condensation, displacement, and definite arrangement of the psychical
matter, we must ascribe to it yet another activity--one which is,
indeed, not shared by every dream. I shall not treat this position of
the dream work exhaustively; I will only point out that the readiest
way to arrive at a conception of it is to take for granted, probably
unfairly, that it _only subsequently influences the dream content which
has already been built up_. Its mode of action thus consists in so
coördinating the parts of the dream that these coalesce to a coherent
whole, to a dream composition. The dream gets a kind of façade which, it
is true, does not conceal the whole of its content. There is a sort of
preliminary explanation to be strengthened by interpolations and slight
alterations. Such elaboration of the dream content must not be too
pronounced; the misconception of the dream thoughts to which it gives
rise is merely superficial, and our first piece of work in analyzing a
dream is to get rid of these early attempts at interpretation.
The motives for this part of the dream work are easily gauged. This
final elaboration of the dream is due to a _regard for
intelligibility_--a fact at once betraying the origin of an action which
behaves towards the actual dream content just as our normal psychical
action behaves towards some proffered perception that is to our liking.
The dream content is thus secured under the pretense of certain
expectations, is perceptually classified by the supposition of its
intelligibility, thereby risking its falsification, whilst, in fact, the
most extraordinary misconceptions arise if the dream can be correlated
with nothing familiar. Every one is aware that we are unable to look at
any series of unfamiliar signs, or to listen to a discussion of unknown
words, without at once making perpetual changes through _our regard for
intelligibility_, through our falling back upon what is familiar.
We can call those dreams _properly made up_ which are the result of an
elaboration in every way analogous to the psychical action of our waking
life. In other dreams there is no such action; not even an attempt is
made to bring about order and meaning. We regard the dream as "quite
mad," because on awaking it is with this last-named part of the dream
work, the dream elaboration, that we identify ourselves. So far,
however, as our analysis is concerned, the dream, which resembles a
medley of disconnected fragments, is of as much value as the one with a
smooth and beautifully polished surface. In the former case we are
spared, to some extent, the trouble of breaking down the
super-elaboration of the dream content.
All the same, it would be an error to see in the dream façade nothing
but the misunderstood and somewhat arbitrary elaboration of the dream
carried out at the instance of our psychical life. Wishes and phantasies
are not infrequently employed in the erection of this façade, which
were already fashioned in the dream thoughts; they are akin to those of
our waking life--"day-dreams," as they are very properly called. These
wishes and phantasies, which analysis discloses in our dreams at night,
often present themselves as repetitions and refashionings of the scenes
of infancy. Thus the dream façade may show us directly the true core of
the dream, distorted through admixture with other matter.
Beyond these four activities there is nothing else to be discovered in
the dream work. If we keep closely to the definition that dream work
denotes the transference of dream thoughts to dream content, we are
compelled to say that the dream work is not creative; it develops no
fancies of its own, it judges nothing, decides nothing. It does nothing
but prepare the matter for condensation and displacement, and refashions
it for dramatization, to which must be added the inconstant last-named
mechanism--that of explanatory elaboration. It is true that a good deal
is found in the dream content which might be understood as the result of
another and more intellectual performance; but analysis shows
conclusively every time that these _intellectual operations were already
present in the dream thoughts, and have only been taken over by the
dream content_. A syllogism in the dream is nothing other than the
repetition of a syllogism in the dream thoughts; it seems inoffensive if
it has been transferred to the dream without alteration; it becomes
absurd if in the dream work it has been transferred to other matter. A
calculation in the dream content simply means that there was a
calculation in the dream thoughts; whilst this is always correct, the
calculation in the dream can furnish the silliest results by the
condensation of its factors and the displacement of the same operations
to other things. Even speeches which are found in the dream content are
not new compositions; they prove to be pieced together out of speeches
which have been made or heard or read; the words are faithfully copied,
but the occasion of their utterance is quite overlooked, and their
meaning is most violently changed.
