question. You say: "Granted this death wish was present at some time or
other, and is substantiated by memory, yet this is no explanation. It is
long outlived, to-day it can be present only in the unconscious and as
an empty, emotionless memory, but not as a strong impulse. Why should it
be recalled by the dream at all!" This question is justified. The
attempt to answer it would lead us far afield and necessitate taking up
a position in one of the most important points of dream study. But I
must remain within the bounds of our discussion and practice restraint.
Prepare yourselves for the temporary abstention. Let us be satisfied
with the circumstantial proof that this outlived wish can be shown to
act as a dream stimulator and let us continue the investigation to see
whether or not other evil wishes admit of the same derivation out of the
past.
Let us continue with the removal or death-wish which most frequently can
be traced back to the unbounded egoism of the dreamer. Such a wish can
very often be shown to be the inciting cause of the dream. As often as
someone has been in our way in life--and how often must this happen in
the complicated relationships of life--the dream is ready to do away
with him, be he father, mother, brother, sister, spouse, etc. We have
wondered sufficiently over this evil tendency of human nature, and
certainly were not predisposed to accept the authenticity of this result
of dream interpretation without question. After it has once been
suggested to us to seek the origin of such wishes in the past, we
disclose immediately the period of the individual past in which such
egoism and such wish-impulses, even as directed against those closest to
the dreamer, are no longer strangers. It is just in these first years of
childhood which later are hidden by amnesia, that this egoism frequently
shows itself in most extreme form, and from which regular but clear
tendencies thereto, or real remnants thereof, show themselves. For the
child loves itself first, and later learns to love others, to sacrifice
something of its ego for another. Even those persons whom the child
seems to love from the very beginning, it loves at the outset because it
has need of them, cannot do without them, in others words, out of
egoistical motives. Not until later does the love impulse become
independent of egoism. _In brief, egoism has taught the child to love._
In this connection it is instructive to compare the child's regard for
his brothers and sisters with that which he has for his parents. The
little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, often,
obviously, he does not love them at all. There is no doubt that in them
he hates his rivals and it is known how frequently this attitude
continues for many years until maturity, and even beyond, without
interruption. Often enough this attitude is superseded by a more tender
feeling, or rather let us say glossed over, but the hostile feeling
appears regularly to have been the earlier. It is most noticeable in
children of from two and one-half to four or five years of age, when a
new little brother or sister arrives. The latter is usually received in
a far from friendly manner. Expressions such as "I don't want him! Let
the stork take him away again," are very usual. Subsequently every
opportunity is made use of to disparage the new arrival, and even
attempts to do him bodily harm, direct attacks, are not unheard of. If
the difference in age is less, the child learns of the existence of the
rival with intense psychic activity, and accommodates himself to the new
situation. If the difference in age is greater, the new child may awaken
certain sympathies as an interesting object, as a sort of living doll,
and if the difference is eight years or more, motherly impulses,
especially in the case of girls, may come into play. But to be truthful,
when we disclose in a dream the wish for the death of a mother or sister
we need seldom find it puzzling and may trace its origin easily to early
childhood, often enough, also, to the propinquity of later years.
Probably no nurseries are free from mighty conflicts among the
inhabitants. The motives are rivalry for the love of the parents,
articles owned in common, the room itself. The hostile impulses are
called forth by older as well as younger brothers and sisters. I believe
it was Bernard Shaw who said: "If there is anyone who hates a young
English lady more than does her mother, it is her elder sister." There
is something about this saying, however, that arouses our antipathy. We
can, at a pinch, understand hatred of brothers and sisters, and rivalry
among them, but how may feelings of hatred force their way into the
relationship between daughter and mother, parents and children?
This relationship is without doubt the more favorable, even when looked
at from the viewpoint of the child. This is in accord with our
expectation; we find it much more offensive for love between parents and
children to be lacking than for love between brothers and sisters. We
have, so to speak, made something holy in the first instance which in
the other case we permitted to remain profane. But daily observation can
show us how frequently the feelings between parents and their grown
children fail to come up to the ideal established by society, how much
enmity exists and would find expression did not accumulations of piety
and of tender impulse hold them back. The motives for this are
everywhere known and disclose a tendency to separate those of the same
sex, daughter from mother, father from son. The daughter finds in her
mother the authority that hems in her will and that is entrusted with
the task of causing her to carry out the abstention from sexual liberty
which society demands; in certain cases also she is the rival who
objects to being displaced. The same type of thing occurs in a more
glaring manner between father and son. To the son the father is the
embodiment of every social restriction, borne with such great
opposition; the father bars the way to freedom of will, to early sexual
satisfaction, and where there is family property held in common, to the
enjoyment thereof. Impatient waiting for the death of the father grows
to heights approximating tragedy in the case of a successor to the
throne. Less strained is the relationship between father and daughter,
mother and son. The latter affords the purest examples of an unalterable
tenderness, in no way disturbed by egoistical considerations.
