had when we began to apply our method of free association: we discovered
that our efforts to penetrate from the dream-element to the unconscious
thought proper for which the former is a substitute encountered a
certain _resistance_. The strength of this resistance, we said, varies,
being sometimes enormous and at other times very slight. In the latter
case we need only a few connecting-links for the work of interpretation;
but where there is great resistance we are compelled to go through long
chains of associations, which carry us far from the initial idea, and on
the way we have to overcome all the difficulties of professedly critical
objections to associations arising. That which we encountered as
resistance in the work of interpretation we now meet again as the
censorship in the dream-work: the resistance is simply the censorship
objectified; it proves to us that the power of the censorship is not
exhausted in effecting distortion, being thereby extinguished, but that
the censorship remains as a permanent institution, the object of which
is to maintain the distortion when once it has been achieved. Moreover,
just as the strength of the resistance encountered during interpretation
varies with each element, so too the degree of distortion effected by
the censorship is different for each element of a whole dream. A
comparison of the manifest and the latent dream shows that certain
latent elements are completely eliminated, others more or less modified,
and others again appear in the manifest dream-content unaltered or
perhaps even intensified.
Our purpose, however, was to find out which are the tendencies
exercising the censorship and upon which tendencies it is exercised. Now
this question, which is fundamental for the understanding of dreams and
perhaps of human life altogether, is easy to answer when we survey the
series of dreams which we have succeeded in interpreting. The tendencies
which exercise the censorship are those which are acknowledged by the
waking judgement of the dreamer and with which he feels himself to be at
one. You may be sure that when you repudiate any correctly-found
interpretation of a dream of your own, you do so from the same motives
as cause the censorship to be exercised and distortion effected, and
make interpretation necessary. Consider the dream of our lady of fifty:
her dream, although it had not been interpreted, struck her as shocking
and she would have been even more outraged if Dr. von Hug-Hellmuth had
told her something of its unmistakable meaning; it was just this
attitude of condemnation which caused the offensive passages in the
dream to be replaced by a murmur.
Those tendencies against which the dream-censorship is directed must
next be described from the point of view of this inner critical
standard. When we do this, we can only say that they are invariably of
an objectionable nature, offensive from the ethical, æsthetic or social
point of view, things about which we do not dare to think at all, or
think of only with abhorrence. Above all are these censored wishes,
which in dreams are expressed in a distorted fashion, manifestations of
a boundless and ruthless egoism; for the dreamer’s own ego makes its
appearance in every dream, and plays the principal part, even if it
knows how to disguise itself completely as far as the manifest content
is concerned. This _sacro egoismo_ of dreams is certainly not
unconnected with the attitude of mind essential to sleep: the withdrawal
of interest from the whole outside world.
The ego which has discarded all ethical bonds feels itself at one with
all the demands of the sexual impulse, those which have long been
condemned by our æsthetic training and those which are contrary to all
the restraints imposed by morality. The striving for pleasure—the
libido, as we say,—chooses its objects unchecked by any inhibition,
preferring indeed those which are forbidden: not merely the wife of
another man, but, above all, the incestuous objects of choice which by
common consent humanity holds sacred—the mother and the sister of men,
the father and the brother of women. (Even the dream of our
fifty-year-old lady is an incestuous one, the libido being unmistakably
directed towards the son.) Desires which we believe alien to human
nature show themselves powerful enough to give rise to dreams. Hate,
too, rages unrestrainedly; wishes for revenge, and death-wishes, against
those who in life are nearest and dearest—parents, brothers and sisters,
husband or wife, the dreamer’s own children—are by no means uncommon.
These censored wishes seem to rise up from a veritable hell; when we
know their meaning, it seems to us in our waking moments as if no
censorship of them could be severe enough. Dreams themselves, however,
are not to blame for this evil content; you surely have not forgotten
that their harmless, nay, useful, function is to protect sleep from
disturbance. Depravity does not lie in the nature of dreams; in fact,
you know that there are dreams which can be recognized as gratifying
justifiable desires and urgent bodily needs. It is true that there is no
distortion in these dreams, but then there is no need for it, they can
perform their function without offending the ethical and æsthetic
tendencies of the ego. Remember, too, that the degree of distortion is
proportionate to two factors: on the one hand, the more shocking the
wish that must be censored, the greater will be the distortion; but it
is also great in proportion as the demands of the censorship are severe.
Hence in a strictly brought up and prudish young girl, a rigid
censorship will distort dream-excitations which we medical men would
have recognized as permissible and harmless libidinous desires, and
which the dreamer herself would judge in the same way ten years later.
