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CHAPTER SEVEN
The Psychology of the Dream-Processes
Among the dreams which have been communicated to me by others there is one which is
at this point especially worthy of our attention. It was told me by a female patient who
had heard it related in a lecture on dreams. Its original source is unknown to me. This
dream evidently made a deep impression upon the lady, since she went so far as to
imitate it, i.e. to repeat the elements of this dream in a dream of her own; in order, by this
transference, to express her agreement with a certain point in the dream.
The preliminary conditions of this typical dream were as follows: A father had been
watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to
rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into
the next, where the child's body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had
been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a
few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and
crying reproachfully: `Father, don't you see that I am burning?' The father woke up and
noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old
man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a
fallen candle.
The meaning of this affecting dream is simple enough, and the explanation given by the
lecturer, as my patient reported it, was correct. The bright light shining through the open
door on to the sleeper's eyes gave him the impression which he would have received had
he been awake: namely, that a fire had been started near the corpse by a falling candle. It
is quite possible that he had taken into his sleep his anxiety lest the aged watcher should
not be equal to his task.
We can find nothing to change in this interpretation; we can only add that the content of
the dream must be over-determined, and that the speech of the child must have consisted
of phrases which it had uttered while still alive, and which were associated with
important events for the father. Perhaps the complaint, `I am burning', was associated
with the fever from which the child died, and `Father, don't you see?' to some other
affective occurrence unknown to us.
Now, when we have come to recognise that the dream has meaning, and can be fitted into
the context of psychic events, it may be surprising that a dream should have occurred in
circumstances which called for such an immediate waking. We shall then note that even
this dream is not lacking in a wish-fulfilment. The dead child behaves as though alive; he
warns his father himself; he comes to his father's bed and clasps his arm, as he probably
did in the recollection from which the dream obtained the first part of the child's speech.
It was for the sake of this wish-fulfilment that the father slept a moment longer. The
dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show the child
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still living. If the father had waked first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led
him into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child's life by this one moment.
There can be no doubt about the peculiar features in this brief dream which engage our
particular interest. So far, we have endeavoured mainly to ascertain wherein the secret
meaning of the dream consists, how it is to be discovered, and what means the dreamwork
uses to conceal it. In other words, our greatest interest has hitherto been centred on
the problems of interpretation. Now, however, we encounter a dream which is easily
explained, and the meaning of which is without disguise; we note that nevertheless this
dream preserves the essential characteristics which conspicuously differentiate a dream
from our waking thoughts, and this difference demands an explanation. It is only when
we have disposed of all the problems of interpretation that we feel how incomplete is our
psychology of dreams.
But before we turn our attention to this new path of investigation, let us stop and look
back, and consider whether we have not overlooked something important on our way
hither. For we must understand that the easy and comfortable part of our journey lies
behind us. Hitherto, all the paths that we have followed have led, if I mistake not, to light,
to explanation, and to full understanding; but from the moment when we seek to
penetrate more deeply into the psychic processes in dreaming, all paths lead into
darkness. It is quite impossible to explain the dream as a psychic process, for to explain
means to trace back to the known, and as yet we have no psychological knowledge to
which we can refer such explanatory fundamentals as may be inferred from the
psychological investigation of dreams. On the contrary, we shall be compelled to advance
a number of new assumptions, which do little more than conjecture the structure of the
psychic apparatus and the play of the energies active in it; and we shall have to be careful
not to go too far beyond the simplest logical construction, since otherwise its value will
be doubtful. And even if we should be unerring in our inferences, and take cognisance of
all the logical possibilities, we should still be in danger of arriving at a completely
mistaken result, owing to the probable incompleteness of the preliminary statement of our
elementary data. We shall not be able to arrive at any conclusions as to the structure and
function of the psychic instrument from even the most careful investigation of dreams, or
of any other isolated activity; or, at all events, we shall not be able to confirm our
conclusions. To do this we shall have to collate such phenomena as the comparative
study of a whole series of psychic activities proves to be reliably constant. So that the
psychological assumptions which we base on the analysis of the dream-processes will
have to mark time, as it were, until they can join up with the results of other
investigations which, proceeding from another starting-point, will seek to penetrate to the
heart of the same problem.
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A. THE FORGETTING OF DREAMS
I propose, then, that we shall first of all turn our attention to a subject which brings us to
a hitherto disregarded objection, which threatens to undermine the very foundation of our
efforts at dream-interpretation. The objection has been made from more than one quarter
that the dream which we wish to interpret is really unknown to us, or, to be more precise,
that we have no guarantee that we know it as it really occurred.
What we recollect of the dream, and what we subject to our methods of interpretation, is,
in the first place, mutilated by the unfaithfulness of our memory, which seems quite
peculiarly incapable of retaining dreams, and which may have omitted precisely the most
significant parts of their content. For when we try to consider our dreams attentively, we
often have reason to complain that we have dreamed much more than we remember; that
unfortunately we know nothing more than this one fragment, and that our recollection of
even this fragment seems to us strangely uncertain. Moreover, everything goes to prove
that our memory reproduces the dream not only incompletely but also untruthfully, in a
falsifying manner. As, on the one hand, we may doubt whether what we dreamed was
really as disconnected as it is in our recollections, so on the other hand we may doubt
whether a dream was really as coherent as our account of it; whether in our attempted
reproduction we have not filled in the gaps which really existed, or those which are due
to forgetfulness, with new and arbitrarily chosen material; whether we have not
embellished the dream, rounded it off and corrected it, so that any conclusion as to its real
content becomes impossible. Indeed, one writer (Spitta)1 surmises that all that is orderly
and coherent is really first put into the dream during the attempt to recall it. Thus we are
in danger of being deprived of the very object whose value we have undertaken to
determine.
In all our dream-interpretations we have hitherto ignored these warnings. On the contrary,
indeed, we have found that the smallest, most insignificant, and most uncertain
components of the dream-content invited interpretations no less emphatically than those
which were distinctly and certainly contained in the dream. In the dream of Irma's
injection we read: `I quickly called in Dr M.,' and we assumed that even this small
addendum would not have got into the dream if it had not been susceptible of a special
derivation. In this way we arrived at the history of that unfortunate patient to whose
bedside I `quickly' called my older colleague. In the seemingly absurd dream which
treated the difference between fifty-one and fifty-six as a quantité négligeable the number
fifty-one was mentioned repeatedly. Instead of regarding this as a matter of course, or a
detail of indifferent value, we proceeded from this to a second train of thought in the
latent dream-content, which led to the number fifty-one, and by following up this clue we
arrived at the fears which proposed fifty-one years as the term of life in the sharpest
opposition to a dominant train of thought which was boastfully lavish of the years. In the
dream `Non vixit' I found, as an insignificant interpolation, that I had at first overlooked
the sentence: `As P. does not understand him, Fl. asks me,' etc. The interpretation then
coming to a standstill, I went back to these words, and I found through them the way to
the infantile fantasy which appeared in the dream-thoughts as an intermediate point of
junction. This came about by means of the poet's verses:
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Selten habit ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Kot uns fanden
So verstanden wir uns gleich!
(Seldom have you understood me,
Seldom have I understood you,
But when we found ourselves in the mire,
We at once understood each other!)
Every analysis will afford evidence of the fact that the most insignificant features of the
dream are indispensable to interpretation, and will show how the completion of the task is
delayed if we postpone our examination of them. We have given equal attention, in the
interpretation of dreams, to every nuance of verbal expression found in them; indeed,
whenever we were confronted by a senseless or insufficient wording, as though we had
failed to translate the dream into the proper version, we have respected even these defects
of expression. In brief, what other writers have regarded as arbitrary improvisations,
concocted hastily to avoid confusion, we have treated like a sacred text. This
contradiction calls for explanation.
It would appear, without doing any injustice to the writers in question, that the
explanation is in our favour. From the standpoint of our newly-acquired insight into the
origin of dreams, all contradictions are completely reconciled. It is true that we distort the
dream in our attempt to reproduce it; we once more find therein what we have called the
secondary and often misunderstanding elaboration of the dream by the agency of normal
thinking. But this distortion is itself no more than a part of the elaboration to which the
dream-thoughts are constantly subjected as a result of the dream-censorship. Other
writers have here suspected or observed that part of the dream-distortion whose work is
manifest; but for us this is of little consequence, as we know that a far more extensive
work of distortion, not so easily apprehended, has already taken the dream for its object
from among the hidden dream-thoughts. The only mistake of these writers consists in
believing the modification effected in the dream by its recollection and verbal expression
to be arbitrary, incapable of further solution, and consequently liable to lead us astray in
our cognition of the dream. They underestimate the determination of the dream in the
psyche. Here there is nothing arbitrary. It can be shown that in all cases a second train of
thought immediately takes over the determination of the elements which have been left
undetermined by the first. For example, I wish quite arbitrarily to think of a number; but
this is not possible; the number that occurs to me is definitely and necessarily determined
by thoughts within me which may be quite foreign to my momentary purpose.2 The
modifications which the dream undergoes in its revision by the waking mind are just as
little arbitrary. They preserve an associative connection with the content, whose place
they take, and serve to show us the way to this content, which may itself be a substitute
for yet another content.
In analysing the dreams of patients I impose the following test of this assertion, and never
without success. If the first report of a dream seems not very comprehensible, I request
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the dreamer to repeat it. This he rarely does in the same words. But the passages in which
the expression is modified are thereby made known to me as the weak points of the
dream's disguise; they are what the embroidered emblem on Siegfried's raiment was to
Hagen. These are the points from which the analysis may start. The narrator has been
admonished by my announcement that I intend to take special pains to solve the dream,
and immediately, obedient to the urge of resistance, he protects the weak points of the
dream's disguise, replacing a treacherous expression by a less relevant one. He thus calls
my attention to the expressions which he has discarded. From the efforts made to guard
against the solution of the dream, I can also draw conclusions about the care with which
the raiment of the dream has been woven.
