Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Part II Dreams

Fifth Lecture — Difficulties and Preliminary Approach to the Subject

One day the discovery was made that the symptoms of disease in certain nervous patients have meaning.25 It was upon this discovery that the psycho-analytic method of treatment was based. In this treatment it happened that patients in speaking of their symptoms also mentioned their dreams, whereupon the suspicion arose that these dreams too had meaning.

However, we will not pursue this historical path, but will strike off in the opposite direction. Our aim is to demonstrate the meaning of dreams, in preparation for the study of the neuroses. There are good grounds for this reversal of procedure, since the study of dreams is not merely the best preparation for that of the neuroses, but a dream is itself a neurotic symptom and, moreover, one which possesses for us the incalculable advantage of occurring in all healthy people. Indeed, if all human beings were healthy and would only dream, we could gather almost all the knowledge from their dreams which we have gained from studying the neuroses.

So dreams become the object of psycho-analytic research—another of these ordinary, under-rated occurrences, apparently of no practical value, like “errors,” and sharing with them the characteristic of occurring in healthy persons. But in other respects the conditions of work are rather less favourable. Errors had only been neglected by science, people had not troubled their heads much about them, but at least it was no disgrace to occupy oneself with them. True, people said, there are things more important but still something may possibly come of it. To occupy oneself with dreams, however, is not merely unpractical and superfluous, but positively scandalous: it carries with it the taint of the unscientific and arouses the suspicion of personal leanings towards mysticism. The idea of a medical student troubling himself about dreams when there is so much in neuropathology and psychiatry itself that is more serious, tumours as large as apples compressing the organ of the mind, hæmorrhages, chronic inflammatory conditions in which the alterations in the tissues can be demonstrated under the microscope! No, dreams are far too unworthy and trivial to be objects of scientific research.

There is yet another factor involved which, in itself, sets at defiance all the requirements of exact investigation. In investigating dreams even the object of research, the dream itself, is indefinite. A delusion, for example, presents clear and definite outlines. “I am the Emperor of China,” says your patient plainly. But a dream? For the most part it cannot be related at all. When a man tells a dream, has he any guarantee that he has told it correctly, and not perhaps altered it in the telling or been forced to invent part of it on account of the vagueness of his recollection? Most dreams cannot be remembered at all and are forgotten except for some tiny fragments. And is a scientific psychology or a method of treatment for the sick to be founded upon material such as this?

A certain element of exaggeration in a criticism may arouse our suspicions. The arguments brought against the dream as an object of scientific research are clearly extreme. We have met with the objection of triviality already in “errors,” and have told ourselves that great things may be revealed even by small indications. As to the indistinctness of dreams, that is a characteristic like any other—we cannot dictate to things their characteristics; besides, there are also dreams which are clear and well defined. Further, there are other objects of psychiatric investigation which suffer in the same way from the quality of indefiniteness, e.g. the obsessive ideas of many cases, with which nevertheless many psychiatrists of repute and standing have occupied themselves. I will recall the last case of the kind which came before me in medical practice. The patient, a woman, presented her case in these words: “I have a certain feeling, as if I had injured, or had meant to injure, some living creature—perhaps a child—no, no, a dog rather, as if perhaps I had pushed it off a bridge—or done something else.” Any disadvantage resulting from the uncertain recollection of dreams may be remedied by deciding that exactly what the dreamer tells is to count as the dream, and by ignoring all that he may have forgotten or altered in the process of recollection. Finally, one cannot maintain in so sweeping a fashion that dreams are unimportant things. We know from our own experience that the mood in which we awake from a dream may last throughout the day, and cases have been observed by medical men in which mental disorder began with a dream, the delusion which had its source in this dream persisting; further, it is told of historical persons that impulses to momentous deeds sprang from their dreams. We may therefore ask: what is the real cause of the disdain in which dreams are held in scientific circles? In my opinion it is the reaction from the overestimation of them in earlier times. It is well known that it is no easy matter to reconstruct the past, but we may assume with certainty (you will forgive my jest) that as early as three thousand years ago and more our ancestors dreamt in the same way as we do. So far as we know, all ancient peoples attached great significance to dreams and regarded them as of practical value; they obtained from them auguries of the future and looked for portents in them. For the Greeks and other Orientals, it was at times as unthinkable to undertake a campaign without a dream-interpreter as it would be to-day without air-scouts for intelligence. When Alexander the Great set out on his campaign of conquest the most famous interpreters of dreams were in his following. The city of Tyre, still at that time on an island, offered so stout a resistance to the king that he entertained the idea of abandoning the siege; then one night he dreamed of a satyr dancing in triumph, and when he related this dream to his interpreters they informed him that it foretold his victory over the city; he gave the order to attack and took Tyre by storm. Among the Etruscans and Romans other methods of foretelling the future were employed, but during the whole of the Græco-Roman period the interpretation of dreams was practised and held in high esteem. Of the literature on this subject the principal work at any rate has come down to us, namely, the book of Artemidorus of Daldis, who is said to have lived at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. How it happened that the art of dream-interpretation declined later and dreams fell into disrepute, I cannot tell you. The progress of learning cannot have had very much to do with it, for in the darkness of the middle ages things far more absurd than the ancient practice of the interpretation of dreams were faithfully retained. The fact remains that the interest in dreams gradually sank to the level of superstition and could hold its own only amongst the uneducated. In our day, there survive, as a final degradation of the art of dream-interpretation, the attempts to find out from dreams numbers destined to draw prizes in games of chance. On the other hand, exact science of the present day has repeatedly concerned itself with the dream, but always with the sole object of illustrating physiological theories. By medical men, naturally, a dream was never regarded as a mental process but as the mental expression of physical stimuli. Binz in 1876 pronounced the dream to be “a physical process, always useless and in many cases actually morbid, a process above which the conception of the world-soul and of immortality stands as high as does the blue sky above the most low-lying, weed-grown stretch of sand.” Maury compares dreams with the spasmodic jerkings of St. Vitus’ dance, contrasted with the co-ordinated movements of the normal human being; in an old comparison a parallel is drawn between the content of a dream and the sounds which would be produced if “someone ignorant of music let his ten fingers wander over the keys of an instrument.”

‘Interpretation’ means discovering a hidden meaning, but there can be no question of attempting this while such an attitude is maintained towards the dream-performance. Look up the description of dreams given in the writings of Wundt, Jodl and other recent philosophers: they are content with the bare enumeration of the divergences of the dream-life from waking thought with a view to depreciating the dreams; they emphasize the lack of connection in the associations, the suspended exercise of the critical faculty, the elimination of all knowledge, and other indications of diminished functioning. The single valuable contribution to our knowledge about dreams for which we are indebted to exact science relates to the influence upon the dream-content of physical stimuli operating during sleep. We have the work of a Norwegian author who died recently—J. Mourly Vold—two large volumes on experimental investigation of dreams (translated into German in 1910 and 1912), which are concerned almost entirely with the results obtained by change in the position of the limbs. These investigations have been held up to us as models of exact research in the subject of dreams. Now can you imagine what would be the comment of exact science on learning that we intend to try to find out the meaning of dreams? The comment that has perhaps been made already! However, we will not allow ourselves to be appalled at the thought. If it was possible for errors to have an underlying meaning, it is possible that dreams have one too; and errors have, in very many cases, a meaning which has eluded the researches of exact science. Let us adopt the assumption of the ancients and of simple folk, and follow in the footsteps of the dream-interpreters of old.

First of all, we must take our bearings in this enterprise, and make a survey of the field of dreams. What exactly is a dream? It is difficult to define it in a single phrase. Yet we need not seek after a definition, when all we need is to refer to something familiar to everyone. Still we ought to pick out the essential features in dreams. How are we to discover these features? The boundaries of the region we are entering comprise such vast differences, differences whichever way we turn. That which we can show to be common to all dreams is probably what is essential.

Well then—the first common characteristic of all dreams would be that we are asleep at the time. Obviously, the dream is the life of the mind during sleep, a life bearing certain resemblances to our waking life and, at the same time, differing from it widely. That, indeed, was Aristotle’s definition. Perhaps dream and sleep stand in yet closer relationship to each other. We can be waked by a dream; we often have a dream when we wake spontaneously or when we are forcibly roused from sleep. Dreams seem thus to be an intermediate condition between sleeping and waking. Hence, our attention is directed to sleep itself: what then is sleep?

That is a physiological or biological problem concerning which much is still in dispute. We can come to no decisive answer, but I think we may attempt to define one psychological characteristic of sleep. Sleep is a condition in which I refuse to have anything to do with the outer world and have withdrawn my interest from it. I go to sleep by retreating from the outside world and warding off the stimuli proceeding from it. Again, when I am tired by that world I go to sleep. I say to it as I fall asleep: “Leave me in peace, for I want to sleep.” The child says just the opposite: “I won’t go to sleep yet; I’m not tired, I want more things to happen to me!” Thus the biological object of sleep seems to be recuperation, its psychological characteristic the suspension of interest in the outer world. Our relationship with the world which we entered so unwillingly seems to be endurable only with intermission; hence we withdraw again periodically into the condition prior to our entrance into the world: that is to say, into intra-uterine existence. At any rate, we try to bring about quite similar conditions—warmth, darkness and absence of stimulus—characteristic of that state. Some of us still roll ourselves tightly up into a ball resembling the intra-uterine position. It looks as if we grown-ups do not belong wholly to the world, but only by two-thirds; one-third of us has never yet been born at all. Every time we wake in the morning it is as if we were newly born. We do, in fact, speak of the condition of waking from sleep in these very words: we feel “as if we were newly born,”—and in this we are probably quite mistaken in our idea of the general sensations of the new-born infant; it may be assumed on the contrary that it feels extremely uncomfortable. Again, in speaking of birth we speak of “seeing the light of day.”

If this is the nature of sleep, then dreams do not come into its scheme at all, but seem rather to be an unwelcome supplement to it; and we do indeed believe that dreamless sleep is the best, the only proper sleep. There should be no mental activity during sleep; if any such activity bestirs itself, then in so far have we failed to reach the true pre-natal condition of peace; we have not been able to avoid altogether some remnants of mental activity, and the act of dreaming would represent these remnants. In that event it really does seem that dreams do not need to have meaning. With errors it was different, for they were at least activities manifested in waking life; but if I sleep and have altogether suspended mental activity, with the exception of certain remnants which I have not been able to suppress, there is no necessity whatever that they should have any meaning. In fact, I cannot even make use of any such meaning, seeing that the rest of my mind is asleep. It can really then be a matter of spasmodic reactions only, of such mental phenomena only as have their origin in physical stimulation. Hence, dreams must be remnants of the mental activity of waking life disturbing sleep, and we might as well make up our minds forthwith to abandon a theme so unsuited to the purposes of psycho-analysis.

Superfluous as dreams may be, however, they do exist nevertheless, and we can try to account for their existence to ourselves. Why does not mental life go off to sleep? Probably because there is something that will not leave the mind in peace; stimuli are acting upon it and to these it is bound to react. Dreams therefore are the mode of reaction of the mind to stimuli acting upon it during sleep. We note here a possibility of access to comprehension of dreams. We can now endeavour to find out, in various dreams, what are the stimuli seeking to disturb sleep, the reaction to which takes the form of dreams. By doing this we should have worked out the first characteristic common to all dreams.

Is there any other common characteristic? Yes, there is another, unmistakable, and yet much harder to lay hold of and describe. The character of mental processes during sleep is quite different from that of waking processes. In dreams we go through many experiences, which we fully believe in, whereas in reality we are perhaps only experiencing the single disturbing stimulus. For the most part our experiences take the form of visual images; there may be feeling as well, thoughts, too, mixed up with them, and the other senses may be drawn in; but for the most part dreams consist of visual images. Part of the difficulty of reciting a dream comes from the fact that we have to translate these images into words. “I could draw it,” the dreamer often says to us, “but I do not know how to put it into words.” Now this is not exactly a diminution in the mental capacity, as seen in a contrast between a feeble-minded person and a man of genius. The difference is rather a qualitative one, but it is difficult to say precisely wherein it lies. G. T. Fechner once suggested that the stage whereon the drama of the dream (within the mind) is played out is other than that of the life of waking ideas. That is a saying which we really do not understand, nor do we know what it is meant to convey to us, but it does actually reproduce the impression of strangeness which most dreams make upon us. Again, the comparison of the act of dreaming with the performances of an unskilled hand in music breaks down here, for the piano will certainly respond with the same notes, though not with melodies, to a chance touch on its keys. We will keep this second common characteristic of dreams carefully in view, even though we may not understand it.

Are there any other qualities common to all dreams? I can think of none, but can see differences only, whichever way I look, differences too in every respect—in apparent duration, definiteness, the part played by affects, persistence in the mind, and so forth. This is really not what we should naturally expect in the case of a compulsive attempt, at once meagre and convulsive, to ward off a stimulus. As regards the length of dreams, some are very short, containing only one image, or very few, or a single thought, possibly even a single word; others are peculiarly rich in content, enact entire romances and seem to last a very long time. There are dreams as distinct as actual experiences, so distinct that for some time after waking we do not realize that they were dreams at all; others, which are ineffably faint, shadowy and blurred; in one and the same dream, even, there may be some parts of extraordinary vividness alternating with others so indistinct as to be almost wholly elusive. Again, dreams may be quite consistent or at any rate coherent, or even witty or fantastically beautiful; others again are confused, apparently imbecile, absurd or often absolutely mad. There are dreams which leave us quite cold, others in which every affect makes itself felt, pain to the point of tears, terror so intense as to wake us, amazement, delight, and so on. Most dreams are forgotten soon after waking; or they persist throughout the day, the recollection becoming fainter and more imperfect as the day goes on; others remain so vivid (as, for example, the dreams of childhood) that thirty years later we remember them as clearly as though they were part of a recent experience. Dreams, like people, may make their appearance once and never come back; or the same person may dream the same thing repeatedly, either in the same form or with slight alterations. In short, these scraps of mental activity at night-time have at command an immense repertory, can in fact create everything that by day the mind is capable of—only, it is never the same.

One might attempt to account for these diversities in dreams by assuming that they correspond to different intermediate states between sleeping and waking, different levels of imperfect sleep. Very well; but then in proportion as the mind approached the waking state there should be not merely an increase in the value, content, and distinctness of the dream-performance, but also a growing perception that it is a dream; and it ought not to happen that side by side with a clear and sensible element in the dream there is one which is nonsensical or indistinct, followed again by a good piece of work. It is certain that the mind could not vary its depth of sleep so rapidly as that. This explanation therefore does not help; there is in fact no short cut to an answer.

For the present we will leave the ‘meaning’ of the dream out of question, and try instead, by starting from the common element in dreams, to clear a path to a better understanding of their nature. From the relationship of dreams to sleep we have drawn the conclusion that dreams are the reaction to a stimulus disturbing sleep. As we have heard, this is also the single point at which exact experimental psychology can come to our aid; it affords proof of the fact that stimuli brought to bear during sleep make their appearance in dreams. Many investigations have been made on these lines, culminating in those of Mourly Vold whom I mentioned earlier; we have all, too, been in a position to confirm their results by occasional observations of our own. I will choose some of the earlier experiments to tell you. Maury had tests of this kind carried out upon himself. Whilst dreaming, he was made to smell some eau de Cologne, whereupon he dreamt he was in Cairo, in the shop of Johann Maria Farina, and this was followed by further crazy adventures. Again, someone gave his neck a gentle pinch, and he dreamt of the application of a blister and of a doctor who had treated him when he was a child. Again, they let a drop of water fall on his forehead and he was immediately in Italy, perspiring freely and drinking the white wine of Orvieto.

The striking feature about these dreams produced under experimental conditions will perhaps become still clearer to us in another series of “stimulus”-dreams. These are three dreams of which we have an account by a clever observer, Hildebrandt, and all three are reactions to the sound of an alarum-clock:

“I am going for a walk on a spring morning, and I saunter through fields just beginning to grow green, till I come to a neighbouring village, where I see the inhabitants in holiday attire making their way in large numbers to the church, their hymn-books in their hands. Of course! it is Sunday and the morning service is just about to begin. I decide to take part in it, but first as I am rather overheated I think I will cool down in the churchyard which surrounds the church. Whilst reading some of the epitaphs there I hear the bell-ringer go up into the tower, where I now notice, high up, the little village bell which will give the signal for the beginning of the service. For some time yet it remains motionless, then it begins to swing, and suddenly the strokes ring out, clear and piercing—so clear and piercing that they put an end to my sleep. But the sound of the bell comes from the alarum-clock.”

Here is another combination of images. “It is a bright winter day, and the roads are deep in snow. I have promised to take part in a sleighing expedition, but I have to wait a long time before I am told that the sleigh is at the door. Now follow the preparations for getting in, the fur rug is spread out and the foot-muff fetched and finally I am in my place. But there is still a delay while the horses wait for the signal to start. Then the reins are jerked and the little bells, shaken violently, begin their familiar janizary music, so loudly that in a moment the web of the dream is rent. Again it is nothing but the shrill sound of the alarum-clock.”

