the dream of the three theatre tickets for 1 Fl. 50 Kr. I can assure you
that I took this example quite unpremeditatedly at first. You are
acquainted with the latent dream thoughts: annoyance, upon hearing that
her friend had just now become engaged, at the thought that she herself
had hurried so to be married; contempt for her husband; the idea that
she might have had a better one had she waited. We also know the wish,
which made a dream out of these thoughts--it is "curiosity to see,"
being permitted to go to the theatre, very likely a derivation from the
old curiosity finally to know just what happens when one is married.
This curiosity, as is well known, regularly directs itself in the case
of children to the sex-life of the parents. It is an impulse of
childhood, and in so far as it persists later, an impulse whose roots
reach back into the infantile. But that day's news played no part in
awaking the curiosity, it awoke only annoyance and regret. This wish
impulse did not have anything to do immediately with the latent dream
thoughts, and we could fit the result of the dream interpretation into
the analysis without considering the wish impulse at all. But then, the
annoyance itself was not capable of producing the dream; a dream could
not be derived from the thought: "It was stupid to marry so soon,"
except by reviving the old wish finally to see what happens when one is
married. The wish then formed the dream content, in that it replaced
marriage by going to the theatre, and gave it the form of an earlier
wish-fulfillment: "so now I may go to the theatre and see all the
forbidden things, and you may not. I am married and you must wait." In
such a manner the present situation was transposed into its opposite, an
old triumph put into the place of the recent defeat. Added thereto was a
satisfied curiosity amalgamated with a satisfied egoistic sense of
rivalry. This satisfaction determines the manifest dream content in
which she really is sitting in the theatre, and her friend was unable to
get tickets. Those bits of dream content are affixed to this
satisfaction situation as unfitting and inexplicable modifications,
behind which the latent dream thoughts still hide. Dream interpretation
must take into consideration everything that serves toward the
representation of the wish-fulfillment and must reconstruct from these
suggestions the painful latent dream-thought.
The observation I now wish to make is for the purpose of drawing your
attention to the latent, dream thoughts, now pushed to the fore. I beg
of you not to forget first, that the dreamer is unconscious of them,
second, they are entirely logical and continuous, so that they may be
understood as a comprehensible reaction to the dream occasion, third,
that they may have the value of any desired psychic impulse or
intellectual operation. I shall now designate these thoughts more
forcibly than before as "day-remnants"; the dreamer may acknowledge them
or not. I now separate day-remnants and latent dream thoughts in
accordance with our previous usage of calling everything that we
discover in interpreting the dream "latent dream thoughts," while the
day-remnants are only a part of the latent dream thoughts. Then our
conception goes to show that something additional has been added to the
day-remnants, something which also belonged to the unconscious, a strong
but suppressed wish impulse, and it is this alone that has made possible
the dream fabrication. The influence of this wish impulse on the
day-remnants creates the further participation of the latent dream
thoughts, thoughts which no longer appear rational and understandable in
relation to waking life.
In explaining the relationship of the day-remnants to the unconscious
wish I have made use of a comparison which I can only repeat here. Every
undertaking requires a capitalist, who defrays the expenses, and an
entrepreneur, who has the idea and understands how to carry it out. The
role of the capitalist in the dream fabrication is always played by the
unconscious wish; it dispenses the psychic energy for dream-building.
The actual worker is the day-remnant, which determines how the
expenditure is to be made. Now the capitalist may himself have the idea
and the particularized knowledge, or the entrepreneur may have the
capital. This simplifies the practical situation, but makes its
theoretical comprehension more difficult. In economics we always
distinguish between the capitalist and the entrepreneur aspect in a
single person, and thus we reconstruct the fundamental situation which
was the point of departure for our comparison. In dream-fabrication the
same variations occur. I shall leave their further development to you.
We can go no further here, for you have probably long been disturbed by
a reflection which deserves to be heard. Are the day-remnants, you ask,
really unconscious in the same sense as the unconscious wish which is
essential to making them suitable for the dream? You discern correctly.