The writers whom I have mentioned are, however, less justified when they attribute so
much importance to the doubt with which our judgment approaches the relation of the
dream. For this doubt is not intellectually warranted; our memory can give no guarantees,
but nevertheless we are compelled to credit its statements far more frequently than is
objectively justifiable. Doubt concerning the accurate reproduction of the dream, or of
individual data of the dream, is only another offshoot of the dream-censorship, that is, of
resistance to the emergence of the dream-thoughts into consciousness. This resistance has
not yet exhausted itself by the displacements and substitutions which it has effected, so
that it still clings, in the form of doubt, to what has been allowed to emerge. We can
recognise this doubt all the more readily in that it is careful never to attack the intensive
elements of the dream, but only the weak and indistinct ones. But we already know that a
transvaluation of all the psychic values has taken place between the dream-thoughts and
the dream. The distortion has been made possible only by devaluation; it constantly
manifests itself in this way and sometimes contents itself therewith. If doubt is added to
the indistinctness of an element of the dream-content, we may, following this indication,
recognise in this element a direct offshoot of one of the outlawed dream-thoughts. The
state of affairs is like that obtaining after a great revolution in one of the republics of
antiquity or the Renaissance. The once powerful, ruling families of the nobility are now
banished; all high posts are filled by upstarts; in the city itself only the poorer and most
powerless citizens, or the remoter followers of the vanquished party, are tolerated. Even
the latter do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship. They are watched with suspicion. In
our case, instead of suspicion we have doubt. I must insist, therefore, that in the analysis
of a dream one must emancipate oneself from the whole scale of standards of reliability;
and if there is the slightest possibility that this or that may have occurred in the dream, it
should be treated as an absolute certainty. Until one has decided to reject all respect for
appearances in tracing the dream-elements, the analysis will remain at a standstill.
Disregard of the element concerned has the psychic effect, in the person analysed, that
nothing in connection with the unwished ideas behind this element will occur to him.
This effect is really not self-evident; it would be quite reasonable to say, `Whether this or
that was contained in the dream I do not know for certain; but the following ideas happen
to occur to me.' But no one ever does say so; it is precisely the disturbing effect of doubt
in the analysis that permits it to be unmasked as an offshoot and instrument of the psychic
resistance. Psychoanalysis is justifiably suspicious. One of its rules runs: Whatever
disturbs the progress of the work is a resistance.3
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The forgetting of dreams, too, remains inexplicable until we seek to explain it by the
power of the psychic censorship. The feeling that one has dreamed a great deal during the
night and has retained only a little of it may have yet another meaning in a number of
cases: it may perhaps mean that the dream-work has continued in a perceptible manner
throughout the night, but has left behind it only one brief dream. There is, however, no
possible doubt that a dream is progressively forgotten on waking. One often forgets it in
spite of a painful effort to recover it. I believe, however, that just as one generally
overestimates the extent of this forgetting, so also one overestimates the lacunae in our
knowledge of the dream due to the gaps occurring in it. All the dream-content that has
been lost by forgetting can often be recovered by analysis; in a number of cases, at all
events, it is possible to discover from a single remaining fragment, not the dream, of
course -- which, after all, is of no importance -- but the whole of the dream-thoughts. It
requires a greater expenditure of attention and self-suppression in the analysis; that is all;
but it shows that the forgetting of the dream is not innocent of hostile intention.4
A convincing proof of the tendentious nature of dream-forgetting -- of the fact that it
serves the resistance -- is obtained on analysis by investigating a preliminary stage of
forgetting.5 It often happens that in the midst of an interpretation an omitted fragment of
the dream suddenly emerges which is described as having been previously forgotten. This
part of the dream that has been wrested from forgetfulness is always the most important
part. It lies on the shortest path to the solution of the dream, and for that very reason it
was most exposed to the resistance. Among the examples of the dreams that I have
included in the text of this treatise, it once happened that I had subsequently to interpolate
a fragment of dream-content. The dream is a dream of travel, which revenges itself on
two unamiable travelling companions; I have left it almost entirely uninterpreted, as part
of its content is crudely obscene. The part omitted reads: `I said, referring to a book of
Schiller's: ``It is from . . .'' but corrected myself, as I realised my mistake: ``It is by . . .''
Whereupon the man remarked to his sister, ``Yes, he said it correctly.'' '6
Self-correction in dreams, which to some writers seems so wonderful, does not really call
for consideration. But I will draw from my own memory an instance typical of verbal
errors in dreams. I was nineteen years of age when I visited England for the first time,
and I spent a day on the shore of the Irish Sea. Naturally enough, I amused myself by
picking up the marine animals left on the beach by the tide, and I was just examining a
starfish (the dream begins with Hollthurn--Holothurian) when a pretty little girl came up
to me and asked me: `Is it starfish? Is it alive?' I replied, `Yes, he is alive,' but then felt
ashamed of my mistake, and repeated the sentence correctly. For the grammatical mistake
which I then made, the dream substitutes another which is quite common among German
people. `Das Buch ist von Schiller' is not to be translated by `the book is from,' but by `the
book is by'. That the dream-work accomplishes this substitution, because the word from,
owing to its consonance with the German adjective fromm (pious, devout) makes a
remarkable condensation possible, should no longer surprise us after all that we have
heard of the intentions of the dream-work and its unscrupulous selection of means. But
what relation has this harmless recollection of the seashore to my dream? It explains, by
means of a very innocent example, that I have used the word -- the word denoting gender,
or sex or the sexual (he) -- in the wrong place. This is surely one of the keys to the
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solution of the dream. Those who have heard of the derivation of the book-title Matter
and Motion (Molière in Le Malade Imaginaire: La Matière est-elle laudable? -- A
Motion of the bowels) will readily be able to supply the missing parts.
Moreover, I can prove conclusively, by a demonstratio ad oculos, that the forgetting of
the dream is in a large measure the work of the resistance. A patient tells me that he has
dreamed, but that the dream has vanished without leaving a trace, as if nothing had
happened. We set to work, however; I come upon a resistance which I explain to the
patient; encouraging and urging him, I help him to become reconciled to some
disagreeable thought; and I have hardly succeeded in doing so when he exclaims: `Now I
can recall what I dreamed!' The same resistance which that day disturbed him in the work
of interpretation caused him also to forget the dream. By overcoming this resistance I
have brought back the dream to his memory.
In the same way the patient, having reached a certain part of the work, may recall a
dream which occurred three, four, or more days ago, and which has hitherto remained in
oblivion.7
Psychoanalytical experience has furnished us with yet another proof of the fact that the
forgetting of dreams depends far more on the resistance than on the mutually alien
character of the waking and sleeping states, as some writers have believed it to depend. It
often happens to me, as well as to other analysts, and to patients under treatment, that we
are waked from sleep by a dream, as we say, and that immediately thereafter, while in
full possession of our mental faculties, we begin to interpret the dream. Often in such
cases I have not rested until I have achieved a full understanding of the dream, and yet it
has happened that after waking I have forgotten the interpretation work as completely as I
have forgotten the dream-content itself, though I have been aware that I have dreamed
and that I had interpreted the dream. The dream has far more frequently taken the result
of the interpretation with it into forgetfulness than the intellectual faculty has succeeded
in retaining the dream in the memory. But between this work of interpretation and the
waking thoughts there is not that psychic abyss by which other writers have sought to
explain the forgetting of dreams. -- When Morton Prince objects to my explanation of the
forgetting of dreams on the ground that it is only a special case of the amnesia of
dissociated psychic states, and that the impossibility of applying my explanation of this
special amnesia to other types of amnesia makes it valueless even for its immediate
purpose, he reminds the reader that in all his descriptions of such dissociated states he has
never attempted to discover the dynamic explanation underlying these phenomena. For
had he done so, he would surely have discovered that repression (and the resistance
produced thereby) is the cause not of these dissociations merely, but also of the amnesia
of their psychic content.
That dreams are as little forgotten as other psychic acts, that even in their power of
impressing themselves on the memory they may fairly be compared with the other
psychic performances, was proved to me by an experiment which I was able to make
while preparing the manuscript of this book. I had preserved in my notes a great many
dreams of my own which, for one reason or another, I could not interpret, or, at the time
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of dreaming them, could interpret only very imperfectly. In order to obtain material to
illustrate my assertion, I attempted to interpret some of them a year or two later. In this
attempt I was invariably successful; indeed, I may say that the interpretation was effected
more easily after all this time than when the dreams were of recent occurrence. As a
possible explanation of this fact, I would suggest that I had overcome many of the
internal resistances which had disturbed me at the time of dreaming. In such subsequent
interpretations I have compared the old yield of dream-thoughts with the present result,
which has usually been more abundant, and I have invariably found the old dreamthoughts
unaltered among the present ones. However, I soon recovered from my surprise
when I reflected that I had long been accustomed to interpret dreams of former years that
had occasionally been related to me by my patients as though they had been dreams of
the night before; by the same method, and with the same success. In the section on
anxiety-dreams I shall include two examples of such delayed dream-interpretations.
When I made this experiment for the first time I expected, not unreasonably, that dreams
would behave in this connection merely like neurotic symptoms. For when I treat a
psychoneurotic, for instance, an hysterical patient, by psychoanalysis, I am compelled to
find explanations for the first symptoms of the malady, which have long since
disappeared, as well as for those still existing symptoms which have brought the patient
to me; and I find the former problem easier to solve than the more exigent one of today.
In the Studies in Hysteria,8 published as early as 1895, I was able to give the explanation
of a first hysterical attack which the patient, a woman over forty years of age, had
experienced in her fifteenth year.9
I will now make a few rather unsystematic remarks relating to the interpretation of
dreams, which will perhaps serve as a guide to the reader who wishes to test my
assertions by the analysis of his own dreams.
He must not expect that it will be a simple and easy matter to interpret his own dreams.
Even the observation of endoptic phenomena, and other sensations which are commonly
immune from attention, calls for practice, although this group of observations is not
opposed by any psychic motive. It is very much more difficult to get hold of the
`unwished ideas'. He who seeks to do so must fulfil the requirements laid down in this
treatise, and while following the rules here given, he must endeavour to restrain all
criticism, all preconceptions, and all affective or intellectual bias in himself during the
work of analysis. He must be ever mindful of the precept which Claude Bernard held up
to the experimenter in the physiological laboratory: `Travailler comme une bete' -- that is,
he must be as enduring as an animal, and also as disinterested in the results of his work.
He who will follow this advice will no longer find the task a difficult one. The
interpretation of a dream cannot always be accomplished in one session; after following
up a chain of associations you will often feel that your working capacity is exhausted; the
dream will not tell you anything more that day; it is then best to break off, and to resume
the work the following day. Another portion of the dream-content then solicits your
attention, and you thus obtain access to a fresh stratum of the dream-thoughts. One might
call this the `fractional' interpretation of dreams.
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It is most difficult to induce the beginner in dream-interpretation to recognise the fact that
his task is not finished when he is in possession of a complete interpretation of the dream
which is both ingenious and coherent, and which gives particulars of all the elements of
the dream-content. Besides this, another interpretation, an over-interpretation of the same
dream, one which has escaped him, may be possible. It is really not easy to form an idea
of the wealth of trains of unconscious thought striving for expression in our minds, or to
credit the adroitness displayed by the dream-work in killing -- so to speak -- seven flies at
one stroke, like the journeyman tailor in the fairy-tale, by means of its ambiguous modes
of expression. The reader will constantly be inclined to reproach the author for a
superfluous display of ingenuity, but anyone who has had personal experience of dreaminterpretation
will know better than to do so.
