accord with all the demands of the sexual striving, with those demands
which have long since been condemned by our aesthetic rearing, demands
of such a character that they resist all our moral demands for
restraint. The pleasure-striving--the libido, as we term it--chooses its
objects without inhibitions, and indeed, prefers those that are
forbidden. It chooses not only the wife of another, but, above all,
those incestuous objects declared sacred by the agreement of
mankind--the mother and sister in the man's case, the father and brother
in the woman's. Even the dream of our fifty-year old lady is an
incestuous one, its libido unmistakably directed toward her son. Desires
which we believe to be far from human nature show themselves strong
enough to arouse dreams. Hate, too, expends itself without restraint.
Revenge and murderous wishes toward those standing closest to the
dreamer are not unusual, toward those best beloved in daily life, toward
parents, brothers and sisters, toward one's spouse and one's own
children. These censored wishes seem to arise from a veritable hell; no
censorship seems too harsh to be applied against their waking
interpretation.
But do not reproach the dream itself for this evil content. You will
not, I am sure, forget that the dream is charged with the harmless,
indeed the useful function of guarding sleep from disturbance. This evil
content, then, does not lie in the nature of the dream. You know also
that there are dreams which can be recognized as the satisfaction of
justified wishes and urgent bodily needs. These, to be sure, undergo no
dream distortion. They need none. They can satisfy their function
without offending the ethical and aesthetic tendencies of the ego. And
will you also keep in mind the fact that the amount of dream distortion
is proportional to two factors. On the one hand, the worse the
censorable wish, the greater the distortion; on the other hand, however,
the stricter the censor himself is at any particular time the greater
the distortion will be also. A young, strictly reared and prudish girl
will, by reason of those factors, disfigure with an inexorable
censorship those dream impulses which we physicians, for example, and
which the dreamer herself ten years later, would recognize as
permissible, harmless, libidinous desires.
Besides, we are far from being at the point where we can allow ourselves
to be shocked by the results of our work of interpretation. I think we
are not yet quite adept at it; and above all there lies upon us the
obligation to secure it against certain attacks. It is not at all
difficult to "find a hitch" in it. Our dream interpretations were made
on the hypotheses we accepted a little while ago, that the dream has
some meaning, that from the hypnotic to the normal sleep one may carry
over the idea of the existence at such times of an unconscious psychic
activity, and that all associations are predetermined. If we had come to
plausible results on the basis of these hypotheses, we would have been
justified in concluding that the hypotheses were correct. But what is to
be done when the results are what I have just pictured them to be? Then
it surely is natural to say, "These results are impossible, foolish, at
least very improbable, hence there must have been something wrong with
the hypotheses. Either the dream is no psychic phenomenon after all, or
there is no such thing as unconscious mental activity in the normal
condition, or our technique has a gap in it somewhere. Is that not a
simpler and more satisfying conclusion than the abominations which we
pretend to have disclosed on the basis of our suppositions?"
Both, I answer. It is a simpler as well as a more satisfying conclusion,
but not necessarily more correct for that reason. Let us take our time,
the matter is not yet ripe for judgment. Above all we can strengthen the
criticism against our dream interpretation still further. That its
conclusions are so unpleasant and unpalatable is perhaps of secondary
importance. A stronger argument is the fact that the dreamers to whom we
ascribe such wish-tendencies from the interpretation of their dreams
reject the interpretations most emphatically, and with good reason.