It is, perhaps, not superfluous to support these assertions by examples:
1. _A seemingly inoffensive, well-made dream of a patient. She was going
to market with her cook, who carried the basket. The butcher said to her
when she asked him for something: "That is all gone," and wished to give
her something else, remarking; "That's very good." She declines, and
goes to the greengrocer, who wants to sell her a peculiar vegetable
which is bound up in bundles and of a black color. She says: "I don't
know that; I won't take it."_
The remark "That is all gone" arose from the treatment. A few days
before I said myself to the patient that the earliest reminiscences of
childhood _are all gone_ as such, but are replaced by transferences and
dreams. Thus I am the butcher.
The second remark, _"I don't know that"_ arose in a very different
connection. The day before she had herself called out in rebuke to the
cook (who, moreover, also appears in the dream): "_Behave yourself
properly_; I don't know _that_"--that is, "I don't know this kind of
behavior; I won't have it." The more harmless portion of this speech was
arrived at by a displacement of the dream content; in the dream thoughts
only the other portion of the speech played a part, because the dream
work changed an imaginary situation into utter irrecognizability and
complete inoffensiveness (while in a certain sense I behave in an
unseemly way to the lady). The situation resulting in this phantasy is,
however, nothing but a new edition of one that actually took place.
2. A dream apparently meaningless relates to figures. _"She wants to pay
something; her daughter takes three florins sixty-five kreuzers out of
her purse; but she says: 'What are you doing? It only cost twenty-one
kreuzers.'"_
The dreamer was a stranger who had placed her child at school in Vienna,
and who was able to continue under my treatment so long as her daughter
remained at Vienna. The day before the dream the directress of the
school had recommended her to keep the child another year at school. In
this case she would have been able to prolong her treatment by one year.
The figures in the dream become important if it be remembered that time
is money. One year equals 365 days, or, expressed in kreuzers, 365
kreuzers, which is three florins sixty-five kreuzers. The twenty-one
kreuzers correspond with the three weeks which remained from the day of
the dream to the end of the school term, and thus to the end of the
treatment. It was obviously financial considerations which had moved the
lady to refuse the proposal of the directress, and which were answerable
for the triviality of the amount in the dream.
3. A lady, young, but already ten years married, heard that a friend of
hers, Miss Elise L----, of about the same age, had become engaged. This
gave rise to the following dream:
_She was sitting with her husband in the theater; the one side of the
stalls was quite empty. Her husband tells her, Elise L---- and her
fiancé had intended coming, but could only get some cheap seats, three
for one florin fifty kreuzers, and these they would not take. In her
opinion, that would not have mattered very much._
The origin of the figures from the matter of the dream thoughts and the
changes the figures underwent are of interest. Whence came the one
florin fifty kreuzers? From a trifling occurrence of the previous day.
Her sister-in-law had received 150 florins as a present from her
husband, and had quickly got rid of it by buying some ornament. Note
that 150 florins is one hundred times one florin fifty kreuzers. For the
_three_ concerned with the tickets, the only link is that Elise L---- is
exactly three months younger than the dreamer. The scene in the dream is
the repetition of a little adventure for which she has often been teased
by her husband. She was once in a great hurry to get tickets in time for
a piece, and when she came to the theater _one side of the stalls was
almost empty_. It was therefore quite unnecessary for her to have been
in _such a hurry_. Nor must we overlook the absurdity of the dream that
two persons should take three tickets for the theater.
Now for the dream ideas. It was _stupid_ to have married so early; I
_need not_ have been _in so great a hurry_. Elise L----'s example shows
me that I should have been able to get a husband later; indeed, one a
_hundred times better_ if I had but waited. I could have bought _three_
such men with the money (dowry).