Now for the third example! “I see a kitchen-maid with dozens of piled-up plates going along the passage to the dining-room. It seems to me that the pyramid of china in her arms is in danger of overbalancing. I call out a warning: ‘Take care, your whole load will fall to the ground.’ Of course I receive the usual answer: that they are accustomed to carrying china in that way, and so on; meanwhile I follow her as she goes with anxious looks. I thought so—the next thing is a stumble on the threshold, the crockery falls, crashing and clattering in a hundred pieces on the ground. But—I soon become aware that that interminably prolonged sound is no real crash, but a regular ringing—and this ringing is due merely to the alarum-clock, as I realize at last on awakening.”

These dreams are very pretty, perfectly sensible, and by no means so incoherent as dreams usually are. We have no quarrel with them on those grounds. The thing common to them all is that in each case the situation arises from a noise, which the dreamer on waking recognizes as that of the alarum-clock. Hence we see here how a dream is produced, but we find out something more. In the dream there is no recognition of the clock, which does not even appear in it, but for the noise of the clock another noise is substituted; the stimulus which disturbs sleep is interpreted, but interpreted differently in each instance. Now why is this? There is no answer; it appears to be mere caprice. But to understand the dream we should be able to account for its choice of just this noise and no other to interpret the stimulus given by the alarum-clock. In analogous fashion we must object to Maury’s experiments that, although it is clear that the stimulus brought to bear on the sleeper does appear in the dream, yet his experiments don’t explain why it appears exactly in that form, which is one that does not seem explicable by the nature of the stimulus disturbing sleep. And further, in Maury’s experiments there was mostly a mass of other dream-material attached to the direct result of the stimulus, for example, the crazy adventures in the eau de Cologne dream, for which we are at a loss to account.

Now will you reflect that the class of dreams which wake one up affords the best opportunity for establishing the influence of external disturbing stimuli. In most other cases it will be more difficult. We do not wake up out of all dreams, and if in the morning we remember a dream of the night before, how are we to assign it to a disturbing stimulus operating perhaps during the night? I once succeeded in subsequently establishing the occurrence of a sound-stimulus of this sort, but only, of course, because of peculiar circumstances. I woke up one morning at a place in the Tyrolese mountains knowing that I had dreamt that the Pope was dead. I could not explain the dream to myself, but later my wife asked me: “Did you hear quite early this morning the dreadful noise of bells breaking out in all the churches and chapels?” No, I had heard nothing, my sleep is too sound, but thanks to her telling me this I understood my dream. How often may such causes of stimulus as this induce dreams in the sleeper without his ever hearing of them afterwards? Possibly very often: and possibly not. If we can get no information of any stimulus we cannot be convinced on the point. And apart from this we have given up trying to arrive at an estimation of the sleep-disturbing external stimuli, since we know that they only explain a fragment of the dream and not the whole dream-reaction.

We need not on that account give up this theory altogether; there is still another possible way of following it out. Obviously it is a matter of indifference what disturbs sleep and causes the mind to dream. If it cannot always be something external acting as a stimulus to one of the senses, it is possible that, instead, a stimulus operates from the internal organs—a so-called somatic stimulus. This supposition lies very close, and moreover it corresponds to the view popularly held with regard to the origin of dreams, for it is a common saying that they come from the stomach. Unfortunately, here again we must suppose that in very many cases information respecting a somatic stimulus operating during the night would no longer be forthcoming after waking, so that it would be incapable of proof. But we will not overlook the fact that many trustworthy experiences support the idea that dreams may be derived from somatic stimuli; on the whole it is indubitable that the condition of the internal organs can influence dreams. The relation of the content of many dreams to distention of the bladder or to a condition of excitation of the sex-organs is so plain that it cannot be mistaken. From these obvious cases we pass to others, in which, to judge by the content of the dream, we are at least justified in suspecting that some such somatic stimuli have been at work, since there is something in this content which can be regarded as elaboration, representation, or interpretation of these stimuli. Scherner, the investigator of dreams (1861), emphatically supported the view which traces the origin of dreams to organic stimuli, and contributed some excellent examples towards it. For instance, he sees in a dream “two rows of beautiful boys, with fair hair and delicate complexions, confronting each other pugnaciously, joining in combat, seizing hold of one another, and again letting go their hold, only to take up the former position and go through the whole process again”; his interpretation of the two rows of boys as the teeth is in itself plausible and seems to receive full confirmation when after this scene the dreamer “pulls a long tooth from his jaw.” Again, the interpretation of “long, narrow, winding passages” as being suggested by a stimulus originating in the intestine seems sound and corroborates Scherner’s assertion that dreams primarily endeavour to represent, by like objects, the organ from which the stimulus proceeds.

We must therefore be prepared to admit that internal stimuli can play the same rôle in dreams as external ones. Unfortunately, evaluation of this factor is open to the same objections. In a great number of instances the attribution of dreams to somatic stimuli must remain uncertain or incapable of proof; not all dreams, but only a certain number of them, rouse the suspicion that stimuli from internal organs have something to do with their origin; and lastly, the internal somatic stimulus will suffice no more than the external sensory stimulus to explain any other part of the dream than the direct reaction to it. The origin of all the rest of the dream remains obscure.

Now, however, let us direct our attention to a certain peculiarity of the dream-life which appears when we study the operation of these stimuli. The dream does not merely reproduce the stimulus, but elaborates it, plays upon it, fits it into a context, or replaces it by something else. This is a side of the dream-work which is bound to be of interest to us because possibly it may lead us nearer to the true nature of dreams. The scope of a man’s production is not necessarily limited to the circumstance which immediately gives rise to it. For instance, Shakespeare’s Macbeth was written as an occasional drama on the accession of the king who first united in his person the crowns of the three kingdoms. But does this historical occasion cover the whole content of the drama, or explain its grandeur and its mystery? Perhaps in the same way the external and internal stimuli operating upon the sleeper are merely the occasion of the dream and afford us no insight into its true nature.

The other element common to all dreams, their peculiarity in mental life, is on the one hand very difficult to grasp and on the other seems to afford no clue for further inquiry. Our experiences in dreams for the most part take the form of visual images. Can these be explained by the stimuli? Is it really the stimulus that we experience? If so, why is the experience visual, when it can only be in the very rarest instance that any stimulus has operated upon our eyesight? Or, can it be shown that when we dream of speech any conversation or sounds resembling conversation reached our ears during sleep? I venture to discard such a possibility without any hesitation whatever.

If we cannot get any further with the common characteristics of dreams as a starting-point, let us try beginning with their differences. Dreams are often meaningless, confused, and absurd, yet there are some which are sensible, sober, and reasonable. Let us see whether these latter sensible dreams can help to elucidate those which are meaningless. I will tell you the latest reasonable dream which was told to me, the dream of a young man: “I went for a walk in the Kärntnerstrasse and there I met Mr. X.; after accompanying him for a short time I went into a restaurant. Two ladies and a gentleman came and sat down at my table. At first I was annoyed and refused to look at them, but presently I glanced across at them and found that they were quite nice.” The dreamer’s comment on this was that the evening before he had actually been walking in the Kärntnerstrasse, which is the way he usually goes, and that he had met Mr. X. there. The other part of the dream was not a direct reminiscence, but only bore a certain resemblance to an occurrence of some time previously. Or here we have another prosaic dream, that of a lady. “Her husband says to her: ‘Don’t you think we ought to have the piano tuned?’ and she replies: ‘It is not worth it, for the hammers need fresh leather anyhow.’” This dream repeats a conversation which took place in almost the same words between herself and her husband the day before the dream. What then do we learn from these two prosaic dreams? Merely that there occur in them recollections of daily life or of matters connected with it. Even that would be something if it could be asserted of all dreams without exception. But that is out of the question; this characteristic too belongs only to a minority of dreams. In most dreams we find no connection with the day before, and no light is thrown from this quarter upon meaningless and absurd dreams. All we know is that we have met with a new problem. Not only do we want to know what a dream is saying, but if as in our examples that is quite plain, we want to know further from what cause and to what end we repeat in dreams this which is known to us and has recently happened to us.

I think you would be as tired as I of continuing the kind of attempts we have made up to this point. It only shows that all the interest in the world will not help us with a problem unless we have also an idea of some path to adopt in order to arrive at a solution. Till now we have not found this path. Experimental psychology has contributed nothing but some (certainly very valuable) information about the significance of stimuli in the production of dreams. Of philosophy we have nothing to expect, unless it be a lofty repetition of the reproach that our object is intellectually contemptible; while from the occult sciences we surely do not choose to borrow. History and the verdict of the people tell us that dreams are full of meaning and importance, and of prophetic significance; but that is hard to accept and certainly does not lend itself to proof. So then our first endeavours are completely baffled.

But unexpectedly there comes a hint from a direction in which we have not hitherto looked. Colloquial speech, which is certainly no matter of chance but the deposit, as it were, of ancient knowledge—a thing which must not indeed be made too much of—our speech, I say, recognizes the existence of something to which, strangely enough, it gives the name of “day-dreams.” Day-dreams are phantasies (products of phantasy); they are very common phenomena, are observable in healthy as well as in sick persons, and they also can easily be studied by the subject himself. The most striking thing about these ‘phantastic’ creations is that they have received the name of “day-dreams,” for they have nothing in common with the two universal characteristics of dreams. Their name contradicts any relationship to the condition of sleep and, as regards the second universal characteristic, no experience or hallucination takes place in them, we simply imagine something; we recognize that they are the work of phantasy, that we are not seeing but thinking. These day-dreams appear before puberty, often indeed in late childhood, and persist until maturity is reached when they are either given up or retained as long as life lasts. The content of these phantasies is dictated by a very transparent motivation. They are scenes and events which gratify either the egoistic cravings of ambition or thirst for power, or the erotic desires of the subject. In young men, ambitious phantasies predominate; in women, whose ambition centres on success in love, erotic phantasies; but the erotic requirement can often enough in men too be detected in the background, all their heroic deeds and successes are really only intended to win the admiration and favour of women. In other respects these day-dreams show great diversity and their fate varies. All of them are either given up after a short time and replaced by a new one, or retained, spun out into long stories, and adapted to changing circumstances in life. They march with the times, receiving as it were “date-stamps” upon them which show the influence of new situations. They form the raw material of poetic production; for the writer by transforming, disguising, or curtailing them creates out of his day-dreams the situations which he embodies in his stories, novels, and dramas. The hero of a day-dream is, however, always the subject himself, either directly imagined in the part or transparently identified with someone else.

Perhaps day-dreams are so called on account of their similar relation to reality, as an indication that their content is no more to be accepted as real than is that of dreams. But it is possible that they share the name of dreams because of some mental characteristic of the dream which we do not yet know but after which we are seeking. On the other hand, it is possible that we are altogether wrong in regarding this similarity of name as significant. That is a question which can only be answered later.

Sixth Lecture — Preliminary Hypotheses and Technique of Interpretation

We thus realize our need of a new way of approach, a definite method, if we are to make any advance in our researches into dreams. I will now offer an obvious suggestion: let us accept as the basis of the whole of our further enquiry the following hypothesis—that dreams are not a somatic, but a mental, phenomenon. You know what this means; but what is our justification in making this assumption? We have none, but on the other hand there is nothing to prevent us. The position is this: if the dream is a somatic phenomenon it does not concern us; it can only be of interest to us on the hypothesis that it is a mental phenomenon. So we will assume that this hypothesis is true, in order to see what happens if we do so. The results of our work will determine whether we may adhere to the assumption, and uphold it in its turn as an inference fairly drawn. Now what exactly is the object of this enquiry of ours, or to what are we directing our efforts? Our object is that of all scientific endeavour—namely, to achieve an understanding of the phenomena, to establish a connection between them, and, in the last resort, wherever it is possible to increase our power over them.

So we continue our work on the assumption that dreams are a mental phenomenon. In that event, they are a performance and an utterance on the part of the dreamer, but of a kind that conveys nothing to us, and which we do not understand. Now supposing that I give utterance to something that you do not understand, what do you do? You ask me to explain, do you not? Why may not we do the same—ask the dreamer the meaning of the dream?

Remember, we have already found ourselves in a similar position. It was when we were enquiring into certain errors, and the instance we took was a slip of the tongue. Someone had said: “Then certain things were refilled,” and thereupon we asked—no, fortunately it was not we who asked, but other people who had nothing to do with psycho-analysis—they asked what he meant by this enigmatic expression. He answered at once that what he had intended to say was: “That was a filthy business,” but had checked himself and substituted the milder words: “Things were revealed there.” I explained to you then that this enquiry was the model for every psycho-analytic investigation, and you understand now that psycho-analytic technique endeavours as far as possible to let the persons being analysed give the answer to their own problems. The dreamer himself then should interpret his dream for us.

That is not so simple with dreams, however, as we all know. Where errors were concerned, this method proved possible in many cases; there were others where the person questioned refused to say anything and even indignantly repudiated the answer suggested to him. With dreams, instances of the first type are entirely lacking; the dreamer always says he knows nothing about it. He cannot very well repudiate our interpretation, since we have none to offer him. Shall we have to give up our attempt then? Since he knows nothing, and we know nothing, and a third person can surely know nothing either, there cannot be any prospect of finding the answer. Well, if you like, give up the attempt. But if you are not so minded, you can accompany me. For I assure you that it is not only quite possible, but highly probable, that the dreamer really does know the meaning of his dream; only he does not know that he knows, and therefore thinks that he does not.

At this point you will probably call my attention to the fact that I am again introducing an assumption, the second in quite a short context, and that by so doing I greatly detract from the force of my claim to a trustworthy method of procedure. Given the hypothesis that dreams are a mental phenomenon, and given further the hypothesis that there are in the minds of men certain things which they know without knowing that they know them—and so forth! You have only to keep in view the intrinsic improbability of both these hypotheses, and you may with an easy mind abandon all interest in the conclusions to be drawn from them.

Well, I have not brought you here either to delude you or to conceal anything from you. True, I announced that I would give a course of lectures entitled Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis; but it was no part of my purpose to play the oracle, professing to show you an easy sequence of facts, whilst carefully concealing all difficulties, filling up gaps, and glossing over doubtful points, so that you might comfortably enjoy the belief that you have learnt something new. No, it is the very fact that you are beginners that makes me anxious to show you our science as it is, with all its excrescences and crudities, the claims that it makes and the criticism to which it may give rise. I know indeed that it is the same in every science and that, especially in the beginnings, it cannot be otherwise. I know too that, in teaching other sciences, an effort is made at first to hide these difficulties and imperfections from the learner. But that cannot be done in psycho-analysis. So I really have set up two hypotheses, the one within the other; and anyone who finds it all too laborious, or too uncertain, or who is used to higher degrees of certainty, or to more refined deductions, need go no further with me. Only I should advise him to leave psychological problems altogether alone, for it is to be feared that this is a field in which he will find no access to such exact and sure paths as he is prepared to tread. And, further, it is quite superfluous for any science which can offer a real contribution to knowledge to strive to make itself heard and to win adherents. Its reception must depend upon its results, and it can afford to wait until these have compelled attention.

But I may warn those of you who are not to be deterred in this way that my two assumptions are not of equal importance. The first, that dreams are a mental phenomenon, is the hypothesis which we hope to prove by the results of our work. The second has already been proved in a different field, and I am merely taking the liberty of transferring it thence to our problems.

Where, and in what connection, is it supposed to have been proved that a man can possess knowledge without knowing that he does so, which is the assumption we are making of the dreamer? Surely that would be a remarkable and surprising fact, which would change our conception of mental life and would have no need of concealment. Incidentally, it would be a fact belied in the very statement of it, which yet attempts to be literally true—a contradiction in terms. There is not, however, any attempt at concealment. We cannot blame the fact for people’s ignorance of it, or lack of interest in it, any more than we ourselves are to blame because all these psychological problems have been passed in judgement by persons who have held aloof from all the observations and experiments which alone can be conclusive.

The proof to which I refer was found in the sphere of hypnotic phenomena. In the year 1889 I was present at the remarkably impressive demonstrations by Liébault and Bernheim, in Nancy, and there I witnessed the following experiment. A man was placed in a condition of somnambulism, and then made to go through all sorts of hallucinatory experiences. On being wakened, he seemed at first to know nothing at all of what had taken place during his hypnotic sleep. Bernheim then asked him in so many words to tell him what had happened while he was under hypnosis. The man declared that he could not remember anything. Bernheim, however, insisted upon it, pressed him, and assured him that he did know and that he must remember, and lo and behold! the man wavered, began to reflect, and remembered in a shadowy fashion first one of the occurrences which had been suggested to him, then something else, his recollection growing increasingly clear and complete until finally it was brought to light without a single gap. Now, since in the end he had the knowledge without having learnt anything from any other quarter in the meantime, we are justified in concluding that these recollections were in his mind from the outset. They were merely inaccessible to him; he did not know that he knew them but believed that he did not know. In fact, his case was exactly similar to what we assume the dreamer’s to be.

