardé assez
d’intensité pour se placer sur sa route et
l’arrêter au passage, établissant entre eux un
lien tantôt faible et indécis, tantôt plus fort
et plus serré, selon que l’activité actuelle du
cerveau est plus ou moins abolie par le sommeil.’ ²

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1909:] Anatole
France expresses exactly the same idea in
Le lys rouge
:
‘Ce que nous voyons la nuit, ce sont les restes malheureux de
ce que nous avons négligé dans la veille. Le
rêve est souvent la revanche des choses qu’on
méprise ou le reproche des êtres
abandonnés.’ [‘What we see during the night are
the miserable remnants of what we have neglected during the
previous day. A dream is often a retaliation on the part of what we
despise or a reproach on the part of those we have
deserted.’]

  
²
[‘In short, dreams are the product of
thought wandering without purpose or direction, attaching itself in
turn to memories which have retained enough intensity to stand in
its way and interrupt its course, and linking them together by a
bond which is sometimes weak and vague and sometimes stronger and
closer, according as the brain’s activity at the moment is
abolished by sleep to a greater or less extent.’]

The Interpretation Of Dreams

589

   (3) We may place in a third group
those theories which ascribe to the dreaming mind a capacity and
inclination for carrying out special psychical activities of which
it is largely or totally incapable in waking life. The putting of
these faculties into force usually provides dreaming with a
utilitarian function. Most of the estimates formed of dreaming by
earlier writers on psychology fall into this class. It will be
enough, however, for me to quote a sentence from Burdach (1838,
512). Dreaming, he writes, ‘is a natural activity of the mind
which is not limited by the power of individuality, which is not
interrupted by self-consciousness and which is not directed by
self-determination, but which is the freely operating vitality of
the sensory centres.’

   This revelling of the mind in the
free use of its own forces is evidently regarded by Burdach and the
rest as a condition in which the mind is refreshed and collects new
strength for the day’s work - in which, in fact, it enjoys a
sort of holiday. Thus Burdach quotes with approval the charming
words in which the poet Novalis praises the reign of dreams:
‘Dreams are a shield against the humdrum monotony of life;
they set imagination free from its chains so that it may throw into
con fusion all the pictures of everyday existence and break into
the unceasing gravity of grown men with the joyful play of a child.
Without dreams we should surely grow sooner old; so we may look on
them - not, perhaps as a gift from on high- but as a precious
recreation, as friendly companions on our pilgrimage to the
grave.’

   The reviving and healing function
of dreams is described with still more insistence by Purkinje
(1846, 456): ‘These functions are performed especially by
productive dreams. They are the easy play of the imagination and
have no connection with the affairs of daytime. The mind has no
wish to prolong the tensions of waking life; it seeks to relax them
and to recover from them. It produces above all conditions contrary
to the waking ones. It cures sorrow by joy, cares by hopes and
pictures of happy distraction, hatred by love and friendliness,
fear by courage and foresight; it allays doubt by conviction and
firm faith, and vain expectation by fulfilment. Many of the
spirit’s wounds which are being constantly re-opened during
the day are healed by sleep, which covers them and shields them
from fresh injury. The healing action of time is based partly on
this.’ We all have a feeling that sleep has a beneficial
effect upon mental activities, and the obscure working of the
popular mind refuses to let itself be robbed of its belief that
dreaming is one of the ways in which sleep dispenses its
benefits.

   The most original and
far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as a special activity of
the mind, capable of free expansion only during the state of sleep,
was that undertaken by Scherner in 1861. His book is written in a
turgid and high-flown style and is inspired by an almost
intoxicated enthusiasm for his subject which is bound to repel
anyone who cannot share in his fervour. It puts such difficulties
in the way of an analysis of its contents that we turn with relief
to the clearer and briefer exposition of Scherner’s doctrines
given by the philosopher Volkelt. ‘Suggestive gleams of
meaning proceed like lightning flashes out of these mystical
agglomerations, these clouds of glory and splendour - but they do
not illuminate a philosopher’s path.’ It is in these
terms that Scherner’s writings are judged even by his
disciple.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

590

   Scherner is not one of those who
believe that the capacities of the mind continue undiminished in
dream-life. He himself shows how the centralized core of the ego -
its spontaneous energy - is deprived of its nervous force in
dreams, how as a result of this decentralization the processes of
cognition, feeling, willing and ideation are modified, and how the
remnants of these psychical functions no longer possess a truly
mental character but become nothing more than mechanisms. But by
way of contrast, the mental activity which may be described as
‘imagination’, liberated from the domination of reason
and from any moderating control, leaps into a position of unlimited
sovereignty. Though dream-imagination makes use of recent waking
memories for its building material, it erects them into structures
bearing not the remotest resemblance to those of waking life; it
reveals itself in dreams as possessing not merely reproductive but
productive
powers. Its characteristics are what lend their
peculiar features to dreams. It shows a preference for what is
immoderate, exaggerated and monstrous. But at the same time, being
freed from the hindrances of the categories of thought, it gains in
pliancy, agility and versatility. It is susceptible in the subtlest
manner to the shades of the tender feelings and to passionate
emotions, and promptly incorporates our inner life into external
plastic pictures. Imagination in dreams is without the power of
conceptual speech. It is obliged to paint what it has to say
pictorially, and, since there are no concepts to exercise an
attenuating influence, it makes full and powerful use of the
pictorial form. Thus, however clear its speech may be, it is
diffuse, clumsy and awkward. The clarity of its speech suffers
particularly from the fact that it has a dislike of representing an
object by its proper image, and prefers some extraneous image which
will express only that particular one of the object’s
attributes which it is seeking to represent. Here we have the
‘symbolizing activity’ of the
imagination. . . . Another very important point is
that dream-imagination never depicts things completely, but only in
outline and even so only in the roughest fashion. For this reason
its paintings seem like inspired sketches. It does not halt,
however, at the mere representation of an object; it is under an
internal necessity to involve the dream-ego to a greater or less
extent with the object and thus produce an
event
. For
instance, a dream caused by a visual stimulus may represent gold
coins in the street; the dreamer will pick them up delightedly and
carry them off.