child’s mental life, and we may now hope to find in a similar way an
explanation of the source of the other kind of prohibited wishes in
dreams, i.e. the excessive sexual desires. We are impelled therefore to
study the development of the sexual life of the child, and here from
various sources we learn the following facts. In the first place, it is
an untenable fallacy to suppose that the child has no sexual life and to
assume that sexuality first makes its appearance at puberty, when the
genital organs come to maturity. On the contrary he has from the very
beginning a sexual life rich in content, though it differs in many
points from that which later is regarded as normal. What in adult life
are termed “perversions” depart from the normal in the following
respects: (1) in a disregard for the barriers of species (the gulf
between man and beast), (2) in the insensibility to barriers imposed by
disgust, (3) in the transgression of the incest-barrier (the prohibition
against seeking sexual gratification with close blood-relations), (4) in
homosexuality and, (5) in the transferring of the part played by the
genital organs to other organs and different areas of the body. All
these barriers are not in existence from the outset, but are only
gradually built up in the course of development and education. The
little child is free from them: he does not perceive any immense gulf
between man and beast, the arrogance with which man separates himself
from the other animals only dawns in him at a later period. He shows at
the beginning of life no disgust for excrement, but only learns this
feeling slowly under the influence of education; he attaches no
particular importance to the difference between the sexes, in fact he
thinks that both have the same formation of the genital organs; he
directs his earliest sexual desires and his curiosity to those nearest
to him or to those who for other reasons are specially beloved—his
parents, brothers and sisters or nurses; and finally we see in him a
characteristic which manifests itself again later at the height of some
love-relationship—namely, he does not look for gratification in the
sexual organs only, but discovers that many other parts of the body
possess the same sort of sensibility and can yield analogous pleasurable
sensations, playing thereby the part of genital organs. The child may be
said then to be _polymorphously perverse_, and even if mere traces of
all these impulses are found in him, this is due on the one hand to
their lesser intensity as compared with that which they assume in later
life and, on the other hand, to the fact that education immediately and
energetically suppresses all sexual manifestations in the child. This
suppression may be said to be embodied in a theory; for grown-up people
endeavour to overlook some of these manifestations, and, by
misinterpretation, to rob others of their sexual nature, until in the
end the whole thing can be altogether denied. It is often the same
people who first inveigh against the sexual “naughtiness” of children in
the nursery and then sit down to their writing-tables to defend the
sexual purity of the same children. When they are left to themselves or
when they are seduced children often display perverse sexual activity to
a really remarkable extent. Of course grown-up people are right in not
taking this too seriously and in regarding it, as they say, as “childish
tricks” and “play,” for the child cannot be judged either by a moral or
legal code as if he were mature and fully responsible; nevertheless
these things do exist, and they have their significance both as evidence
of innate constitutional tendencies and inasmuch as they cause and
foster later developments: they give us an insight into the child’s
sexual life and so into that of humanity as a whole. If then we find all
these perverse wishes behind the distortions of our dreams, it only
means that dreams in _this respect also_ have regressed completely to
the infantile condition.
Amongst these forbidden wishes special prominence must still be given to
the incestuous desires, i.e. those directed towards sexual intercourse
with parents or brothers and sisters. You know in what abhorrence human
society holds, or at least professes to hold, such intercourse, and what
emphasis is laid upon the prohibitions of it. The most preposterous
attempts have been made to account for this horror of incest: some
people have assumed that it is a provision of nature for the
preservation of the species, manifesting itself in the mind by these
prohibitions because in-breeding would result in racial degeneration;
others have asserted that propinquity from early childhood has deflected
sexual desire from the persons concerned. In both these cases, however,
the avoidance of incest would have been automatically secured and we
should be at a loss to understand the necessity for stern prohibitions,
which would seem rather to point to a strong desire. Psycho-analytic
investigations have shown beyond the possibility of doubt that _an
incestuous love-choice_ is in fact the first and the regular one, and
that it is only later that any opposition is manifested towards it, the
causes of which are not to be sought in the psychology of the
individual.