"What," says the one, "you want to prove to me by this dream that I
begrudged the sums which I spent for my sister's trousseau and my
brother's education? But indeed that can't be so. Why I work only for my
sister, I have no interest in life but to fulfill my duties toward her,
as being the oldest child, I promised our blessed mother I would." Or a
woman says of her dream, "You mean to say that I wish my husband were
dead! Why, that is simply revolting, nonsense. It isn't only that we
have the happiest possible married life, you probably won't believe me
when I tell you so, but his death would deprive me of everything else
that I own in the world." Or another will tell us, "You mean that I have
sensual desires toward my sister? That is ridiculous. I am not in the
least fond of her. We don't get along and I haven't exchanged a word
with her in years." We might perhaps ignore this sort of thing if the
dreamers did not confirm or deny the tendencies ascribed to them; we
could say that they are matters which the dreamers do not know about
themselves. But that the dreamers should feel the exact opposite of the
ascribed wish, and should be able to prove to us the dominance of the
opposite tendency--this fact must finally disconcert us. Is it not time
to lay aside the whole work of the dream interpretation as something
whose results reduce it to absurdity?
By no means; this stronger argument breaks down when we attack it
critically. Assuming that there are unconscious tendencies in the
psychic life, nothing is proved by the ability of the subject to show
that their opposites dominate his conscious life. Perhaps there is room
in the psychic life even for antithetical tendencies, for contradictions
which exist side by side, yes, possibly it is just the dominance of the
one impulse which is the necessary condition for the unconsciousness of
its opposite. The first two objections raised against our work hold
merely that the results of dream interpretation are not simple, and very
unpleasant. In answer to the first of these, one may say that for all
your enthusiasm for the simple solution, you cannot thereby solve a
single dream problem. To do so you must make up your mind to accept the
fact of complicated relationships. And to the second of these objections
one may say that you are obviously wrong to use a preference or a
dislike as the basis for a scientific judgment. What difference does it
make if the results of the dream interpretation seem unpleasant, even
embarrassing and disgusting to you? "That doesn't prevent them from
existing," as I used to hear my teacher Charcot say in similar cases,
when I was a young doctor. One must be humble, one must keep personal
preferences and antipathies in the background, if one wishes to
discover the realities of the world. If a physicist can prove to you
that the organic life of this planet must, within a short period of
time, become completely extinct, do you also venture to say to him,
"That cannot be so. This prospect is too unpleasant." On the contrary,
you will be silent until another physicist proves some error in the
assumptions or calculations of the first. If you reject the unpleasant,
you are repeating the mechanism of dream construction instead of
understanding and mastering it.
Perhaps you will promise to overlook the repulsive character of the
censored dream-wishes, and will take refuge in the argument that it is
improbable, after all, that so wide a field be given over to the evil in
the constitution of man. But does your own experience justify you in
saying that? I will not discuss the question of how you may estimate
yourselves, but have you found so much good will among your superiors
and rivals, so much chivalry among your enemies, so little envy in their
company, that you feel yourselves in duty bound to enter a protest
against the part played by the evil of egoism in human nature? Are you
ignorant of how uncontrolled and undependable the average human being is
in all the affairs of sex life? Or do you not know that all the
immoralities and excesses of which we dream nightly are crimes committed
daily by waking persons? What else does psychoanalysis do here but
confirm the old saying of Plato, that the good people are those who
content themselves with dreaming what the others, the bad people, really
do?
And now turn your attention from the individual case to the great war
devastating Europe. Think of the amount of brutality, the cruelty and
the lies allowed to spread over the civilized world. Do you really
believe that a handful of conscienceless egoists and corruptionists
could have succeeded in setting free all these evil spirits, if the
millions of followers did not share in the guilt? Do you dare under
these circumstances to break a lance for the absence of evil from the
psychic constitution of mankind?
You will reproach me with judging the war one-sidedly, you will say that
it has also brought forth all that is most beautiful and noble in
mankind, its heroic courage, its self-sacrifice, its social feeling.
Certainly, but do not at this point allow yourselves to become guilty of
the injustice which has so often been perpetrated against
psychoanalysis, of reproaching it with denying one thing because it was
asserting another. It is not our intention to deny the noble strivings
of human nature, nor have we ever done anything to deprecate their
value. On the contrary, I show you not only the censored evil
dream-wishes, but also the censor which suppresses them and renders them
unrecognizable. We dwell on the evil in mankind with greater emphasis
only because others deny it, a method whereby the psychic life of
mankind does not become better, but merely incomprehensible. When,
however, we give up this one-sided ethical estimate, we shall surely be
able to find a more accurate formula for the relationship of the evil to
the good in human nature.