Besides, we are still not nearly far enough advanced to allow ourselves
to be outraged at the result of our work of interpretation. I think we
still do not understand it properly; but first of all it is incumbent
upon us to secure it against certain possible attacks. It is not at all
difficult to detect weak points in it. Our interpretations were based on
hypotheses which we adopted earlier: that there really is some meaning
in dreams; that the idea of mental processes being unconscious for a
time, which was first arrived at through hypnotic sleep, may be applied
also to normal sleep; and that all associations are subject to
determination. Now if, reasoning from these hypotheses, we had obtained
plausible results in our dream-interpretation we should have been
justified in concluding that these hypotheses were correct. But what if
these discoveries are of the kind I have described? In that case, surely
it seems natural to say: “These results are impossible, absurd, at the
very least highly improbable, so there must have been something wrong
about the hypotheses. Either the dream is after all not a mental
phenomenon, or there is nothing which is unconscious in our normal
condition, or there is a flaw somewhere in our technique. Is it not
simpler and more satisfactory to assume this than to accept all the
abominable conclusions which we profess to have deduced from our
hypotheses?”
Both! it is both simpler and more satisfactory, but not on that account
necessarily more correct. Let us give ourselves time: the matter is not
yet ripe for judgement. First of all, we can make the case against our
interpretations even stronger. The fact that our results are so
unpleasant and repellent would not perhaps weigh so very heavily with
us; a stronger argument is the emphatic and well-grounded repudiation by
dreamers of the wish-tendencies which we try to foist upon them after
interpretating their dreams. “What?” says one, “You want to prove to me
from my dream that I grudge the money I have spent on my sister’s dowry
and my brother’s education? But it is out of the question; I spend my
whole time working for my brothers and sisters and my only interest in
life is to do my duty by them, as, being the eldest, I promised our dead
mother I would.” Or a woman says: “I am supposed to wish that my husband
were dead? Really that is outrageous nonsense! Not only is our married
life very happy, though perhaps you won’t believe that, but if he died I
should lose everything I possess in the world.” Or someone else will
reply: “Do you mean to suggest that I entertain sexual desires towards
my sister? The thing is ludicrous; she is nothing to me; we get on badly
with one another, and for years I have not exchanged a word with her.”
We still might not be much impressed if these dreamers neither admitted
nor denied the tendencies attributed to them; we might say that these
are just the things of which they are quite unconscious. But when they
detect in their own minds the exact opposite of such a wish as is
interpreted to them, and when they can prove to us by their whole
conduct in life that the contrary desire predominates, surely we must be
nonplussed. Is it not about time now for us to discard our whole work of
dream-interpretation as something which has led to a _reductio ad
absurdum_?
No, not even now. Even this stronger argument falls to pieces when
subjected to a critical attack. Assuming that unconscious tendencies do
exist in mental life, the fact that the opposite tendencies predominate
in conscious life goes to prove nothing. Perhaps there is room in the
mind for opposite tendencies, for contradictions, existing side by side;
indeed, possibly the very predominance of the one tendency conditions
the unconscious nature of the opposite. So the first objections raised
only amount to the statement that the results of dream-interpretation
are not simple and are very disagreeable. To the first charge we may
reply that, however much enamoured of simplicity you may be, you cannot
thereby solve one of the problems of dreams; you have to make up your
mind at the outset to accept the fact of complicated relations. And, as
regards the second point, you are manifestly wrong in taking the fact
that something pleases or repels yourself as the motive for a scientific
judgement. What does it matter if you do find the results of
dream-interpretation unpleasant, or even mortifying and repulsive? _Ça
n’empêche pas d’exister_—as I, when a young doctor, heard my chief,
Charcot, say in a similar case. We must be humble and put sympathies and
antipathies honourably in the background if we would learn to know
reality in this world. If a physicist could prove to you that organic
life on the earth was bound to become extinct before long, would you
venture to say to him also: “That cannot be so; I dislike the prospect
too much.” I think you would say nothing, until another physicist came
along and convicted the first of a mistake in his premises or his
calculations. If you repudiate whatever is distasteful to you, you are
repeating the mechanism of a dream structure rather than understanding
and mastering it.