I hope you are duly surprised that this fact is already established and that you will ask me: “Why did you not refer to this proof before, when we were considering errors and came to the point of ascribing to a man who had made a slip of the tongue intentions behind his speech, of which he knew nothing, and which he denied? If it is possible for a man to believe that he knows nothing of experiences of which nevertheless he does possess the recollection, it seems no longer improbable that there should be other mental processes going on within him about which also he knows nothing. We should certainly have been impressed by this argument and should have been in a better position to understand about errors.” Certainly, I might have brought forward this proof then, but I reserved it for a later occasion when there would be more need for it. Some of the errors explained themselves, others suggested to us that in order to understand the connection between the phenomena it would be advisable to postulate the existence of mental processes of which the person is entirely ignorant. With dreams we are compelled to seek our explanations elsewhere, and besides, I am counting on your being more ready to accept in this connection a proof from the field of hypnosis. The condition in which we perform errors must seem to you normal and, as such, to bear no similarity to that of hypnosis. On the other hand there exists a clear relationship between the hypnotic state and sleep, the essential condition of dreaming. Hypnosis is actually called artificial sleep; we say to the people whom we hypnotize: “Sleep,” and the suggestions made to them are comparable to the dreams of natural sleep. The mental situation is really analogous in the two cases. In natural sleep we withdraw our interest from the whole outer world; so also in hypnotic sleep, with the exception of the one person who has hypnotized us and with whom we remain in rapport. Again, the so-called “nurse’s sleep” in which the nurse remains in rapport with the child and can be wakened only by him is a normal counterpart of hypnotic sleep. So it does not seem so very audacious to carry over to natural sleep something which is a condition in hypnosis. The assumption that some knowledge about his dream exists in the dreamer and that this knowledge is merely inaccessible to him, so that he himself does not believe he has it, is not a wild invention. Incidentally, we observe here that a third way of approaching the study of dreams is thus opened out for us; we may approach it by the avenue of sleep-disturbing stimuli, by that of day-dreams, and now by that of the dreams suggested during hypnosis.

Now perhaps we shall return to our task with greater confidence. We see it is very probable that the dreamer knows something about his dream; the problem is how to make it possible for him to get at his knowledge and impart it to us. We do not expect him immediately to tell us what his dream means, but we do think he will be able to discover its source, from what circle of thoughts and interests it is derived. With errors, you will remember the man was asked how the slip of the tongue “refilled” had come about, and his first association gave us the explanation. The technique we employ in the case of dreams is very simple and is modelled on this example. Here again we shall ask the dreamer how he came to have the dream, and his next words must be regarded as giving the explanation in this case also. It makes no difference to us therefore, whether he thinks that he does or does not know anything about it, and we treat both cases alike.

This technique is certainly very simple, nevertheless I am afraid it will provoke most strenuous opposition in you. You will say: “Another assumption, the third! And the most improbable of all! When I ask the dreamer what ideas come to him about the dream, do you mean to say that his very first association will give the desired explanation? But surely he might have no association at all, or heaven only knows what the association might be. We cannot imagine upon what grounds such an expectation is based. It really implies too much trust in Providence, and this at a point where rather more exercise of the critical faculty would better meet the case. Besides, a dream is not like a single slip of the tongue but is made up of many elements. That being so, upon which association is one to rely?”

You are right in all the unessentials. It is true that a dream differs from a slip of the tongue in the matter of its many elements as well as in other points. We must take account of that in our technique. So I suggest to you that we divide the dream up into its various elements, and examine each element separately; then we shall have re-established the analogy with a slip of the tongue. Again, you are right in saying that the dreamer when questioned on the single elements of the dream may reply that he has no ideas about them. There are cases in which we accept this answer, and later I will tell you which these are; curiously enough, they are cases about which we ourselves may have certain definite ideas. But in general, when the dreamer declares that he has no ideas, we shall contradict him, press him to answer, assure him that he must have some idea and—shall find we are right. He will produce an association, any one, it does not matter to us what it is. He will be especially ready with information which we may term historical. He will say: “That is something which happened yesterday” (as in the instance of the two “prosaic” dreams quoted above) or: “That reminds me of something which happened recently,” and in this way we shall come to notice that dreams are much more often connected with impressions of the day before than we thought at first. Finally, with the dream as his starting-point, he will recall events which happened less recently, and at last even some which lie very far back in the past.

In regard to the main issue, however, you are wrong. When you think it arbitrary to assume that the first association of the dreamer must give us just what we are looking for, or at any rate lead to it, and further, that the association is much more likely to be quite capricious and to have no connection with what we are looking for, and that it only shows my blind trust in Providence if I expect anything else—then you make a very great mistake. I have already taken the liberty of pointing out to you that there is within you a deeply-rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice, that this belief is quite unscientific, and that it must give ground before the claims of a determinism which governs even mental life. I ask you to have some respect for the fact that that one association, and nothing else, occurs to the dreamer when he is questioned. Nor am I setting up one belief against another. It can be proved that the association thus given is not a matter of choice, not indeterminate, and that it is not unconnected with what we are looking for. Indeed, I have recently learnt—not that I attach too much importance to the fact—that experimental psychology itself has brought forward similar proofs.

Because of the importance of the matter I ask you to pay special attention to this. When I ask a man to say what comes to his mind about any given element in a dream, I require him to give himself up to the process of FREE ASSOCIATION which follows when he keeps in mind the original idea. This necessitates a peculiar attitude of the attention, something quite different from reflection, indeed, precluding it. Many people adopt this attitude without any difficulty, but others when they attempt to do so display an incredible inaptitude. There is a still higher degree of freedom in association which appears when I dispense with any particular stimulus-idea and perhaps only describe the kind and species of association that I want; for example, ask someone to let a proper name or a number occur to him. An association of this sort should, one would say, be even more subject to choice and unaccountable than the kind used in our technique. Nevertheless, it can be shown that in every instance it will be strictly determined by important inner attitudes of mind, which are unknown to us at the moment when they operate, just as much unknown as are the disturbing tendencies which cause errors, and those tendencies which bring about so-called “chance” actions.

I myself and many after me have repeatedly made an examination of names and numbers called up without any particular idea as a starting-point; some of these experiments have been published. The method is this: a train of associations is stirred up by the name which occurred, and these associations, as you see, are no longer quite free, but are attached just so far as the associations to the different elements of the dream are attached; this train of associations is then kept up until the thoughts arising from the impulse have been exhausted. By that time, however, you will have explained the motivation and significance of the free association with a name. The experiments yield the same result again and again; the information they give us often includes a wealth of material and necessitates going far afield into its ramifications. The associations to numbers that arise spontaneously are perhaps the most demonstrative; they follow upon one another so swiftly and make for a hidden goal with such astounding certainty that one is really quite taken aback. I will give you just one example of a name-analysis of this sort, because it happens to be one which does not involve the handling of a great mass of material.

Once, when I was treating a young man, I happened to say something on this subject and to assert that in spite of our apparent freedom of choice in such matters we cannot, in point of fact, think of any name which cannot be shown to be narrowly determined by the immediate circumstances, the idiosyncrasies, of the person experimented with and his situation at the moment. As he was inclined to be sceptical, I proposed that he should make the experiment himself then and there. I knew that he had unusually numerous relationships of all sorts with women and girls, so I told him that I thought he would have an exceptionally large number to choose from if he were to let the name of a woman occur to him. He agreed. To my surprise, or rather perhaps to his own, he did not overwhelm me with an avalanche of women’s names, but remained silent for a time, and then confessed that the only name which came into his mind at all was “Albine.” “How curious! What do you connect with this name? How many Albines do you know?” Strangely enough, he knew no one of the name of Albine, and he found no associations to the name. One might infer that the analysis had failed; but no, it was already complete, and no further association was required. The man himself was unusually fair in colouring, and whilst talking to him in analysis I had often jokingly called him an albino; moreover, we were just in the midst of tracing the feminine element in his nature. So it was he himself who was this female albino, the “woman” who interested him most at the moment.

In the same way, the tunes which suddenly come into a man’s head can be shown to be conditioned by some train of thought to which they belong, and which for some reason is occupying his mind without his knowing anything about it. It is easy to show that the connection with the tune is to be sought either in the words which belong to it or in the source from which it comes: I must, however, make this reservation, that I do not maintain this in the case of really musical people of whom I happen to have had no experience; in them the musical value of the tune may account for its suddenly emerging into consciousness. The first case is certainly much more common; I know of a young man who for some time was absolutely haunted by the tune (a charming one, I admit) of the song of Paris in Helen of Troy, until his attention was drawn in analysis to the fact that at that time an “Ida” and a “Helen” were rivals in his interest.

If then the associations which arise quite freely are determined in this way and belong to some definite context, we are surely justified in concluding that associations attached to one single stimulus-idea must be equally narrowly conditioned. Examination shows as a fact that they are not only attached in the first place to the stimulus-idea which we have provided for them, but that they are also dependent, in the second place, on circles of thoughts and interests of strong affective value (complexes, as we call them) of whose influence at the time nothing is known, that is to say, on unconscious activities.

Associations attached in this way have been made the subject of very instructive experiments, which have played a notable part in the history of psycho-analysis. Wundt’s school originated the so-called ‘association-experiment,’ in which the subject of the experiment is bidden to reply to a given ‘stimulus-word’ as quickly as possible with whatever ‘reaction-word’ occurs to him. The following points may then be noted: the interval which elapses between the sounding of the stimulus-word and of the reaction-word, the nature of the latter, and possibly any mistake which comes in when the same experiment is repeated later, and so on. The Zurich School, under the leadership of Bleuler and Jung, arrived at the explanation of the reactions to the association-experiment by asking the person experimented upon to throw light upon any associations which seemed at all remarkable, by means of subsequent associations. In this way it became clear that these unusual reactions were most strictly determined by the complexes of the person concerned. By this discovery Bleuler and Jung built the first bridge between experimental psychology and psycho-analysis.

Having heard this you may possibly say: “We admit now that free associations are subject to determination and not a matter of choice, as we thought at first, and we admit this also in the case of associations to the elements of dreams. But it is not this that we are bothering about. You maintain that the association to each element in the dream is determined by some mental background to this particular element, a background of which we know nothing. We cannot see that there is any proof of this. Naturally we expect that the association to the dream-element will be shown to be conditioned by one of the complexes of the dreamer, but what good is that to us? That does not help us to understand the dream; it merely leads to some knowledge of these so-called complexes, as did the association-experiment; but what have these to do with the dream?”

You are right, but you are overlooking an important point, the very thing which deterred me from choosing the association-experiment as a starting-point for this discussion. In this experiment the stimulus-word, the single thing which determines the reaction, is chosen by us at will, and the reaction stands as intermediary between this stimulus-word and the complex aroused in the person experimented upon. In the dream, the stimulus-word is replaced by something derived from the mental life of the dreamer, from sources unknown to him, and hence may very probably be itself a ‘derivative of a complex.’ It is not, therefore, altogether fantastic to suppose that the further associations connected with the elements of the dream are determined by no other complex than that which has produced the particular element itself, and that they will lead to the discovery of that complex.

Let me give you another instance which may serve to show that, in the case of dreams, the facts bear out our expectations. The forgetting of proper names is really an excellent prototype of what happens in dream-analysis, only that in the former case one person alone is concerned, while in the interpretation of dreams there are two. When I forget a name temporarily, I am still certain that I know it, and by way of a détour through Bernheim’s experiment, we are now in a position to achieve a similar certainty in the case of the dreamer. Now this name which I have forgotten, and yet really know, eludes me. Experience soon teaches me that no amount of thinking about it, even with effort, is any use. I can, however, always think of another or of several other names instead of the forgotten one. When such a substitute name occurs to me spontaneously, only then is the similarity between this situation and that of dream-analysis evident. The dream-element also is not what I am really looking for; it is only a substitute for something else, for the real thing which I do not know and am trying to discover by means of dream-analysis. Again the difference is that when I forget a name I know perfectly well that the substitute is not the right one, whereas we only arrived at this conception of the dream-element by a laborious process of investigation. Now there also is a way in which, when we forget a name, we can by starting from the substitute, arrive at the real thing eluding our consciousness at the moment, i.e. the forgotten name. If I turn my attention to these substitute names and let further associations to them come into my mind, I arrive after a short or a long way round at the name I have forgotten, and in so doing I discover that the substitutes I have spontaneously produced had a definite connection with, and were determined by, the forgotten name.

I will give you an instance of an analysis of this sort: one day I found that I could not call to mind the name of the small country on the Riviera, of which Monte Carlo is the capital. It was most annoying, but so it was. I delved into all my knowledge about the country; I thought of Prince Albert of the House of Lusignan, of his marriages, of his passion for deep-sea exploration—in fact of everything I could summon up, but all to no purpose. So I gave up trying to think and, instead of the name I had lost, let substitute names come into my mind. They came quickly: Monte Carlo itself, then Piedmont, Albania, Montevideo, Colico. Albania was the first to attract my attention; it was immediately replaced by Montenegro, probably because of the contrast between black and white. Then I noticed that four of the substitute names have the same syllable “mon,” and immediately I recalled the forgotten word and cried out “Monaco.” You see the substitutes really originated in the forgotten name; the four first came from the first syllable and the last gave the sequence of the syllables and the whole of the final syllable. Incidentally, I could quite easily find out what had made me forget the name for the time being. Monaco is the Italian name for Munich, and it was some thoughts connected with this town which had acted as an inhibition.

Now that is a very pretty example, but it is too simple. In other cases you might have to take a longer succession of associations to the substitute name, and then the analogy to dream-analysis would be clearer. I have had experiences of that sort, too. A stranger once invited me to drink some Italian wine with him, and in the inn he found he had forgotten the name of the wine which he had meant to order on account of his very pleasant recollections of it. A number of dissimilar substitute names occurred to him, and from these I was able to infer that the thought of someone called Hedwig had made him forget the name of the wine. Sure enough, not only did he tell me that there had been a Hedwig with him on the occasion when he first tasted the wine, but this discovery brought back to him the name he wanted. He was now happily married, and “Hedwig” belonged to earlier days which he did not care to recall.

What is possible in the case of forgotten names must be also possible in the interpretation of dreams: starting from the substitute, we must be able to arrive at the real object of our search by means of a train of associations; and further, arguing from what happens with forgotten names, we may assume that the associations to the dream-element will have been determined not only by that element but also by the real thought which is not in consciousness. If we could do this, we should have gone some way towards justifying our technique.

Seventh Lecture — Manifest Content and Latent Thoughts

You see that our study of errors has not been fruitless. Thanks to our exertions in that direction, we have—reasoning from the hypotheses with which you are familiar—secured two results: a conception of the nature of the dream-element and a technique of dream-interpretation. The conception of the dream-element is as follows: it is not in itself a primary and essential thing, a ‘thought proper,’ but a substitute for something else unknown to the person concerned, just as is the underlying intention of the error, a substitute for something the knowledge of which is indeed possessed by the dreamer but is inaccessible to him. We hope to be able to carry over the same conception on to the dream as a whole, which consists of a number of such elements. Our method is to allow other substitute-ideas, from which we are able to divine that which lies hidden, to emerge into consciousness by means of free association to the said elements.

I am now going to propose that we introduce an alteration in our nomenclature in order to make our terminology more flexible. Instead of using the words “hidden,” “inaccessible,” or “proper,” let us give a more precise description and say “inaccessible to the consciousness of the dreamer” or “unconscious.” By that we mean nothing more than was implied in the case of the forgotten word, or the underlying intention responsible for the error; that is to say, unconscious at the moment. It follows that in contradistinction we may call the dream-elements themselves, and those substitute-ideas arrived at by the process of association, conscious. No theoretical implication is so far contained in these terms; no exception can be taken to the use of the word “unconscious” as a description at once applicable and easy to understand.26

Now, transferring our conception from the single element to the dream as a whole, it follows that the latter is the distorted substitute for something else, something unconscious, and that the task of dream-interpretation is to discover these unconscious thoughts. Hence are derived three important rules which should be observed in the work of dream-interpretation:

1. We are not to trouble about the surface meaning of the dream, whether it be reasonable or absurd, clear or confused; in no case does it constitute the unconscious thoughts we are seeking. (An obvious limitation of this rule will force itself upon us later.)

2. We are to confine our work to calling up substitute-ideas for every element and not to ponder over them and try to see whether they contain something which fits in, nor to trouble ourselves about how far they are taking us from the dream-element.

3. We must wait until the hidden unconscious thoughts which we are seeking appear of their own accord, just as in the case of the missing word “Monaco” in the experiment which I described.

Now we understand also how entirely indifferent it is whether we remember much or little of our dreams, above all whether we remember them accurately or not. The dream as remembered is not the real thing at all, but a distorted substitute which, by calling up other substitute-ideas, provides us with a means of approaching the thought proper, of bringing into consciousness the unconscious thoughts underlying the dream. If our recollection was at fault, all that has happened is that a further distortion of the substitute has taken place, and this distortion itself cannot be without motivation.