[1] "Ich möchte gerne etwas geniessen ohne 'Kosten' zu haben." A a pun
upon the word "kosten," which has two meanings--"taste" and "cost." In
"Die Traumdeutung," third edition, p. 71 footnote, Professor Freud
remarks that "the finest example of dream interpretation left us by the
ancients is based upon a pun" (from "The Interpretation of Dreams," by
Artemidorus Daldianus). "Moreover, dreams are so intimately bound up
with language that Ferenczi truly points out that every tongue has its
own language of dreams. A dream is as a rule untranslatable into other
languages."--TRANSLATOR.
[2] It is worthy of remark that eminent philologists maintain that the
oldest languages used the same word for expressing quite general
antitheses. In C. Abel's essay, "Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworter"
(1884, the following examples of such words in England are given:
"gleam--gloom"; "to lock--loch"; "down--The Downs"; "to step--to stop."
In his essay on "The Origin of Language" ("Linguistic Essays," p. 240),
Abel says: "When the Englishman says 'without,' is not his judgment
based upon the comparative juxtaposition of two opposites, 'with' and
'out'; 'with' itself originally meant 'without,' as may still be seen in
'withdraw.' 'Bid' includes the opposite sense of giving and of
proffering." Abel, "The English Verbs of Command," "Linguistic Essays,"
p. 104; see also Freud, "Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte"; _Jahrbuch für
Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen_, Band II., part
i., p. 179).--TRANSLATOR.
III
WHY THE DREAM DISGUISES THE DESIRES
In the foregoing exposition we have now learnt something of the dream
work; we must regard it as a quite special psychical process, which, so
far as we are aware, resembles nothing else. To the dream work has been
transferred that bewilderment which its product, the dream, has aroused
in us. In truth, the dream work is only the first recognition of a group
of psychical processes to which must be referred the origin of
hysterical symptoms, the ideas of morbid dread, obsession, and illusion.
Condensation, and especially displacement, are never-failing features in
these other processes. The regard for appearance remains, on the other
hand, peculiar to the dream work. If this explanation brings the dream
into line with the formation of psychical disease, it becomes the more
important to fathom the essential conditions of processes like dream
building. It will be probably a surprise to hear that neither the state
of sleep nor illness is among the indispensable conditions. A whole
number of phenomena of the everyday life of healthy persons,
forgetfulness, slips in speaking and in holding things, together with a
certain class of mistakes, are due to a psychical mechanism analogous to
that of the dream and the other members of this group.
Displacement is the core of the problem, and the most striking of all
the dream performances. A thorough investigation of the subject shows
that the essential condition of displacement is purely psychological; it
is in the nature of a motive. We get on the track by thrashing out
experiences which one cannot avoid in the analysis of dreams. I had to
break off the relations of my dream thoughts in the analysis of my dream
on p. 8 because I found some experiences which I do not wish strangers
to know, and which I could not relate without serious damage to
important considerations. I added, it would be no use were I to select
another instead of that particular dream; in every dream where the
content is obscure or intricate, I should hit upon dream thoughts which
call for secrecy. If, however, I continue the analysis for myself,
without regard to those others, for whom, indeed, so personal an event
as my dream cannot matter, I arrive finally at ideas which surprise me,
which I have not known to be mine, which not only appear _foreign_ to
me, but which are _unpleasant_, and which I would like to oppose
vehemently, whilst the chain of ideas running through the analysis
intrudes upon me inexorably. I can only take these circumstances into
account by admitting that these thoughts are actually part of my
psychical life, possessing a certain psychical intensity or energy.
However, by virtue of a particular psychological condition, the
_thoughts could not become conscious to me_. I call this particular
condition "_Repression_." It is therefore impossible for me not to
recognize some casual relationship between the obscurity of the dream
content and this state of repression--this _incapacity of
consciousness_. Whence I conclude that the cause of the obscurity is
_the desire to conceal these thoughts_. Thus I arrive at the conception
of the _dream distortion_ as the deed of the dream work, and of
_displacement_ serving to disguise this object.
