the indifferent experience is substituted for the psychologically
important one, seems odd to us and open to question. In a later chapter
we shall undertake the task of making this seemingly incorrect operation
more intelligible. We are here concerned only with consequences of this
procedure, whose assumption we have been forced to make by the regularly
recurring experiences of dream analysis. But the process seems to be
that, in the course of those intermediate steps, a displacement—let us
say of the psychic accent—has taken place, until ideas that are at first
weakly charged with intensity, by taking over the charge from ideas
which have a stronger initial intensity, reach a degree of strength,
which enables them to force their way into consciousness. Such
displacements do not at all surprise us when it is a question of the
bestowal of affects or of the motor actions in general. The fact that
the woman who has remained single transfers her affection to animals,
that the bachelor becomes a passionate collector, that the soldier
defends a scrap of coloured cloth, his flag, with his life-blood, that
in a love affair a momentary clasping of hands brings bliss, or that in
_Othello_ a lost handkerchief causes a burst of rage—all these are
examples of psychic displacement which seem unquestionable to us. But
if, in the same manner and according to the same fundamental principles,
a decision is made as to what is to reach our consciousness and what is
to be withheld from it, that is to say, what we are to think—this
produces an impression of morbidity, and we call it an error of thought
if it occurs in waking life. We may here anticipate the result of a
discussion which will be undertaken later—namely, to the effect that the
psychic process which we have recognised as dream displacement proves to
be not a process morbidly disturbed, but a process differing from the
normal merely in being of a more primitive nature.
We thus find in the fact that the dream content takes up remnants of
trivial experiences a manifestation of dream disfigurement (by means of
displacement), and we may recall that we have recognised this dream
disfigurement as the work of a censor which controls the passage between
two psychic instances. We accordingly expect that dream analysis will
regularly reveal to us the genuine, significant source of the dream in
the life of the day, the recollection of which has transferred its
accent to some indifferent recollection. This conception brings us into
complete opposition to Robert’s[55] theory, which thus becomes valueless
for us. The fact which Robert was trying to explain simply doesn’t
exist; its assumption is based upon a misunderstanding, upon the failure
to substitute the real meaning of the dream for its apparent content.
Further objection may be made to Robert’s doctrine: If it were really
the duty of the dream, by means of a special psychic activity, to rid
our memory of the “slag” of the recollections of the day, our sleep
would have to be more troubled and employed in a more strained effort
than we may suppose it to be from our waking life. For the number of
indifferent impressions received during the day, against which we should
have to protect our memory, is obviously infinitely large; the night
would not be long enough to accomplish the task. It is very much more
probable that the forgetting of indifferent impressions takes place
without any active interference on the part of our psychic powers.
Still something cautions us against taking leave of Robert’s idea
without further consideration. We have left unexplained the fact that
one of the indifferent day-impressions—one from the previous day
indeed—regularly furnished a contribution to the dream-content.
Relations between this impression and the real source of the dream do
not always exist from the beginning; as we have seen, they are
established only subsequently, in the course of the dream-work, as
though in order to serve the purpose of the intended displacement. There
must, therefore, be some necessity to form connections in this
particular direction, of the recent, although indifferent impression;
the latter must have special fitness for this purpose because of some
property. Otherwise it would be just as easy for the dream thoughts to
transfer their accent to some inessential member of their own series of
associations.
The following experiences will lead us to an explanation. If a day has
brought two or more experiences which are fitted to stimulate a dream,
then the dream fuses the mention of both into a single whole; it obeys
an _impulse to fashion a whole out of them_; for instance: One summer
afternoon I entered a railroad compartment, in which I met two friends
who were unknown to each other. One of them was an influential
colleague, the other a member of a distinguished family, whose physician
I was; I made the two gentlemen acquainted with each other; but during
the long ride I was the go-between in the conversation, so that I had to
treat a subject of conversation now with the one, now with the other. I
asked my colleague to recommend a common friend who had just begun his
medical practice. He answered that he was convinced of the young man’s
thoroughness, but that his plain appearance would make his entrance into
households of rank difficult. I answered: “That is just why he needs
recommendation.” Soon afterwards I asked the other fellow-traveller
about the health of his aunt—the mother of one of my patients—who was at
the time prostrated by a serious illness. During the night after this
journey I dreamt that the young friend, for whom I had asked assistance,
was in a splendid salon, and was making a funeral oration to a select
company with the air of a man of the world—the oration being upon the
old lady (now dead for the purposes of the dream) who was the aunt of
the second fellow-traveller. (I confess frankly that I had not been on
good terms with this lady.) My dream had thus found connections between
the two impressions of the day, and by means of them composed a unified
situation.