Let us sum up the results which our excursion into child-psychology has
brought to the understanding of dreams. We have learnt not only that the
material of the forgotten childish experiences is accessible to the
dream, but also that the child’s mental life, with all its
peculiarities, its egoism, its incestuous object-choice, persists in it
and therefore in the unconscious, and that our dreams take us back every
night to this infantile stage. This corroborates the belief that _the
Unconscious is the infantile mental life_, and, with this, the
objectionable impression that so much evil lurks in human nature grows
somewhat less. For this terrible evil is simply what is original,
primitive and infantile in mental life, what we find in operation in the
child, but in part overlook in him because it is on so small a scale,
and in part do not take greatly to heart because we do not demand a high
ethical standard in a child. By regressing to this infantile stage our
dreams appear to have brought the evil in us to light, but the
appearance is deceptive, though we have let ourselves be dismayed by it;
we are not so evil as the interpretation of our dreams would lead us to
suppose.
If the evil impulses of our dreams are merely infantile, a reversion to
the beginnings of our ethical development, the dream simply making us
children again in thought and feeling, it is surely not reasonable to be
ashamed of these evil dreams. But the reasoning faculty is only part of
our mental life; there is much in it besides which is not reasonable,
and so it happens that, although it is unreasonable, we nevertheless are
ashamed of such dreams. We subject them to the dream-censorship and are
ashamed and indignant when one of these wishes by way of exception
penetrates our consciousness in a form so undisguised that we cannot
fail to recognize it; yes, we even at times feel just as much ashamed of
a distorted dream as if we really understood it. Just think of the
outraged comment of the respectable elderly lady upon her dream about
“love service,” although it was not interpreted to her. So the problem
is not yet solved, and it is still possible that if we pursue this
question of the evil in dreams we may arrive at another conclusion and
another estimate of human nature.
Our whole enquiry has led to two results which, however, merely indicate
the beginning of new problems and new doubts. In the first place: the
regression in dreams is one not only of form but of substance. Not only
does it translate our thoughts into a primitive form of expression, but
it also re-awakens the peculiarities of our primitive mental life—the
old supremacy of the ego, the initial impulses of our sexual life, even
restores to us our old intellectual possession if we may conceive of
symbolism in this way. And secondly: all these old infantile
characteristics, which were once dominant and solely dominant, must
to-day be accounted to the unconscious and must alter and extend our
views about it. “Unconscious” is no longer a term for what is
temporarily latent: the unconscious is a special realm, with its own
desires and modes of expression and peculiar mental mechanisms not
elsewhere operative. Yet the latent dream-thoughts disclosed by our
interpretation do not belong to this realm; rather they correspond to
the kind of thoughts we have in waking life also. And yet they are
unconscious: how is the paradox to be resolved? We begin to realize that
here we must discriminate. Something which has its origin in our
conscious life and shares its characteristics—we call it the “residue”
from the previous day—meets together with something from the realm of
the unconscious in the formation of a dream, and it is with these two
contributing elements that the dream-work is accomplished. The influence
of the unconscious impinging upon this residue probably constitutes the
condition for regression. This is the deepest insight into the nature of
dreams possible to us until we have explored further fields in the mind;
but soon it will be time to give another name to the unconscious
character of the latent dream-thoughts, in order to distinguish it from
that unconscious material which has its origin in the province of the
infantile.
We can of course also ask: What is it that forces our mental activity
during sleep to such regression? Why cannot the mental stimuli that
disturb sleep be dealt with without it? And if on account of the
dream-censorship the mental activity has to disguise itself in the old,
and now incomprehensible, form of expression, what is the object of
re-animating the old impulses, desires and characteristics, now
surmounted; what, in short, is the use of _regression in substance_ as
well as in _form_? The only satisfactory answer would be that this is
the one possible way in which dreams can be formed, that, dynamically
considered, the relief from the stimulus giving rise to the dream cannot
otherwise be accomplished. But this is an answer for which, at present,
we have no justification.