I will test this in my own dream, and ask myself, What is the thought
which, quite innocuous in its distorted form, provokes my liveliest
opposition in its real form? I remember that the free drive reminded me
of the last expensive drive with a member of my family, the
interpretation of the dream being: I should for once like to experience
affection for which I should not have to pay, and that shortly before
the dream I had to make a heavy disbursement for this very person. In
this connection, I cannot get away from the thought _that I regret this
disbursement_. It is only when I acknowledge this feeling that there is
any sense in my wishing in the dream for an affection that should entail
no outlay. And yet I can state on my honor that I did not hesitate for a
moment when it became necessary to expend that sum. The regret, the
counter-current, was unconscious to me. Why it was unconscious is quite
another question which would lead us far away from the answer which,
though within my knowledge, belongs elsewhere.
If I subject the dream of another person instead of one of my own to
analysis, the result is the same; the motives for convincing others is,
however, changed. In the dream of a healthy person the only way for me
to enable him to accept this repressed idea is the coherence of the
dream thoughts. He is at liberty to reject this explanation. But if we
are dealing with a person suffering from any neurosis--say from
hysteria--the recognition of these repressed ideas is compulsory by
reason of their connection with the symptoms of his illness and of the
improvement resulting from exchanging the symptoms for the repressed
ideas. Take the patient from whom I got the last dream about the three
tickets for one florin fifty kreuzers. Analysis shows that she does not
think highly of her husband, that she regrets having married him, that
she would be glad to change him for some one else. It is true that she
maintains that she loves her husband, that her emotional life knows
nothing about this depreciation (a hundred times better!), but all her
symptoms lead to the same conclusion as this dream. When her repressed
memories had rewakened a certain period when she was conscious that she
did not love her husband, her symptoms disappeared, and therewith
disappeared her resistance to the interpretation of the dream.
This conception of repression once fixed, together with the distortion
of the dream in relation to repressed psychical matter, we are in a
position to give a general exposition of the principal results which the
analysis of dreams supplies. We learnt that the most intelligible and
meaningful dreams are unrealized desires; the desires they pictured as
realized are known to consciousness, have been held over from the
daytime, and are of absorbing interest. The analysis of obscure and
intricate dreams discloses something very similar; the dream scene again
pictures as realized some desire which regularly proceeds from the dream
ideas, but the picture is unrecognizable, and is only cleared up in the
analysis. The desire itself is either one repressed, foreign to
consciousness, or it is closely bound up with repressed ideas. The
formula for these dreams may be thus stated: _They are concealed
realizations of repressed desires_. It is interesting to note that they
are right who regard the dream as foretelling the future. Although the
future which the dream shows us is not that which will occur, but that
which we would like to occur. Folk psychology proceeds here according to
its wont; it believes what it wishes to believe.
Dreams can be divided into three classes according to their relation
towards the realization of desire. Firstly come those which exhibit a
_non-repressed, non-concealed desire_; these are dreams of the infantile
type, becoming ever rarer among adults. Secondly, dreams which express
in _veiled_ form some _repressed desire_; these constitute by far the
larger number of our dreams, and they require analysis for their
understanding. Thirdly, these dreams where repression exists, but
_without_ or with but slight concealment. These dreams are invariably
accompanied by a feeling of dread which brings the dream to an end. This
feeling of dread here replaces dream displacement; I regarded the dream
work as having prevented this in the dream of the second class. It is
not very difficult to prove that what is now present as intense dread in
the dream was once desire, and is now secondary to the repression.
There are also definite dreams with a painful content, without the
presence of any anxiety in the dream. These cannot be reckoned among
dreams of dread; they have, however, always been used to prove the
unimportance and the psychical futility of dreams. An analysis of such
an example will show that it belongs to our second class of dreams--a
_perfectly concealed_ realization of repressed desires. Analysis will
demonstrate at the same time how excellently adapted is the work of
displacement to the concealment of desires.