In view of many similar experiences, I am driven to conclude that a kind
of compulsion exists for the dream function, forcing it to bring
together in the dream all the available sources of dream stimulation
into a unified whole.[AT] In a subsequent chapter (on the dream
function) we shall become acquainted with this impulse for putting
together as a part of condensation another primary psychic process.
I shall now discuss the question whether the source from which the dream
originates, and to which our analysis leads, must always be a recent
(and significant) event, or whether a subjective experience, that is to
say, the recollection of a psychologically valuable experience—a chain
of thought—can take the part of a dream stimulus. The answer, which
results most unequivocally from numerous analyses, is to the following
effect. The stimulus for the dream may be a subjective occurrence, which
has been made recent, as it were, by the mental activity during the day.
It will probably not be out of place here to give a synopsis of various
conditions which may be recognised as sources of dreams.
The source of a dream may be:
(_a_) A recent and psychologically significant experience which is
directly represented in the dream.[AU]
(_b_) Several recent, significant experiences, which are united by the
dream into a whole.[AV]
(_c_) One or more recent and significant experiences, which are
represented in the dream by the mention of a contemporary but
indifferent experience.[AW]
(_d_) A subjective significant experience (a recollection, train of
thought), which is _regularly_ represented in the dream by the mention
of a recent but indifferent impression.[AX]
As may be seen, in dream interpretation the condition is firmly adhered
to throughout that each component of the dream repeats a recent
impression of the day. The element which is destined to representation
in the dream may either belong to the presentations surrounding the
actual dream stimulus itself—and, furthermore, either as an essential or
an inessential element of the same—or it may originate in the
neighbourhood of an indifferent impression, which, through associations
more or less rich, has been brought into relation with the thoughts
surrounding the dream stimulus. The apparent multiplicity of the
conditions here is produced by _the alternative according to whether
displacement has or has not taken place_, and we may note that this
alternative serves to explain the contrasts of the dream just as readily
as the ascending series from partially awake to fully awake brain cells
in the medical theory of the dream (_cf._ p. 64).
Concerning this series, it is further notable that the element which is
psychologically valuable, but not recent (a train of thought, a
recollection) may be replaced, for the purposes of dream formation, by a
recent, but psychologically indifferent, element, if only these two
conditions be observed: 1. That the dream shall contain a reference to
something which has been recently experienced; 2. That the dream
stimulus shall remain a psychologically valuable train of thought. In a
single case (_a_) both conditions are fulfilled by the same impression.
If it be added that the same indifferent impressions which are used for
the dream, as long as they are recent, lose this availability as soon as
they become a day (or at most several days) older, the assumption must
be made that the very freshness of an impression gives it a certain
psychological value for dream formation, which is somewhat equivalent to
the value of emotionally accentuated memories or trains of thought. We
shall be able to see the basis of this value of _recent_ impressions for
dream formation only with the help of certain psychological
considerations which will appear later.[AY]
Incidentally our attention is called to the fact that important changes
in the material comprised by our ideas and our memory may be brought
about unconsciously and at night. The injunction that one should sleep
for a night upon any affair before making a final decision about it is
obviously fully justified. But we see that at this point we have
proceeded from the psychology of dreaming to that of sleep, a step for
which there will often be occasion.
Now there arises an objection threatening to invalidate the conclusions
we have just reached. If indifferent impressions can get into the dream
only in case they are recent, how does it happen that we find also in
the dream content elements from earlier periods in our lives, which at
the time when they were recent possessed, as Strümpell expresses it, no
psychic value, which, therefore, ought to have been forgotten long ago,
and which, therefore, are neither fresh nor psychologically significant?
This objection can be fully met if we rely upon the results furnished by
psychoanalysis of neurotics. The solution is as follows: The process of
displacement which substitutes indifferent material for that having
psychic significance (for dreaming as well as for thinking) has already
taken place in those earlier periods of life, and has since become fixed
in the memory. Those elements which were originally indifferent are in
fact no longer so, since they have acquired the value of psychologically
significant material. That which has actually remained indifferent can
never be reproduced in the dream.
It will be correct to suppose from the foregoing discussion that I
maintain that there are no indifferent dream stimuli, and that,
accordingly, there are no harmless dreams. This I believe to be the
case, thoroughly and exclusively, allowance being made for the dreams of
children and perhaps for short dream reactions to nocturnal sensations.
Whatever one may dream, it is either manifestly recognisable as
psychically significant or it is disfigured, and can be judged correctly
only after a complete interpretation, when, as before, it may be
recognised as possessing psychic significance. The dream never concerns
itself with trifles; we do not allow ourselves to be disturbed in our
sleep by matters of slight importance. Dreams which are apparently
harmless turn out to be sinister if one takes pains to interpret them;
if I may be permitted the expression, they all have “the mark of the
beast.” As this is another point on which I may expect opposition, and
as I am glad of an opportunity to show dream-disfigurement at work, I
shall here subject a number of dreams from my collection to analysis.