On the other hand, I cannot accept the opinion first expressed by H. Silberer, that every
dream -- or even that many dreams, and certain groups of dreams -- calls for two different
interpretations, between which there is even supposed to be a fixed relation. One of these,
which Silberer calls the psychoanalytic interpretation, attributes to the dream any
meaning you please, but in the main an infantile sexual one. The other, the more
important interpretation, which he calls the anagogic interpretation, reveals the more
serious and often profound thoughts which the dream-work has used as its material.
Silberer does not prove this assertion by citing a number of dreams which he has
analysed in these two directions. I am obliged to object to this opinion on the ground that
it is contrary to facts. The majority of dreams require no over-interpretation, and are
especially insusceptible of an anagogic interpretation. The influence of a tendency which
seeks to veil the fundamental conditions of dream-formation and divert our interest from
its instinctual roots is as evident in Silberer's theory as in other theoretical efforts of the
last few years. In a number of cases I can confirm Silberer's assertions; but in these the
analysis shows me that the dream-work was confronted with the task of transforming a
series of highly abstract thoughts, incapable of direct representation, from waking life
into a dream. The dream-work attempted to accomplish this task by seizing upon another
thought-material which stood in loose and often allegorical relation to the abstract
thoughts, and thereby diminished the difficulty of representing them. The abstract
interpretation of a dream originating in this manner will be given by the dreamer
immediately, but the correct interpretation of the substituted material can be obtained
only by means of the familiar technique.
The question whether every dream can be interpreted is to be answered in the negative.
One should not forget that in the work of interpretation one is opposed by the psychic
forces that are responsible for the distortion of the dream. Whether one can master the
inner resistances by one's intellectual interest, one's capacity for self-control, one's
psychological knowledge, and one's experience in dream-interpretation depends on the
relative strength of the opposing forces. It is always possible to make some progress; one
can at all events go far enough to become convinced that a dream has meaning, and
generally far enough to gain some idea of its meaning. It very often happens that a second
dream enables us to confirm and continue the interpretation assumed for the first. A
whole series of dreams, continuing for weeks or months, may have a common basis, and
should therefore be interpreted as a continuity. In dreams that follow one another we
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often observe that one dream takes as its central point something that is only alluded to in
the periphery of the next dream, and conversely, so that even in their interpretations the
two supplement each other. That different dreams of the same night are always to be
treated, in the work of interpretation, as a whole, I have already shown by examples.
In the best interpreted dreams we often have to leave one passage in obscurity because
we observe during the interpretation that we have here a tangle of dream-thoughts which
cannot be unravelled, and which furnishes no fresh contribution to the dream-content.
This, then, is the keystone of the dream, the point at which it ascends into the unknown.
For the dream-thoughts which we encounter during the interpretation commonly have no
termination, but run in all directions into the net-like entanglement of our intellectual
world. It is from some denser part of this fabric that the dream-wish then arises, like the
mushroom from its mycelium.
Let us now return to the facts of dream-forgetting. So far, of course, we have failed to
draw any important conclusion from them. When our waking life shows an unmistakable
intention to forget the dream which has been formed during the night, either as a whole,
immediately after waking, or little by little in the course of the day, and when we
recognise as the chief factor in this process of forgetting the psychic resistance against the
dream which has already done its best to oppose the dream at night, the question then
arises: What actually has made the dream-formation possible against this resistance? Let
us consider the most striking case, in which the waking life has thrust the dream aside as
though it had never happened. If we take into consideration the play of the psychic
forces, we are compelled to assert that the dream would never have come into existence
had the resistance prevailed at night as it did by day. We conclude, then, that the
resistance loses some part of its force during the night; we know that it has not been
discontinued, as we have demonstrated its share in the formation of dreams -- namely, the
work of distortion. We have therefore to consider the possibility that at night the
resistance is merely diminished, and that dream-formation becomes possible because of
this slackening of the resistance; and we shall readily understand that as it regains its full
power on waking it immediately thrusts aside what it was forced to admit while it was
feeble. Descriptive psychology teaches us that the chief determinant of dream-formation
is the dormant state of the psyche; and we may now add the following explanation: The
state of sleep makes dream-formation possible by reducing the endopsychic censorship.
We are certainly tempted to look upon this as the only possible conclusion to be drawn
from the facts of dream-forgetting, and to develop from this conclusion further
deductions as to the comparative energy operative in the sleeping and waking states. But
we shall stop here for the present. When we have penetrated a little farther into the
psychology of dreams we shall find that the origin of dream-formation may be differently
conceived. The resistance which tends to prevent the dream-thoughts from becoming
conscious may perhaps be evaded without suffering reduction. It is also plausible that
both the factors which favour dream-formation, the reduction as well as the evasion of
the resistance, may be simultaneously made possible by the sleeping state. But we shall
pause here, and resume the subject a little later.
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We must now consider another series of objections against our procedure in dreaminterpretation.
For we proceed by dropping all the directing ideas which at other times
control reflection, directing our attention to a single element of the dream, noting the
involuntary thoughts that associate themselves with this element. We then take up the
next component of the dream-content, and repeat the operation with this; and, regardless
of the direction taken by the thoughts, we allow ourselves to be led onwards by them,
rambling from one subject to another. At the same time, we harbour the confident hope
that we may in the end, and without intervention on our part, come upon the dreamthoughts
from which the dream originated. To this the critic may make the following
objection: That we arrive somewhere if we start from a single element of the dream is not
remarkable. Something can be associatively connected with every idea. The only thing
that is remarkable is that one should succeed in hitting upon the dream-thoughts in this
arbitrary and aimless excursion. It is probably a self-deception; the investigator follows
the chain of associations from the one element which is taken up until he finds the chain
breaking off, whereupon he takes up a second element; it is thus only natural that the
originally unconfined associations should now become narrowed down. He has the
former chain of associations still in mind, and will therefore in the analysis of the second
dream-idea hit all the more readily upon single associations which have something in
common with the associations of the first chain. He then imagines that he has found a
thought which represents a point of junction between two of the dream-elements. As he
allows himself all possible freedom of thought-connection, excepting only the transitions
from one idea to another which occur in normal thinking, it is not difficult for him finally
to concoct out of a series of `intermediary thoughts', something which he calls the dreamthoughts;
and without any guarantee, since they are otherwise unknown, he palms these
off as the psychic equivalent of the dream. But all this is a purely arbitrary procedure, an
ingenious-looking exploitation of chance, and anyone who will go to this useless trouble
can in this way work out any desired interpretation for any dream whatever.
If such objections are really advanced against us, we may in defence refer to the
impression produced by our dream-interpretations, the surprising connections with other
dream-elements which appear while we are following up the individual ideas, and the
improbability that anything which so perfectly covers and explains the dream as do our
dream-interpretations could be achieved otherwise than by following previously
established psychic connections. We might also point to the fact that the procedure in
dream-interpretation is identical with the procedure followed in the resolution of
hysterical symptoms, where the correctness of the method is attested by the emergence
and disappearance of the symptoms -- that is, where the interpretation of the text is
confirmed by the interpolated illustrations. But we have no reason to avoid this problem -
- namely, how one can arrive at a pre-existent aim by following an arbitrarily and
aimlessly meandering chain of thoughts -- since we shall be able not to solve the
problem, it is true, but to get rid of it entirely.
For it is demonstrably incorrect to state that we abandon ourselves to an aimless
excursion of thought when, as in the interpretation of dreams, we renounce reflection and
allow the involuntary ideas to come to the surface. It can be shown that we are able to
reject only those directing ideas which are known to us, and that with the cessation of
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these the unknown -- or, as we inexactly say, unconscious -- directing ideas immediately
exert their influence, and henceforth determine the flow of the involuntary ideas.
Thinking without directing ideas cannot be ensured by any influence we ourselves exert
on our own psychic life; neither do I know of any state of psychic derangement in which
such a mode of thought establishes itself.10 The psychiatrists have here far too
prematurely relinquished the idea of the solidity of the psychic structure. I know that an
unregulated stream of thoughts, devoid of directing ideas, can occur as little in the realm
of hysteria and paranoia as in the formation or solution of dreams. Perhaps it does not
occur at all in the endogenous psychic affections, and, according to the ingenious
hypothesis of Lauret, even the deliria observed in confused psychic states have meaning
and are incomprehensible to us only because of ommissions. I have had the same
conviction whenever I have had an opportunity of observing such states. The deliria are
the work of a censorship which no longer makes any effort to conceal its sway, which,
instead of lending its support to a revision that is no longer obnoxious to it, cancels
regardlessly anything to which it objects, thus causing the remnant to appear
disconnected, This censorship proceeds like the Russian censorship of the frontier, which
allows only those foreign journals which have had certain passages blacked out to fall
into the hands of the readers to be protected.
The free play of ideas following any chain of associations may perhaps occur in cases of
destructive organic affections of the brain. What, however, is taken to be such in the
psychoneuroses may always be explained as the influence of the censorship on a series of
thoughts which have been pushed into the foreground by the concealed directing ideas.11
It has been considered an unmistakable sign of free association unencumbered by
directing ideas if the emerging ideas (or images) appear to be connected by means of the
so-called superficial associations -- that is, by assonance, verbal ambiguity, and temporal
coincidence, without inner relationship of meaning; in other words, if they are connected
by all those associations which we allow ourselves to exploit in wit and in playing upon
words. This distinguishing mark holds good with associations which lead us from the
elements of the dream-content to the intermediary thoughts, and from these to the dreamthoughts
proper; in many analyses of dreams we have found surprising examples of this.
In these no connection was too loose and no witticism too objectionable to serve as a
bridge from one thought to another. But the correct understanding of such surprising
tolerance is not far to seek. Whenever one psychic element is connected with another by
an obnoxious and superficial association, there exists also a correct and more profound
connection between the two, which succumbs to the resistance of the censorship.
The correct explanation for the predominance of the superficial associations is the
pressure of the censorship, and not the suppression of the directing ideas. Whenever the
censorship renders the normal connective paths impassable, the superficial associations
will replace the deeper ones in the representation. It is as though in a mountainous region
a general interruption of traffic, for example an inundation, should render the broad
highways impassable: traffic would then have to be maintained by steep and inconvenient
tracks used at other times only by the hunter.
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We can here distinguish two cases which, however, are essentially one. In the first case,
the censorship is directed only against the connection of two thoughts which, being
detached from one another, escape its opposition. The two thoughts then enter
successively into consciousness; their connection remains concealed; but in its place
there occurs to us a superficial connection between the two which would not otherwise
have occurred to us, and which as a rule connects with another angle of the conceptual
complex instead of that from which the suppressed but essential connection proceeds. Or,
in the second case, both thoughts, owing to their content, succumb to the censorship; both
then appear not in their correct form but in a modified, substituted form; and both
substituted thoughts are so selected as to represent, by a superficial association, the
essential relation which existed between those that they have replaced. Under the
pressure of the censorship, the displacement of a normal and vital association by one
superficial and apparently absurd has thus occurred in both cases.