We can interpret our own dreams as well as those of others; indeed, we learn more from our own and the process carries more conviction. Now if we experiment in this direction, we notice that something is working against us. Associations come, it is true, but we do not admit them all; we are moved to criticize and to select. We say to ourselves of one association: “No, that does not fit in—it is irrelevant,” and of another: “That is too absurd,” and of a third: “That is quite beside the point”; and then we can observe further that in making such objections we stifle, and in the end actually banish, the associations before they have become quite clear. So on the one hand we tend to hold too closely to the initial idea, that is, the dream-element itself, and on the other, by allowing ourselves to select, we vitiate the results of the process of free association. If we are not attempting the interpretation by ourselves, but are allowing someone else to interpret, we shall clearly perceive another motive impelling us to this selection, forbidden as we know it to be. We find ourselves thinking at times: “No, this association is too unpleasant; I cannot, or will not, tell it to him.”

Clearly these objections threaten to spoil the success of our work. We must guard against them when we are interpreting our own dreams by resolving firmly not to yield to them, and, in interpreting those of someone else, by laying down the hard and fast rule that he must not withhold any association, even if one of the four objections I have named rises up against it, namely, that it is too unimportant, too absurd, too irrelevant or too unpleasant to speak of. He promises to keep this rule, and we may well feel annoyed when we find how badly he fulfils his promise later on. At first we account for this by imagining that in spite of our authoritative assurance he is not convinced that the process of free association will be justified by its results; and perhaps our next idea will be to win him over first to our theory, by giving him books to read or sending him to lectures so that he may be converted to our views on the subject. But we shall be saved from any such false steps by observing that the same critical objections against certain associations arise even in ourselves, whom we surely cannot suspect of doubt, and can only subsequently, on second thoughts as it were, be overcome.

Instead of being annoyed at the dreamer’s disobedience, we can turn this experience to good account as a means of learning something new, something which is the more important the more unprepared we were for it. We realize that the work of dream-interpretation is encountering opposition by a resistance which expresses itself in this very form of critical objections. This resistance is independent of the theoretical conviction of the dreamer. We learn even more than this. Experience shows that a critical objection of this nature is never justified. On the contrary, the associations which people wish to suppress in this way prove without exception to be the most important, to be decisive for the discovery of the unconscious thought. When an association is accompanied by an objection of this sort it positively calls for special notice.

This resistance is something entirely new; a phenomenon which we have found by following out our hypotheses, although it was not included in them. We are not altogether agreeably surprised by this new factor which we have to reckon with, for we suspect already that it will not make our work any easier: it might almost tempt us to give up the effort with dreams altogether. To take such a trivial subject and then to have so much trouble, instead of spinning along smoothly with our technique! But we might on the other hand find these difficulties fascinating and be led to suspect that the work will be worth the trouble. Resistances invariably confront us when we try to penetrate to the hidden unconscious thought from the substitute offered by the dream-element. We may suppose, therefore, that something very significant must be concealed behind the substitute; for, if not, why should we meet with such difficulties, the purpose of which is to keep up the concealment? When a child will not open his clenched fist to show what is in it, we may be quite certain that it is something which he ought not to have.

As soon as we introduce into our subject the dynamic conception of resistance, we must bear in mind that this factor is something quantitatively variable. There are greater and lesser resistances, and we are prepared to find these differences showing themselves in the course of our work. Perhaps we can connect with this another experience also met with in the process of dream-interpretation. I mean that sometimes only a few associations—perhaps not more than one—suffice to lead us from the dream-element to the unconscious thought behind it, whilst on other occasions long chains of associations are necessary and many critical objections have to be overcome. We shall probably think that the number of associations necessary varies with the varying strength of the resistances, and very likely we shall be right. If there is only a slight resistance, the substitute is not far removed from the unconscious thought; a strong resistance on the other hand causes great distortions of the latter, and thereby entails a long journey back from the substitute to the unconscious thought itself.

Perhaps this would be a good moment to select a dream and try our technique upon it, to see whether the expectations we have entertained are realized. Very well, but what dream shall we choose? You do not know how difficult it is for me to decide, nor can I make it clear to you yet what the difficulties are. Obviously there must be dreams in which on the whole there is very little distortion, and one would think it would be best to begin with these. But which are the least distorted dreams? Those which make good sense and are not confused, of which I have already given you two examples? In assuming this, we should make a great mistake, for examination shows that these dreams have undergone an exceptionally high degree of distortion. Supposing then that I make no special condition but take any dream at random, you would probably be very much disappointed. We might have to observe and record such a vast number of associations to the single dream-elements that it would be quite impossible to gain any clear view of the work as a whole. If we write the dream down and compare with it all the associations which it produces, we are likely to find that they have multiplied the length of the text of the dream many times. So the most practical method would seem to be that of selecting for analysis several short dreams, each of which can at least convey some idea to us or confirm some supposition. This will be the course we shall decide to take, unless experience gives us a hint where we ought really to look for slightly distorted dreams.

But I can suggest another means of simplifying matters, one which lies right before us. Instead of attempting the interpretation of whole dreams, let us confine ourselves to single dream-elements and find out by taking a series of examples how the application of our technique explains them:—

(a) A lady related that as a child she very often dreamt that God had a pointed paper cap on his head. How are you going to understand that without the help of the dreamer? It sounds quite nonsensical; but the absurdity disappears when the lady says that as a little girl she used to have a cap like that put on her head at table, because she wouldn’t give up looking at the plates of her brothers and sisters to see whether any of them had been given more than she. Evidently the cap was meant to serve the purpose of blinkers; this piece of historical information was given, by the way, without any difficulty. The interpretation of this element and, with it, of the whole short dream becomes easy enough with the help of a further association of the dreamer’s: “As I had been told that God knew everything and saw everything, the dream could only mean that I knew and saw everything as God did, even when they tried to prevent me.” This example is perhaps too simple.

(b) A sceptical patient had a longer dream, in which certain people were telling her about my book on Wit and praising it very highly. Then something else came in about a canal; it might have been another book in which the word canal occurred, or something else to do with a canal... she did not know... it was quite vague.

Now you will certainly be inclined to suppose that the canal in the dream will defy interpretation on account of its vagueness. You are right in expecting difficulty, but the difficulty is not caused by the vagueness; on the contrary, the difficulty in interpretation is caused by something else, by the same thing that makes the element vague. The dreamer had no association to the word “canal”; naturally I did not know what to say either. Shortly afterwards, to be accurate, on the next day, she told me that an association had occurred to her which perhaps had something to do with it. It was in fact a witty remark which some one had told her. On board ship between Dover and Calais a well-known author was talking to an Englishman who in some particular context quoted the words: “Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.” The author answered: “Oui, le Pas-de-Calais,” meaning that he regarded France as sublime and England as ridiculous. Of course, the Pas-de-Calais is a canal—that is to say, the Canal la Manche—the English Channel. Now, you ask, do I think that this association had anything to do with the dream? Certainly I think so: it gives the true meaning of the puzzling dream-element. Or are you inclined to doubt that the joke already existed before the dream and was the unconscious thought behind the element “canal,” and to maintain that it was a subsequent invention? The association reveals the scepticism disguised under the obtrusive admiration, and resistance was no doubt the cause both of the association being so long in occurring to her, and of the corresponding dream-element being so vague. Observe here the relation between the dream-element and the unconscious thought underlying it: it is, as it were, a fragment of the thought, an allusion to it; by being isolated in that way it became quite incomprehensible.

(c) A patient had a fairly long dream, part of which was as follows: Several members of his family were seated at a table of a particular shape... etc. This table reminded the dreamer that he had seen one of the same sort when he was visiting a certain family. From that his thoughts ran on thus: in this family the relationship between father and son was a peculiar one, and the patient presently added that his own relationship to his father was, as a matter of fact, of the same nature. So the table was introduced into the dream to indicate this parallelism.

It happened that this dreamer had long been familiar with the demands of dream-interpretation; otherwise he might have taken exception to the idea of investigating so trivial a detail as the shape of a table. We do literally deny that anything in the dream is a matter of chance or of indifference, and it is precisely by enquiring into such trivial and (apparently) unmotivated details that we expect to arrive at our conclusion. You may perhaps still be surprised that the dream-work should happen to choose the table, in order to express the thought “Our relationship is just like theirs.” But even this is explicable when you learn that the family in question was named “Tischler.” (Tisch = table.) In making his relations sit at this table the dreamer’s meaning was that they too were “Tischler.”27 And notice another thing: that in relating dream-interpretations of this sort one is forced into indiscretion. There you have one of the difficulties I alluded to in the matter of choosing examples. I could easily have given you another example instead of this one, but probably I should have avoided this indiscretion only to commit another in its place.

This seems to me a good point at which to introduce two new terms which we might have used already. Let us call the dream as related the manifest dream-content, and the hidden meaning, which we should come by in following out the associations, the latent dream-thoughts. Then we must consider the relation between the manifest content and the latent thoughts, as shown in the above examples. There are many varieties of these relations. In examples (a) and (b) the manifest dream-element is also an integral part of the latent thoughts, but only a fragment of them. A small piece of a great, composite, mental structure in the unconscious dream-thoughts has made its way into the manifest dream also, in the form of a fragment or in other cases as an allusion, like a catch-word or an abbreviation in a telegraphic code. The interpretation has to complete the whole to which this scrap or allusion belongs, which it did most successfully in example (b). One method of the distorting process in which the dream-work consists is therefore that of substituting for something else a fragment or an allusion. In example (c) we notice, moreover, another possible relation between manifest content and latent thought, a relation which is even more plainly and distinctly expressed in the following examples:—

(d) The dreamer was pulling a certain lady of his acquaintance out of a ditch. He himself found the meaning of this dream-element by means of the first association. It meant: he “picked her out,” preferred her.28

(e) Another man dreamt that his brother was digging up his garden all over again. The first association was to deep-trenching for vegetables, the second gave the meaning. The brother was retrenching. (Retrenching his expenses).29

(f) The dreamer was climbing a mountain from which he had a remarkably wide view. This sounds most reasonable; perhaps no interpretation is called for and we have only to find out what recollection is referred to in the dream, and what had aroused it. No, you are mistaken; it comes out that this dream needed interpretation just as much as any other, more confused. For the dreamer remembers nothing about mountain-climbing himself; instead, it occurs to him that an acquaintance is publishing a Rundschau (Review), on the subject of our relations with the most distant parts of the earth: hence, the latent thought is one in which the dreamer identifies himself with the “reviewer” (lit. one who takes a survey).

Here you come across a new type of relation between the manifest and the latent element in dreams. The former is not so much a distortion of the latter as a representation—a plastic, concrete piece of imagery, originating in the sound of a word. It is true that this amounts in effect to a distortion, for we have long forgotten from what concrete image the word sprang, and hence fail to recognize it when that image is substituted for it. When you consider that the manifest dream consists of visual images in by far the greatest number of cases, and less frequently of thoughts and words, you will easily realize that this kind of relation between the manifest and the latent has a special significance in the structure of dreams. You see too that in this way it becomes possible for a long series of abstract thoughts to create substitute-images in the manifest dream which do indeed serve the purpose of concealment. This is how our picture-puzzles are made up. The source of the semblance of wit which goes with this type of representation is a special question which we need not touch on here.

There is a fourth kind of relation between the manifest and the latent elements which I will say nothing about until the time comes for it in my account of our technique. Even then I shall not have given you a full list of these possible relations, but we shall have sufficient for our purpose.

Now do you think you can summon up courage to venture on the interpretation of a whole dream? Let us see whether we are adequately equipped for the task. I shall not, of course, choose one of the most obscure, but all the same it shall be one which shows the characteristics of dreams in a well-marked form.

A young woman who had already been married for a number of years dreamt as follows: She was at the theatre with her husband, and one side of the stalls was quite empty. Her husband told her that Elise L. and her fiancé also wanted to come, but could only get bad seats, three for a florin and a half, and of course they could not take those. She replied that in her opinion they did not lose much by that.

The first thing stated by the dreamer is that the occasion giving rise to the dream is alluded to in the manifest content: her husband had really told her that Elise L., an acquaintance of about her own age, had become engaged, and the dream is the reaction to this piece of news. We know already that in many dreams it is easy to point to some such occasion occurring on the day before, and that this is often traced by the dreamer without any difficulty. This dreamer supplies us with further information of the same sort about other elements in the manifest dream. To what did she trace the detail of one side of the stalls being empty? It was an allusion to a real occurrence of the week before, when she had meant to go to a certain play and had therefore booked seats early, so early that she had to pay extra for the tickets. On entering the theatre it was evident that her anxiety had been quite superfluous, for one side of the stalls was almost empty. It would have been time enough if she had bought the tickets on the actual day of the performance and her husband did not fail to tease her about having been in too great a hurry. Next, what about the one florin and a half (1 fl. 50)? This was traced to quite another context which had nothing to do with the former, but it again refers to some news received on the previous day. Her sister-in-law had had a present of 150 florins from her husband and had rushed off in a hurry, like a silly goose, to a jeweller’s shop and spent it all on a piece of jewellery. What about the number three? She knew nothing about that unless this idea could be counted an association, that the engaged girl, Elise L., was only three months younger than she herself who had been married ten years. And the absurdity of taking three tickets for two people? She had nothing to say to this and refused to give any more associations or information whatever.

Nevertheless, her few associations have provided us with so much material that it is possible to discover the latent dream-thoughts. We are struck by the fact that in her statements references to time are noticeable at several points, which form a common basis for the different parts of this material. She had got the theatre tickets too soon, taken them in too great a hurry, so that she had to pay extra for them; in the same way her sister-in-law had hurried off to the jeweller’s with her money to buy an ornament with it, as though she might miss something. If the strongly emphasized points: “too early,” “too great a hurry,” are connected with the occasion for the dream (namely, the news that her friend, only three months younger than herself, had now found a good husband after all) and with the criticism expressed in her asperity about her sister-in-law, that it was folly to be so precipitate, there occurs to us almost spontaneously the following construction of the latent dream-thoughts, for which the manifest dream is a highly-distorted substitute:

“It was really foolish of me to be in such a hurry to marry! Elise’s example shows me that I too could have found a husband later on.” (The over-haste is represented by her own conduct in buying the tickets and that of her sister-in-law in buying the jewellery. Going to the theatre is substituted for getting married.) This would be the main thought; perhaps we may go on, though with less certainty because the analysis in these passages ought not to be unsupported by statements of the dreamer: “And I might have had one a hundred times better for the money!” (150 florins is 100 times more than one florin and a half.) If we may substitute the dowry for the money, it would mean that the husband is bought with the dowry: both the jewellery and the bad seats would stand for the husband. It would be still more desirable if we could see some connection between the element “three tickets” and a husband; but our knowledge does not as yet extend to this. We have only found out that the dream expresses depreciation of her own husband and regret at having married so early.

In my opinion we shall be more surprised and confused by the result of this our first attempt at dream-interpretation than satisfied with it. Too many ideas force themselves upon us at once, more than as yet we can master. We see already that we shall not come to the end of what the interpretation of this dream can teach us. Let us immediately single out those points in which we can definitely see some new knowledge.

In the first place: we note that in the latent thoughts the chief emphasis falls upon the element of hurry; in the manifest dream that is exactly a feature about which we find nothing. Without analysis we could have had no suspicion that this thought entered in at all. It seems possible, therefore, that precisely the main point round which the unconscious thoughts centre does not appear in the manifest dream at all. This fact must radically change the impression made upon us by the whole dream. In the second place: in the dream there is a nonsensical combination of ideas (three for one florin and a half); in the dream-thoughts we detect the opinion: “It was folly (to marry so early).” Can one reject the conclusion that this thought, “It was folly,” is represented by the introduction into the manifest dream of an absurd element? In the third place: comparison shows us that the relation between manifest and latent elements is no simple one, certainly not of such a kind that a manifest always replaces a latent element. The relation between the two is of the nature of a relation between two different groups, so that a manifest element can represent several latent thoughts or a latent thought be replaced by several manifest elements.

As regards the meaning of the dream and the dreamer’s attitude towards it, here again we might find many surprising things to say. The lady certainly admitted the interpretation, but she wondered at it; she had not been aware that she had such disparaging thoughts of her husband; she did not even know why she should so disparage him. So there is still much that is incomprehensible about it. I really think that as yet we are not properly equipped for interpreting a dream and that we need further instruction and preparation first.

Eighth Lecture — Children’s Dreams

We had the impression that we had advanced too rapidly; let us therefore retrace our steps a little. Before we made our last experiment in which we tried to overcome the difficulty of dream-distortion by means of our technique, we said that it would be best to circumvent it by confining our attention to dreams in which distortion is absent or occurs only to a very slight extent, if there are any such dreams. In doing this, we are again departing from the actual course of development of our knowledge; for in reality it was only after consistently applying our method of interpretation, and after exhaustive analysis of dreams in which distortion occurred, that we became aware of the existence of those in which it is lacking.