A girl dreamt that she saw lying dead before her the only surviving
child of her sister amid the same surroundings as a few years before she
saw the first child lying dead. She was not sensible of any pain, but
naturally combatted the view that the scene represented a desire of
hers. Nor was that view necessary. Years ago it was at the funeral of
the child that she had last seen and spoken to the man she loved. Were
the second child to die, she would be sure to meet this man again in her
sister's house. She is longing to meet him, but struggles against this
feeling. The day of the dream she had taken a ticket for a lecture,
which announced the presence of the man she always loved. The dream is
simply a dream of impatience common to those which happen before a
journey, theater, or simply anticipated pleasures. The longing is
concealed by the shifting of the scene to the occasion when any joyous
feeling were out of place, and yet where it did once exist. Note,
further, that the emotional behavior in the dream is adapted, not to the
displaced, but to the real but suppressed dream ideas. The scene
anticipates the long-hoped-for meeting; there is here no call for
painful emotions.
There has hitherto been no occasion for philosophers to bestir
themselves with a psychology of repression. We must be allowed to
construct some clear conception as to the origin of dreams as the first
steps in this unknown territory. The scheme which we have formulated not
only from a study of dreams is, it is true, already somewhat
complicated, but we cannot find any simpler one that will suffice. We
hold that our psychical apparatus contains two procedures for the
construction of thoughts. The second one has the advantage that its
products find an open path to consciousness, whilst the activity of the
first procedure is unknown to itself, and can only arrive at
consciousness through the second one. At the borderland of these two
procedures, where the first passes over into the second, a censorship
is established which only passes what pleases it, keeping back
everything else. That which is rejected by the censorship is, according
to our definition, in a state of repression. Under certain conditions,
one of which is the sleeping state, the balance of power between the two
procedures is so changed that what is repressed can no longer be kept
back. In the sleeping state this may possibly occur through the
negligence of the censor; what has been hitherto repressed will now
succeed in finding its way to consciousness. But as the censorship is
never absent, but merely off guard, certain alterations must be conceded
so as to placate it. It is a compromise which becomes conscious in this
case--a compromise between what one procedure has in view and the
demands of the other. _Repression, laxity of the censor,
compromise_--this is the foundation for the origin of many another
psychological process, just as it is for the dream. In such compromises
we can observe the processes of condensation, of displacement, the
acceptance of superficial associations, which we have found in the dream
work.
It is not for us to deny the demonic element which has played a part in
constructing our explanation of dream work. The impression left is that
the formation of obscure dreams proceeds as if a person had something
to say which must be agreeable for another person upon whom he is
dependent to hear. It is by the use of this image that we figure to
ourselves the conception of the _dream distortion_ and of the
censorship, and ventured to crystallize our impression in a rather
crude, but at least definite, psychological theory. Whatever explanation
the future may offer of these first and second procedures, we shall
expect a confirmation of our correlate that the second procedure
commands the entrance to consciousness, and can exclude the first from
consciousness.
Once the sleeping state overcome, the censorship resumes complete sway,
and is now able to revoke that which was granted in a moment of
weakness. That the _forgetting_ of dreams explains this in part, at
least, we are convinced by our experience, confirmed again and again.
During the relation of a dream, or during analysis of one, it not
infrequently happens that some fragment of the dream is suddenly
forgotten. This fragment so forgotten invariably contains the best and
readiest approach to an understanding of the dream. Probably that is why
it sinks into oblivion--_i.e._, into a renewed suppression.
Viewing the dream content as the representation of a realized desire,
and referring its vagueness to the changes made by the censor in the
repressed matter, it is no longer difficult to grasp the function of
dreams. In fundamental contrast with those saws which assume that sleep
is disturbed by dreams, we hold the _dream as the guardian of sleep_. So
far as children's dreams are concerned, our view should find ready
acceptance.