On Dreams Read online

  There is a still more urgent necessity in the case of the process of displacement than in that of condensation to discover the motive for these puzzling efforts on the part of the dream-work.

  VI

  It is the process of displacement which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream-content, unless we understand the reason for their distortion. Nevertheless, the dream-thoughts are also submitted to another and milder sort of transformation, which leads to our discovering a new achievement on the part of the dream-work - one, however, which is easily intelligible. The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech. There is no difficulty in accounting for the constraint imposed upon the form in which the dream-thoughts are expressed. The manifest content of dreams consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the dream-thoughts must accordingly be submitted in the first place to a treatment which will make them suitable for a representation of this kind. If we imagine ourselves faced by the problem of representing the arguments in a political leading article or the speeches of counsel before a court of law in a series of pictures, we shall easily understand the modifications which must necessarily be carried out by the dream-work owing to considerations of representability in the content of the dream.

  The psychical material of the dream-thoughts habitually includes recollections of impressive experiences - not infrequently dating back to early childhood - which are thus themselves perceived as a rule as situations having a visual subject matter. Wherever the possibility arises, this portion of the dream-thoughts exercises a determining influence upon the form taken by the content of the dream; it constitutes, as it were, a nucleus of crystallization, attracting the material of the dream-thoughts to itself and thus affecting their distribution. The situation in a dream is often nothing other than a modified repetition, complicated by interpolations, of an impressive experience of this kind; on the other hand, faithful and straightforward reproductions of real scenes only rarely appear in dreams.

  The content of dreams, however, does not consist entirely of situations, but also includes disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and even bits of unmodified thoughts. It may therefore perhaps be of interest to enumerate very briefly the modes of representation available to the dream-work for reproducing the dream-thoughts in the peculiar form of expression necessary in dreams.

  The dream-thoughts which we arrive at by means of analysis reveal themselves as a psychical complex of the most intricate possible structure. Its portions stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another: they represent foreground and background, conditions, digressions and illustrations, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart. This material lacks none of the characteristics that are familiar to us from our waking thinking. If now all of this is to be turned into a dream, the psychical material will be submitted to a pressure which will condense it greatly, to an internal fragmentation and displacement which will, as it were, create new surfaces, and to a selective operation in favour of those portions of it which are the most appropriate for the construction of situations. If we take into account the genesis of the material, a process of this sort deserves to be described as a ‘regression.’ In the course of this transformation, however, the logical links which have hitherto held the psychical material together are lost. It is only, as it were, the substantive content of the dream-thoughts that the dream-work takes over and manipulates. The restoration of the connections which the dream-work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the work of analysis.

  The modes of expression open to a dream may therefore be qualified as meagre by comparison with those of our intellectual speech; nevertheless a dream need not wholly abandon the possibility of reproducing the logical relations present in the dream-thoughts. On the contrary, it succeeds often enough in replacing them by formal characteristics in its own texture.

  In the first place, dreams take into account the connection which undeniably exists between all the portions of the dream-thoughts by combining the whole material into a single situation. They reproduce logical connection by approximation in space and time, just as a painter will represent all the poets in a single group in a picture of Parnassus. It is true that they were never in fact assembled on a single mountain-top; but they certainly form a conceptual group. Dreams carry this method of reproduction down to details; and often when they show us two elements in the dream-content close together, this indicates that there is some specially intimate connection between what correspond to them among the dream-thoughts. Incidentally, it is to be observed that all dreams produced during a single night will be found on analysis to be derived from the same circle of thoughts.

  A causal relation between two thoughts is either left unrepresented or is replaced by a sequence of two pieces of dream of different lengths. Here the representation is often reversed, the beginning of the dream standing for the consequence and its conclusion for the premise. An immediate transformation of one thing into another in a dream seems to represent the relation of cause and effect.

  The alternative ‘either-or’ is never expressed in dreams, both of the alternatives being inserted in the text of the dream as though they were equally valid. I have already mentioned that an ‘either-or’ used in recording a dream is to be translated by ‘and’.

  Ideas which are contraries are by preference expressed in dreams by one and the same element.¹ ‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned. Opposition between two thoughts, the relation of reversal, may be represented in dreams in a most remarkable way. It may be represented by some other piece of the dream-content being turned into its opposite - as it were by an afterthought. We shall hear presently of a further method of expressing contradiction. The sensation of inhibition of movement which is so common in dreams also serves to express a contradiction between two impulses, a conflict of will.

  ¹ [Footnote added 1911:] It deserves to be remarked that well-known philologists have asserted that the most ancient human languages tended in general to express contradictory opposites by the same word. (E.g. ‘strong-weak’, ‘inside-outside.’ This has been described as ‘the antithetical meaning of primal words’.)

  One and one only of these logical relations - that of similarity, consonance, the possession of common attributes - is very highly favoured by the mechanism of dream-formation. The dream-work makes use of such cases as a foundation for dream-condensation, by bringing together everything that shows an agreement of this kind into a new unity.