The dreams we are looking for are met with in children: short, clear, coherent, and easy to understand, they are free from ambiguity and yet are unmistakable dreams. You must not think, however, that all dreams in children are of this type. Distortion in dreams begins to appear very early in childhood, and there are on record dreams of children between five and eight years old which already show all the characteristics of the dreams of later life. But, if you confine yourselves to those occurring in the period between the dawn of recognizable mental activity and the fourth or fifth year of life, you will discover a series which we should characterize as infantile, and, in the later years of childhood, you may find single dreams of the same type; indeed, even in grown-up people under certain conditions dreams appear which in no way differ from the typically infantile.

Now from these children’s dreams it is possible to obtain without any difficulty trustworthy information about the essential nature of dreams, which we hope will prove to be decisive and universally valid.

1. In order to understand these dreams there is no need for any analysis nor for the employment of any technique. It is not necessary to question the child who relates his dream. But we must know something about his life; in every instance there is some experience from the previous day which explains the dream. The dream is the mind’s reaction in sleep to the experience of the previous day.

Let us consider some examples in order to base our further conclusions upon them:

(a) A boy of a year and ten months old had to present someone with a basket of cherries as a birthday gift. He plainly did it very unwillingly, although he had been promised some of them for himself. The next morning he told his dream: “Hermann eaten all the cherries.”

(b) A little girl of three and a quarter years went for the first time for a trip on the lake. When they came to land, she did not wish to leave the boat and cried bitterly; the time on the water had evidently gone too quickly for her. Next morning she said: “Last night I was sailing on the lake.” We may probably infer that this trip lasted longer.

(c) A boy five and a quarter years old was taken on an excursion to the Escherntal near Hallstatt. He had heard that Hallstatt lay at the foot of the Dachstein and had shown great interest in that mountain. From the lodgings in Aussee there was a fine view of the Dachstein, and with a telescope it was possible to make out the Simony Hut on top. The child had repeatedly endeavoured to see the hut through the telescope, but nobody knew whether he had succeeded. The excursion began in a mood of joyful expectation. Whenever a new mountain came into sight, the little boy asked: “Is that the Dachstein?” Every time his question was answered in the negative he grew more out of spirits and presently became silent and refused to climb a little way up to the waterfall with the others. He was thought to be overtired, but the next morning he said quite happily: “Last night I dreamt that we were in the Simony Hut.” So it was with this expectation that he had taken part in the excursion. The only detail he gave was one he had heard before: “You have to climb up steps for six hours.”

These three dreams will be enough to give us all the information we need at this point.

2. We see that these childhood dreams are not meaningless; they are complete, comprehensible mental acts. Remember the medical verdict about dreams, which I told you, and the comparison with unskilled fingers wandering over the keys of the piano. You cannot fail to notice how sharply this conception is contradicted by the children’s dreams I have quoted. Now it would surely be most extraordinary if a child were able to achieve the performance of complete mental acts during sleep, and the grown-up person in the same situation contented himself with spasmodic reactions. Besides, we have every reason for attributing better and deeper sleep to a child.

3. In these dreams there is no distortion and therefore they need no interpretation: the manifest and the latent content is here identical. From this we conclude that distortion is not essential to the nature of the dream. I expect that this statement will take a weight off your minds. Nevertheless, closer consideration forces us to admit that even in these dreams distortion is present, though in a very slight degree, that there is a certain difference between the manifest content and the latent dream-thought.

4. The child’s dream is a reaction to an experience of the previous day, which has left behind a regret, a longing, or an unsatisfied wish. In the dream we have the direct, undisguised fulfilment of this wish. Now consider our discussion as to the part played by the external or internal somatic stimuli as disturbers of sleep and begetters of dreams. We learnt certain quite definite facts on this point, but this explanation only held good in a small number of dreams. In these children’s dreams there is nothing to indicate the influence of such somatic stimuli; we can make no mistake about it, for the dreams are perfectly comprehensible and each can easily be grasped as a whole. But we need not on that account give up our notion of the stimulus as causing the dream. We can only ask why we forget from the outset that there are mental as well as bodily sleep-disturbing stimuli; surely we know that it is these which are mainly responsible for disturbing the sleep of the grown-up person, in that they hinder him from bringing about in himself the mental condition essential for sleep, i.e. the withdrawal of interest from the outside world. He wishes not to have any interruption in his life; he would prefer to continue working at whatever occupies him, and that is the reason why he does not sleep. The mental stimulus which disturbs sleep is therefore for a child the unsatisfied wish, and his reaction to this is a dream.

5. This takes us by a very short step to a conclusion about the function of dreams. If dreams are the reaction to a mental stimulus their value must lie in effecting a discharge of the excitation so that the stimulus is removed and sleep can continue. We do not yet know how this discharge through the dream is effected dynamically, but we notice already that dreams are not disturbers of sleep (the accusation commonly brought against them), but are guardians and deliverers of it from disturbing influences. True, we are apt to think we should have slept better if we had not dreamed, but there we are wrong: the truth is that without the help of the dream we should not have slept at all, and we owe it to the dream that we slept as well as we did. It could not help disturbing us a little, just as a policeman often cannot avoid making a noise when driving off disturbers of the peace who would wake us.

6. That dreams are brought about by a wish and that the content of the dream expresses this wish is one main characteristic of dreams. The other equally constant feature is that the dream does not merely give expression to a thought, but represents this wish as fulfilled, in the form of an hallucinatory experience. “I should like to sail on the lake,” runs the wish which gives rise to the dream; the content of the dream itself is: “I am sailing on the lake.” So that even in these simple dreams belonging to childhood there is still a difference between the latent and the manifest dream, and still a distortion of the latent dream-thought, in the translation of the thought into an experience. In interpreting a dream, we must first of all undo this process of alteration. If this is to be regarded as one of the most universal characteristics of all dreams, we then know how to translate the dream-fragment I quoted before: “I see my brother digging” does not mean “my brother is retrenching,” but “I wish my brother would retrench, he is to retrench.” Of the two universal characteristics here mentioned the second is obviously more likely to be acknowledged without opposition than the first. It is only by extensive investigations that we can make sure that what produces the dream must always be a wish and cannot sometimes be a preoccupation, a purpose, or reproach; but the other characteristic remains unaffected, namely, that the dream does not merely reproduce this stimulus, but, by a kind of living it through, removes it, sets it aside, relieves it.

7. In connection with these characteristics of dreams we may take up again our comparison between dreams and errors. In the latter we distinguished between a disturbing tendency and one which is disturbed, the error being a compromise between the two. Dreams fall into the same category; the disturbed tendency can only, of course, be the tendency to sleep, while the disturbing tendency resolves itself into the mental stimulus which we may call the wish (clamouring for gratification), since at present we know of no other mental stimulus disturbing sleep. Here again the dream is the result of a compromise; we sleep, and yet we experience the satisfaction of a wish; we gratify a wish and at the same time continue to sleep. Each achieves part-success and part-failure.

8. You will remember that at one point we hoped to find a path to an understanding of the problems presented by dreams in the fact that certain very transparent phantasy-formations are called “day-dreams.” Now these day-dreams are literally wish-fulfilments, fulfilments of ambitious or erotic wishes, which we recognize as such; they are, however, carried out in thought, and, however vividly imagined, they never take the form of hallucinatory experiences. Here, therefore, the less certain of the two main characteristics of the dream is retained, whereas the other, to which the condition of sleep is essential and which cannot be realized in waking life, is entirely lacking. So in language we find a hint that a wish-fulfilment is a main characteristic of dreams. And further, if the experience we have in dreams is only another form of imaginative representation, a form which becomes possible under the peculiar conditions of the sleeping state—“a nocturnal day-dream,” as we might call it—we understand at once how it is that the process of dream-formation can abrogate the stimulus operating at night and can bring gratification; for day-dreaming also is a mode of activity closely linked up with gratification, which is in fact the only reason why people practise it.

Again, there are other linguistic expressions, besides this, which imply the same thing. We are familiar with the proverbs: “The pig dreams of acorns and the goose of maize.” “What do chickens dream of? Of millet.” The proverb, you see, goes even lower in the scale than we do, beyond the child to the animal, and asserts that the content of dreams is the satisfaction of a want. And there are many phrases which seem to point to the same thing: we say “as beautiful as a dream.” “I should never have dreamt of such a thing.” “I never imagined that in my wildest dreams.” Here colloquial speech is clearly partial in its judgement. Of course there are also anxiety-dreams, and dreams the content of which is painful or indifferent, but these have not given rise to any special phrases. We do indeed speak of “bad” dreams, but by a “dream” pure and simple common usage always understands some sort of exquisite wish-fulfilment. Nor is there any proverb which attempts to assert that pigs or geese dream of being slaughtered!

It is, of course, inconceivable that this wish-fulfilling character of dreams should have escaped the notice of writers on the subject. On the contrary, they have very often remarked upon it; but it has not occurred to any of them to recognize this characteristic as universal, and to take it as the key to the explanation of dreams. We can easily imagine what may have deterred them, and later we will discuss the question.

Now see how much information we have gained, and that with hardly any trouble, from our study of children’s dreams! We have learnt that the function of dreams is to protect sleep; that they arise out of two conflicting tendencies, of which the one, the desire for sleep, remains constant, whilst the other endeavours to satisfy some mental stimulus; that dreams are proved to be mental acts, rich in meaning; that they have two main characteristics, i.e., they are wish-fulfilments and hallucinatory experiences. And meanwhile we could almost have forgotten that we were studying psycho-analysis. Apart from the connection we have made between dreams and errors our work has not borne any specific stamp. Any psychologist knowing nothing of the assumptions of psycho-analysis could have given this explanation of children’s dreams. Why has no one done so?

If only all dreams were of the infantile type the problem would be solved and our task already achieved, and that without questioning the dreamer, referring to the unconscious or having recourse to the process of free association. Clearly it is in this direction that we must continue our work. We have already repeatedly found that characteristics alleged to be universally valid have afterwards proved to hold good only for a certain kind and a limited number of dreams. So the question we now have to decide is whether the common characteristics revealed by children’s dreams are any more stable than these, and whether they hold also for those dreams whose meaning is not obvious and in whose manifest content we can recognize no reference to a wish remaining from the day before. Our idea is that these other dreams have undergone a good deal of distortion and on that account we must refrain from immediate judgement. We suspect too that to unravel this distortion we shall need the help of psycho-analytic technique, which we could dispense with while learning, as we have just now done, the meaning of children’s dreams.

There is yet one other class of dreams at least in which no distortion is present and which, like children’s dreams, we easily recognize to be wish-fulfilments. These are dreams which are occasioned all through life by imperative physical needs—hunger, thirst, sexual desire—and are wish-fulfilments in the sense of being reactions to internal somatic stimuli. Thus I have on record the dream of a little girl, one year and seven months old, which consisted of a kind of menu, together with her name (Anna F..., strawberries, bilberries, egg, pap), the dream being a reaction to a day of fasting, enforced on account of indigestion due to eating the fruit which appeared twice in the dream. At the same time her grandmother—their combined ages totalled seventy—was obliged, owing to a floating kidney, to go without food for a day and dreamt that night that she had been invited out and had had the most tempting delicacies set before her. Observations on prisoners who are left to go hungry, and on people who suffer privations whilst travelling or on expeditions, show that in these circumstances they regularly dream about the satisfaction of their wants. Thus Otto Nordenskjöld in his book on the Antarctic (1904) tells us of the band of men in whose company he spent the winter (Vol. I, p. 336): “Our dreams showed very clearly the direction our thoughts were taking. Never had we dreamt so frequently and so vividly as at that time. Even those of our comrades who usually dreamt but rarely had now long stories to tell in the mornings when we exchanged our latest experiences in this realm of phantasy. All the dreams were about that outside world now so far away, but often they included a reference to our condition at the time... eating and drinking were, incidentally, the pivot on which our dreams most often turned. One of us, who was particularly good at going out to large dinners in his sleep, was delighted when he could tell us in the morning that he had had a three-course dinner. Another dreamt of tobacco, whole mountains of tobacco; another of a ship which came full sail over the water, at last clear of ice. Yet another dream deserves mention: the postman came with the letters and gave a long explanation of why they were so late; he said he had made a mistake in delivering them, and had had great trouble in getting them back again. Of course, things even more impossible occupied our minds in sleep, but the lack of imagination in almost all the dreams which I dreamt myself or heard the others tell was quite striking. It would certainly be of great psychological interest if we had a record of all these dreams. You can imagine how we longed for sleep, when it offered each one of us all that he most eagerly desired.” Another quotation, this time from Du Prel: “Mungo Park, when nearly dying of thirst on a journey in Africa, dreamt continually of the well-watered hills and valleys of his home. So Trenck, tormented with hunger in the redoubt at Magdebourg, saw himself in his dreams surrounded by sumptuous meals; and George Back, who took part in Franklin’s first expedition, when on the point of dying of hunger owing to their terrible privations, dreamt regularly of abundant food to eat.”

Anyone who has made himself thirsty at night by eating highly-seasoned dishes at supper is likely to dream of drinking. Of course it is not possible to relieve acute hunger or thirst by dreaming; in that case we awake thirsty and are obliged to drink real water. The service of the dream is here of little practical account, but it is none the less clear that it was called up for the purpose of protecting sleep from the stimulus impelling us to wake up and act. Where the intensity of the desire is less, ‘satisfaction’-dreams do often answer the purpose.

In the same way, when the stimulus is that of sexual desire the dream provides satisfaction, but of a kind which shows peculiarities worthy of mention. Since it is a characteristic of the sexual impulse that it is a degree less dependent on its object than are hunger and thirst, the satisfaction in a pollution-dream can be real; and, in consequence of certain difficulties in the relation to the object (which will be discussed later), it particularly often happens that the real satisfaction is yet connected with a vague or distorted dream-content. This peculiarity of pollution-dreams makes them, as O. Rank has observed, suitable objects for the study of dream-distortion. Moreover, with adults, dreams of desire usually contain besides the satisfaction something else, springing from a purely mental source and requiring interpretation if it is to be understood.

We do not maintain, by the way, that wish-fulfilment dreams of the infantile type occur in adults solely as reactions to the imperative desires I have mentioned. We are equally familiar with short clear dreams of this type, occasioned by certain dominating situations and unquestionably produced by mental stimuli. For example, there are ‘impatience’-dreams in which someone making preparations for a journey, for a theatrical performance in which he is specially interested, or for a lecture or a visit, has his expectations prematurely realized in a dream, and finds himself the night before the actual experience already at his journey’s end, at the theatre, or talking to the friend he is going to visit. Or again, there is the ‘comfort’-dream, rightly so-called, in which someone who wants to go on sleeping dreams that he has already got up, that he is washing, or is at school, while all the time he is really continuing his sleep, meaning that he would rather dream of getting up than do so in reality. In these dreams the desire for sleep, which we have recognized as regularly participating in dream-formation, expresses itself plainly and appears as their actual originator. The need for sleep ranks itself quite rightly with the other great physical needs.

I would refer you at this point to the reproduction of a picture by Schwind in the Schack Gallery at Munich30 and would ask you to notice how correctly the artist has realized the way in which a dream arises out of a dominating situation. The picture is called The Prisoner’s Dream, and the subject of the dream must undoubtedly be his escape. It is a happy thought that the prisoner is to escape by the window, for it is through the window that the ray of light has entered and roused him from sleep. The gnomes standing one above the other no doubt represent the successive positions he would have to assume in climbing up to the window; and, if I am not mistaken and do not attribute too much intentional design to the artist, the features of the gnome at the top, who is filing the grating through (the very thing the prisoner himself would like to do), resemble the man’s own.

I have said that in all dreams, other than those of children and such as conform to the infantile type, we encounter the obstacle of distortion. We cannot immediately say whether they too are wish-fulfilments, as we are inclined to suppose, nor can we guess from their manifest content in what mental stimulus they originate, or prove that they, like the others, endeavour to remove or relieve the stimulus. They must, in fact, be interpreted, i.e. translated; the process of distortion must be reversed, and the manifest content replaced by the latent thought, before we can make any definite pronouncement whether what we have found out about infantile dreams may claim to hold good for all dreams alike.

Ninth Lecture — The Dream-Censorship

Our study of children’s dreams has taught us how dreams originate, what their essential character is, and what their function. Dreams are the means of removing, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that disturb sleep. It is true that with the dreams of adults we have been able to explain one group only, those which we termed dreams of the infantile type. We do not yet know how it may be with the others, neither do we understand them. The result we have arrived at already is one, however, of which the significance is not to be under-estimated. Every time that we fully understand a dream it proves to be a wish-fulfilment; and this coincidence cannot be accidental or unimportant.

Dreams of another type are assumed by us to be distorted substitutes for an unknown content, which first of all has to be traced; we have various grounds for this assumption, amongst others the analogy to our conception of errors. Our next task is to investigate and understand this dream-distortion.

It is dream-distortion which makes dreams seem strange and incomprehensible. There are several things we want to know about it: first, whence it comes (its dynamics), secondly, what it does, and finally, how it does it. Further, we can say that distortion is the production of the dream-work. Let us describe the dream-work and trace out the forces in it.