Because we know of these displacements, we unhesitatingly rely upon even the
superficial associations which occur in the course of dream-interpretation.12
The psychoanalysis of neurotics makes abundant use of the two principles: that with the
abandonment of the conscious directing ideas the control over the flow of ideas is
transferred to the concealed directing ideas; and that superficial associations are only a
displacement-substitute for suppressed and more profound ones. Indeed, psychoanalysis
makes these two principles the foundation stones of its technique. When I request a
patient to dismiss all reflection, and to report to me whatever comes into his mind, I
firmly cling to the assumption that he will not be able to drop the directing idea of the
treatment, and I feel justified in concluding that what he reports, even though it may seem
to be quite ingenuous and arbitrary, has some connection with his morbid state. Another
directing idea of which the patient has no suspicion is my own personality. The full
appreciation, as well as the detailed proof of both these explanations, belongs to the
description of the psychoanalytic technique as a therapeutic method. We have here
reached one of the junctions, so to speak, at which we purposely drop the subject of
dream-interpretation.13
Of all the objections raised, only one is justified and still remains to be met: namely, that
we ought not to ascribe all the associations of the interpretation-work to the nocturnal
dream-work. By interpretation in the waking state we are actually opening a path running
back from the dream-elements to the dream-thoughts. The dream-work has followed the
contrary direction, and it is not at all probable that these paths are equally passable in
opposite directions. On the contrary, it appears that during the day, by means of new
thought-connections, we sink shafts that strike the intermediary thoughts and the dreamthoughts
now in this place, now in that. We can see how the recent thought-material of
the day forces its way into the interpretation-series, and how the additional resistance
which has appeared since the night probably compels it to make new and further detours.
But the number and form of the collaterals which we thus contrive during the day are,
psychologically speaking, indifferent, so long as they point the way to the dreamthoughts
which we are seeking.
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1 Similar views are expressed by Foucault and Tannery.
2 cf. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
3 This peremptory statement: `Whatever disturbs the progress of the work is a resistance'
might easily be misunderstood. It has, of course, the significance merely of a technical
rule, a warning for the analyst. It is not denied that during an analysis events may occur
which cannot be ascribed to the intention of the person analysed. The patient's father may
die in other ways than by being murdered by the patient, or a war may break out and
interrupt the analysis. But despite the obvious exaggeration of the above statement there
is still something new and useful in it. Even if the disturbing event is real and
independent of the patient, the extent of the disturbing influence does often depend only
on him, and the resistance reveals itself unmistakably in the ready and immoderate
exploitation of such an opportunity.
4 As an example of the significance of doubt and uncertainty in a dream with a
simultaneous shrinking of the dream-content to a single element I will cite from my
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis the following dream, the analysis of which was
successful, despite a short postponement:
A sceptical lady patient has a rather long dream, in which it happens that certain persons
tell her of my book on Wit, and praise it highly. Then something is said about a `channel',
perhaps another book in which `channel' occurs, or something else to do with `channel', .
. . she doesn't know; it is quite vague.
You will, of course, be inclined to think that the element `channel' will resist analysis,
because it is so indeterminate. You are right in assuming this difficulty, but it is not
difficult because it is vague; it is vague for the reason that makes the interpretation
difficult. The dreamer could associate nothing with `channel'; and of course I could not
suggest anything. A little while later -- the following day, to be precise -- she stated that
something did occur to her which perhaps referred to `channel'. It was, as a matter of
fact, a witticism which she had heard someone repeat. On a steamer running between
Dover and Calais a well-known writer was talking to an Englishman, who in a certain
connection quoted the aphorism: Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas. The writer
retorted: Oui, le pas de Calais, whereby he wished to imply that he thought France
sublime and England ridiculous. But the Pas de Calais is a channel, the Canal la Manche
(the sleeve channel). Do I think that this association has anything to do with the dream? I
certainly do; it really furnishes the solution of this enigmatical dream-element. Can you
doubt that this witticism already existed, before the dream, as the unconscious of the
element `channel'; can you assume that it was subsequently invented as an association?
The association testifies to the scepticism concealed behind her obtrusive admiration, and
the resistance is, of course, the common reason for both her hesitation in finding an
association and the indefinite character of the corresponding dream-element. Note the
relation of the dream-element to the unconscious in this case. It is like a fragment of this
unconscious, like an allusion to it; by its isolation it has become quite unintelligible.
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5 Concerning the intention of forgetting in general, see my The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life.
6 Such corrections in the use of foreign languages are not rare in dreams, but they are
usually attributed to foreigners. Maury, while he was studying English, once dreamed
that he informed someone that he had called on him the day before in the following
words: `I called for you yesterday.' The other answered, correctly: `You mean: I called on
you yesterday.'
7 Ernest Jones describes an analogous case of frequent occurrence; during the analysis of
one dream another dream of the same night is often recalled which until then was not
merely forgotten, but was not even suspected.
8 Translated by A. A. Brill, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co., New
York.
9 Dreams which have occurred during the first years of childhood, and which have
sometimes been retained in the memory for decades with perfect sensorial freshness, are
almost always of great importance for the understanding of the development and the
neurosis of the dreamer. The analysis of them protects the physician from errors and
uncertainties which might confuse him even theoretically.
10 Only recently has my attention been called to the fact that Ed. von Hartmann took the
same view with regard to this psychologically important point: Incidental to the
discussion of the role of the unconscious in artistic creation (Philos. d. Unbew., Bd. 1,
Abschn. B., Kap. V) Eduard von Hartmann clearly enunciated the law of association of
ideas which is directed by unconscious directing ideas, without however realising the
scope of this law. With him it was a question of demonstrating that `every combination of
a sensuous idea when it is not left entirely to chance, but is directed to a definite end, is in
need of help from the unconscious', and that the conscious interest in any particular
thought-association is a stimulus for the unconscious to discover from among the
numberless possible ideas the one which corresponds to the directing idea. `It is the
unconscious that selects, and appropriately, in accordance with the aims of the interest:
and this holds true for the associations in abstract thinking (as sensible representations
and artistic combinations as well as for flashes of wit).' Hence, a limiting of the
association of ideas to ideas that evoke and are evoked in the sense of pure associationpsychology
is untenable. Such a restriction `would be justified only if there were states in
human life in which man was free not only from any conscious purpose, but also from the
domination or co-operation of any unconscious interest, any passing mood. But such a
state hardly ever comes to pass, for even if one leaves one's train of thought seemingly
altogether to chance, or if one surrenders oneself entirely to the involuntary dreams of
fantasy, yet always other leading interests, dominant feelings and moods prevail at one
time rather than another, and these will always exert an influence on the association of
ideas.' (Philos. d. Unbew., 11e Aufl. i, 246). In semi-conscious dreams there always
appear only such ideas as correspond to the (unconscious) momentary main interest. By
rendering prominent the feelings and moods over the free thought-series, the methodical
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procedure of psychoanalysis is thoroughly justified even from the standpoint of
Hartmann's Psychology (N. E. Pohorilles, Internat. Zeitschrift. f. Ps.A., 1, 1913, p. 605). -
- Du Prel concludes from the fact that a name which we vainly try to recall suddenly
occurs to the mind that there is an unconscious but none the less purposeful thinking,
whose result then appears in consciousness (Philos. d. Mystik, p. 107).
11 Jung has brilliantly corroborated this statement by analyses of dementia praecox. (cf.
The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, translated by A. A. Brill. Monograph Series,
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co., New York.)
12 The same considerations naturally hold good of the case in which superficial
associations are exposed in the dream-content, as, for example, in both the dreams
reported by Maury (p. 50, pélerinage-pelletier-pelle, kilometre-kilograms-gilolo, Lobelia-
Lopez-Lotto). I know from my work with neurotics what kind of reminiscence is prone to
represent itself in this manner. It is the consultation of encyclopedias by which most
people have satisfied their need of an explanation of the sexual mystery when obsessed
by the curiosity of puberty.
13 The above statements, which when written sounded very improbable, have since been
corroborated and applied experimentally by Jung and his pupils in the Diagnostiche
Assoziationsstudien.
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B. REGRESSION
Now that we have defended ourselves against the objections raised, or have at least
indicated our weapons of defence, we must no longer delay entering upon the
psychological investigations for which we have so long been preparing. Let us summarise
the main results of our recent investigations: The dream is a psychic act full of import; its
motive power is invariably a wish craving fulfilment; the fact that it is unrecognisable as
a wish, and its many peculiarities and absurdities, are due to the influence of the psychic
censorship to which it has been subjected during its formation. Besides the necessity of
evading the censorship, the following factors have played a part in its formation: first, a
need for condensing the psychic material; second, regard for representability in sensory
images; and third (though not constantly), regard for a rational and intelligible exterior of
the dream-structure. From each of these propositions a path leads onward to
psychological postulates and assumptions. Thus, the reciprocal relation of the wishmotives,
and the four conditions, as well as the mutual relations of these conditions, must
now be investigated; the dream must be inserted in the context of the psychic life.
At the beginning of this section we cited a certain dream in order that it might remind us
of the problems that are still unsolved. The interpretation of this dream (of the burning
child) presented no difficulties, although in the analytical sense it was not given in full.
We asked ourselves why, after all, it was necessary that the father should dream instead
of waking, and we recognised the wish to represent the child as living as a motive of the
dream. That there was yet another wish operative in the dream we shall be able to show
after further discussion. For the present, however, we may say that for the sake of the
wish-fulfilment the thought-process of sleep was transformed into a dream.
If the wish-fulfilment is cancelled out, only one characteristic remains which
distinguishes the two kinds of psychic events. The dream-thought would have been: `I see
a glimmer coming from the room in which the body is lying. Perhaps a candle has fallen
over, and the child is burning!' The dream reproduces the result of this reflection
unchanged, but represents it in a situation which exists in the present and is perceptible
by the senses like an experience of the waking state. This, however, is the most common
and the most striking psychological characteristic of the dream: a thought, usually the one
wished for, is objectified in the dream, and represented as a scene, or -- as we think --
experienced.
But how are we now to explain this characteristic peculiarity of the dream-work, or -- to
put it more modestly -- how are we to bring it into relation with the psychic processes?
On closer examination, it is plainly evident that the manifest form of the dream is marked
by two characteristics which are almost independent of each other. One is its
representation as a present situation with the omission of `perhaps'; the other is the
translation of the thought into visual images and speech.