FOURTEENTH LECTURE
WISH-FULFILMENT
Shall I remind you once more of the steps by which we have arrived at
our present position? When in applying our technique we came upon the
distortion in dreams, we made up our minds to avoid it for the moment
and turned to the study of infantile dreams for some definite
information about the nature of dreams in general. Next, equipped with
the results of this investigation, we attacked the question of
dream-distortion directly, and I hope that bit by bit we have also
mastered that. Now, however, we are bound to admit that our findings in
these two directions do not exactly tally, and it behoves us to combine
and correlate our results.
Both enquiries have made it plain that the essential feature in the
dream-work is the transformation of thoughts into hallucinatory
experience. It is puzzling enough to see how this process is
accomplished, but this is a problem for general psychology, and we have
not to deal with it here. We have learnt from children’s dreams that the
object of the dream-work is to remove, by means of the fulfilment of
some wish, a mental stimulus which is disturbing sleep. We could make no
similar pronouncement with regard to distorted dreams until we
understood how to interpret them, but from the outset we expected to be
able to bring our ideas about them into line with our views on infantile
dreams. This expectation was for the first time fulfilled when we
recognized that all dreams are really children’s dreams; that they make
use of infantile material and are characterized by impulses and
mechanisms which belong to the childish mind. When we feel we have
mastered the distortion in dreams we must go on to find out whether the
notion that dreams are WISH-FULFILMENTS holds good of distorted dreams
also.
We have just subjected a series of dreams to interpretation, but without
taking the question of wish-fulfilment into consideration at all. I feel
certain that while we were talking about them the question repeatedly
forced itself upon you: “What has become of the wish-fulfilment which is
supposed to be the object of the dream-work?” Now this question is
important, for it is the one which our lay critics are constantly
asking. As you know, mankind has an instinctive antipathy to
intellectual novelties; one of the ways in which this shows itself is
that any such novelty is immediately reduced to its very smallest
compass, and if possible embodied in some catch-word. “Wish-fulfilment”
has become the catch-word for the new theory of dreams. Directly they
hear that dreams are said to be wish-fulfilments, the laity asks: “Where
does the wish-fulfilment come in?” and their asking the question amounts
to a repudiation of the idea. They can immediately think of countless
dreams of their own which were accompanied by feeling so unpleasant as
sometimes to reach the point of agonizing dread; and so this statement
of the psycho-analytical theory of dreams appears to them highly
improbable. It is easy to reply that in distorted dreams the
wish-fulfilment is not openly expressed, but has to be looked for, so
that it cannot be shown until the dreams have been interpreted. We know
too that the wishes underlying these distorted dreams are those which
are prohibited and rejected by the censorship, and that it is just their
existence which is the cause of distortion and the motive for the
intervention of the censorship. But it is difficult to make the lay
critic understand that we must not ask about the wish-fulfilment in a
dream before it has been interpreted; he always forgets this. His
reluctance to accept the theory of wish-fulfilment is really nothing but
the effect of the dream-censorship, causing him to replace the real
thought by a substitute, and following from his repudiation of these
censored dream-wishes.
Of course we ourselves must feel the need to explain why so many dreams
are painful in content; and in particular we shall want to know how we
come to have ‘anxiety-dreams.’ Here for the first time we are confronted
with the problem of the affects in dreams; a problem which deserves
special study, but one which we cannot concern ourselves with just now,
unfortunately. If the dream is a wish-fulfilment, it should be
impossible for any painful emotions to come into it: on this point the
lay critics seem to be right. But the matter is complicated by three
considerations which they have overlooked.
First, it may happen that the dream-work is not wholly successful in
creating a wish-fulfilment, so that part of the painful feeling in the
latent thoughts is carried over into the manifest dream. Analysis would
then have to show that these thoughts were a great deal more painful
than the dream which is formed from them; this much can be proved in
every instance. We admit then that the dream-work has failed in its
purpose, just as a dream of drinking excited by the stimulus of thirst
fails to quench that thirst. One is still thirsty after it and has to
wake up and drink. Nevertheless, it is a proper dream: it has renounced
nothing of its essential nature. We must say: “Ut desint vires, tamen
est laudanda voluntas.” The clearly recognizable intention remains a
praiseworthy one, at any rate. Such instances of failure in the work are
by no means rare, and one reason is that it is so much more difficult
for the dream-work to produce the required change in the nature of the
affect than to modify the content; affects are often very intractable.