  This short series of rough comments is of course inadequate to deal with the full extent of the formal means employed by dreams for the expression of logical relations in the dream-thoughts. Different dreams are more or less carefully constructed in this respect; they keep more or less closely to the text presented to them; they make more or less use of the expedients that are open to the dream-work. In the second case they appear obscure, confused and disconnected. If, however, a dream strikes one as obviously absurd, if its content includes a piece of palpable nonsense, this is intentionally so; its apparent disregard of all the requirements of logic is expressing a piece of the intellectual content of the dream-thoughts. Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the dream-thoughts of contradiction, ridicule and derision. Since this statement is in the most marked opposition to the view that dreams are the product of a dissociated and uncritical mental activity, I will emphasize it by means of an example.

  One of my acquaintances, Herr M., had been attacked in an essay with an unjustifiable degree of violence, as we all thought - by no less a person than Goethe. Her
r M. was naturally crushed by the attack. He complained of it bitterly to some company at table; his veneration for Goethe had not been affected, however, by this personal experience. I now tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which seemed to me improbable. Goethe died in 1832. Since his attack on Herr M. must have been made earlier than that, Herr M. must have been quite a young man at the time. It seemed to be a plausible notion that he was eighteen. I was not quite sure, however, what year we were actually in, so that my whole calculation melted into obscurity. Incidentally, the attack was contained in Goethe’s well-known essay on ‘Nature’.

  The nonsensical character of this dream will be even more glaringly obvious, if I explain that Herr M. is a youngish business man, who is far removed from any poetical and literary interests. I have no doubt, however, that when I have entered into the analysis of the dream I shall succeed in showing how much ‘method’ there is in its nonsense.

  The material of the dream was derived from three sources:

  (1) Herr M., whom I had got to know among some company at table, asked me one day to examine his elder brother, who was showing signs of general paralysis. In the course of my conversation with the patient an awkward episode occurred for he gave his brother away for no accountable reason by talking of his youthful follies. I had asked the patient the year of his birth (cf. the year of Goethe’s death in the dream) and had made him carry out a number of calculations in order to test the weakness of his memory.

  (2) A medical journal, which bore my name among others on its title-page, had published a positively ‘crushing’ criticism by a youthful reviewer of a book by my friend F. in Berlin. I took the editor to task over this; but, though he expressed his regret, he would not undertake to offer any redress. I therefore severed my connection with the journal, but in my letter of resignation expressed a hope that our personal relations would not be affected by the event. This was the true source of the dream. The unfavourable reception of my friend’s work had made a profound impression on me. It contained, in my opinion, a fundamental biological discovery, which is only now - many years later beginning to find favour with the experts.

  (3) A woman patient of mine had given me an account a short time before of her brother’s illness, and how he had broken out in a frenzy with cries of ‘Nature! Nature!’ The doctors believed that his exclamation came from his having read Goethe’s striking essay on that subject and that it showed he had been overworking at his studies. I had remarked that it seemed to me more plausible that his exclamation of the word ‘Nature’ should be taken in the sexual sense in which it is used by the less educated people here. This idea of mine was at least not disproved by the fact that the unfortunate young man subsequently mutilated his own genitals. He was eighteen at the time of his outbreak.

  Behind my own ego in the dream-content there lay concealed, in the first instance, my friend who had been so badly treated by the critic. ‘I tried to throw a little light on the chronological data.’ My friend’s book dealt with the chronological data of life and among other things showed that the length of Goethe’s life was a multiple of a number of days that has a significance in biology. But this ego was compared with a paralytic: ‘I was not quite sure what year we were in.’ Thus the dream made out that my friend was behaving like a paralytic, and in this respect it was a mass of absurdities. The dream-thoughts, however, were saying ironically: ‘Naturally, it’s he who is the crazy fool and it’s you who are the men of genius and know better. Surely it couldn’t be the reverse?’ There were plenty of examples of this reversal in the dream. For instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whereas it is still easy for quite a young man to attack the great Goethe.

  I should like to lay it down that no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones. In fact, the ego in the present dream does not stand only for my friend but for myself as well. I was identifying myself with him, because the fate of his discovery seemed to foreshadow the reception of my own findings. If I were to bring forward my theory emphasizing the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of psychoneurotic disorders (cf. the allusion to the eighteen-year-old patient’s cry of ‘Nature! Nature!’), I should come across the same criticisms; and I was already preparing to meet them with the same derision.