Here lies the salient point of the whole affair. They are not
unconscious in the same sense. The dream wish belongs to a different
unconsciousness, that which we have recognized as of infantile origin,
fitted out with special mechanisms. It is entirely appropriate to
separate these two types of unconsciousness and give them different
designations. But let us rather wait until we have become acquainted
with the field of neurotic symptoms. If people say one unconsciousness
is fantastic, what will they say when we acknowledge that we arrived at
our conclusions by using two kinds of unconsciousness?
Let us stop here. Once more you have heard something incomplete; but is
there not hope in the thought that this science has a continuation which
will be brought to light either by ourselves or by those to follow? And
have not we ourselves discovered a sufficient number of new and
surprising things?
FIFTEENTH LECTURE
THE DREAM
_Doubtful Points and Criticism_
Let us not leave the subject of dreams before we have touched upon the
most common doubts and uncertainties which have arisen in connection
with the new ideas and conceptions we have discussed up to this point.
The more attentive members of the audience probably have already
accumulated some material bearing upon this.
1. You may have received the impression that the results of our work of
interpretation of the dream have left so much that is uncertain, despite
our close adherence to technique, that a true translation of the
manifest dream into the latent dream thoughts is thereby rendered
impossible. In support of this you will point out that in the first
place, one never knows whether a specific element of the dream is to be
taken literally or symbolically, since those elements which are used
symbolically do not, because of that fact, cease to be themselves. But
if one has no objective standard by which to decide this, the
interpretation is, as to this point, left to the discretion of the dream
interpreter. Moreover, because of the way in which the dream work
combines opposites, it is always uncertain whether a specific dream
element is to be taken in the positive or the negative sense, whether it
is to be understood as itself or as its opposite. Hence this is another
opportunity for the exercise of the interpreter's discretion. In the
third place, in consequence of the frequency with which every sort of
inversion is practised in the dream, the dream interpreter is at liberty
to assume such an inversion at any point of the dream he pleases. And
finally you will say, you have heard that one is seldom sure that the
interpretation which is found is the only possible one. There is danger
of overlooking a thoroughly admissible second interpretation of the
same dream. Under these circumstances, you will conclude there is a
scope left for the discretion of the interpreter, the breadth of which
seems incompatible with the objective accuracy of the results. Or you
may also conclude that the fault does not rest with the dream but that
the inadequacies of our dream interpretation result from errors in our
conceptions and hypotheses.
All your material is irreproachable, but I do not believe that it
justifies your conclusions in two directions, namely, that dream
interpretation as we practice it is sacrificed to arbitrariness and that
the deficiency of our results makes the justification of our method
doubtful. If you will substitute for the arbitrariness of the
interpreter, his skill, his experience, his comprehension, I agree with
you. We shall surely not be able to dispense with some such personal
factor, particularly not in difficult tasks of dream interpretation. But
this same state of affairs exists also in other scientific occupations.
There is no way in which to make sure that one man will not wield a
technique less well, or utilize it more fully, than another. What might,
for example, impress you as arbitrariness in the interpretation of
symbols, is compensated for by the fact that as a rule the connection of
the dream thoughts among themselves, the connection of the dream with
the life of the dreamer, and the whole psychic situation in which the
dream occurs, chooses just one of the possible interpretations advanced
and rejects the others as useless for its purposes. The conclusion drawn
from the inadequacies of dream interpretation, that our hypotheses are
wrong, is weakened by an observation which shows that the ambiguity and
indefiniteness of the dream is rather characteristic and necessarily to
be expected.