1. An intelligent and refined young lady, who, however, in conduct,
belongs to the class we call reserved, to the “still waters,” relates
the following dream:—
_Her husband asks: “Should not the piano be tuned?” She answers: “It
won’t pay; the hammers would have to be newly buffed too.”_ This repeats
an actual event of the previous day. Her husband had asked such a
question, and she had answered something similar. But what is the
significance of her dreaming it? She tells of the piano, indeed, that it
is a _disgusting old box_ which has a bad tone; it is one of the things
which her husband had before they were married,[AZ] &c., but the key to
the true solution lies in the phrase: _It won’t pay._ This originated in
a visit made the day before to a lady friend. Here she was asked to take
off her coat, but she declined, saying, “_It won’t pay._ I must go in a
moment.” At this point, I recall that during yesterday’s analysis she
suddenly took hold of her coat, a button of which had opened. It is,
therefore, as if she had said, “Please don’t look in this direction; it
won’t pay.” Thus “_box_” develops into “_chest_,” or breast-box
(“bust”), and the interpretation of the dream leads directly to a time
in her bodily development when she was dissatisfied with her shape. It
also leads to earlier periods, if we take into consideration
“_disgusting_” and “_bad tone_,” and remember how often in allusions and
in dreams the two small hemispheres of the feminine body take the
place—as a substitute and as an antithesis—of the large ones.
II. I may interrupt this dream to insert a brief harmless dream of a
young man. He dreamt that _he was putting on his winter overcoat again,
which was terrible_. The occasion for this dream is apparently the cold
weather, which has recently set in again. On more careful examination we
note that the two short portions of the dream do not fit together well,
for what is there “terrible” about wearing a heavy or thick coat in the
cold? Unfortunately for the harmlessness of this dream, the first idea
educed in analysis is the recollection that on the previous day a lady
had secretly admitted to him that her last child owed its existence to
the bursting of a condom. He now reconstructs his thoughts in accordance
with this suggestion: A thin condom is dangerous, a thick one is bad.
The condom is an “overcoat” (_Überzieher_), for it is put over
something; _Ueberzieher_ is also the name given in German to a thin
overcoat. An experience like the one related by the lady would indeed be
“terrible” for an unmarried man.—We may now return to our other harmless
dreamer.
III. _She puts a candle into a candlestick; but the candle is broken, so
that it does not stand straight. The girls at school say she is clumsy;
the young lady replies that it is not her fault._
Here, too, there is an actual occasion for the dream; the day before she
had actually put a candle into a candlestick; but this one was not
broken. A transparent symbolism has been employed here. The candle is an
object which excites the feminine genitals; its being broken, so that it
does not stand straight, signifies impotence on the man’s part (“it is
not her fault”). But does this young woman, carefully brought up, and a
stranger to all obscenity, know of this application of the candle? She
happens to be able to tell how she came by this information. While
riding in a boat on the Rhine, another boat passes containing students
who are singing or rather yelling, with great delight: “When the Queen
of Sweden with closed shutters and the candles of Apollo....”
She does not hear or understand the last word. Her husband is asked to
give her the required explanation. These verses are then replaced in the
dream content by the harmless recollection of a command which she once
executed clumsily at a girls’ boarding school, this occurring by means
of the common features _closed shutters_. The connection between the
theme of onanism and that of impotence is clear enough. “Apollo” in the
latent dream content connects this dream with an earlier one in which
the virgin Pallas figured. All this is obviously not harmless.
IV. Lest it may seem too easy a matter to draw conclusions from dreams
concerning the dreamer’s real circumstances, I add another dream coming
from the same person which likewise appears harmless. “_I dreamt of
doing something_,” she relates, “_which I actually did during the day,
that is to say, I filled a little trunk so full of hooks that I had
difficulty in closing it. My dream was just like the actual
occurrence._” Here the person relating the dream herself attaches chief
importance to the correspondence between the dream and reality. All such
criticisms upon the dream and remarks about it, although they have
secured a place in waking thought, regularly belong to the latent dream
content, as later examples will further demonstrate. We are told, then,
that what the dream relates has actually taken place during the day. It
would take us too far afield to tell how we reach the idea of using the
English language to help us in the interpretation of this dream. Suffice
it to say that it is again a question of a little box (_cf._ p. 130, the
dream of the dead child in the box) which has been filled so full that
nothing more can go into it. Nothing in the least sinister this time.
