Must minister to himself.
And here, insensibly, we have passed into the World of Dreams. The
morbid and the normal have come together. Dreams are the awaking of
dormant complexes; they are transfigured experiences; they come into
consciousness trailing clouds of emotion, and fill the dreamer’s
imagination with mysterious images. It is here that the method of
psycho-analysis most fascinates the student. It looks as if once more
the “interpretation of dreams” had become a reality. The results of
psycho-analysis, even when the method is applied with a master hand and
the details are interpreted with a skill that comes only of a quick
imagination, are not entirely convincing; but they are certainly such as
to make more and more observation desirable. In the present short essay
Professor Freud gives a sketch of psycho-analysis as it is applied to
the interpretations of dreams. His examples, if they are enough to
illustrate the theory, are hardly enough to prove it, but they are
intended as an introduction to his more elaborate studies; and,
hitherto, observers as they have increased in experience have gained in
conviction. That the method goes a long way to prove that dreams are not
a chaotic sport of the brain, but are a manifestation of ordered mental
experience, is beyond doubt. It would be easy to show where the theory
does not cover facts, but it is equally easy to show many facts that it
does cover.
What, then, is the theory? Briefly this, that dreams are very largely
the expressions of unfulfilled desires. Where, as in children, the
waking experience and the sleeping experience differ from each other by
very little, the dream, or sleeping experience, readily takes the form
of the ungratified desires of the day. But as the mind grows older the
dream expression of a desire gets more intricate. By-and-by it is too
intricate to be deciphered from direct memory, and then there is a
chance for the method of psycho-analysis. What of the dream is
remembered gives the cue for the analysis. Take a remembered element of
a dream, track it back and back by free association or other method, and
you will find that, at one or two removes, the remembered element stirs
up forgotten elements, and ultimately brings coherence out of
incoherence.
This appears simple, but let the reader study the dreams analysed in
this essay, and he will find himself stirred by a thousand suggestions.
For Professor Freud has constructed empirical laws out of his masses of
material. The dream as it appears to the dreamer he calls the _manifest
dream ideas_. But as these are too absurd to form a coherent reality, he
gives ground for believing that they represent _latent dream ideas_. The
manifest dream is a mass of symbols representing elements in the latent
dream ideas. How the latent dream ideas generate the manifest dream is
discovered by psycho-analysis, the translation from the latent to the
manifest is the effect of the _dream work_. The dream work is the very
core of the difficulty. It is round this that Professor Freud’s greatest
subtleties of method are focussed. He shows that every dream is linked
to something that occurs on the previous day, some recent experience,
but the experience emerges in the dream as part of the current panorama
of the subjective life, and there is no date to the beginning of the
panorama—it may go back to any point in the individual’s history, even
into the preconscious days of early infancy. The day’s experience and
the life’s experience flow in a single stream, and the images that
appear in dreams are but the symbols of all the latent ideas of that
experience. How, by displacement of this element or that, compound
symbols are formed; how, by the foreshortening of experience and the
linking of the past with the present in a single idea, masses of old
memories are clotted into a single point; how, in the freedom of the
dream world, where the tension of the waking life is relaxed, where the
exacting stimulations of the day are reduced, where the consciousness of
duty to be done in the highly organised conditions of social conduct is
lowered, where, in a word, the _censor_ is drowsy or asleep, where the
dream symbols shape themselves into dramatic scenes of endless
variety—these it is that Professor Freud’s theory endeavours to set
forth. Displacement, condensation, dramatisation—these are the short
names for these long and complicated processes. In the course of his
expositions, Professor Freud uses these processes almost as if they were
demons, and he admits frankly their figurative character. But he pleads
that they represent real processes, and is ready to accept better names
when he finds them. To trace back the dream images to a definite meaning
in experience is the aim of the psycho-analysis of dreams. And the
successes in these must be tested by the facts. Sometimes the results
are highly persuasive, sometimes they look highly fanciful, always they
are full of suggestion and keep close to realities.
The dream symbolism, in particular, it is easy to criticise; but, after
all, dream symbolism is a reality. The point to investigate is, what
dream images are legitimately considered symbolic and what not. One has
only to remember that every word spoken or written is a symbol, and a
symbol in much the same sense as the symbolism of dreams, for every
written or spoken word is a complicated series of motions that express
meanings. The dream images are complicated series of images that express
meanings. The difficulty of symbolism is no greater in the one case than
in the other. But the variety of dream symbols is so immense that the
difficulties of tracing their meaning are enormous. It is here that the
method meets its greatest difficulties; but, equally, it is here that it
scores its greatest triumphs. Spoken or written language is a
technically organised system of symbols; dream language is as yet a
poorly organised system of symbols. The method of psycho-analysis aims
at organising them. Some test results are described in this essay;
multitudes of others are to be found in the literature that is flowing
from the application of the psycho-analytic method. Time alone will show
how far the organisation of dream symbols into a definite “language of
dreams” is, in any given society, actual or possible. But the effort of
organisation has led Professor Freud to another fine fetch of theory,
for his dream symbolism suggests many curious explanations for the
mythologies of all ages and all countries. Myth symbols, that seem to
defy explanation, he traces back to their roots in the “unconscious” of
primitive man.
That the emotions of sex should play an enormous part in the processes
of analysis is to be expected; for the sex emotions are among the
deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature, and colour every experience.
From their proximate beginning in infancy—and Freud’s theory here is of
immense significance—to their multiform derivatives in adult life, the
sex emotions exercise an influence on every phase of development, and,
in one form or another, are themselves a normal index of the stages of
development. It is therefore reasonable to expect that they should play
a great part in the formation of obsessions, of fixed ideas, of
perversions, of repressed complexes. In every civilisation, as Freud
indicates, the sex emotions are the most difficult to control, and have
demanded the greatest amount of restraint.
Restraints lead to repressions, repressions lead to dissociations,
dissociations lead to irregularities of action. When, therefore, as in
dreams, the restraints of the social day are withdrawn, naturally the
repressed ideas tend to emerge once more. How much these ideas account
for in the hysterias, how much “the shocks of despised love” affect even
the normal life, needs no emphasis, but Freud pushes his analysis
farther, and tracks the sex emotions, like many other fundamental
emotions, into a thousand by-paths of ordinary experience. But it would
be foolishness to say that sex emotions are everything in the ruins of
the “Buried Temple.” Far from it. What is true of the sex emotions is
true of all other emotions in their varying degrees, and often what
looks like predominant sex emotions may turn out to be accidental rather
than causative, a concomitant symptom rather than the initiatory centre
of disturbance. But these points are all controversial. It is the object
of Freud to put them to the test. If his general theory be true, the
dream-world will more and more become the revealer of our deepest and
oldest experience.
It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrative items and relative
criticisms, but that is not the purpose of an introduction. Here I am
concerned simply to recommend this essay to the careful study of all
those interested in the mental history of the individual, and in the
blotting out from the mind of needless fears and anxieties. And no one
need hesitate to enter on this study, whatever his metaphysical theories
may be. Even the “unity of consciousness” will not suffer, for, through
his unending efforts to link the experiences of the day with the whole
experience of the individual life, Professor Freud, by the union of
buried consciousness, restores to the mind a new unity of consciousness.
Dr. Eder, whose studies in this field have been long and varied, does
well to present to British readers this essay which serves as an
introduction to the more elaborate studies of FREUD and his school, and
I am glad to have the privilege of saying so.