Why do I speak of these things, so banal and so well known? Because
there is an unmistakable disposition to deny their significance in life,
and to set forth the ideal demanded by society as a fulfilled thing much
oftener than it really is fulfilled. But it is preferable for psychology
to speak the truth, rather than that this task should be left to the
cynic. In any event, this denial refers only to actual life. The arts of
narrative and dramatic poetry are still free to make use of the motives
that result from a disturbance of this ideal.
It is not to be wondered at that in the case of a large number of people
the dream discloses the wish for the removal of the parents, especially
the parent of the same sex. We may conclude that it is also present
during waking hours, and that it becomes conscious even at times when it
is able to mask itself behind another motive, as in the case of the
dreamer's sympathy for his father's unnecessary sufferings in example 3.
It is seldom that the enmity alone controls the relationship; much more
often it recedes behind more tender impulses, by which it is suppressed,
and must wait until a dream isolates it. That which the dream shows us
in enlarged form as a result of such isolation, shrinks together again
after it has been properly docketed in its relation to life as a result
of our interpretation (H. Sachs). But we also find this dream wish in
places where it has no connection with life, and where the adult, in his
waking hours, would never recognize it. The reason for this is that the
deepest and most uniform motive for becoming unfriendly, especially
between persons of the same sex, has already made its influence felt in
earliest childhood.
I mean the love rivalry, with the especial emphasis of the sex
character. The son, even as a small child, begins to develop an especial
tenderness for his mother, whom he considers as his own property, and
feels his father to be a rival who puts into question his individual
possession; and in the same manner the little daughter sees in her
mother a person who is a disturbing element in her tender relationship
with her father, and who occupies a position that she could very well
fill herself. One learns from these observations to what early years
these ideas extend back--ideas which we designate as the
_Oedipus-complex_, because this myth realizes with a very slightly
weakened effect the two extreme wishes which grow out of the situation
of the son--to kill his father and take his mother to wife. I do not
wish to maintain that the Oedipus-complex covers entirely the relation
of the child to its parents; this relation can be much more complicated.
Furthermore, the Oedipus-complex is more or less well-developed; it may
even experience a reversal, but it is a customary and very important
factor in the psychic life of the child; and one tends rather to
underestimate than to overestimate its influence and the developments
which may follow from it. In addition, children frequently react to the
Oedipus-idea through stimulation by the parents, who in the placing of
their affection are often led by sex-differences, so that the father
prefers the daughter, the mother the son; or again, where the marital
affection has cooled, and this love is substituted for the outworn love.
One cannot maintain that the world was very grateful to psychoanalytic
research for its discovery of the Oedipus-complex. On the contrary, it
called forth the strongest resistance on the part of adults; and persons
who had neglected to take part in denying this proscribed or tabooed
feeling-relationship later made good the omission by taking all value
from the complex through false interpretations. According to my
unchanged conviction there is nothing to deny and nothing to make more
palatable. One should accept the fact, recognized by the Greek myth
itself, as inevitable destiny. On the other hand, it is interesting that
this Oedipus-complex, cast out of life, was yielded up to poetry and
given the freest play. O. Rank has shown in a careful study how this
very Oedipus-complex has supplied dramatic literature with a large
number of motives in unending variations, derivations and disguises,
also in distorted forms such as we recognize to be the work of a censor.
We may also ascribe this Oedipus-complex to those dreamers who were so
fortunate as to escape in later life these conflicts with their parents,
and intimately associated therewith we find what we call the _castration
complex_, the reaction to sexual intimidation or restriction, ascribed
to the father, of early infantile sexuality.