Recollect that we said that the dream work translates the dream thoughts
into primitive expressions analogous to picture writing. All these
primitive systems of expression are, however, subject to such
indefiniteness and ambiguities, but it does not follow that we are
justified in doubting their usefulness. You know that the fusion of
opposites by the dream-work is analogous to the so-called "antithetical
meaning of primitive words," in the oldest languages. The philologist,
R. Abel (1884), whom we have to thank for this point of view, admonishes
us not to believe that the meaning of the communication which one
person made to another when using such ambiguous words was necessarily
unclear. Tone and gesture used in connection with the words would have
left no room for doubt as to which of the two opposites the speaker
intended to communicate. In writing, where gesture is lacking, it was
replaced by a supplementary picture sign not intended to be spoken, as
for example by the picture of a little man squatting lazily or standing
erect, according to whether the ambiguous hieroglyphic was to mean
"weak" or "strong." It was in this way that one avoided any
misunderstanding despite the ambiguity of the sounds and signs.
We recognize in the ancient systems of expression, e.g., the writings of
those oldest languages, a number of uncertainties which we would not
tolerate in our present-day writings. Thus in many Semitic writings only
the consonants of words are indicated. The reader had to supply the
omitted vowels according to his knowledge and the context. Hieroglyphic
writing does not proceed in exactly this way, but quite similarly, and
that is why the pronunciation of old Egyptian has remained unknown to
us. The holy writings of the Egyptians contain still other
uncertainties. For example, it is left to the discretion of the writer
whether or not he shall arrange the pictures from right to left or from
left to right. To be able to read we have to follow the rule that we
must depend upon the faces of the figures, birds, and the like. The
writer, however, could also arrange the picture signs in vertical rows,
and in inscriptions on small objects he was guided by considerations of
beauty and proportion further to change the order of the signs. Probably
the most confusing feature of hieroglyphic writing is to be found in the
fact that there is no space between words. The pictures stretch over the
page at uniform distances from one another, and generally one does not
know whether a sign belongs to what has gone before or is the beginning
of a new word. Persian cuneiform writing, on the other hand, makes use
of an oblique wedge sign to separate the words.
The Chinese tongue and script is exceedingly old, but still used by four
hundred million people. Please do not think I understand anything about
it. I have only informed myself concerning it because I hoped to find
analogies to the indefinite aspects of the dream. Nor was I
disappointed. The Chinese language is filled with so many vagaries that
it strikes terror into our hearts. It consists, as is well known, of a
number of syllable sounds which are spoken singly or are combined in
twos. One of the chief dialects has about four hundred such sounds. Now
since the vocabulary of this dialect is estimated at about four thousand
words, it follows that every sound has on an average of ten different
meanings, some less but others, consequently, more. Hence there are a
great number of ways of avoiding a multiplicity of meaning, since one
cannot guess from the context alone which of the ten meanings of the
syllable sound the speaker intended to convey to the hearer. Among them
are the combining of two sounds into a compounded word and the use of
four different "tones" with which to utter these syllables. For our
purposes of comparison, it is still more interesting to note that this
language has practically no grammar. It is impossible to say of a
one-syllable word whether it is a noun, a verb, or an adjective, and we
find none of those changes in the forms of the words by means of which
we might recognize sex, number, ending, tense or mood. The language,
therefore, might be said to consist of raw material, much in the same
manner as our thought language is broken up by the dream work into its
raw materials when the expressions of relationship are left out. In the
Chinese, in all cases of vagueness the decision is left to the
understanding of the hearer, who is guided by the context. I have
secured an example of a Chinese saying which, literally translated,
reads: "Little to be seen, much to wonder at." That is not difficult to
understand. It may mean, "The less a man has seen, the more he finds to
wonder at," or, "There is much to admire for the man who has seen
little." Naturally, there is no need to choose between these two
translations, which differ only in grammar. Despite these uncertainties,
we are assured, the Chinese language is an extraordinarily excellent
medium for the expression of thought. Vagueness does not, therefore,
necessarily lead to ambiguity.
Now we must certainly admit that the condition of affairs is far less
favorable in the expression-system of the dream than in these ancient
languages and writings. For, after all, these latter are really designed
for communication, that is to say, they were always intended to be
understood, no matter in what way and with what aids. But it is just
this characteristic which the dream lacks. The dream does not want to
tell anyone anything, it is no vehicle of communication, it is, on the
contrary, constructed so as not to be understood. For that reason we
must not be surprised or misled if we should discover that a number of
the ambiguities and vagaries of the dream do not permit of
determination. As the one specific gain of our comparison, we have only
the realization that such uncertainties as people tried to make use of
in objecting to the validity of our dream interpretation, are rather the
invariable characteristic of all primitive systems of expression.