The transformation to which the dream-thoughts are subjected because the expectation is
put into the present tense is, perhaps, in this particular dream not so very striking. This is
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probably due to the special and really subsidiary role of the wish-fulfilment in this dream.
Let us take another dream, in which the dream-wish does not break away from the
continuation of the waking thoughts in sleep; for example, the dream of Irma's injection.
Here the dream-thought achieving representation is in the conditional: `If only Otto could
be blamed for Irma's illness!' The dream suppresses the conditional, and replaces it by a
simple present tense: `Yes, Otto is to blame for Irma's illness.' This, then, is the first of
the transformations which even the undistorted dream imposes on the dream-thoughts.
But we will not linger over this first peculiarity of the dream. We dispose of it by a
reference to the conscious fantasy, the day-dream, which behaves in a similar fashion
with its conceptual content. When Daudet's M. Joyeuse wanders unemployed through the
streets of Paris while his daughter is led to believe that he has a post and is sitting in his
office, he dreams, in the present tense, of circumstances that might help him to obtain a
recommendation and employment. The dream, then, employs the present tense in the
same manner and with the same right as the day-dream. The present is the tense in which
the wish is represented as fulfilled.
The second quality peculiar to the dream alone, as distinguished from the daydream, is
that the conceptual content is not thought, but is transformed into visual images, to which
we give credence, and which we believe that we experience. Let us add, however, that
not all dreams show this transformation of ideas into visual images. There are dreams
which consist solely of thoughts, but we cannot on that account deny that they are
substantially dreams. My dream `Autodidasker -- the day-fantasy about Professor N.' is
of this character; it is almost as free of visual elements as though I had thought its content
during the day. Moreover, every long dream contains elements which have not undergone
this transformation into the visual, and which are simply thought or known as we are
wont to think or know in our waking state. And we must here reflect that this
transformation of ideas into visual images does not occur in dreams alone, but also in
hallucinations and visions, which may appear spontaneously in health, or as symptoms in
the psychoneuroses. In brief, the relation which we are here investigating is by no means
an exclusive one; the fact remains, however, that this characteristic of the dream,
whenever it occurs, seems to be its most noteworthy characteristic, so that we cannot
think of the dream-life without it. To understand it, however, requires a very exhaustive
discussion.
Among all the observations relating to the theory of dreams to be found in the literature
of the subject, I should like to lay stress upon one as being particularly worthy of
mention. The famous G. T. H. Fechner makes the conjecture,1 in a discussion as to the
nature of the dreams, that the dream is staged elsewhere than in the waking ideation. No
other assumption enables us to comprehend the special peculiarities of the dream-life.
The idea which is thus put before us is one of psychic locality. We shall wholly ignore the
fact that the psychic apparatus concerned is known to us also as an anatomical
preparation, and we shall carefully avoid the temptation to determine the psychic locality
in any anatomical sense. We shall remain on psychological ground, and we shall do no
more than accept the invitation to think of the instrument which serves the psychic
activities much as we think of a compound microscope, a photographic camera, or other
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apparatus. The psychic locality, then, corresponds to a place within such an apparatus in
which one of the preliminary phases of the image comes into existence. As is well
known, there are in the microscope and the telescope such ideal localities or planes, in
which no tangible portion of the apparatus is located. I think it superfluous to apologise
for the imperfections of this and all similar figures. These comparisons are designed only
to assist us in our attempt to make intelligible the complication of the psychic
performance by dissecting it and referring the individual performances to the individual
components of the apparatus. So far as I am aware, no attempt has yet been made to
divine the construction of the psychic instrument by means of such dissection. I see no
harm in such an attempt; I think that we should give free rein to our conjectures, provided
we keep our heads and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building. Since for the first
approach to any unknown subject we need the help only of auxiliary ideas, we shall
prefer the crudest and most tangible hypothesis to all others.
Accordingly, we conceive the psychic apparatus as a compound instrument, the
component parts of which we shall call instances, or, for the sake of clearness, systems.
We shall then anticipate that these systems may perhaps maintain a constant partial
orientation to one another, very much as do the different and successive systems of lenses
of a telescope. Strictly speaking, there is no need to assume an actual spatial arrangement
of the psychic system. It will be enough for our purpose if a definite sequence is
established, so that in certain psychic events the system will be traversed by the
excitation in a definite temporal order. This order may be different in the case of other
processes; such a possibility is left open. For the sake of brevity, we shall henceforth
speak of the component parts of the apparatus as `y-systems'.
The first thing that strikes us is the fact that the apparatus composed of y-systems has a
direction. All our psychic activities proceed from (inner or outer) stimuli and terminate in
innervations. We thus ascribe to the apparatus a sensory and a motor end; at the sensory
end we find a system which receives the perceptions, and at the motor end another which
opens the sluices of motility. The psychic process generally runs from the perceptive end
to the motor end. The most general scheme of the psychic apparatus has therefore the
following appearance as shown in Fig. 1 on page 379. But this is only in compliance with
the requirement, long familiar to us, that the psychic apparatus must be constructed like a
reflex apparatus. The reflex act remains the type of every psychic activity as well.
FIG. 1
We now have reason to admit a first differentiation at the sensory end. The percepts that
come to us leave in our psychic apparatus a trace, which we may call a memory-trace.
The function related to this memory-trace we call `the memory'. If we hold seriously to
our resolution to connect the psychic processes into systems, the memory-trace can
consist only of lasting changes in the elements of the systems. But, as has already been
shown elsewhere, obvious difficulties arise when one and the same system is faithfully to
preserve changes in its elements and still to remain fresh and receptive in respect of new
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occasions of change. In accordance with the principle which is directing our attempt, we
shall therefore ascribe these two functions to two different systems. We assume that an
initial system of this apparatus receives the stimuli of perception but retains nothing of
them -- that is, it has no memory; and that behind this there lies a second system, which
transforms the momentary excitation of the first into lasting traces. The following would
then be the diagram of our psychic apparatus:
FIG. 2
We know that of the percepts which act upon the P-system, we retain permanently
something else as well as the content itself. Our percepts prove also to be connected with
one another in the memory, and this is especially so if they originally occurred
simultaneously. We call this the fact of association. It is now clear that, if the P-system is
entirely lacking in memory, it certainly cannot preserve traces for the associations; the
individual P-elements would be intolerably hindered in their functioning if a residue of a
former connection should make its influence felt against a new perception. Hence we
must rather assume that the memory-system is the basis of association. The fact of
association, then, consists in this -- that in consequence of a lessening of resistance and a
smoothing of the ways from one of the mem-elements, the excitation transmits itself to a
second rather than to a third mem-element.
On further investigation we find it necessary to assume not one but many such memsystems,
in which the same excitation transmitted by the P-elements undergoes a
diversified fixation. The first of these mem-systems will in any case contain the fixation
of the association through simultaneity, while in those lying farther away the same
material of excitation will be arranged according to other forms of combination; so that
relationships of similarity, etc., might perhaps be represented by these later systems. It
would, of course, be idle to attempt to express in words the psychic significance of such a
system. Its characteristic would lie in the intimacy of its relations to elements of raw
material of memory -- that is (if we wish to hint at a more comprehensive theory) in the
gradations of the conductive resistance on the way to these elements.
An observation of a general nature, which may possibly point to something of
importance, may here be interpolated. The P-system, which possesses no capacity for
preserving changes, and hence no memory, furnishes to consciousness the complexity
and variety of the sensory qualities. Our memories, on the other hand, are unconscious in
themselves; those that are most deeply impressed form no exception. They can be made
conscious, but there is no doubt that they unfold all their activities in the unconscious
state. What we term our character is based, indeed, on the memory-traces of our
impressions, and it is precisely those impressions that have affected us most strongly,
those of our early youth, which hardly ever become conscious. But when memories
become conscious again they show no sensory quality, or a very negligible one in
comparison with the perceptions. If, now, it can be confirmed that for consciousness
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memory and quality are mutually exclusive in the y-systems, we have gained a most
promising insight into the determinations of the neuron-excitations.2
What we have so far assumed concerning the composition of the psychic apparatus at the
sensible end has been assumed regardless of dreams and of the psychological
explanations which we have hitherto derived from them. Dreams, however, will serve as
a source of evidence for our knowledge of another part of the apparatus. We have seen
that it was impossible to explain dream-formation unless we ventured to assume two
psychic `instances', one of which subjected the activities of the other to criticism, the
result of which was exclusion from consciousness.
We have concluded that the criticising `instance' maintains closer relations with the
consciousness than the `instance' criticised. It stands between the latter and the
consciousness like a screen. Further, we have found that there is reason to identify the
criticising `instance' with that which directs our waking life and determines our voluntary
conscious activities. If, in accordance with our assumptions, we now replace these
`instances' by systems, the criticising system will therefore be moved to the motor end.
We now enter both systems in our diagram, expressing, by the names given them, their
relation to consciousness.
FIG 3
The last of the systems at the motor end we call the preconscious (Pcs.) to denote that the
exciting processes in this system can reach consciousness without any further detention,
provided certain other conditions are fulfilled, e.g. the attainment of a definite degree of
intensity, a certain apportionment of that function which we must call attention, etc. This
is at the same time the system which holds the keys of voluntary motility. The system
behind it we call the unconscious (Ucs.), because it has no access to consciousness except
through the preconscious, in the passage through which the excitation-process must
submit to certain changes.3
In which of these systems, then, do we localise the impetus to dream-formation? For the
sake of simplicity, let us say in the system Ucs. We shall find, it is true, in subsequent
discussions, that this is not altogether correct; that dream-formation is obliged to make
connection with dream-thoughts which belong to the system of the preconscious. But we
shall learn elsewhere, when we come to deal with the dream-wish, that the motive power
of the dream is furnished by the Ucs., and on account of this factor we shall assume the
unconscious system as the starting-point for dream-formation. This dream-excitation, like
all the other thought-structures, will now strive to continue itself in the Pcs., and thence
to gain admission to the consciousness.
Experience teaches us that the path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is
closed to the dream-thoughts during the day by the resisting censorship. At night they
gain admission to consciousness; the question arises, In what way and because of what
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changes? If this admission were rendered possible to the dream-thoughts by the
weakening, during the night, of the resistance watching on the boundary between the
unconscious and the preconscious, we should then have dreams in the material of our
ideas, which would not display the hallucinatory character that interests us at present.
The weakening of the censorship between the two systems, Ucs. and Pcs., can explain to
us only such dreams as the `Autodidasker' dream, but not dreams like that of the burning
child, which -- as will be remembered -- we stated as a problem at the outset in our
present investigations.