Now let me tell you a dream recorded by a lady well-known in psycho-analytical circles31, who said that the dreamer was an elderly woman, highly cultivated and held in great esteem. The dream was not analysed and our informant observed that for psycho-analysts it needed no interpreting. Nor did the dreamer herself interpret it, but she criticized it and condemned it in such a way as though she knew what it meant. “Imagine,” she said, “such abominable nonsense being dreamt by a woman of fifty, whose only thought day and night is concern for her child.”

I will now tell you the dream, which is about “love service in war-time.”32 ‘She went to the First Military Hospital and said to the sentinel at the gate that she must speak to the physician-in-chief (giving a name which she did not know), as she wished to offer herself for service in the hospital. In saying this, she emphasized the word service in such a way that the sergeant at once perceived that she was speaking of “love service.” As she was an old lady, he let her pass after some hesitation, but instead of finding the chief physician, she came to a large gloomy room, where a number of officers and army doctors were standing or sitting around a long table. She turned to a staff doctor and told him her proposal; he soon understood her meaning. The words she said in her dream were: “I and countless other women and girls of Vienna are ready for the soldiers, officers or men, to....” This ended in a murmur. She saw, however, by the half-embarrassed, half-malicious expressions of the officers that all of them grasped her meaning. The lady continued: “I know our decision sounds odd, but we are in bitter earnest. The soldier on the battlefield is not asked whether he wishes to die or not.” There followed a minute of painful silence; then the staff doctor put his arm round her waist and said: “Madam, supposing it really came to this, that... (murmur.)” She withdrew herself from his arm, thinking: “They are all alike,” and replied: “Good heavens, I am an old woman and perhaps it won’t happen to me. And one condition must be observed: age must be taken into account, so that an old woman and a young lad may not... (murmur); that would be horrible.” The staff doctor said: “I quite understand”; but some of the officers, amongst them one who as a young man had made love to her, laughed loudly, and the lady asked to be taken to the physician-in-chief, whom she knew, so that everything might be put straight. It then struck her, to her great consternation, that she did not know his name. The staff doctor, however, with the utmost respect and courtesy, showed her the way to the second floor, up a very narrow iron spiral staircase leading direct from the room where they were to the upper storeys. As she went up, she heard an officer say: “That is a tremendous decision, no matter whether she is young or old; all honour to her!” With the feeling that she was simply doing her duty, she went up an endless staircase.’

This dream was repeated twice within a few weeks, with alterations here and there which, as the lady remarked, were quite unimportant and entirely meaningless.

The way in which this dream progresses corresponds to the course of a day-dream; there are only a few places where an interruption occurs, and many individual points in its content might have been cleared up by enquiry: this, however, as you know, was not undertaken. But the most striking and to us the most interesting thing about it is the occurrence of many gaps, not in the recollection, but in the content. In three places the latter is, as it were, blotted out; where these gaps occur the speeches are interrupted by a murmur. As we did not analyse the dream, we have, strictly speaking, no right to say anything about its meaning; but there are certain indications from which we may draw conclusions, e.g. the words “love service”; and, above all, the broken speeches immediately preceding the murmurs require completion of a kind which admits of only one construction. If we do so complete them a phantasy results, in which the content is that the dreamer is ready at the call of duty to offer herself to gratify the sexual needs of the troops, irrespective of rank. This is certainly shocking, a model of a shamelessly libidinous phantasy, but—the dream says nothing about this. Just where the context demands this confession, there is in the manifest dream an indistinct murmur: something has been lost or suppressed.

I hope you recognize how obvious is the inference that it is just the shocking nature of these passages which has led to their suppression. Now where will you find a parallel to what has taken place here? In these times you have not far to seek. Take up any political paper and you will find that here and there in the text something is omitted and in its place the blank white of the paper meets your eye: you know that this is the work of the press censor. Where these blank spaces occur, there originally stood something of which the authorities at the censorship disapproved and which has been deleted on that account. You probably think it a pity, for that must have been the most interesting part, the “cream” of the news.

On other occasions the censorship has not dealt with the sentence in its completed form; for the writer, foreseeing which passages were likely to be objected to by the censor, has forestalled him by softening them down, making some slight modification or contenting himself with hints and allusions to what he really wants to write. In this case there are no blanks, but from the roundabout and obscure mode of expression you can detect the fact that, at the time of writing, the author had the censorship in mind.

Now keeping to this parallel we say that those speeches in the dream which were omitted or disguised by a murmur have also been sacrificed to some form of censorship. We actually use the term DREAM-CENSORSHIP, and ascribe part of the distortion to its agency. Wherever there are gaps in the manifest dream we know that the censorship is responsible; and indeed we should go further and recognize that wherever, amongst other more clearly-defined elements, one appears which is fainter, more indefinite or more dubious in recollection, it is evidence of the work of the censorship. It is, however, seldom that it takes a form so undisguised, so naïve, as we might say, as it does in the case of the dream about “love service;” far more often the censorship makes itself felt in the second way I mentioned: by effecting modifications, hints, and allusions in place of the true meaning.

There is a third way in which the dream-censorship works, to which the ordinances of the Press censorship supply no parallel; but it happens that I can demonstrate to you this particular mode of activity on the part of the dream-censorship in the only dream hitherto analysed by us. You will remember the dream of the “three bad theatre tickets, costing one florin and a half.” In the latent thoughts underlying this dream, the element “too great a hurry, too early” was in the foreground; the meaning was: “It was folly to marry so early, it was foolish also to take the tickets so early, it was ridiculous of the sister-in-law to spend her money so hurriedly on a piece of jewellery.” Nothing of this central element of the dream-thoughts appeared in the manifest content, where everything was focussed on going to the theatre and taking tickets. By this displacement of the accent and regrouping of the dream-elements, the manifest content was made so unlike the latent thoughts that nobody would suspect the presence of the latter behind the former. This displacement of accent is one of the principal means employed in distortion, and it is this which gives the dream that character of strangeness which makes the dreamer himself reluctant to recognize it as the product of his own mind.

Omission, modification, regrouping of material—these then are the modes of the dream-censorship’s activity and the means employed in distortion. The censorship itself is the originator, or one of the originators, of distortion, the subject of our present enquiry. Modification and alteration in arrangement are commonly included under the term ‘displacement.’

After these remarks on the activities of the dream-censorship, let us turn our attention to its dynamics. I hope you are not taking the expression “censorship” in too anthropomorphic a sense, picturing to yourselves the censor as a stern little manikin or a spirit, who lives in a little chamber of the brain and there discharges the duties of his office; and neither must you localize it too exactly, so that you imagine a “brain-centre” whence there emanates a censorial influence, liable to cease with the injury or disappearance of that centre. For the present we may regard it merely as a useful term by which to express a dynamic relationship. This need not hinder us from asking what sort of tendencies exercise this influence and is it exercised upon; and further, we must not be surprised to discover that we have already come across the censorship, perhaps without recognizing it.

Indeed this has actually happened. Remember a surprising experience we 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.

The symbolic relation is essentially that of a comparison, but not any kind of comparison. We must suspect that this comparison is subject to particular conditions, although we cannot say what these conditions are. Not everything with which an object or an occurrence can be compared appears in dreams as symbolic of it, and, on the other hand, dreams do not employ symbolism for anything and everything, but only for particular elements of latent dream-thoughts; there are thus limitations in both directions. We must admit also that we cannot at present assign quite definite limits to our conception of a symbol; for it tends to merge into substitution, representation, etc., and even approaches closely to allusion. In one set of symbols the underlying comparison may be easily apparent, but there are others in which we have to look about for the common factor, the tertium comparationis contained in the supposed comparison. Further reflection may then reveal it to us, or on the other hand it may remain definitely hidden from us. Again, if the symbol is really a comparison, it is remarkable that this comparison is not exposed by the process of free association, and also that the dreamer knows nothing about it, but makes use of it unawares; nay, more, that he is actually unwilling to recognize it when it is brought to his notice. So you see that the symbolic relation is a comparison of a quite peculiar kind, the nature of which is as yet not fully clear to us. Perhaps some indication will be found later which will throw some light upon this unknown quantity.

The number of things which are represented symbolically in dreams is not great. The human body as a whole, parents, children, brothers and sisters, birth, death, nakedness—and one thing more. The only typical, that is to say, regularly occurring, representation of the human form as a whole is that of a house, as was recognized by Scherner, who even wanted to attribute to this symbol an overwhelming significance which is not really due to it. People have dreams of climbing down the front of a house, with feelings sometimes of pleasure and sometimes of dread. When the walls are quite smooth, the house means a man; when there are ledges and balconies which can be caught hold of, a woman. Parents appear in dreams as emperor and empress, king and queen or other exalted personages; in this respect the dream attitude is highly dutiful. Children and brothers and sisters are less tenderly treated, being symbolized by little animals or vermin. Birth is almost invariably represented by some reference to water: either we are falling into water or clambering out of it, saving someone from it or being saved by them, i.e. the relation between mother and child is symbolized. For dying we have setting out upon a journey or travelling by train, while the state of death is indicated by various obscure and, as it were, timid allusions; clothes and uniforms stand for nakedness. You see that here the dividing line between the symbolic and the allusive kinds of representation tends to disappear.

In comparison with the poverty of this enumeration, it cannot fail to strike us that objects and matters belonging to another range of ideas are represented by a remarkably rich symbolism. I am speaking of what pertains to the sexual life—the genitals, sexual processes and intercourse. An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols. A curious disproportion arises thus, for the matters dealt with are few in number, whereas the symbols for them are extraordinarily numerous, so that each of these few things can be expressed by many symbols practically equivalent. When they are interpreted, therefore, the result of this peculiarity gives universal offence, for, in contrast to the multifarious forms of its representation in dreams, the interpretation of the symbols is very monotonous. This is displeasing to everyone who comes to know of it: but how can we help it?

As this is the first time in the course of these lectures that I have touched upon the sexual life, I owe you some explanation of the manner in which I propose to treat this subject. Psycho-Analysis sees no occasion for concealments or indirect allusions, and does not think it necessary to be ashamed of concerning itself with material so important; it is of opinion that it is right and proper to call everything by its true name, hoping in this way the more easily to avoid disturbing suggestions. The fact that I am speaking to a mixed audience can make no difference in this. No science can be treated as an oracular mystery, or in a manner adapted to school-girls; the women present, by appearing in this lecture-room, have tacitly expressed their desire to be regarded on the same footing as the men.

The male genital organ is symbolically represented in dreams in many different ways, with most of which the common idea underlying the comparison is easily apparent. In the first place, the sacred number three is symbolic of the whole male genitalia. Its more conspicuous and, to both sexes, more interesting part, the penis, is symbolized primarily by objects which resemble it in form, being long and upstanding, such as sticks, umbrellas, poles, trees and the like; also by objects which, like the thing symbolized, have the property of penetrating, and consequently of injuring, the body,—that is to say, pointed weapons of all sorts: knives, daggers, lances, sabres; fire-arms are similarly used: guns, pistols and revolvers, these last being a very appropriate symbol on account of their shape. In the anxiety-dreams of young girls, pursuit by a man armed with a knife or rifle plays a great part. This is perhaps the most frequently occurring dream-symbol: you can now easily translate it for yourselves. The substitution of the male organ by objects from which water flows is again easily comprehensible: taps, watering-cans, or springs; and by other objects which are capable of elongation, such as pulley lamps, pencils which slide in and out of a sheath, and so on. Pencils, penholders, nail-files, hammers and other implements are undoubtedly male sexual symbols, based on an idea of the male organ which is equally easily perceived.

The peculiar property of this member of being able to raise itself upright in defiance of the law of gravity, part of the phenomena of erection, leads to symbolic representation by means of balloons, aeroplanes, and, just recently, Zeppelins. But dreams have another, much more impressive, way of symbolizing erection; they make the organ of sex into the essential part of the whole person, so that the dreamer himself flies. Do not be upset by hearing that dreams of flying, which we all know and which are often so beautiful, must be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitement, dreams of erection. One psycho-analytic investigator, P. Federn, has established the truth of this interpretation beyond doubt; but, besides this, Mourly Vold, a man highly praised for his sober judgement, who carried out the experiments with artificial postures of the arms and legs, and whose theories were really widely removed from those of psycho-analysis (indeed he may have known nothing about it), was led by his own investigations to the same conclusion. Nor must you think to object to this on the ground that women can also have dreams of flying; you should rather remind yourselves that the purpose of dreams is wish-fulfilment, and that the wish to be a man is frequently met with in women, whether they are conscious of it or not. Further, no one familiar with anatomy will be misled by supposing that it is impossible for a woman to realize this wish by sensations similar to those of a man, for the woman’s sexual organs include a small one which resembles the penis, and this little organ, the clitoris, does actually play during childhood and in the years before sexual intercourse the same part as the large male organ.

Male sexual symbols less easy to understand are certain reptiles and fishes: above all, the famous symbol of the serpent. Why hats and cloaks are used in the same way is certainly difficult to divine, but their symbolic meaning is quite unquestionable. Finally, it may be asked whether the representation of the male organ by some other member, such as the hand or the foot, may be termed symbolic. I think the context in which this is wont to occur, and the female counterparts with which we meet, force this conclusion upon us.

The female genitalia are symbolically represented by all such objects as share with them the property of enclosing a space or are capable of acting as receptacles: such as pits, hollows and caves, and also jars and bottles, and boxes of all sorts and sizes, chests, coffers, pockets, and so forth. Ships too come into this category. Many symbols refer rather to the uterus than to the other genital organs: thus cupboards, stoves and, above all, rooms. Room symbolism here links up with that of houses, whilst doors and gates represent the genital opening. Moreover, material of different kinds is a symbol of woman,—wood, paper, and objects made of these, such as tables and books. From the animal world, snails and mussels at any rate must be cited as unmistakable female symbols; of the parts of the body, the mouth as a representation of the genital opening, and, amongst buildings, churches and chapels are symbols of a woman. You see that all these symbols are not equally easy to understand.

The breasts must be included amongst the organs of sex; these, as well as the larger hemispheres of the female body, are represented by apples, peaches and fruit in general. The pubic hair in both sexes is indicated in dreams by woods and thickets. The complicated topography of the female sexual organs accounts for their often being represented by a landscape with rocks, woods and water, whilst the imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends it to symbolization by all kinds of complicated and indescribable machinery.

Yet another noteworthy symbol of the female genital organ is a jewel-case, whilst “jewel” and “treasure” are used also in dreams to represent the beloved person,33 and sweetmeats frequently stand for sexual pleasures. Gratification derived from a person’s own genitals is indicated by any kind of play, including playing the piano. The symbolic representation of onanism by sliding or gliding and also by pulling off a branch is very typical. A particularly remarkable dream-symbol is the falling out or extraction of teeth; the primary significance of this is certainly castration as a punishment for onanism. Special representations of sexual intercourse are less frequent in dreams than we should expect after all this, but we may mention in this connection rhythmical activities such as dancing, riding and climbing, and also experiencing some violence, e.g. being run over. To these may be added certain manual occupations, and of course being threatened with weapons.

You must not imagine that these symbols are either employed or translated quite simply: on all sides we meet with what we do not expect. For instance, it seems hardly credible that there is often no sharp discrimination of the different sexes in these symbolic representations. Many symbols stand for sexual organs in general, whether male or female: for instance, a little child, or a little son or daughter. At another time a symbol which is generally a male one may be used to denote the female sexual organ, or vice versa. This is incomprehensible until we have acquired some knowledge of the development of conceptions about sexuality amongst human beings. In many cases this ambiguity of the symbols may be apparent rather than real; and moreover, the most striking amongst them, such as weapons, pockets and chests, are never used bisexually in this way.

I will now give a brief account, beginning with the symbols themselves instead of with the objects symbolized, to show you from what spheres the sexual symbols have for the most part been derived, and I will add a few remarks relating particularly to those in which the attribute in common with the thing symbolized is hard to detect. An instance of an obscure symbol of this kind is the hat, or perhaps head-coverings in general; this usually has a masculine significance, though occasionally a feminine one. In the same way a cloak betokens a man, though perhaps sometimes without special reference to the organs of sex. It is open to you to ask why this should be so. A tie, being an object which hangs down and is not worn by women, is clearly a male symbol, whilst underlinen and linen in general stands for the female. Clothes and uniforms, as we have heard, represent nakedness or the human form; shoes and slippers symbolize the female genital organs. Tables and wood we have mentioned as being puzzling, but nevertheless certain, female symbols; the act of mounting ladders, steep places or stairs is indubitably symbolic of sexual intercourse. On closer reflection we shall notice that the rhythmic character of this climbing is the point in common between the two, and perhaps also the accompanying increase in excitation—the shortening of the breath as the climber ascends.