How far the dream can really be understood can be determined only by
practice and experience. My opinion is, that that is very far indeed,
and the comparison of results which correctly trained analysts have
gathered confirms my view. The lay public, even that part of the lay
public which is interested in science, likes, in the face of the
difficulties and uncertainties of a scientific task, to make what I
consider an unjust show of its superior scepticism. Perhaps not all of
you are acquainted with the fact that a similar situation arose in the
history of the deciphering of the Babylonian-Assyrian inscriptions.
There was a period then when public opinion went far in declaring the
decipherors of cuneiform writing to be visionaries and the whole
research a "fraud." But in the year 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society made
a decisive test. It challenged the four most distinguished decipherors
of cuneiform writing, Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot and Oppert, each to
send to it in a sealed envelope his independent translation of a newly
discovered inscription, and the Society was then able to testify, after
having made a comparison of the four readings, that their agreement was
sufficiently marked to justify confidence in what already had been
accomplished, and faith in further progress. At this the mockery of the
learned lay world gradually came to an end and the confidence in the
reading of cuneiform documents has grown appreciably since then.
2. A second series of objections is firmly grounded in the impression
from which you too probably are not free, that a number of the solutions
of dream interpretations which we find it necessary to make seem forced,
artificial, far-fetched, in other words, violent or even comical or
jocose. These comments are so frequent that I shall choose at random the
latest example which has come to my attention. Recently, in free
Switzerland, the director of a boarding-school was relieved of his
position on account of his active interest in psychoanalysis. He raised
objections and a Berne newspaper made public the judgment of the school
authorities. I quote from that article some sentences which apply to
psychoanalysis: "Moreover, we are surprised at the many far-fetched and
artificial examples as found in the aforementioned book of Dr. Pfister
of Zurich.... Thus, it certainly is a cause of surprise when the
director of a boarding-school so uncritically accepts all these
assertions and apparent proofs." These observations are offered as the
decisions of "one who judges calmly." I rather think this calm is
"artificial." Let us examine these remarks more closely in the hope that
a little reflection and knowledge of the subject can be no detriment to
calm judgment.
It is positively refreshing to see how quickly and unerringly some
individuals can judge a delicate question of abstruse psychology by
first impressions. The interpretations seem to them far-fetched and
forced, they do not please them, so the interpretations are wrong and
the whole business of interpretation amounts to nothing. No fleeting
thought ever brushes the other possibility, that these interpretations
must appear as they are for good reasons, which would give rise to the
further question of what these good reasons might be.
The content thus judged generally relates to the results of
displacement, with which you have become acquainted as the strongest
device of the dream censor. It is with the help of displacements that
the dream censor creates substitute-formations which we have designated
as allusions. But they are allusions which are not easily recognized as
such, and from which it is not easy to find one's way back to the
original and which are connected with this original by means of the
strangest, most unusual, most superficial associations. In all of these
cases, however, it is a question of matters which are to be hidden,
which were intended for concealment; this is what the dream censor aims
to do. We must not expect to find a thing that has been concealed in its
accustomed place in the spot where it belongs. In this respect the
Commissions for the Surveillance of Frontiers now in office are more
cunning than the Swiss school authorities. In their search for documents
and maps they are not content to search through portfolios and letter
cases but they also take into account the possibility that spies and
smugglers might carry such severely proscribed articles in the most
concealed parts of their clothing, where they certainly do not belong,
as for example between the double soles of their boots. If the concealed
objects are found in such a place, they certainly are very far-fetched,
but nevertheless they have been "fetched."
If we recognize that the most remote, the most extraordinary
associations between the latent dream element and its manifest
substitute are possible, associations appearing ofttimes comical,
ofttimes witty, we follow in so doing a wealth of experience derived
from examples whose solutions we have, as a rule, not found ourselves.