So it happens that in the process of the dream-work the painful
_content_ of the dream-thoughts is transformed into a wish-fulfilment
while the painful _affect_ persists unchanged. When this occurs the
affect is quite out of harmony with the content, which gives our critics
the opportunity of remarking that the dream is so far from being a
wish-fulfilment that even a harmless content may be accompanied in it by
painful feelings. Our answer to this rather unintelligent comment will
be that it is just in dreams of this sort that the wish-fulfilling
tendency of the dream-work is most apparent, because it is there seen in
isolation. The mistake in this criticism arises because people who are
not familiar with the neuroses imagine a more intimate connection
between content and affect than actually exists, and so cannot
understand that there may be an alteration in the content while the
accompanying affect remains unchanged.
A second consideration, much more important and far-reaching but equally
overlooked by the laity, is the following. A wish-fulfilment must
certainly bring some pleasure; but we go on to ask: “To whom?” Of course
to the person who has the wish. But we know that the attitude of the
dreamer towards his wishes is a peculiar one: he rejects them, censors
them, in short, he will have none of them. Their fulfilment then can
afford him no pleasure, rather the opposite, and here experience shows
that this “opposite,” which has still to be explained, takes the form of
_anxiety_. The dreamer, where his wishes are concerned, is like two
separate people closely linked together by some important thing in
common. Instead of enlarging upon this I will remind you of a well-known
fairy-tale in which you will see these relationships repeated. A good
fairy promised a poor man and his wife to fulfil their first three
wishes. They were delighted and made up their minds to choose the wishes
carefully. But the woman was tempted by the smell of some sausages being
cooked in the next cottage and wished for two like them. Lo! and behold,
there they were—and the first wish was fulfilled. With that, the man
lost his temper and in his resentment wished that the sausages might
hang on the tip of his wife’s nose. This also came to pass, and the
sausages could not be removed from their position; so the second wish
was fulfilled, but it was the man’s wish and its fulfilment was most
unpleasant for the woman. You know the rest of the story: as they were
after all man and wife, the third wish had to be that the sausages
should come off the end of the woman’s nose. We might make use of this
fairy-tale many times over in other contexts, but here it need only
serve to illustrate the fact that it is possible for the fulfilment of
one person’s wish to be very disagreeable to someone else, unless the
two people are entirely at one.
It will not be difficult now to arrive at a still better understanding
of anxiety-dreams. There is just one more observation to be made use of
and then we may adopt an hypothesis which is supported by several
considerations. The observation is that anxiety-dreams often have a
content in which there is no distortion; it has, so to speak, escaped
the censorship. This type of dream is frequently an undisguised
wish-fulfilment, the wish being of course not one which the dreamer
would accept but one which he has rejected; anxiety has developed in
place of the working of the censorship. Whereas the infantile dream is
an open fulfilment of a wish admitted by the dreamer, and the ordinary
distorted dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish, the
formula for the anxiety-dream is that it is the open fulfilment of a
repressed wish. Anxiety is an indication that the repressed wish has
proved too strong for the censorship and has accomplished or was about
to accomplish its fulfilment in spite of it. We can understand that
fulfilment of a repressed wish can only be, for us who are on the side
of the censorship, an occasion for painful emotions and for setting up a
defence. The anxiety then manifested in our dreams is, if you like to
put it so, anxiety experienced because of the strength of wishes which
at other times we manage to stifle. The study of dreams alone does not
reveal to us why this defence takes the form of anxiety; obviously we
must consider the latter in other connections.
The hypothesis which holds good for anxiety-dreams without any
distortion may be adopted also for those which have undergone some
degree of distortion, and for other kinds of unpleasant dreams in which
the accompanying unpleasant feelings probably approximate to anxiety.