We have already recognized that landscapes represent the female sexual organs; mountains and rocks are symbols of the male organ; gardens, a frequently occurring symbol of the female genitalia. Fruit stands for the breasts, not for a child. Wild animals denote human beings whose senses are excited, and, hence, evil impulses or passions. Blossoms and flowers represent the female sexual organs, more particularly, in virginity. In this connection you will recollect that the blossoms are really the sexual organs of plants.

We already know how rooms are used symbolically. This representation may be extended, so that windows and doors (entrances and exits from rooms) come to mean the openings of the body; the fact of rooms being open or closed also accords with this symbolism: the key, which opens them, is certainly a male symbol.

This is some material for a study of dream-symbolism. It is not complete, and could be both extended and made deeper. However, I think it will seem to you more than enough; perhaps you may dislike it. You will ask: “Do I then really live in the midst of sexual symbols? Are all the objects round me, all the clothes I wear, all the things I handle, always sexual symbols and nothing else?” There really is good reason for surprised questions, and the first of these would be: How do we profess to arrive at the meaning of these dream-symbols, about which the dreamer himself can give us little or no information?

My answer is that we derive our knowledge from widely different sources: from fairy tales and myths, jokes and witticisms, from folk-lore, i.e. from what we know of the manners and customs, sayings and songs, of different peoples, and from poetic and colloquial usage of language. Everywhere in these various fields the same symbolism occurs, and in many of them we can understand it without being taught anything about it. If we consider these various sources individually, we shall find so many parallels to dream-symbolism that we are bound to be convinced of the correctness of our interpretations.

The human body is, we said, according to Scherner frequently symbolized in dreams by a house; by an extension of this symbolism, windows, doors and gates stand for the entrances to cavities in the body, and the façades may either be smooth or may have balconies and ledges to hold on to. The same symbolism is met with in colloquialisms; for instance, we speak of “a thatch of hair,” or a “tile hat,” or say of someone that he is not right “in the upper storey.”34 In anatomy, too, we speak of the openings of the body as its “portals.”35

We may at first find it surprising that parents appear in our dreams as kings and emperors and their consorts, but we have a parallel to this in fairy tales. Does it not begin to dawn upon us that the many fairy tales which begin with the words “Once upon a time there were a king and queen” simply mean: “Once upon a time there were a father and mother?” In family life the children are sometimes spoken of jestingly as princes, and the eldest son as the crown prince. The king himself is called the father of his people.36 Again, in some parts, little children are often playfully spoken of as little animals, e.g. in Cornwall, as “little toad,” or in Germany as “little worm,” and, in sympathizing with a child, Germans say “poor little worm.”

Now let us return to the house symbolism. When in our dreams we make use of the projections of houses as supports, does that not suggest a well-known, popular German saying, with reference to a woman with a markedly developed bust: “She has something for one to hold on to” (Die hat etwas zum Anhalten), whilst another colloquialism in the same connection is: “She has plenty of wood in front of her house” (Die hat viel Holz vor dem Hause), as though our interpretation were to be borne out by this when we say that wood is a female maternal symbol.

There is still something to be said on the subject of wood. It is not easy to see why wood should have come to represent a woman or mother, but here a comparison of different languages may be useful to us. The German word Holz (wood) is said to be derived from the same root as the Greek ὔλη, which means stuff, raw material. This would be an instance of a process which is by no means rare, in that a general name for material has come finally to be applied to a particular material only. Now, in the Atlantic Ocean, there is an island named Madeira, and this name was given to it by the Portuguese when they discovered it, because at that time it was covered with dense forests; for in Portuguese the word for wood is madeira. But you cannot fail to notice that this madeira is merely a modified form of the Latin materia, which again signifies material in general. Now materia is derived from mater = mother, and the material out of which anything is made may be conceived of as giving birth to it. So, in the symbolic use of wood to represent woman or mother, we have a survival of this old idea.

Birth is regularly expressed by some connection with water: we are plunging into or emerging from water, that is to say, we give birth or are being born. Now let us not forget that this symbol has a twofold reference to the actual facts of evolution. Not only are all land mammals, from which the human race itself has sprung, descended from creatures inhabiting the water—this is the more remote of the two considerations—but also every single mammal, every human being, has passed the first phase of existence in water—that is to say, as an embryo in the amniotic fluid of the mother’s womb—and thus, at birth, emerged from water. I do not maintain that the dreamer knows this; on the other hand, I contend that there is no need for him to know it. He probably knows something else from having been told it as a child, but even this, I will maintain, has contributed nothing to symbol-formation. The child is told in the nursery that the stork brings the babies, but then where does it get them? Out of a pond or a well—again, out of the water. One of my patients who had been told this as a child (a little count, as he was then) afterwards disappeared for a whole afternoon, and was at last found lying at the edge of the castle lake, with his little face bent over the clear water, eagerly gazing to see whether he could catch sight of the babies at the bottom of the water.

In the myths of the births of heroes, a comparative study of which has been made by O. Rank—the earliest is that of King Sargon of Akkad, about 2800 B.C.—exposure in water and rescue from it play a major part. Rank perceived that this symbolizes birth in a manner analogous to that employed in dreams. When anyone in his dream rescues somebody from the water, he makes that person into his mother, or at any rate a mother; and in mythology, whoever rescues a child from water confesses herself to be its real mother. There is a well-known joke in which an intelligent Jewish boy, when asked who was the mother of Moses, answers immediately: “The Princess.” He is told: “No, she only took him out of the water.” “That’s what she said,” he replies, showing that he had hit upon the right interpretation of the myth.

Going away on a journey stands in dreams for dying; similarly, it is the custom in the nursery, when a child asks questions as to the whereabouts of someone who has died and whom he misses, to tell him that that person has “gone away.” Here again, I deprecate the idea that the dream-symbol has its origin in this evasive reply to the child. The poet uses the same symbol when he speaks of the other side as “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.” Again, in everyday speech it is quite usual to speak of the “last journey,” and everyone who is acquainted with ancient rites knows how seriously the idea of a journey into the land of the dead was taken, for instance, in ancient Egyptian belief. In many cases the “Book of the Dead” survives, which was given to the mummy, like a Baedeker, to take with him on the last journey. Since burial-grounds have been placed at a distance from the houses of the living, the last journey of the dead has indeed become a reality.

Nor does sexual symbolism belong only to dreams. You will all know the expression “a baggage” as applied contemptuously to a woman, but perhaps people do not know that they are using a genital symbol. In the New Testament we read: “The woman is the weaker vessel.” The sacred writings of the Jews, the style of which so closely approaches that of poetry, are full of expressions symbolic of sex, which have not always been correctly interpreted and the exegesis of which, e.g. in the Song of Solomon, has led to many misunderstandings.37 In later Hebrew literature the woman is very frequently represented by a house, the door standing for the genital opening; thus a man complains, when he finds a woman no longer a virgin, that “he has found the door open.” The symbol “table” for a woman also occurs in this literature; the woman says of her husband “I spread the table for him, but he overturned it.” Lame children are said to owe their infirmity to the fact that the man “overturned the table.” I quote here from a treatise by L. Levy in Brünn: Sexual Symbolism in the Bible and the Talmud.

That ships in dreams signify women is a belief in which we are supported by the etymologists, who assert that “ship” (Schiff) was originally the name of an earthen vessel and is the same word as Schaff (schaffen = to make or produce). That an oven stands for a woman or the mother’s womb is an interpretation confirmed by the Greek story of Periander of Corinth and his wife Melissa. According to the version of Herodotus, the tyrant adjured the shade of his wife, whom he had loved passionately but had murdered out of jealousy, to tell him something about herself, whereupon the dead woman identified herself by reminding him that he, Periander, “had put his bread into a cold oven,” thus expressing in a disguised form a circumstance of which everyone else was ignorant. In the Anthropophyteia, edited by F. S. Kraus, a work which is an indispensable text-book on everything concerning the sexual life of different peoples, we read that in a certain part of Germany people say of a woman who is delivered of a child that “her oven has fallen to pieces.” The kindling of fire and everything connected with this is permeated through and through with sexual symbolism, the flame always standing for the male organ, and the fireplace or the hearth for the womb of the woman.

If you have chanced to wonder at the frequency with which landscapes are used in dreams to symbolize the female sexual organs, you may learn from mythologists how large a part has been played in the ideas and cults of ancient times by “Mother Earth” and how the whole conception of agriculture was determined by this symbolism. The fact that in dreams a room represents a woman you may be inclined to trace to the German colloquialism by which Frauenzimmer (lit. “woman’s room”) is used for Frau, that is to say, the human person is represented by the place assigned for her occupation. Similarly we speak of the Porte, meaning thereby the Sultan and his government, and the name of the ancient Egyptian ruler, Pharaoh, merely means “great court.” (In the ancient Orient the courts between the double gates of the city were places of assembly, like the market-place in classical times.) But I think this derivation is too superficial, and it strikes me as more probable that the room came to symbolize woman on account of its property of enclosing within it the human being. We have already met with the house in this sense; from mythology and poetry we may take towns, citadels, castles and fortresses to be further symbols for women. It would be easy to decide the point by reference to the dreams of people who neither speak nor understand German. Of late years I have mainly treated foreign patients, and I think I recollect that in their dreams rooms stand in the same way for women, even though there is no word analogous to our Frauenzimmer in their language. There are other indications that symbolism may transcend the boundaries of language, a fact already maintained by the old dream-investigator, Schubert, in 1862. Nevertheless, none of my patients were wholly ignorant of German, so that I must leave this question to be decided by those analysts who can collect instances in other countries from persons who speak only one language.38

Amongst the symbols for the male sexual organ, there is scarcely one which does not appear in jests, or in vulgar or poetic phrases, especially in the old classical poets. Here, however, we meet not only with such symbols as occur in dreams but also with new ones, e.g. the implements employed in various kinds of work, first and foremost, the plough. Moreover, when we come to male symbols, we trench on very extensive and much-contested ground, which, in order not to waste time, we will avoid. I should just like to devote a few remarks to the one symbol which stands, as it were, by itself; I refer to the number three. Whether this number does not in all probability owe its sacred character to its symbolic significance is a question which we must leave undecided, but it seems certain that many tripartite natural objects, e.g. the clover-leaf, are used in coats-of-arms and as emblems on account of their symbolism. The so-called “French” lily with its three parts and, again, the “trisceles,” that curious coat-of-arms of two such widely separated islands as Sicily and the Isle of Man (a figure consisting of three bent legs projecting from a central point), are supposed to be merely disguised forms of the male sexual organ, images of which were believed in ancient times to be the most powerful means of warding off evil influences (apotropaea); connected with this is the fact that the lucky “charms” of our own time may all be easily recognized as genital or sexual symbols. Let us consider a collection of such charms in the form of tiny silver pendants: a four-leaved clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horseshoe, a ladder and a chimney-sweep. The four-leaved clover has taken the place of that with three leaves, which was really more appropriate for the purposes of symbolism; the pig is an ancient symbol of fruitfulness; the mushroom undoubtedly symbolizes the penis, there are mushrooms which derive their name from their unmistakable resemblance to that organ (Phallus impudicus); the horseshoe reproduces the contour of the female genital opening; while the chimney-sweep with his ladder belongs to this company because his occupation is one which is vulgarly compared with sexual intercourse. (Cf. Anthropophyteia.) We have learnt to recognize his ladder in dreams as a sexual symbol: expressions in language show what a completely sexual significance the word steigen, to mount, has, as in the phrases: Den Frauen nachsteigen (to run after women) and ein alter Steiger (an old roué). So, in French, where the word for “step” is la marche, we find the quite analogous expression for an old rake: un vieux marcheur. Probably the fact that with many of the larger animals sexual intercourse necessitates a mounting or “climbing upon” the female has something to do with this association of ideas.

Pulling off a branch to symbolize onanism is not only in agreement with vulgar descriptions of that act, but also has far-reaching parallels in mythology. But especially remarkable is the representation of onanism, or rather of castration as the punishment for onanism, by the falling out or extraction of teeth; for we find in folk-lore a counterpart to this which could only be known to very few dreamers. I think that there can be no doubt that circumcision, a practice common to so many peoples, is an equivalent and replacement of castration. And recently we have learnt that certain aboriginal tribes in Australia practise circumcision as a rite to mark the attaining of puberty (at the celebration of the boy’s coming of age), whilst other tribes living quite near have substituted for this practice that of knocking out a tooth.

I will end my account with these examples. They are only examples; we know more about this subject and you can imagine how much richer and more interesting a collection of this sort might be made, not by dilettanti like ourselves, but by real experts in mythology, anthropology, philology and folk-lore. We are forced to certain conclusions, which cannot be exhaustive, but nevertheless will give us plenty to think about.

In the first place, we are confronted with the fact that the dreamer has at his command a symbolic mode of expression of which he knows nothing, and does not even recognize, in his waking life. This is as amazing as if you made the discovery that your housemaid understood Sanscrit, though you know that she was born in a Bohemian village and had never learnt that language. It is not easy to bring this fact into line with our views on psychology. We can only say that the dreamer’s knowledge of symbolism is unconscious and belongs to his unconscious mental life, but even this assumption does not help us much. Up till now we have only had to assume the existence of unconscious tendencies which are temporarily or permanently unknown to us; but now the question is a bigger one and we have actually to believe in unconscious knowledge, thought-relations, and comparisons between different objects, in virtue of which one idea can constantly be substituted for another. These comparisons are not instituted afresh every time, but are ready to hand, perfect for all time; this we infer from their unanimity in different persons, even probably in spite of linguistic differences.

Whence is our knowledge of this symbolism derived? The usages of speech cover only a small part of it, whilst the manifold parallels in other fields are for the most part unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves had to collate them laboriously in the first instance.

In the second place, these symbolic relations are not peculiar to the dreamer or to the dream-work by which they are expressed; for we have discovered that the same symbolism is employed in myths and fairy tales, in popular sayings and songs, in colloquial speech and poetic phantasy. The province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide: dream-symbolism is only a small part of it; it would not even be expedient to attack the whole problem from the side of dreams. Many of the symbols commonly occurring elsewhere either do not appear in dreams at all or appear very seldom; on the other hand, many of the dream-symbols are not met with in every other department, but, as you have seen, only here and there. We get the impression that here we have to do with an ancient but obsolete mode of expression, of which different fragments have survived in different fields, one here only, another there only, a third in various spheres perhaps in slightly different forms. At this point I am reminded of the phantasy of a very interesting insane patient, who had imagined a “primordial language” (Grundsprache) of which all these symbols were survivals.

In the third place, it must strike you that the symbolism occurring in the other fields I have named is by no means confined to sexual themes, whereas in dreams the symbols are almost exclusively used to represent sexual objects and relations. This again is hard to account for. Are we to suppose that symbols originally of sexual significance were later employed differently and that perhaps the decline from symbolic to other modes of representation is connected with this? It is obviously impossible to answer these questions by dealing only with dream-symbolism; all we can do is to hold fast to the supposition that there is a specially close relation between true symbols and sexuality.

An important clue in this connection has recently been given to us in the view expressed by a philologist (H. Sperber, of Upsala, who works independently of psycho-analysis), that sexual needs have had the largest share in the origin and development of language. He says that the first sounds uttered were a means of communication, and of summoning the sexual partner, and that in the later development the elements of speech were used as an accompaniment to the different kinds of work carried on by primitive man. This work was performed by associated efforts, to the sound of rhythmically repeated utterances, the effect of which was to transfer a sexual interest to the work. Primitive man thus made his work agreeable, so to speak, by treating it as the equivalent of and substitute for sexual activities. The word uttered during the communal work had therefore two meanings, the one referring to the sexual act, the other to the labour which had come to be equivalent to it. In time the word was dissociated from its sexual significance and its application confined to the work. Generations later the same thing happened to a new word with a sexual signification, which was then applied to a new form of work. In this way a number of root-words arose which were all of sexual origin but had all lost their sexual meaning. If the statement here outlined be correct, a possibility at least of understanding dream-symbolism opens out before us. We should comprehend why it is that in dreams, which retain something of these primitive conditions, there is such an extraordinarily large number of sexual symbols; and why weapons and tools in general stand for the male, and materials and things worked on for the female. The symbolic relation would then be the survival of the old identity in words; things which once had the same name as the genitalia could now appear in dreams as symbolizing them.

Further, our parallels to dream-symbolism may assist you to appreciate what it is in psycho-analysis which makes it a subject of general interest, in a way that was not possible to either psychology or psychiatry; psycho-analytic work is so closely intertwined with so many other branches of science, the investigation of which gives promise of the most valuable conclusions: with mythology, philology, folk-lore, folk psychology and the study of religion. You will not be surprised to hear that a publication has sprung from psycho-analytic soil, of which the exclusive object is to foster these relations. I refer to Imago, first published in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank. In its relation to all these other subjects, psycho-analysis has in the first instance given rather than received. True, analysis reaps the advantage of receiving confirmation of its own results, seemingly so strange, again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis which supplies the technical methods and the points of view, the application of which is to prove fruitful in these other provinces. The mental life of the human individual yields, under psycho-analytic investigation, explanations which solve many a riddle in the life of the masses of mankind or at any rate can show these problems in their true light.