What takes place in the hallucinatory dream we can describe in no other way than by
saying that the excitation follows a retrogressive course. It communicates itself not to the
motor end of the apparatus, but to the sensory end, and finally reaches the system of
perception. If we call the direction which the psychic process follows from the
unconscious into the waking state progressive, we may then speak of the dream as having
a regressive character.4
This regression is therefore assuredly one of the most important psychological
peculiarities of the dream-process; but we must not forget that it is not characteristic of
the dream alone. Intentional recollection and other component processes of our normal
thinking likewise necessitate a retrogression in the psychic apparatus from some complex
act of ideation to the raw material of the memory-traces which underlie it. But during the
waking state this turning backwards does not reach beyond the memory-images; it is
incapable of producing the hallucinatory revival of the perceptual images. Why is it
otherwise in dreams? When we spoke of the condensation-work of the dream we could
not avoid the assumption that by the dream-work the intensities adhering to the ideas are
completely transferred from one to another. It is probably this modification of the usual
psychic process which makes possible the cathexis5 of the system of P to its full sensory
vividness in the reverse direction to thinking.
I hope that we are not deluding ourselves as regards the importance of this present
discussion. We have done nothing more than give a name to an inexplicable
phenomenon. We call it regression if the idea in the dream is changed back into the visual
image from which it once originated. But even this step requires justification. Why this
definition if it does not teach us anything new? Well, I believe that the word regression is
of service to us, inasmuch as it connects a fact familiar to us with the scheme of the
psychic apparatus endowed with direction. At this point, and for the first time, we shall
profit by the fact that we have constructed such a scheme. For with the help of this
scheme we shall perceive, without further reflection, another peculiarity of dreamformation.
If we look upon the dream as a process of regression within the hypothetical
psychic apparatus, we have at once an explanation of the empirically proven fact that all
thought-relations of the dream-thoughts are either lost in the dream-work or have
difficulty in achieving expression. According to our scheme, these thought-relations are
contained not in the first mem-systems, but in those lying farther to the front, and in the
regression to the perceptual images they must forfeit expression. In regression the
structure of the dream-thoughts breaks up into its raw material.
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But what change renders possible this regression which is impossible during the day? Let
us here be content with an assumption. There must evidently be changes in the cathexis
of the individual systems, causing the latter to become more accessible or inaccessible to
the discharge of the excitation; but in any such apparatus the same effect upon the course
of the excitation might be produced by more than one kind of change. We naturally think
of the sleeping state, and of the many cathectic changes which this evokes at the sensory
end of the apparatus. During the day there is a continuous stream flowing from the y-
system of the P toward the motility end; this current ceases at night, and can no longer
block the flow of the current of excitation in the opposite direction. This would appear to
be that `seclusion from the outer world' which according to the theory of some writers is
supposed to explain the psychological character of the dream. In the explanation of the
regression of the dream we shall, however, have to take into account those other
regressions which occur during morbid waking states. In these other forms of regression
the explanation just given plainly leaves us in the lurch. Regression occurs in spite of the
uninterrupted sensory current in a progressive direction.
The hallucinations of hysteria and paranoia, as well as the visions of mentally normal
persons, I would explain as corresponding, in fact, to regressions, i.e. to thoughts
transformed into images; and would assert that only such thoughts undergo this
transformation as are in intimate connection with suppressed memories, or with
memories which have remained unconscious. As an example I will cite the case of one of
my youngest hysterical patients -- a boy of twelve, who was prevented from falling
asleep by `green faces with red eyes', which terrified him. The source of this
manifestation was the suppressed, but once conscious memory of a boy whom he had
often seen four years earlier, and who offered a warning example of many bad habits,
including masturbation, for which he was now reproaching himself. At that time his
mother had noticed that the complexion of this ill-mannered boy was greenish and that he
had red (i.e. red-rimmed) eyes. Hence his terrifying vision, which merely determined his
recollection of another saying of his mother's, to the effect that such boys become
demented, are unable to learn anything at school, and are doomed to an early death. A
part of this prediction came true in the case of my little patient; he could not get on at
school, and, as appeared from his involuntary associations, he was in terrible dread of the
remainder of the prophecy. However, after a brief period of successful treatment his sleep
was restored, his anxiety removed, and he finished his scholastic year with an excellent
record.
Here I may add the interpretation of a vision described to me by an hysterical woman of
forty, as having occurred when she was in normal health. One morning she opened her
eyes and saw her brother in the room, although she knew him to be confined in an insane
asylum. Her little son was asleep by her side. Lest the child should be frightened on
seeing his uncle, and fall into convulsions, she pulled the sheet over his face. This done,
the phantom disappeared. This apparition was the revision of one of her childish
memories, which, although conscious, was most intimately connected with all the
unconscious material in her mind. Her nurserymaid had told her that her mother, who had
died young (my patient was then only eighteen months old), had suffered from epileptic
or hysterical convulsions, which dated back to a fright caused by her brother (the patient's
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uncle) who appeared to her disguised as a spectre with a sheet over his head. The vision
contains the same elements as the reminiscence, viz. the appearance of the brother, the
sheet, the fright, and its effect. These elements, however, are arranged in a fresh context,
and are transferred to other persons. The obvious motive of the vision, and the thought
which it replaced, was her solicitude lest her little son, who bore a striking resemblance
to his uncle, should share the latter's fate.
Both examples here cited are not entirely unrelated to the state of sleep, and may for that
reason be unfitted to afford the evidence for the sake of which I have cited them. I will,
therefore, refer to my analysis of an hallucinatory paranoiac woman patient6 and to the
results of my hitherto unpublished studies on the psychology of the psychoneuroses, in
order to emphasise the fact that in these cases of regressive thought-transformation one
must not overlook the influence of a suppressed memory, or one that has remained
unconscious, this being usually of an infantile character. This memory draws into the
regression, as it were, the thoughts with which it is connected, and which are kept from
expression by the censorship -- that is, into that form of representation in which the
memory itself is psychically existent. And here I may add, as a result of my studies of
hysteria, that if one succeeds in bringing to consciousness infantile scenes (whether they
are recollections or fantasies) they appear as hallucinations, and are divested of this
character only when they are communicated. It is known also that even in persons whose
memories are not otherwise visual, the earliest infantile memories remain vividly visual
until late in life.
If, now, we bear in mind the part played in the dream-thoughts by the infantile
experiences, or by the fantasies based upon them, and recollect how often fragments of
these re-emerge in the dream-content, and how even the dream-wishes often proceed
from them, we cannot deny the probability that in dreams, too, the transformation of
thoughts into visual images may be the result of the attraction exercised by the visually
represented memory, striving for resuscitation, upon the thoughts severed from
consciousness and struggling for expression. Pursuing this conception, we may further
describe the dream as the substitute for the infantile scene modified by transference to
recent material. The infantile scene cannot enforce its own revival, and must therefore be
satisfied to return as a dream.
This reference to the significance of the infantile scenes (or of their fantastic repetitions)
as in a certain degree furnishing the pattern for the dream-content renders superfluous the
assumption made by Scherner and his pupils concerning inner sources of stimuli.
Scherner assumes a state of `visual excitation', of internal excitation in the organ of sight,
when the dreams manifest a special vividness or an extraordinary abundance of visual
elements. We need raise no objection to this assumption; we may perhaps content
ourselves with assuming such a state of excitation only for the psychic perceptive system
of the organ of vision; we shall, however, insist that this state of excitation is a
reanimation by the memory of a former actual visual excitation. I cannot, from my own
experience, give a good example showing such an influence of an infantile memory; my
own dreams are altogether less rich in perceptual elements than I imagine those of others
to be; but in my most beautiful and most vivid dream of late years I can easily trace the
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hallucinatory distinctness of the dream-contents to the visual qualities of recently
received impressions. On page 314 I mentioned a dream in which the dark blue of the
water, the brown of the smoke issuing from the ship's funnels, and the sombre brown and
red of the buildings which I saw made a profound and lasting impression upon my mind.
This dream, if any, must be attributed to visual excitation, but what was it that had
brought my organ of vision into this excitable state? It was a recent impression which had
joined itself to a series of former impressions. The colours I beheld were in the first place
those of the toy blocks with which my children had erected a magnificent building for my
admiration, on the day preceding the dream. There was the sombre red on the large
blocks, the blue and brown on the small ones. Joined to these were the colour impressions
of my last journey in Italy: the beautiful blue of the Isonzo and the lagoons, the brown
hue of the Alps. The beautiful colours seen in the dream were but a repetition of those
seen in memory.
Let us summarise what we have learned about this peculiarity of dreams: their power of
recasting their idea-content in visual images. We may not have explained this character of
the dream-work by referring it to the known laws of psychology, but we have singled it
out as pointing to unknown relations, and have given it the name of the regressive
character. Wherever such regression has occurred, we have regarded it as an effect of the
resistance which opposes the progress of thought on its normal way to consciousness, and
of the simultaneous attraction exerted upon it by vivid memories.7 The regression in
dreams is perhaps facilitated by the cessation of the progressive stream flowing from the
sense-organs during the day; for which auxiliary factor there must be some
compensation, in the other forms of regression, by the strengthening of the other
regressive motives. We must also bear in mind that in pathological cases of regression,
just as in dreams, the process of energy transference must be different from that occurring
in the regressions of normal psychic life, since it renders possible a full hallucinatory
cathexis of the perceptive system. What we have described in the analysis of the dreamwork
as `regard for representability' may be referred to the selective attraction of visually
remembered scenes touched by the dream-thoughts.
As to the regression, we may further observe that it plays a no less important part in the
theory of neurotic symptom-formation than in the theory of dreams. We may therefore
distinguish a threefold species of regression: (a) a topical one, in the sense of the scheme
of the y-systems here expounded; (b) a temporal one, in so far as it is a regression to
older psychic formations; and (c) a formal one, when primitive modes of expression and
representation take the place of the customary modes. These three forms of regression
are, however, basically one, and in the majority of cases they coincide, for that which is
older in point of time is at the same time formally primitive and, in the psychic
topography, nearer to the perception-end.
We cannot leave the theme of regression in dreams without giving utterance to an
impression which has already and repeatedly forced itself upon us, and which will return
to us reinforced after a deeper study of the psychoneuroses: namely, that dreaming is on
the whole an act of regression to the earliest relationships of the dreamer, a resuscitation
of his childhood, of the impulses which were then dominant and the modes of expression
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which were then available. Behind this childhood of the individual we are then promised
an insight into the phylogenetic childhood, into the evolution of the human race, of which
the development of the individual is only an abridged repetition influenced by the
fortuitous circumstances of life. We begin to suspect that Friedrich Nietzsche was right
when he said that in a dream `there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can
no longer reach by a direct path', and we are encouraged to expect, from the analysis of
dreams, a knowledge of the archaic inheritance of man, a knowledge of psychical things
in him that are innate. It would seem that dreams and neuroses have preserved for us
more of the psychical antiquities than we suspected; so that psychoanalysis may claim a
high rank among those sciences which endeavour to reconstruct the oldest and darkest
phases of the beginnings of mankind.