Anxiety-dreams generally wake us; we usually break off our sleep before
the repressed wish behind the dream overcomes the censorship and reaches
complete fulfilment. In such a case the dream has failed to achieve its
purpose, but its essential character is not thereby altered. We have
compared the dream with a night-watchman, a guardian of sleep, whose
purpose it is to protect sleep from interruption. Now night-watchmen
also, just like dreams, have to rouse sleepers when they are not strong
enough to ward off the cause of disturbance or danger alone.
Nevertheless we do sometimes succeed in continuing to sleep even when
our dreams begin to give us some uneasiness and to turn to anxiety. We
say to ourselves in sleep: “It is only a dream after all,” and go on
sleeping.
You may ask _when_ it happens that the dream-wish is able to overcome
the censorship. This may depend either on the wish or on the censorship:
it may be that for unknown reasons the strength of the wish at times
becomes excessive; but our impression is that it is more often the
attitude of the censorship which is responsible for this shifting in the
balance of power. We have already heard that the censorship works with
varying intensity in each individual instance, treating the different
elements with different degrees of strictness; now we may add that it is
very variable in its general behaviour and does not show itself always
equally severe towards the same element. If then it chances that the
censorship feels itself for once powerless against some dream-wish which
threatens to overthrow it, it then, instead of making use of distortion,
employs the last weapon left to it and destroys sleep by bringing about
an access of anxiety.
At this point it strikes us that we still have no idea why these evil,
rejected wishes rise up just at night-time, so as to disturb us when we
sleep. The answer can hardly be found except in another hypothesis which
goes back to the nature of sleep itself. During the day the heavy
pressure of a censorship is exercised upon these wishes and, as a rule,
it is impossible for them to make themselves felt at all. But in the
night it is probable that this censorship, like all the other interests
of mental life, is suspended, or at least very much weakened, in favour
of the single desire for sleep. So it is due to this partial abrogation
of the censorship at night that the forbidden wishes can again become
active. There are nervous people suffering from insomnia who confess
that their sleeplessness was voluntary in the first instance; for they
did not dare to go to sleep because they were afraid of their
dreams—that is to say, they feared the consequences of the diminished
vigilance of the censorship. You will have no difficulty in
understanding that this curtailment of the censorship does not argue any
flagrant carelessness: sleep impairs our motor functions; even if our
evil intentions do begin to stir within us the utmost they can do is to
produce a dream, which is for all practical purposes harmless; and it is
this comforting circumstance which gives rise to the sleeper’s remark,
made, it is true, in the night but yet not part of his dream-life: “It
is only a dream.” So we let it have its way and continue to sleep.
Thirdly, if you call to mind our idea that the dreamer striving against
his own wishes is like a combination of two persons, separate and yet
somehow intimately united, you will be able to understand another
possible way in which something that is highly unpleasant may be brought
about through wish-fulfilment: I am speaking of punishment. Here again
the fairy-tale of the three wishes may help to make things clear. The
sausages on the plate were the direct fulfilment of the first person’s
(the woman’s) wish; the sausages on the tip of her nose were the
fulfilment of the second person’s (the husband’s) wish, but at the same
time they were the punishment for the foolish wish of the wife. In the
neuroses we shall meet with wishes corresponding in motivation to the
third wish of the fairy-tale, the only one left. There are many such
punishment tendencies in the mental life of man; they are very strong
and we may well regard them as responsible for some of our painful
dreams. Now you will probably think that with all this there is very
little of the famous wish-fulfilment left; but on closer consideration
you will admit that you are wrong. In comparison with the manifold
possibilities (to be discussed later) of what dreams might be—according
to some writers, what they actually are—the solution: wish-fulfilment,
anxiety-fulfilment, punishment-fulfilment, is surely quite a narrow one.
Add to this, that anxiety is the direct opposite of a wish and that
opposites lie very near one another in association and, as we have
learned, actually coincide in the unconscious. Moreover, punishment
itself is the fulfilment of a wish, namely, the wish of the other,
censoring person.