By applying our former researches to the study of the psychic life of
the child, we may expect to find that the origin of other forbidden
dream-wishes, of excessive sexual impulses, may be explained in the same
manner. Thus we are moved to study the development of sex-life in the
child also, and we discover the following from a number of sources: In
the first place, it is a mistake to deny that the child has a sexual
life, and to take it for granted that sexuality commences with the
ripening of the genitals at the time of puberty. On the contrary--the
child has from the very beginning a sexual life rich in content and
differing in numerous respects from that which is later considered
normal. What we call "perverse" in the life of the adult, differs from
the normal in the following respects: first, in disregard for the
dividing line of species (the gulf between man and animal); second,
being insensible to the conventional feeling of disgust; third, the
incest-limitation (being prohibited from seeking sexual satisfaction
with near blood-relations); fourth, homosexuality, and fifth,
transferring the role of the genitals to other organs and other parts of
the body. None of these limitations exist in the beginning, but are
gradually built up in the course of development and education. The
little child is free from them. He knows no unbridgable chasm between
man and animal; the arrogance with which man distinguishes himself from
the animal is a later acquisition. In the beginning he is not disgusted
at the sight of excrement, but slowly learns to be so disgusted under
the pressure of education; he lays no special stress on the difference
between the sexes, rather accredits to both the same genital formation;
he directs his earliest sexual desires and his curiosity toward those
persons closest to him, and who are dear to him for various reasons--his
parents, brothers and sisters, nurses; and finally, you may observe in
him that which later breaks through again, raised now to a love
attraction, viz., that he does not expect pleasure from his sexual
organs alone, but that many other parts of the body portray the same
sensitiveness, are the media of analogous sensations, and are able to
play the role of the genitals. The child may, then, be called
"polymorphus perverse," and if he makes but slight use of all these
impulses, it is, on the one hand, because of their lesser intensity as
compared to later life, and on the other hand, because the bringing up
of the child immediately and energetically suppresses all his sexual
expressions. This suppression continues in theory, so to say, since the
grown-ups are careful to control part of the childish sex-expressions,
and to disguise another part by misrepresenting its sexual nature until
they can deny the whole business. These are often the same persons who
discourse violently against all the sexual faults of the child and then
at the writing table defend the sexual purity of the same children.
Where children are left to themselves or are under the influence of
corruption, they often are capable of really conspicuous performances of
perverse sexual activity. To be sure, the grown-ups are right in looking
upon these things as "childish performances," as "play," for the child
is not to be judged as mature and answerable either before the bar of
custom or before the law, but these things do exist, they have their
significance as indications of innate characteristics as well as causes
and furtherances of later developments, they give us an insight into
childhood sex-life and thereby into the sex life of man. When we
rediscover in the background of our distorted dreams all these perverse
wish-impulses, it means only that the dream has in this field traveled
back to the infantile condition.
Especially noteworthy among these forbidden wishes are those of incest,
i.e., those directed towards sexual intercourse with parents and
brothers and sisters. You know what antipathy society feels toward such
intercourse, or at least pretends to feel, and what weight is laid on
the prohibitions directed against it. The most monstrous efforts have
been made to explain this fear of incest. Some have believed that it is
due to evolutionary foresight on the part of nature, which is
psychically represented by this prohibition, because inbreeding would
deteriorate the race-character; others maintained that because of having
lived together since early childhood the sexual desire is diverted from
the persons under consideration. In both cases, furthermore, the
incest-avoidance would be automatically assured, and it would be
difficult to understand the need of strict prohibitions, which rather
point to the presence of a strong desire. Psychoanalytic research has
incontrovertibly shown that the incestuous love choice is rather the
first and most customary choice, and that not until later is there any
resistance, the source of which probably is to be found in the
individual psychology.
Let us sum up what our plunge into child psychology has given us toward
the understanding of the dream. We found not only that the materials of
forgotten childhood experiences are accessible to the dream, but we saw
also that the psychic life of children, with all its peculiarities, its
egoism, its incestuous love-choice, etc., continues, for the purposes of
the dream, in the unconscious, and that the dream nightly leads us back
to this infantile stage. Thus it becomes more certain _that the
unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile_. The estranging
impression that there is so much evil in man, begins to weaken. This
frightful evil is simply the original, primitive, infantile side of
psychic life, which we may find in action in children, which we overlook
partly because of the slightness of its dimensions, partly because it is
lightly considered, since we demand no ethical heights of the child.
Since the dream regresses to this stage, it seems to have made apparent
the evil that lies in us. But it is only a deceptive appearance by which
we have allowed ourselves to be frightened. We are not so evil as we
might suspect from the interpretation of dreams.
If the evil impulses of the dream are merely infantilism, a return to
the beginnings of our ethical development, since the dream simply makes
children of us again in thinking and in feeling, we need not be ashamed
of these evil dreams if we are reasonable. But being reasonable is only
a part of psychic life. Many things are taking place there that are not
reasonable, and so it happens that we are ashamed of such dreams, and
unreasonably. We turn them over to the dream-censorship, are ashamed and
angry if one of these dreams has in some unusual manner succeeded in
penetrating into consciousness in an undistorted form, so that we must
recognize it--in fact, we are at times just as ashamed of the distorted
dream as we would be if we understood it. Just think of the scandalized
opinion of the fine old lady about her uninterpreted dream of "services
of love." The problem is not yet solved, and it is still possible that
upon further study of the evil in the dream we shall come to some other
decision and arrive at another valuation of human nature.