And thus the matter stands. We need not give up the conclusions to which
our labors in dream interpretation lead us even though we must consider
those conclusions strange. Perhaps we can approach their understanding
later by another path. For the present, let us repeat: dream distortion
is a consequence of the censorship practised by accredited tendencies of
the ego against those wish-impulses that are in any way shocking,
impulses which stir in us nightly during sleep. Why these wish-impulses
come just at night, and whence they come--these are questions which will
bear considerable investigation.
It would be a mistake, however, to omit to mention, with fitting
emphasis, another result of these investigations. The dream wishes which
try to disturb our sleep are not known to us, in fact we learn of them
first through the dream interpretation. Therefore, they may be described
as "at that time" unconscious in the sense above defined. But we can go
beyond this and say that they are more than merely "at that time"
unconscious. The dreamer to be sure denies their validity, as we have
seen in so many cases, even after he has learned of their existence by
means of the interpretation. The situation is then repeated which we
first encountered in the interpretation of the tongue slip "hiccough"
where the toastmaster was outraged and assured us that neither then nor
ever before had he been conscious of disrespectful impulse toward his
chief. This is repeated with every interpretation of a markedly
distorted dream, and for that reason attains a significance for our
conception. We are now prepared to conclude that there are processes and
tendencies in the psychic life of which one knows nothing at all, has
known nothing for some time, might, in fact, perhaps never have known
anything. The unconscious thus receives a new meaning for us; the idea
of "at present" or "at a specific time" disappears from its conception,
for it can also mean _permanently_ unconscious, not merely _latent at
the time_. Obviously we shall have to learn more of this at another
session.
TENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM
_Symbolism in the Dream_
We have discovered that the distortion of dreams, a disturbing element
in our work of understanding them, is the result of a censorious
activity which is directed against the unacceptable of the unconscious
wish-impulses. But, of course, we have not maintained that censorship is
the only factor which is to blame for the dream distortion, and we may
actually make the discovery in a further study of the dream that other
items play a part in this result. That is, even if the dream censorship
were eliminated we might not be in a position to understand the dreams;
the actual dream still might not be identical with the latent dream
thought.
This other item which makes the dream unintelligible, this new addition
to dream distortion, we discover by considering a gap in our technique.
I have already admitted that for certain elements of the dream, no
associations really occur to the person being analyzed. This does not
happen so often as the dreamers maintain; in many cases the association
can be forced by persistence. But still there are certain instances in
which no association is forthcoming, or if forced does not furnish what
we expected. When this happens in the course of a psychoanalytic
treatment, then a particular meaning may be attached thereto, with which
we have nothing to do here. It also occurs, however, in the
interpretation of the dreams of a normal person or in interpreting one's
own dreams. Once a person is convinced that in these cases no amount of
forcing of associations will avail, he will finally make the discovery
that the unwished-for contingency occurs regularly in certain dream
elements, and he will begin to recognize a new order of things there,
where at first he believed he had come across a peculiar exception to
our technique.
In this way we are tempted to interpret these silent dream elements
ourselves, to undertake their translation by the means at hand. The fact
that every time we trust to this substitution we obtain a satisfactory
meaning is forced upon us; until we resolve upon this decision the dream
remains meaningless, its continuity is broken. The accumulation of many
similar cases tends to give the necessary certainty to our first timid
attempts.
I am expounding all this in rather a schematic manner, but this is
permissible for purposes of instruction, and I am not trying to
misstate, but only to simplify matters.
In this manner we derive constant translations for a whole series of
dream elements just as constant translations are found in our popular
dream books for all the things we dream. But do not forget that in our
association technique we never discover constant substitutes for the
dream elements.