  If we pursue the dream-thoughts further, we shall keep on finding ridicule and derision as correlates of the absurdities of the manifest dream. It is well known that it was the discovery of the split skull of a sheep on the Lido of Venice that gave Goethe the idea of the so-called ‘vertebral’ theory of the skull. My friend boasts that, when he was a student, he released a storm which led to the resignation of an old Professor who, though he had once been distinguished (among other things in connection precisely with the same branch of comparative anatomy), had become incapable of teaching owing to senile dementia. Thus the agitation which my friend promoted served to combat the mischievous system according to which there is no age limit for academic workers in German universities - for age is proverbially no defence against folly. - In the hospital here I had the honour of serving for years under a chief who had long been a fossil and had for decades been notoriously feeble minded, but who was allowed to continue carrying on his responsible duties. At this point I thought of a descriptive term based upon the discovery on the Lido.¹ Some of my young contemporaries at the hospital concocted, in connection with this man, a version of what was then a popular song: ‘Das hat kein Goethe g’schrieben, das hat kein Schiller g’dicht . . .’ ²

  ¹ [‘Schafkopf’, literally ‘sheep’s head’, = ‘silly ass.’]

  ² [‘This was written by no Goethe, this was composed by no Schiller.’]

  VII

  We have not yet come to the end of our consideration of the dream-work. In addition to condensation, displacement and pictorial arrangement of the psychical material, we are obliged to assign it yet another activity, though this is not to be found in operation in every dream. I shall not deal exhaustively with this part of the dream-work, and will therefore merely remark that the easiest way of forming an idea of its nature is to suppose - though the supposition probably does not meet the facts - that it only comes into operation after the dream-content has already been constructed. Its function would then consist in arranging the constituents of the dream in such a way that they form an approximately connected whole, a dream-composition. In this way the dream is given a kind of façade (though this does not, it is true, hide its content at every point), and thus receives a first, preliminary interpretation, which is supported by interpolations and slight modifications. Incidentally, this revision of the dream-content is only possible if it is not too punctiliously carried out; nor does it present us with anything more than a glaring misunderstanding of the dream-thoughts. Before we start upon the analysis of a dream we have to clear the ground of this attempt at an interpretation.

  The motive for this part of the dream-work is particularly obvious. Considerations of intelligibility are what lead to this final revision of a dream; and this reveals the origin of the activity. It behaves towards the dream-content lying before it just as our normal psychical activity behaves in general towards any perceptual content that may be presented to it. It understands that content on the basis of certain anticipatory ideas, and arranges it, even at the moment of perceiving it, on the presupposition of its being intelligible; in so doing it runs a risk of falsifying it, and in fact, if it cannot bring it into line with anything familiar, is a prey to the strangest misunderstandings. As is well known, we are incapable of seeing a series of unfamiliar signs or of hearing a succession of unknown words, without at once falsifying the perception from considerations of intelligibility, on the basis of something already known to us.

  Dreams which have undergone a revision of this kind at the hands of a psychical activity completely analogous to waking thought may be described as ‘well-constructed.’ In the case of other dreams this activity has completely broken down
; no attempt even has been made to arrange or interpret the material, and, since after we have woken up we feel ourselves identical with this last part of the dream-work, we make a judgement that the dream was ‘hopelessly confused.’ From the point of view of analysis, however, a dream that resembles a disordered heap of disconnected fragments is just as valuable as one that has been beautifully polished and provided with a surface. In the former case, indeed, we are saved the trouble of demolishing what has been superimposed upon the dream-content.

  It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that these dream-façades are nothing other than mistaken and somewhat arbitrary revisions of the dream-content by the conscious agency of our mental life. In the erection of a dream-façade use is not infrequently made of wishful phantasies which are present in the dream-thoughts in a pre-constructed form, and are of the same character as the appropriately named ‘day-dreams’ familiar to us in waking life. The wishful phantasies revealed by analysis in night-dreams often turn out to be repetitions or modified versions of scenes from infancy; thus in some cases the façade of the dream directly reveals the dream’s actual nucleus, distorted by an admixture of other material.

  The dream-work exhibits no activities other than the four that have already been mentioned. If we keep to the definition of ‘dream-work’ as the process of transforming the dream-thoughts into the dream-content, it follows that the dream-work is not creative, that it develops no phantasies of its own, that it makes no judgements and draws no conclusions; it has no functions whatever other than condensation and displacement of the material and its modification into pictorial form, to which must be added as a variable factor the final bit of interpretative revision. It is true that we find various things in the dream-content which we should be inclined to regard as a product of some other and higher intellectual function; but in every case analysis shows convincingly that these intellectual operations have already been performed in the dream-thoughts and have only been TAKEN OVER by the dream-content. A conclusion drawn in a dream is nothing other than the repetition of a conclusion in the dream-thoughts; if the conclusion is taken over into the dream unmodified, it will appear impeccable; if the dream-work has displaced it on to some other material, it will appear nonsensical. A calculation in the dream-content signifies nothing more than that there is a calculation in the dream-thoughts; but while the latter is always rational, a dream-calculation may produce the wildest results if its factors are condensed or if its mathematical operations are displaced on to other material. Not even the speeches that occur in the dream-content are original compositions; they turn out to be a hotchpotch of speeches made, heard or read, which have been revived in the dream-thoughts and whose wording is exactly reproduced, while their origin is entirely disregarded and their meaning is violently changed.