As a result of the whole investigation we grasp two facts, which,
however, disclose only the beginnings of new riddles, new doubts. First:
the regression of dream-work is not only formal, it is also of greater
import. It not only translates our thoughts into a primitive form of
expression, but it reawakens the peculiarities of our primitive psychic
life, the ancient predominance of the ego, the earliest impulses of our
sexual life, even our old intellectual property, if we may consider the
symbolic relations as such. And second: We must accredit all these
infantilisms which once were governing, and solely governing, to the
unconscious, about which our ideas now change and are broadened.
Unconscious is no longer a name for what is at that time latent, the
unconscious is an especial psychic realm with wish-impulses of its own,
with its own method of expression and with a psychic mechanism peculiar
to itself, all of which ordinarily are not in force. But the latent
dream-thoughts, which we have solved by means of the dream-interpretation,
are not of this realm. They are much more nearly the same as any we may
have thought in our waking hours. Still they are unconscious; how does
one solve this contradiction? We begin to see that a distinction must be
made. Something that originates in our conscious life, and that shares
its characteristics--we call it the day-remnants--combines in the
dream-fabrication with something else out of the realm of the
unconscious. Between these two parts the dream-work completes itself.
The influencing of the day-remnants by the unconscious necessitates
regression. This is the deepest insight into the nature of the dream
that we are able to attain without having searched through further
psychic realms. The time will soon come, however, when we shall clothe
the unconscious character of the latent dream-thought with another name,
which shall differentiate it from the unconscious out of the realm of
the infantile.
We may, to be sure, propound the question: what forces the psychological
activity during sleep to such regression? Why do not the sleep
disturbing psychic stimuli do the job without it? And if they must,
because of the dream censorship, disguise themselves through old forms
of expression which are no longer comprehensible, what is the use of
giving new life to old, long-outgrown psychic stimuli, wishes and
character types, that is, why the material regression in addition to the
formal? The only satisfactory answer would be this, that only in this
manner can a dream be built up, that dynamically the dream-stimulus can
be satisfied only in this way. But for the time being we have no right
to give such an answer.
FOURTEENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM
_Wish Fulfillment_
May I bring to your attention once more the ground we have already
covered? How, when we met with dream distortion in the application of
our technique, we decided to leave it alone for the time being, and set
out to obtain decisive information about the nature of the dream by way
of infantile dreams? How, then, armed with the results of this
investigation, we attacked dream distortion directly and, I trust, in
some measure overcame it? But we must remind ourselves that the results
we found along the one way and along the other do not fit together as
well as might be. It is now our task to put these two results together
and balance them against one another.
From both sources we have seen that the dream-work consists essentially
in the transposition of thoughts into an hallucinatory experience. How
that can take place is puzzling enough, but it is a problem of general
psychology with which we shall not busy ourselves here. We have learned
from the dreams of children that the purpose of the dream-work is the
satisfaction of one of the sleep-disturbing psychic stimuli by means of
a wish fulfillment. We were unable to make a similar statement
concerning distorted dreams, until we knew how to interpret them. But
from the very beginning we expected to be able to bring the distorted
dreams under the same viewpoint as the infantile. The earliest
fulfillment of this expectation led us to believe that as a matter of
fact all dreams are the dreams of children and that they all work with
infantile materials, through childish psychic stimuli and mechanics.
Since we consider that we have conquered dream-distortion, we must
continue the investigation to see whether our hypothesis of
wish-fulfillment holds good for distorted dreams also.
We very recently subjected a number of dreams to interpretation, but
left wish-fulfillment entirely out of consideration. I am convinced that
the question again and again occurred to you: "What about
wish-fulfillment, which ostensibly is the goal of dream-work?" This
question is important. It was, in fact, the question of our lay-critics.
As you know, humanity has an instinctive antagonism toward intellectual
novelties. The expression of such a novelty should immediately be
reduced to its narrowest limits, if possible, comprised in a commonplace
phrase. Wish-fulfillment has become that phrase for the new
dream-science. The layman asks: "Where is the wish-fulfillment?"
Immediately, upon having heard that the dream is supposed to be a
wish-fulfillment, and indeed, by the very asking of the question, he
answers it with a denial. He is at once reminded of countless
dream-experiences of his own, where his aversion to the dream was
enormous, so that the proposition of psychoanalytic dream-science seems
very improbable to him. It is a simple matter to answer the layman that
wish-fulfillment cannot be apparent in distorted dreams, but must be
sought out, so that it is not recognized until the dream is interpreted.
We know, too, that the wishes in these distorted dreams are prohibited
wishes, are wishes rejected by the censor and that their existence lit
the very cause of the dream distortion and the reason for the intrusion
of the dream censor. But it is hard to convince the lay-critic that one
may not seek the wish-fulfillment in the dream before the dream has been
interpreted. This is continually forgotten. His sceptical attitude
toward the theory of wish-fulfillment is really nothing more than a
consequence of dream-censorship, a substitute and a result of the denial
of this censored dream-wish.