You will say at once that this road to interpretation appears far more
uncertain and open to objection than the former methods of free
association. But a further fact is to be taken into consideration. After
one has gathered a sufficient number of such constant substitutes
empirically, he will say that of his own knowledge he should actually
have denied that these items of dream interpretation could really be
understood without the associations of the dreamer. The facts that force
us to recognize their meaning will appear in the second half of our
analysis.
We call such a constant relationship between a dream element and its
interpretation _symbolic_. The dream element is itself a _symbol_ of the
unconscious dream thought. You will remember that previously, when we
were investigating the relationship between dream elements and their
actuality, I drew three distinctions, viz., that of the part of the
whole, that of the allusion, and that of the imagery. I then announced
that there was a fourth, but did not name it. This fourth is the
symbolic relationship here introduced. Very interesting discussions
center about this, and we will now consider them before we express our
own particular observations on symbolism. Symbolism is perhaps the most
noteworthy chapter of dream study.
In the first place, since symbols are permanent or constant
translations, they realize, in a certain measure, the ideal of ancient
as well as popular dream interpretation, an ideal which by means of our
technique we had left behind. They permit us in certain cases to
interpret a dream without questioning the dreamer who, aside from this,
has no explanation for the symbol. If the interpreter is acquainted with
the customary dream symbols and, in addition, with the dreamer himself,
the conditions under which the latter lives and the impressions he
received before having the dream, it is often possible to interpret a
dream without further information--to translate it "right off the bat."
Such a trick flatters the interpreter and impresses the dreamer; it
stands out as a pleasurable incident in the usual arduous course of
cross-examining the dreamer. But do not be misled. It is not our
function to perform tricks. Interpretation based on a knowledge of
symbols is not a technique that can replace the associative technique,
or even compare with it. It is a supplement to the associative
technique, and furnishes the latter merely with transplanted, usable
results. But as regards familiarity with the dreamer's psychic
situation, you must consider the fact that you are not limited to
interpreting the dreams of acquaintances; that as a rule you are not
acquainted with the daily occurrences which act as the stimuli for the
dreams, and that the associations of the subject furnish you with a
knowledge of that very thing we call the psychic situation.
Furthermore, it is very extraordinary, particularly in view of
circumstances to be mentioned later, that the most vehement opposition
has been voiced against the existence of the symbolic relationship
between the dream and the unconscious. Even persons of judgment and
position, who have otherwise made great progress in psychoanalysis, have
discontinued their support at this point. This is the more remarkable
since, in the first place, symbolism is neither peculiar to the dream
nor characteristic of it, and since in the second place, symbolism in
the dream was not discovered through psychoanalysis, although the latter
is not poor otherwise in making startling discoveries. The discoverer of
dream symbolism, if we insist on a discovery in modern times, was the
philosopher K. A. Scherner (1861). Psychoanalysis affirmed Scherner's
discovery and modified it considerably.
Now you will want to know something of the nature of dream symbolism,
and to hear some examples. I shall gladly impart to you what I know, but
I admit that our knowledge is not so complete as we could desire it to
be.
The nature of the symbol relationship is a comparison, but not any
desired comparison. One suspects a special prerequisite for this
comparison, but is unable to say what it is. Not everything to which we
are able to compare an object or an occurrence occurs in the dream as
its symbol; on the other hand, the dream does not symbolize anything we
may choose, but only specific elements of the dream thought. There are
limitations on both sides. It must be admitted that the idea of the
symbol cannot be sharply delimited at all times--it mingles with the
substitution, dramatization, etc., even approaches the allusion. In one
series of symbols the basic comparison is apparent to the senses. On the
other hand, there are other symbols which raise the question of where
the similarity, the "something intermediate" of this suspected
comparison is to be sought. We may discover it by more careful
consideration, or it may remain hidden to us. Furthermore, it is
extraordinary, if the symbol is a comparison, that this comparison is
not revealed by the association, that the dreamer is not acquainted with
the comparison, that he makes use of it without knowing of its
existence. Indeed, the dreamer does not even care to admit the validity
of this comparison when it is pointed out to him. So you see, a symbolic
relationship is a comparison of a very special kind, the origin of which
is not yet clearly understood by us. Perhaps later we may find
references to this unknown factor.