Perhaps, then, you will undertake to overlook the offensive nature of
the censored dream-wishes and will fall back upon the argument that it
is surely very improbable that we ought to concede so large a part in
the human constitution to what is evil. But do your own experiences
justify you in this statement? I will say nothing of how you may appear
in your own eyes, but have you met with so much goodwill in your
superiors and rivals, so much chivalry in your enemies and so little
envy amongst your acquaintances, that you feel it incumbent on you to
protest against the idea of the part played by egoistic baseness in
human nature? Do you not know how uncontrolled and unreliable the
average human being is in all that concerns sexual life? Or are you
ignorant of the fact that all the excesses and aberrations of which we
dream at night are crimes actually committed every day by men who are
wide awake? What does psycho-analysis do in this connection but confirm
the old saying of Plato that the good are those who content themselves
with dreaming of what others, the wicked, actually do?
And now look away from individuals to the great war still devastating
Europe: think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is
now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world. Do you really
believe that a handful of unprincipled place-hunters and corrupters of
men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the
millions of their followers were not also guilty? Will you venture, even
in these circumstances, to break a lance for the exclusion of evil from
the mental constitution of humanity?
You will accuse me of taking a one-sided view of war, and tell me that
it has also called out all that is finest and most noble in mankind,
heroism, self-sacrifice, and public spirit. That is true; but do not now
commit the injustice, from which psycho-analysis has so often suffered,
of reproaching it that it denies one thing because it affirms another.
It is no part of our intention to deny the nobility in human nature, nor
have we ever done anything to disparage its value. On the contrary, I
show you not only the evil wishes which are censored but also the
censorship which suppresses them and makes them unrecognizable. We dwell
upon the evil in human beings with the greater emphasis only because
others deny it, thereby making the mental life of mankind not indeed
better, but incomprehensible. If we give up the one-sided ethical
valuation then, we are sure to find the truer formula for the relation
of evil to good in human nature.
Here the matter rests. We need not give up the results of our work of
dream-interpretation, even though we cannot fail to find them strange.
Perhaps later we shall be able to come nearer to understanding them by
another path. For the present let us hold fast to this: dream-distortion
is due to the censorship exercised, by certain recognized tendencies of
the ego, over desires of an offensive character which stir in us at
night during sleep. Obviously, when we ask ourselves why it is just at
night that they appear and what is the origin of these reprehensible
wishes, we find that there is still much to investigate and many
questions to answer.
It would, however, be wrong if we neglected to give due prominence at
this point to another result of these investigations. The dream-wishes
which would disturb our sleep are unknown to us; we first learn about
them by dream-interpretation; they are therefore to be designated
“unconscious at the moment” in the sense in which we have used the term.
But we must recognize that they are also more than unconscious at the
moment; for the dreamer denies them, as we have so frequently found,
even after he has learnt of them through the interpretation of his
dream. Here we have a repetition of the case which we first met with
when interpreting the slip of the tongue “hiccough,” where the
after-dinner speaker indignantly assured us that neither then nor at any
time had he been conscious of any feeling of disrespect towards his
chief. We ventured even then to doubt the value of this assertion and
assumed instead that the speaker was permanently ignorant of the
existence of this feeling within him. We meet with the same situation
every time we interpret a dream in which there is a high degree of
distortion, and this lends an added significance to our conception. We
are now prepared to assume that there are processes and tendencies in
mental life, of which we know nothing; have known nothing; have, for a
very long time, perhaps even never, known anything about at all. This
gives the term _unconscious_ a fresh meaning for us: the qualification
“at the moment” or “temporary” is seen to be no essential attribute, the
term may also mean _permanently unconscious_, not merely “latent at the
moment.” You see that later on we shall have to discuss this point
further.
TENTH LECTURE
SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS
We have found out that the distortion in dreams which hinders our
understanding of them is due to the activities of a censorship, directed
against the unacceptable, unconscious wish-impulses. But of course we
have not asserted that the censorship is the only factor responsible for
the distortion, and as a matter of fact a further study of dreams leads
to the discovery that there are yet other causes contributing to this
effect; that is as much as to say, if the censorship were eliminated we
should nevertheless be unable to understand dreams, nor would the
manifest dream be identical with the latent dream-thoughts.
This other cause of the obscurity of dreams, this additional
contribution to distortion, is revealed by our becoming aware of a gap
in our technique. I have already admitted to you that there are
occasions when persons being analysed really have no associations to
single elements in their dreams. To be sure, this does not happen as
often as they declare that it does; in very many instances the
association may yet be elicited by perseverance; but still there remain
a certain number of cases where association fails altogether or, if
something is finally extorted, it is not what we need. If this happens
during psycho-analytic treatment it has a certain significance which
does not concern us here; but it also occurs in the course of
interpretation of dreams in normal people, or when we are interpreting
our own. When we are convinced in such circumstances that no amount of
pressing is of any use, we finally discover that this unwelcome
contingency regularly presents itself where special dream-elements are
in question; and we begin to recognize the operation of some new
principle, whereas at first we thought we had only come across an
exceptional case in which our technique had failed.