Often it is not possible to give such interpretations from our own
examples. No sane person could guess the requisite association. The
dreamer either gives us the translation with one stroke by means of his
immediate association--he can do this, for this substitute formation was
created by his mind--or he provides us with so much material that the
solution no longer demands any special astuteness but forces itself upon
us as inevitable. If the dreamer does not help us in either of these two
ways, then indeed the manifest element in question remains forever
incomprehensible to us. Allow me to give you one more such example of
recent occurrence. One of my patients lost her father during the time
that she was undergoing treatment. Since then she has made use of every
opportunity to bring him back to life in her dreams. In one of her
dreams her father appears in a certain connection, of no further
importance here, and says, "_It is a quarter past eleven, it is half
past eleven, it is quarter of twelve_." All she can think of in
connection with this curious incident is the recollection that her
father liked to see his grown-up children appear punctually at the
general meal hour. That very thing probably had some connection with the
dream element, but permitted of no conclusion as to its source. Judging
from the situation of the treatment at that time, there was a justified
suspicion that a carefully suppressed critical rebellion against her
loved and respected father played its part in this dream. Continuing her
associations, and apparently far afield from topics relevant to the
dream, the dreamer relates that yesterday many things of a
psychological nature had been discussed in her presence, and that a
relative made the remark: "The cave man (_Urmensch_) continues to live
in all of us." Now we think we understand. That gave her an excellent
opportunity of picturing her father as continuing to live. So in the
dream she made of him a clockman (_Uhrmensch_) by having him announce
the quarter-hours at noon time.
You may not be able to disregard the similarity which this examples
bears to a pun, and it really has happened frequently that the dreamer's
pun is attributed to the interpreter. There are still other examples in
which it is not at all easy to decide whether one is dealing with a joke
or a dream. But you will recall that the same doubt confronted us when
we were dealing with slips of the tongue. A man tells us a dream of his,
that his uncle, while they were sitting in the latter's _auto_mobile,
gave him a kiss. He very quickly supplies the interpretation himself. It
means "_auto_-eroticism," (a term taken from the study of the libido, or
love impulse, and designating satisfaction of that impulse without an
external object). Did this man permit himself to make fun of us and give
out as a dream a pun that occurred to him? I do not believe so; he
really dreamed it. Whence comes the astounding similarity? This question
at one time led me quite a ways from my path, by making it necessary for
me to make a thorough investigation of the problem of humor itself. By
so doing I came to the conclusion that the origin of wit lies in a
foreconscious train of thought which is left for a moment to unconscious
manipulation, from which it then emerges as a joke. Under the influence
of the unconscious it experiences the workings of the mechanisms there
in force, namely, of condensation and displacement, that is, of the same
processes which we found active in the dream work, and it is to this
agreement that we are to ascribe the similarity between wit and the
dream, wherever it occurs. The unintentional "dream joke" has, however,
none of the pleasure-giving quality of the ordinary joke. Why that is
so, greater penetration into the study of wit may teach you. The "dream
joke" seems a poor joke to us, it does not make us laugh, it leaves us
cold.
Here we are also following in the footsteps of ancient dream
interpretation, which has left us, in addition to much that is useless,
many a good example of dream interpretation we ourselves cannot
surpass. I am now going to tell you a dream of historical importance
which Plutarch and Artemidorus of Daldis both tell concerning Alexander
the Great, with certain variations. When the King was engaged in
besieging the city of Tyre (322 B.C.), which was being stubbornly
defended, he once dreamed that he saw a dancing satyr. Aristandros, his
dream interpreter, who accompanied the army, interpreted this dream for
him by making of the word _Satyros_, [Greek] sa Turos, "Thine is
Tyre," and thus promising him a triumph over the city. Alexander allowed
himself to be influenced by this interpretation to continue the siege,
and finally captured Tyre. The interpretation, which seems artificial
enough, was without doubt the correct one.