The number of things that find symbolic representation in the dream is
not great--the human body as a whole, parents, children, brothers and
sisters, birth, death, nakedness and a few others. The only typical,
that is, regular representation of the human person as a whole is in the
form of a _house_, as was recognized by Scherner who, indeed, wished to
credit this symbol with an overwhelming significance which it does not
deserve. It occurs in dreams that a person, now lustful, now frightened,
climbs down the fronts of houses. Those with entirely smooth walls are
men; but those which are provided with projections and balconies to
which one can hold on, are women. Parents appear in the dream as _king_
and _queen_, or other persons highly respected. The dream in this
instance is very pious. It treats children, and brothers and sisters,
less tenderly; they are symbolized as _little animals_ or _vermin_.
Birth is almost regularly represented by some reference to _water_;
either one plunges into the water or climbs out of it, or rescues
someone from the water, or is himself rescued from it, i.e., there is a
mother-relation to the person. Death is replaced in the dream by _taking
a journey, riding in a train_; _being dead, by various darksome, timid
suggestions_; _nakedness, by clothes_ and _uniforms_. You see here how
the lines between symbolic and suggestive representation merge one into
another.
In contrast to the paucity of this enumeration, it is a striking fact
that the objects and subject matter of another sphere are represented by
an extraordinarily rich symbolism. This is the sphere of the sexual
life, the genitals, the sex processes and sexual intercourse. The great
majority of symbols in the dream are sex symbols. A remarkable
disproportion results from this fact. The designated subject matters are
few, their symbols extraordinarily profuse, so that each of these
objects can be expressed by any number of symbols of almost equal value.
In the interpretation something is disclosed that arouses universal
objection. The symbol interpretations, in contrast to the many-sidedness
of the dream representations, are very monotonous--this displeases all
who deal with them; but what is one to do?
Since this is the first time in these lectures that we speak of the
sexual life, I must tell you the manner in which I intend to handle this
theme. Psychoanalysis sees no reason for hiding matters or treating them
by innuendo, finds no necessity of being ashamed of dealing with this
important subject, believes it is proper and decent to call everything
by its correct name, and hopes most effectively in this manner to ward
off disturbing or salacious thoughts. The fact that I am talking before
a mixed audience can make no difference on this point. Just as there is
no special knowledge either for the Delphic oracle or for flappers, so
the ladies present among you have, by their appearance in this lecture
hall, made it clear that they wish to be considered on the same basis as
the men.
The dream has a number of representations for the male genital that may
be called symbolic, and in which the similarity of the comparison is,
for the most part, very enlightening. In the first place, the holy
figure 3 is a symbolical substitute for the entire male genital. The
more conspicuous and more interesting part of the genital to both sexes,
the male organ, has symbolical substitute in objects of like form, those
which are long and upright, such as _sticks_, _umbrellas_, _poles_,
_trees_, etc. It is also symbolized by objects that have the
characteristic, in common with it, of penetration into the body and
consequent injury, hence pointed _weapons_ of every type, _knives_,
_daggers_, _lances_, _swords_, and in the same manner _firearms_,
_guns_, _pistols_ and the _revolver_, which is so suitable because of
its shape. In the troubled dream of the young girl, pursuit by a man
with a knife or a firearm plays a big role. This, probably the most
frequent dream symbolism, is easily translatable. Easily comprehensible,
too, is the substitution for the male member of objects out of which
water flows: _faucets_, _water cans_, _fountains_, as well as its
representation by other objects that have the power of elongation, such
as _hanging lamps_, _collapsible pencils_, etc. That _pencils_,
_quills_, _nail files_, _hammers_ and other _instruments_ are
undoubtedly male symbols is a fact connected with a conception of the
organ, which likewise is not far to seek.