In all these “harmless” dreams the sexual factor as a motive for the
exercise of the censor receives striking prominence. But this is a
matter of primary importance, which we must postpone.
(_b_) _Infantile Experiences as the Source of Dreams_
As the third of the peculiarities of the dream content, we have cited
from all the authors (except Robert) the fact that impressions from the
earliest times of our lives, which seem not to be at the disposal of the
waking memory, may appear in the dream. It is, of course, difficult to
judge how often or how seldom this occurs, because the respective
elements of the dream are not recognised according to their origin after
waking. The proof that we are dealing with childhood impressions must
thus be reached objectively, and the conditions necessary for this
happen to coincide only in rare instances. The story is told by A.
Maury,[48] as being particularly conclusive, of a man who decided to
visit his birthplace after twenty years’ absence. During the night
before his departure, he dreams that he is in an altogether strange
district, and that he there meets a strange man with whom he has a
conversation. Having afterward returned to his home, he was able to
convince himself that this strange district really existed in the
neighbourhood of his home town, and the strange man in the dream turned
out to be a friend of his dead father who lived there. Doubtless, a
conclusive proof that he had seen both the man and the district in his
childhood. The dream, moreover, is to be interpreted as a dream of
impatience, like that of the girl who carries her ticket for the concert
of the evening in her pocket (p. 110), of the child whose father had
promised him an excursion to the Hameau, and the like. The motives
explaining why just this impression of childhood is reproduced for the
dreamer cannot, of course, be discovered without an analysis.
One of the attendants at my lectures, who boasted that his dreams were
very rarely subject to disfigurement, told me that he had sometime
before in a dream seen _his former tutor in bed with his nurse_, who had
been in the household until he was eleven years old. The location of
this scene does not occur to him in the dream. As he was much
interested, he told the dream to his elder brother, who laughingly
confirmed its reality. The brother said he remembered the affair very
well, for he was at the time six years old. The lovers were in the habit
of making him, the elder boy, drunk with beer, whenever circumstances
were favourable for nocturnal relations. The smaller child, at that time
three years old—our dreamer—who slept in the same room as the nurse, was
not considered an obstacle.
In still another case it may be definitely ascertained, without the aid
of dream interpretation, that the dream contains elements from
childhood; that is, if it be a so-called _perennial_ dream, which being
first dreamt in childhood, later appears again and again after adult age
has been reached. I may add a few examples of this sort to those already
familiar, although I have never made the acquaintance of such a
perennial dream in my own case. A physician in the thirties tells me
that a yellow lion, about which he can give the most detailed
information, has often appeared in his dream-life from the earliest
period of his childhood to the present day. This lion, known to him from
his dreams, was one day discovered _in natura_ as a long-forgotten
object made of porcelain, and on that occasion the young man learned
from his mother that this object had been his favourite toy in early
childhood, a fact which he himself could no longer remember.
If we now turn from the manifest dream content to the dream thoughts
which are revealed only upon analysis, the co-operation of childhood
experiences may be found to exist even in dreams whose content would not
have led us to suspect anything of the sort. I owe a particularly
delightful and instructive example of such a dream to my honoured
colleague of the “yellow lion.” After reading Nansen’s account of his
polar expedition, he dreamt that he was giving the bold explorer
electrical treatment in an ice field for an ischæmia of which the latter
complained! In the analysis of this dream, he remembered a story of his
childhood, without which the dream remains entirely unintelligible. When
he was a child, three or four years old, he was listening attentively to
a conversation of older people about trips of exploration, and presently
asked papa whether exploration was a severe illness. He had apparently
confused “trips” with “rips,” and the ridicule of his brothers and
sisters prevented his ever forgetting the humiliating experience.
The case is quite similar when, in the analysis of the dream of the
monograph on the genus cyclamen, I happen upon the recollection,
retained from childhood, that my father allowed me to destroy a book
embellished with coloured plates when I was a little boy five years old.
It will perhaps be doubted whether this recollection actually took part
in the composition of the dream content, and it will be intimated that
the process of analysis has subsequently established the connection. But
the abundance and intricacy of the ties of association vouch for the
truth of my explanation: cyclamen—favourite flower—favourite
dish—artichoke; to pick to pieces like an artichoke, leaf by leaf (a
phrase which at that time rang in our ears à propos of the dividing up
of the Chinese Empire)—herbarium-bookworm, whose favourite dish is
books. I may state further that the final meaning of the dream, which I
have not given here, has the most intimate connection with the content
of the childhood scene.
In another series of dreams we learn from analysis that the wish itself,
which has given rise to the dream, and whose fulfilment the dream turns
out to be, has originated in childhood—until one is astonished to find
that the child with all its impulses lives on in the dream.