It is quite possible that we shall not find this first part of our psychological evaluation of
dreams particularly satisfying. We must, however, console ourselves with the thought
that we are, after all, compelled to build out into the dark. If we have not gone altogether
astray, we shall surely reach approximately the same place from another starting-point,
and then, perhaps, we shall be better able to find our bearings.
1 Psychophysik, Part II, p. 520.
2 Since writing this, I have thought that consciousness occurs actually in the locality of the
memory-trace. (cf. Notiz über den Wünderblock, 1925, Ges. Schriften, Bd. vi.)
3 The further elaboration of this linear diagram will have to reckon with the assumption
that the system following the Pcs. represents the one to which we must attribute
consciousness (Cs.), so that P = Cs.
4 The first indication of the element of regression is already encountered in the writings of
Albertus Magnus. According to him the imaginatio constructs the dream out of the
tangible objects which it has retained. The process is the converse of that operating in the
waking state. Hobbes states (Leviathan, 1651): `In sum our dreams are the reverse of our
imagination, the motion, when we are awake, beginning at one end, and when we dream
at another' (quoted by Havelock Ellis, loc. cit., p. 112).
5 [From the Greek kathekho, to occupy, used here in place of the author's term Besetzung,
to signify a charge or investment of energy. -- TRANS.]
6 Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses, p. 165, translated by A. A. Brill,
Monograph Series, Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases Publishing Co.
7 In a statement of the theory of repression it should be explained that a thought passes
into repression owing to the co-operation of two of the factors which influence it. On the
one side (the censorship of Cs.) it is pushed, and from the other side (the Ucs.) it is
pulled, much as one is helped to the top of the Great Pyramid. (cf. the Chapter Die
Verdrängung in Ges. Schriften, Bd. v.)
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C. THE WISH-FULFILMENT
The dream of the burning child (cited above) affords us a welcome opportunity for
appreciating the difficulties confronting the theory of wish-fulfilment. That a dream
should be nothing but a wish-fulfilment must undoubtedly seem strange to us all -- and
not only because of the contradiction offered by the anxiety-dream. Once our first
analyses had given us the enlightenment that meaning and psychic value are concealed
behind our dreams, we could hardly have expected so unitary a determination of this
meaning. According to the correct but summary definition of Aristotle, the dream is a
continuation of thinking in sleep. Now if, during the day, our thoughts perform such a
diversity of psychic acts -- judgments, conclusions, the answering of objections,
expectations, intentions, etc. -- why should they be forced at night to confine themselves
to the production of wishes only? Are there not, on the contrary, many dreams that
present an altogether different psychic act in dream-form -- for example, anxious care --
and is not the father's unusually transparent dream of the burning child such a dream?
From the gleam of light that falls upon his eyes while he is asleep the father draws the
apprehensive conclusion that a candle has fallen over and may be burning the body; he
transforms this conclusion into a dream by embodying it in an obvious situation enacted
in the present tense. What part is played in this dream by the wish-fulfilment? And how
can we possibly mistake the predominance of the thought continued from the waking
state or evoked by the new sensory impression?
All these considerations are justified, and force us to look more closely into the role of
the wish-fulfilment in dreams, and the significance of the waking thoughts continued in
sleep.
It is precisely the wish-fulfilment that has already caused us to divide all dreams into two
groups. We have found dreams which were plainly wish-fulfilments; and others in which
the wish-fulfilment was unrecognisable and was often concealed by every available
means. In this latter class of dreams we recognised the influence of the dream-censorship.
The undisguised wish-dreams were found chiefly in children; short, frank wish-dreams
seemed (I purposely emphasise this word) to occur also in adults.
We may now ask whence in each case does the wish that is realised in the dream
originate? But to what opposition or to what diversity do we relate this `whence'? I think
to the opposition between conscious daily life and an unconscious psychic activity which
is able to make itself perceptible only at night. I thus find a threefold possibility for the
origin of a wish. Firstly, it may have been excited during the day, and owing to external
circumstances may have remained unsatisfied; there is thus left for the night an
acknowledged and unsatisfied wish. Secondly, it may have emerged during the day, only
to be rejected; there is thus left for the night an unsatisfied but suppressed wish. Thirdly,
it may have no relation to daily life, but may belong to those wishes which awake only at
night out of the suppressed material in us. If we turn to our scheme of the psychic
apparatus, we can localise a wish of the first order in the system Pcs. We may assume
that a wish of the second order has been forced back from the Pcs. system into the Ucs.
system, where alone, if anywhere, can it maintain itself; as for the wish-impulse of the
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third order, we believe that it is wholly incapable of leaving the Ucs. system. Now, have
the wishes arising from these different sources the same value for the dream, the same
power to incite a dream?
On surveying the dreams at our disposal with a view to answering this question, we are at
once moved to add as a fourth source of the dream-wish the actual wish-impetus which
arises during the night (for example, the stimulus of thirst, and sexual desire). It then
seems to us probable that the source of the dream-wish does not affect its capacity to
incite a dream. I have in mind the dream of the child who continued the voyage that had
been interrupted during the day, and the other children's dreams cited in the same chapter;
they are explained by an unfulfilled but unsuppressed wish of the daytime. That wishes
suppressed during the day assert themselves in dreams is shown by a great many
examples. I will mention a very simple dream of this kind. A rather sarcastic lady, whose
younger friend has become engaged to be married, is asked in the daytime by her
acquaintances whether she knows her friend's fiancé, and what she thinks of him. She
replies with unqualified praise, imposing silence on her own judgment, although she
would have liked to tell the truth, namely, that he is a commonplace fellow -- one meets
such by the dozen (Dutzendmensch). The following night she dreams that the same
question is put to her, and that she replies with the formula: `In case of subsequent
orders, it will suffice to mention the reference number.' Finally, as the result of numerous
analyses, we learn that the wish in all dreams that have been subject to distortion has its
origin in the unconscious, and could not become perceptible by day. At first sight, then, it
seems that in respect of dream-formation all wishes are of equal value and equal power.
I cannot prove here that this is not really the true state of affairs, but I am strongly
inclined to assume a stricter determination of the dream-wish. Children's dreams leave us
in no doubt that a wish unfulfilled during the day may instigate a dream. But we must not
forget that this is, after all, the wish of a child; that it is a wish-impulse of the strength
peculiar to childhood. I very much doubt whether a wish unfulfilled in the daytime would
suffice to create a dream in an adult. It would rather seem that as we learn to control our
instinctual life by intellection we more and more renounce as unprofitable the formation
or retention of such intense wishes as are natural to childhood. In this, indeed, there may
be individual variations; some retain the infantile type of the psychic processes longer
than others; just as we find such differences in the gradual decline of the originally vivid
visual imagination. In general, however, I am of the opinion that unfulfilled wishes of the
day are insufficient to produce a dream in adults. I will readily admit that the wishimpulses
originating in consciousness contribute to the instigation of dreams, but they
probably do no more. The dream would not occur if the preconscious wish were not
reinforced from another source.
That source is the unconscious. I believe that the conscious wish becomes effective in
exciting a dream only when it succeeds in arousing a similar unconscious wish which
reinforces it. From the indications obtained in the psychoanalysis of the neuroses I
believe that these unconscious wishes are always active and ready to express themselves
whenever they find an opportunity of allying themselves with an impulse from
consciousness, and transferring their own greater intensity to the lesser intensity of the
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latter.1 It must, therefore, seem that the conscious wish alone has been realised in the
dream; but a slight peculiarity in the form of the dream will put us on the track of the
powerful ally from the unconscious. These ever-active and, as it were, immortal wishes
of our unconscious recall the legendary Titans who, from time immemorial, have been
buried under the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods,
and even now quiver from time to time at the convulsions of their mighty limbs. These
wishes, existing in repression, are themselves of infantile origin, as we learn from the
psychological investigation of the neurouses. Let me, therefore, set aside the view
previously expressed, that it matters little whence the dream-wish originates, and replace
it by another, namely: the wish manifested in the dream must be an infantile wish. In the
adult it originates in the Ucs., while in the child, in whom no division and censorship
exist as yet between the Pcs. and Ucs., or in whom these are only in process of formation,
it is an unfulfilled and unrepressed wish from the waking state. I am aware that this
conception cannot be generally demonstrated, but I maintain that it can often be
demonstrated even where one would not have suspected it, and that it cannot be generally
refuted.
In dream-formation, the wish-impulses which are left over from the conscious waking
life are, therefore, to be relegated to the background. I cannot admit that they play any
part except that attributed to the material of actual sensations during sleep in relation to
the dream-content. If I now take into account those other psychic instigations left over
from the waking life of the day, which are not wishes, I shall merely be adhering to the
course mapped out for me by this line of thought. We may succeed in provisionally
disposing of the energetic cathexis of our waking thoughts by deciding to go to sleep. He
is a good sleeper who can do this; Napoleon I is reputed to have been a model of this
kind. But we do not always succeed in doing it, or in doing it completely. Unsolved
problems, harassing cares, overwhelming impressions, continue the activity of our
thought even during sleep, maintaining psychic processes in the system which we have
termed the preconscious. The thought-impulses continued into sleep may be divided into
the following groups:
1. Those which have not been completed during the day, owing to some accidental
cause.
2. Those which have been left uncompleted because our mental powers have failed
us, i.e. unsolved problems.
3. Those which have been turned back and suppressed during the day. This is
reinforced by a powerful fourth group --
4. Those which have been excited in our Ucs. during the day by the workings of the
Pcs.; and finally we may add a fifth, consisting of --
5. The indifferent impressions of the day, which have therefore been left unsettled.
We need not underrate the psychic intensities introduced into sleep by these residues of
the day's waking life, especially those emanating from the group of the unsolved issues. It
is certain that these excitations continue to strive for expression during the night, and we
may assume with equal certainty that the state of sleep renders impossible the usual
continuance of the process of excitation in the preconscious and its termination in
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becoming conscious. In so far as we can become conscious of our mental processes in the
ordinary way, even during the night, to that extent we are simply not asleep. I cannot say
what change is produced in the Pcs. system by the state of sleep,2 but there is no doubt
that the psychological characteristics of sleep are to be sought mainly in the cathectic
changes occurring just in this system, which dominates, moreover, the approach to
motility, paralysed during sleep. On the other hand, I have found nothing in the
psychology of dreams to warrant the assumption that sleep produces any but secondary
changes in the conditions of the Ucs. system. Hence, for the nocturnal excitations in the
Pcs. there remains no other path than that taken by the wish-excitations from the Ucs.;
they must seek reinforcement from the Ucs., and follow the detours of the unconscious
excitations. But what is the relation of the preconscious day-residues to the dream? There
is no doubt that they penetrate abundantly into the dream; that they utilise the dreamcontent
to obtrude themselves upon consciousness even during the night; indeed, they
sometimes even dominate the dream-content, and impel it to continue the work of the
day; it is also certain that the day-residues may just as well have any other character as
that of wishes. But it is highly instructive, and for the theory of wish-fulfilment of quite
decisive importance, to see what conditions they must comply with in order to be
received into the dream.