In this way it comes about that we try to interpret these “silent”
elements, and attempt to translate them by drawing upon our own
resources. It cannot fail to strike us that we arrive at a satisfactory
meaning in every instance in which we venture on this substitution,
whereas the dream remains meaningless and disconnected as long as we do
not resolve to use this method. The accumulation of many exactly similar
instances then affords us the required certainty, our experiment having
been tried at first with considerable diffidence.
I am presenting all this somewhat in outline, but that is surely
allowable for purposes of instruction, nor is it falsified by so doing,
but merely made simpler.
We arrive in this way at constant translations for a series of
dream-elements, just as in popular books on dreams we find such
translations for everything that occurs in dreams. You will not have
forgotten that when we employ the method of free association such
constant substitutions for dream-elements never make their appearance.
Now you will at once say that this mode of interpretation seems to you
far more uncertain and open to criticism than even the former method of
free association. But there is still something more to be said: when we
have collected from actual experience a sufficient number of such
constant translations, we eventually realize that we could actually have
filled in these portions of the interpretation from our own knowledge,
and that they really could have been understood without using the
dreamer’s associations. How it is that we are bound to know their
meaning is a matter which will be dealt with in the second half of our
discussion.
We call a constant relation of this kind between a dream-element and its
translation a _symbolic_ one, and the dream-element itself a _symbol_ of
the unconscious dream-thought. You will remember that some time ago,
when we were examining the different relations which may exist between
dream-elements and the thoughts proper underlying them, I distinguished
three relations: substitution of the part for the whole, allusion, and
imagery. I told you then that there was a fourth possible relation, but
I did not tell you what it was. This fourth relation is the symbolic,
which I am now introducing; there are connected with it certain very
interesting points for discussion, to which we will turn attention
before setting forth our special observations on this subject. Symbolism
is perhaps the most remarkable part of our theory of dreams.
First of all: since the relation between a symbol and the idea
symbolized is an invariable one, the latter being as it were a
translation of the former, symbolism does in some measure realize the
ideal of both ancient and popular dream-interpretation, one from which
we have moved very far in our technique. Symbols make it possible for us
in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without questioning the
dreamer, who indeed in any case can tell us nothing about the symbols.
If the symbols commonly appearing in dreams are known, and also the
personality of the dreamer, the conditions under which he lives, and the
impressions in his mind after which his dream occurred, we are often in
a position to interpret it straightaway; to translate it at sight, as it
were. Such a feat flatters the vanity of the interpreter and impresses
the dreamer; it is in pleasing contrast to the laborious method of
questioning the latter. But do not let this lead you away: it is no part
of our task to perform tricks nor is that method of interpretation which
is based on a knowledge of symbolism one which can replace, or even
compare with, that of free association. It is complementary to this
latter, and the results it yields are only useful when applied in
connection with the latter. As regards our knowledge of the dreamer’s
mental situation, moreover, you must reflect that you have not only to
interpret dreams of people whom you know well; that, as a rule, you know
nothing of the events of the previous day which stimulated the dream;
and that the associations of the person analysed are the very source
from which we obtain our knowledge of what we call the mental situation.
Further, it is especially remarkable, particularly with reference to
certain considerations upon which we shall touch later, that the most
strenuous opposition has manifested itself again here, over this
question of the existence of a symbolic relation between the dream and
the unconscious. Even persons of judgement and standing, who in other
respects have gone a long way with psycho-analysis, have renounced their
adherence at this point. This behaviour is the more remarkable when we
remember two things: first, that symbolism is not peculiar to dreams,
nor exclusively characteristic of them; and, in the second place, that
the use of symbolism in dreams was not one of the discoveries of
psycho-analysis, although this science has certainly not been wanting in
surprising discoveries. If we must ascribe priority in this field to
anyone in modern times, the discoverer must be recognized in the
philosopher K. A. Scherner (1861); psycho-analysis has confirmed his
discovery, although modifying it in certain important respects.
Now you will wish to hear something about the nature of dream-symbolism
and will want some examples. I will gladly tell you what I know, but I
confess that our knowledge is less full than we could wish.