Let us pick out one of the dreams cited above, e.g. the dream in which my friend Otto
seems to show the symptoms of Basedow's disease (p. 163). Otto's appearance gave me
some concern during the day, and this worry, like everything else relating to him, greatly
affected me. I may assume that this concern followed me into sleep. I was probably bent
on finding out what was the matter with him. During the night my concern found
expression in the dream which I have recorded. Not only was its content senseless, but it
failed to show any wish-fulfilment. But I began to search for the source of this
incongruous expression of the solicitude felt during the day, and analysis revealed a
connection. I identified my friend Otto with a certain Baron L. and myself with a
Professor R. There was only one explanation of my being impelled to select just this
substitute for the day-thought. I must always have been ready in the Ucs. to identify
myself with Professor R., as this meant the realisation of one of the immortal infantile
wishes, viz. the wish to become great. Repulsive ideas respecting my friend, ideas that
would certainly have been repudiated in a waking state, took advantage of the
opportunity to creep into the dream; but the worry of the day had likewise found some
sort of expression by means of a substitute in the dream-content. The day-thought, which
was in itself not a wish, but on the contrary a worry, had in some way to find a
connection with some infantile wish, now unconscious and suppressed, which then
allowed it -- duly dressed up -- to `arise' for consciousness. The more domineering the
worry the more forced could be the connection to be established; between the content of
the wish and that of the worry there need be no connection, nor was there one in our
example.
It would perhaps be appropriate, in dealing with this problem, to inquire how a dream
behaves when material is offered to it in the dream-thoughts which flatly opposes a wishfulfilment;
such as justified worries, painful reflections and distressing realisations. The
many possible results may be classified as follows: (a) The dream-work succeeds in
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replacing all painful ideas by contrary ideas, and suppressing the painful affect belonging
to them. This, then, results in a pure and simple satisfaction-dream, a palpable `wishfulfilment',
concerning which there is nothing more to be said. (b) The painful ideas find
their way into the manifest dream-content, more or less modified, but nevertheless quite
recognisable. This is the case which raises doubts about the wish-theory of dreams, and
thus calls for further investigation. Such dreams with a painful content may either be
indifferent in feeling, or they may convey the whole painful affect, which the ideas
contained in them seem to justify, or they may even lead to the development of anxiety to
the point of waking.
Analysis then shows that even these painful dreams are wish-fulfilments. An unconscious
and repressed wish, whose fulfilment could only be felt as painful by the dreamer's ego,
has seized the opportunity offered by the continued cathexis of painful day-residues, has
lent them its support, and has thus made them capable of being dreamed. But whereas in
case (a) the unconscious wish coincided with the conscious one, in case (b) the discord
between the unconscious and the conscious -- the repressed material and the ego -- is
revealed, and the situation in the fairy-tale, of the three wishes which the fairy offers to
the married couple, is realised (see [note 32] below, p. 434). The gratification in respect
of the fulfilment of the repressed wish may prove to be so great that it balances the
painful affects adhering to the day-residues; the dream is then indifferent in its affective
tone, although it is on the one hand the fulfilment of a wish, and on the other the
fulfilment of a fear. Or it may happen that the sleep ego plays an even more extensive
part in the dream-formation, that it reacts with violent resentment to the accomplished
satisfaction of the repressed wish, and even goes so far as to make an end of the dream by
means of anxiety. It is thus not difficult to recognise that dreams of pain and anxiety are,
in accordance with our theory, just as much wish-fulfilments as are the straightforward
dreams of gratification.
Painful dreams may also be `punishment dreams'. It must be admitted that the recognition
of these dreams adds something that is, in a certain sense, new to the theory of dreams.
What is fulfilled by them is once more an unconscious wish -- the wish for the
punishment of the dreamer for a repressed, prohibited wish-impulse. To this extent these
dreams comply with the requirement here laid down: that the motive-power behind the
dream-formation must be furnished by a wish belonging to the unconscious. But a finer
psychological dissection allows us to recognise the difference between this and the other
wish-dreams. In the dreams of group (b) the unconscious dream-forming wish belonged
to the repressed material. In the punishment-dreams it is likewise an unconscious wish,
but one which we must attribute not to the repressed material but to the `ego'.
Punishment-dreams point, therefore, to the possibility of a still more extensive
participation of the ego in dream-formation. The mechanism of dream-formation
becomes indeed in every way more transparent if in place of the antithesis `conscious'
and `unconscious', we put the antithesis: `ego' and `repressed'. This, however, cannot be
done without taking into account what happens in the psychoneuroses, and for this reason
it has not been done in this book. Here I need only remark that the occurrence of
punishment-dreams is not generally subject to the presence of painful day-residues. They
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287
originate indeed most readily if the contrary is true, if the thoughts which are dayresidues
are of a gratifying nature, but express illicit gratifications. Of these thoughts
nothing then finds its way into the manifest dream except their contrary, just as was the
case in the dreams of group (a). Thus it would be the essential characteristic of
punishment-dreams that in them it is not the unconscious wish from the repressed
material (from the system Ucs.) that is responsible for dream-formation, but the punitive
wish reacting against it, a wish pertaining to the ego, even though it is unconscious (i.e.
preconscious).3
I will elucidate some of the foregoing observations by means of a dream of my own, and
above all I will try to show how the dream-work deals with a day-residue involving
painful expectation:
Indistinct beginning. I tell my wife I have some news for her, something very special. She
becomes frightened, and does not wish to hear it. I assure her that on the contrary it is
something which will please her greatly, and I begin to tell her that our son's Officers'
Corps has sent a sum of money (5,000 k.?) . . . something about honourable mention . . .
distribution . . . at the same time I have gone with her into a small room, like a
storeroom, in order to fetch something from it. Suddenly I see my son appear; he is not in
uniform but rather in a tight-fitting sports suit (like a seal?) with a small cap. He climbs
onto a basket which stands to one side near a chest, in order to put something on this
chest: I address him; no answer. It seems to me that his face or forehead is bandaged, he
arranges something in his mouth, pushing something into it. Also his hair shows a glint of
grey. I reflect: Can he be so exhausted? And has he false teeth? Before I can address him
again I awake without anxiety, but with palpitations. My clock points to 2.30 a.m.
To give a full analysis is once more impossible. I shall therefore confine myself to
emphasising some decisive points. Painful expectations of the day had given occasion for
this dream; once again there had been no news for over a week from my son, who was
fighting at the front. It is easy to see that in the dream-content the conviction that he has
been killed or wounded finds expression. At the beginning of the dream one can observe
an energetic effort to replace the painful thoughts by their contrary. I have to impart
something very pleasing, something about sending money, honourable mention, and
distribution. (The sum of money originates in a gratifying incident of my medical
practice; it is therefore trying to lead the dream away altogether from its theme.) But this
effort fails. The boy's mother has a presentiment of something terrible and does not wish
to listen. The disguises are too thin; the reference to the material to be suppressed shows
through everywhere. If my son is killed, then his comrades will send back his property; I
shall have to distribute whatever he has left among his sisters, brothers and other people.
Honourable mention is frequently awarded to an officer after he has died the `hero's
death'. The dream thus strives to give direct expression to what it at first wished to deny,
whilst at the same time the wishfulfilling tendency reveals itself by distortion. (The
change of locality in the dream is no doubt to be understood as threshold symbolism, in
line with Silberer's view.) We have indeed no idea what lends it the requisite motivepower.
But my son does not appear as `falling' (on the field of battle) but `climbing'. --
He was, in fact, a daring mountaineer. -- He is not in uniform, but in a sports suit; that is,
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the place of the fatality now dreaded has been taken by an accident which happened to
him at one time when he was ski-running, when he fell and fractured his thigh. But the
nature of his costume, which makes him look like a seal, recalls immediately a younger
person, our comical little grandson; the grey hair recalls his father, our son-in-law, who
has had a bad time in the War. What does this signify? But let us leave this: the locality, a
pantry, the chest, from which he wants to take something (in the dream, to put something
on it), are unmistakable allusions to an accident of my own, brought upon myself when I
was between two and three years of age. I climbed on a foot-stool in the pantry, in order
to get something nice which was on a chest or table. The foot-stool tumbled over and its
edge struck me behind the lower jaw. I might very well have knocked all my teeth out. At
this point, an admonition presents itself: it serves you right -- like a hostile impulse
against the valiant warrior. A profounder analysis enables me to detect the hidden
impulse, which would be able to find satisfaction in the dreaded mishap to my son. It is
the envy of youth which the elderly man believes that he has thoroughly stifled in actual
life. There is no mistaking the fact that it was the very intensity of the painful
apprehension lest such a misfortune should really happen that searched out for its
alleviation such a repressed wish-fulfilment.
I can now clearly define what the unconscious wish means for the dream. I will admit
that there is a whole class of dreams in which the incitement originates mainly or even
exclusively from the residues of the day; and returning to the dream about my friend
Otto, I believe that even my desire to become at last a professor extraordinarius would
have allowed me to sleep in peace that night, had not the day's concern for my friend's
health continued active. But this worry alone would not have produced a dream; the
motive-power needed by the dream had to be contributed by a wish, and it was the
business of my concern to find such a wish for itself, as the motive power of the dream.
To put it figuratively, it is quite possible that a day-thought plays the part of the
entrepreneur in the dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as we say, has the idea, and feels
impelled to realise it, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who will
defray the expense, and this capitalist, who contributes the psychic expenditure for the
dream, is invariably and indisputably, whatever the nature of the waking thoughts, a wish
from the unconscious.
In other cases the capitalist himself is the entrepreneur; this, indeed, seems to be the
more usual case. An unconscious wish is excited by the day's work, and this now creates
the dream. And the dream-processes provide a parallel for all the other possibilities of the
economic relationship here used as an illustration. Thus the entrepreneur may himself
contribute a little of the capital, or several entrepreneurs may seek the aid of the same
capitalist, or several capitalists may jointly supply the capital required by the
entrepreneurs. Thus there are dreams sustained by more than one dream-wish, and many
similar variations, which may be readily imagined, and which are of no further interest to
us. What is still lacking to our discussion of the dream-wish we shall only be able to
complete later on.

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