I have still given you no idea of the circumstances in which we may arrive at the deepest insight into that hypothetical “primordial language,” or of the province in which it is for the most part retained. As long as you do not know this you cannot appreciate the true significance of the whole subject. I refer to the province of neurosis; the material is found in the symptoms and other modes of expression of nervous patients, for the explanation and treatment of which psycho-analysis was indeed devised.

My fourth point of view takes us back to the place from which we started and leads into the track we have already marked out. We said that even if there were no dream-censorship we should still find it difficult to interpret dreams, for we should then be confronted with the task of translating the symbolic language of dreams into the language of waking life. Symbolism, then, is a second and independent factor in dream-distortion, existing side by side with the censorship. But the conclusion is obvious that it suits the censorship to make use of symbolism, in that both serve the same purpose: that of making the dream strange and incomprehensible.

Whether a further study of the dream will not introduce us to yet another contributing factor in the distortion, we shall soon see. But I must not leave the subject of dream-symbolism without once more touching on the puzzling fact that it has succeeded in rousing such strenuous opposition amongst educated persons, although the prevalence of symbolism in myth, religion, art and language is beyond all doubt. Is it not probable that, here again, the reason is to be found in its relation to sexuality?

Eleventh Lecture — The Dream-Work

When you have successfully grasped the dream-censorship and symbolic representation, you will not, it is true, have mastered dream-distortion in its entirety, but you will nevertheless be in a position to understand most dreams. To do so, you will make use of the two complementary methods: you will call up the dreamer’s associations till you have penetrated from the substitute to the thought proper for which it stands, and you will supply the meaning of the symbols from your own knowledge of the subject. We will speak later of certain doubtful points which may arise in the process.

We can now return to a task which we attempted earlier with inadequate equipment, when we were studying the relations between dream-elements and the thoughts proper underlying them. We then determined the existence of four such main relations: substitution of the part for the whole, hints or allusions, symbolic connection, and plastic word-representation (images). We will now try to deal with this subject on a larger scale, by a comparison of the manifest dream-content as a whole with the latent dream as laid bare by our interpretation.

I hope you will never again confuse these two things. If you succeed in distinguishing between them, you will have advanced further towards an understanding of dreams than in all probability most of the readers of my Interpretation of Dreams have done. Let me again remind you that the process by which the latent dream is transformed into the manifest dream is called THE DREAM-WORK; while the reverse process, which seeks to progress from the manifest to the latent thoughts, is our work of interpretation; the work of interpretation therefore aims at demolishing the dream-work. In dreams of the infantile type in which the obvious wish-fulfilments are easily recognized, the process of dream-work has nevertheless been operative to some extent, for the wish has been transformed into a reality and, usually, the thoughts also into visual images. Here no interpretation is necessary; we only have to retrace both these transformations. The further operations of the dream-work, as seen in the other types of dreams, we call dream-distortion, and here the original ideas have to be restored by our interpretative work.

Having had the opportunity of comparing many dream-interpretations, I am in a position to give you a comprehensive account of the manner in which the dream-work deals with the material of the latent dream-thoughts. But please do not expect to understand too much: it is a piece of description which should be listened to quietly and attentively.

The first achievement of the dream-work is CONDENSATION; by this term we mean to convey the fact that the content of the manifest dream is less rich than that of the latent thoughts, is, as it were, a kind of abbreviated translation of the latter. Now and again condensation may be lacking, but it is present as a rule and is often carried to a very high degree. It never works in the opposite manner, i.e. it never happens that the manifest dream is wider in range or richer in content than is the latent dream. Condensation is accomplished in the following ways: (1) certain latent elements are altogether omitted; (2) of many complexes in the latent dream only a fragment passes over into the manifest content; (3) latent elements sharing some common characteristic are in the manifest dream put together, blended into a single whole.

If you prefer to do so, you can reserve the term ‘condensation’ for this last process, the effects of which are particularly easy to demonstrate. Taking your own dreams, you will be able without any trouble to recall instances of the condensation of different persons into a single figure. Such a composite figure resembles A. in appearance, but is dressed like B., pursues some occupation which recalls C., and yet all the time you know that it is really D. The composite picture serves, of course, to lay special emphasis upon some characteristic common to the four people. And it is possible also for a composite picture to be formed with objects or places, as with persons, provided only that the single objects or places have some common attribute upon which the latent dream lays stress. It is as though a new and fugitive concept were formed, of which the common attribute is the kernel. From the superimposing of the separate parts which undergo condensation there usually results a blurred and indistinct picture, as if several photographs had been taken on the same plate.

The formation of such composite figures must be of great importance in the dream-work, for we can prove that the common properties necessary to their formation are purposely manufactured where at first sight they would seem to be lacking, as, for example, by the choice of some particular verbal expression for a thought. We have already met with instances of condensation and composite-formation of this sort; they played an important part in originating many slips of the tongue. You will remember the case of the young man who wished to “insort” a lady (beleidigen = insult, begleiten = escort, composite word begleitdigen). Besides, there are jokes in which the technique is traceable to condensation of this sort. Apart from this, however, we may venture to assert that this process is something quite unusual and strange. It is true that in many a creation of phantasy we meet with counterparts to the formation of the composite persons of our dreams, component parts which do not belong to one another in reality being readily united into a single whole by phantasy, as, for instance, in the centaurs and fabulous animals of ancient mythology or of Boecklin’s pictures. “Creative” phantasy can, in fact, invent nothing new, but can only regroup elements from different sources. But the peculiar thing about the way in which the dream-work proceeds is this: its material consists of thoughts, some of which may be objectionable and disagreeable, but which nevertheless are correctly formed and expressed. The dream-work transmutes these thoughts into another form, and it is curious and incomprehensible that in this process of translation—of rendering them, as it were, into another script or language—the means of blending and combining are employed. The translator’s endeavour in other cases must surely be to respect the distinctions observed in the text, and especially to differentiate between things which are similar but not the same; the dream-work, on the contrary, strives to condense two different thoughts by selecting, after the manner of wit, an ambiguous word which can suggest both thoughts. We must not expect to understand this characteristic straight away, but it may assume great significance for our conception of the dream-work.

Although condensation renders the dream obscure, yet it does not give the impression of being an effect of the dream-censorship. Rather we should be inclined to trace it to mechanical or economic factors; nevertheless the censorship’s interests are served by it.

What condensation can achieve is sometimes quite extraordinary: by this device it is at times possible for two completely different latent trains of thought to be united in a single manifest dream, so that we arrive at an apparently adequate interpretation of a dream and yet overlook a second possible meaning.

Moreover, one of the effects of condensation upon the relationship between the manifest and the latent dream is that the connection between the elements of the one and of the other nowhere remains a simple one; for by a kind of interlacing a manifest element represents simultaneously several latent ones and, conversely, a latent thought may enter into several manifest elements. Again, when we come to interpret dreams, we see that the associations to a single manifest element do not commonly make their appearance in orderly succession; we often have to wait until we have the interpretation of the whole dream.

The dream-work, then, follows a very unusual mode of transcription for the dream-thoughts; not a translation, word for word, or sign for sign; nor yet a process of selection according to some definite rule, for instance, as though the consonants only of the words were reproduced and the vowels omitted; nor again what one might call a process of representation, one element being always picked out to represent several others. It works by a different and much more complicated method.

The second achievement of the dream-work is DISPLACEMENT. Fortunately here we are not breaking perfectly fresh ground; indeed, we know that it is entirely the work of the dream-censorship. Displacement takes two forms: first, a latent element may be replaced, not by a part of itself, but by something more remote, something of the nature of an allusion; and, secondly, the accent may be transferred from an important element to another which is unimportant, so that the centre of the dream is shifted as it were, giving the dream a foreign appearance.

Substitution by allusion is familiar to us in our waking thoughts also, but with a difference; for it is essential in the latter that the allusion should be easily comprehensible, and that the content of the substitute should be associated to that of the thought proper. Allusion is also frequently employed in wit, where the condition of association in content is dispensed with and replaced by unfamiliar external associations, such as similarity of sound, ambiguity of meaning, etc. The condition of comprehensibility, however, is observed: the joke would lose all its point if we could not recognize without any effort what is the actual thing to which the allusion is made. But in dreams allusion by displacement is unrestricted by either limitation. It is connected most superficially and most remotely with the element for which it stands, and for that reason is not readily comprehensible; and, when the connection is traced, the interpretation gives the impression of an unsuccessful joke or of a “forced,” far-fetched and “dragged in” explanation. The object of the dream-censorship is only attained when it has succeeded in making it impossible to trace the thought proper back from the allusion.

Displacement of accent is not a legitimate device if our object be the expression of thought; though we do sometimes admit it in waking life in order to produce a comic effect. I can to some extent convey to you the impression of confusion which then results, by reminding you of an anecdote, according to which there was in a certain village a smith who had committed a capital offence. The court decided that the smith was guilty; but, since he was the only one of his trade in the village and therefore indispensable, whereas there were three tailors living there, one of these three was hanged in his place!

The third achievement of the dream-work is the most interesting from the psychological point of view. It consists in the transformation of thoughts into visual images. Let us be quite clear that not everything in the dream-thoughts is thus transformed; much keeps its original form and appears also in the manifest dream as thought or knowledge, on the part of the dreamer; again, translation of them into visual images is not the only possible transformation of thoughts. But it is nevertheless the essential feature in the formation of dreams, and, as we know, this part of the dream-work is, if we except one other case, the least subject to variation; for single dream-elements, moreover, plastic word-representation is a process already familiar to us.

Obviously this achievement is by no means an easy one. In order to get some idea of its difficulty, imagine that you had undertaken to replace a political leading article in a newspaper by a series of illustrations; you would have to abandon alphabetic characters in favour of hieroglyphics. The people and concrete objects mentioned in the article could be easily represented, perhaps even more satisfactorily, in pictorial form; but you would expect to meet with difficulties when you came to the portrayal of all the abstract words and all those parts of speech which indicate relations between the various thoughts, e.g. particles, conjunctions, and so forth. With the abstract words you would employ all manner of devices: for instance, you would try to render the text of the article into other words, more unfamiliar perhaps, but made up of parts more concrete and therefore more capable of such representation. This will remind you of the fact that most abstract words were originally concrete, their original significance having faded; and therefore you will fall back on the original concrete meaning of these words wherever possible. So you will be glad that you can represent the “possessing” of an object as a literal, physical “sitting upon” it (possess = potis + sedeo). This is just how the dream-work proceeds. In such circumstances you can hardly demand great accuracy of representation, neither will you quarrel with the dream-work for replacing an element which is difficult to reduce to pictorial form, such as the idea of breaking marriage vows, by some other kind of breaking, e.g. that of an arm or leg.39 In this way you will to some extent succeed in overcoming the awkwardness of rendering alphabetic characters into hieroglyphs.

When you come to represent those parts of speech which indicate thought-relations, e.g. “because,” “therefore,” “but,” and so on, you have no such means as those described to assist you; so that these parts of the text must be lost, so far as your translation into pictorial form is concerned. Similarly, the content of the dream-thoughts is resolved by the dream-work into its ‘raw material,’ consisting of objects and activities. You may be satisfied if there is any possibility of indicating somehow, by a more minute elaboration of the images, certain relations which cannot be represented in themselves. In a precisely similar manner the dream-work succeeds in expressing much of the content of the latent thoughts by means of peculiarities in the form of the manifest dream, by its distinctness or obscurity, its division into various parts, etc. The number of parts into which a dream is divided corresponds as a rule with the number of its main themes, the successive trains of thought in the latent dream; a short preliminary dream often stands in an introductory or causal relation to the subsequent detailed main dream; whilst a subordinate dream-thought is represented by the interpolation into the manifest dream of a change of scene, and so on. The form of dreams, then, is by no means unimportant in itself, and itself demands interpretation. Several dreams in the same night often have the same meaning, and indicate an endeavour to control more and more completely a stimulus of increasing urgency. In a single dream, a specially difficult element may be represented by “doubling” it, i.e. by more than one symbol.

If we continue the comparison of dream-thoughts with the manifest dreams representing them, we discover in all directions things we should never have expected, e.g. that even nonsense and absurdity in dreams have their meaning; in fact, at this point the contrast between the medical and the psycho-analytic view of dreams becomes more marked than ever before. According to the medical view, the dream is absurd because while dreaming our mental activity has renounced its functions; according to our view, on the other hand, the dream becomes absurd when it has to represent a criticism implicit in the latent thoughts—the opinion: “It is absurd.” The dream I told you, about the visit to the theatre (“three tickets for one florin and a half”) is a good example of this: the opinion thus expressed was as follows: “It was absurd to marry so early.”

Similarly, we find out when we interpret dreams what is the real meaning of the doubts and uncertainties, so frequently mentioned by dreamers, whether a certain element did actually appear in the dream, whether it was really this and not rather something else. As a rule, there is nothing in the latent thoughts corresponding with these doubts and uncertainties; they originate wholly through the operation of the censorship and are comparable to a not entirely successful attempt at erasure.

One of our most surprising discoveries is the manner in which opposites in the latent dream are dealt with by the dream-work. We know already that points of agreement in the latent material are replaced by condensation in the manifest dream. Now contraries are treated in just the same way as similarities, with a marked preference for expression by means of the same manifest element. An element in the manifest dream which admits of an opposite may stand simply for itself, or for its opposite, or for both together; only the sense can decide which translation is to be chosen. It accords with this that there is no representation of a “No” in dreams, or at least none which is not ambiguous.

A welcome analogy to this strange behaviour of the dream-work is furnished in the development of language. Many philologists have maintained that in the oldest languages opposites such as: strong—weak, light—dark, large—small, were expressed by the same root word (antithetical sense of primal words). Thus, in old Egyptian “ken” stood originally for both “strong” and “weak.” In speaking, misunderstanding was guarded against in the use of such ambivalent words by the intonation and accompanying gestures; in writing, by the addition of a so-called “determinative,” that is to say, of a picture which was not meant to be expressed orally. Thus, “ken” = “strong” was written in such a way that after the letters there was a picture of a little man standing upright; when “ken” meant “weak,” there was added the picture of a man in a slack, crouching attitude. Only at a later period did the two opposite meanings of the same primal word come to be designated in two different ways by slight modifications of the original. Thus, from “ken” meaning “strong—weak” were derived two words: “ken” = “strong” and “kan” = “weak.” Nor is it only the oldest languages, in the last stages of their development, which have retained many survivals of these early words capable of meaning either of two opposites, but the same is true of much younger languages, even those which are to-day still living. I will quote some illustrations of this taken from the work of C. Abel (1884):

In Latin, such ambivalent words are:

altus = high or deep. sacer = sacred or accursed.

As examples of modifications of the original root, I quote:

clamare = to shout. clam = quietly, silently, secretly. siccus = dry. succus = juice.

and, in German, Stimme = voice. stumm = dumb.

A comparison of kindred languages yields a large number of examples:

English: lock = to shut. German: Loch = hole. Lücke = gap. English: cleave.40 German: kleben = to stick, adhere.

The English word “without,” originally carrying with it both a positive and a negative connotation, is to-day used in the negative sense only, but it is clear that “with” has the signification, not merely of “adding to,” but of “depriving of,” from the compounds “withdraw,” “withhold” (cf. the German wieder).

Yet another peculiarity of the dream-work has its counterpart in the development of language. In ancient Egyptian, as well as in other later languages, the sequence of sounds was transposed so as to result in different words for the same fundamental idea. Examples of this kind of parallels between English and German words may be quoted:

Topf (pot)—pot. Boat—tub. Hurry—Ruhe (rest). Balken (beam)—Kloben (club). wait—täuwen (to wait).

Parallels between Latin and German:—

capere—packen (to seize). ren—Niere (kidney).

Such transpositions as have taken place here in the case of single words are made by the dream-work in a variety of ways. The inversion of the meaning, i.e. substitution by the opposite, is a device with which we are already familiar; but, besides this, we find in dreams inversion of situations or of the relations existing between two persons, as though the scene were laid in a “topsy-turvy” world. In dreams often enough the hare shoots the hunter. Again, inversion is met with in the sequence of events, so that in dreams cause follows effect, which reminds us of what sometimes happens in a third-rate theatrical performance, when first the hero falls and then the shot which kills him is fired from the wings. Or there are dreams in which the whole arrangement of the elements is inverted, so that in interpreting them the last must be taken first, and the first last, in order to make sense at all. You remember that we also found this in our study of dream-symbolism, in which the act of plunging or falling into water has the same meaning as that of emerging from water, namely, giving birth or being born, and going up steps or a ladder means the same as coming down them. We cannot fail to recognize the advantage reaped for dream-distortion by this freedom from restrictions in representing the dream-thoughts.

These features of the dream-work may be termed archaic. They cling to the primitive modes of expression of languages or scripts, and yield the same difficulties, which we shall touch upon later in the course of some critical observations on this topic.

Now let us consider some other aspects of the subject. Clearly what has to be accomplished by the dream-work is the transformation of the latent thoughts, as expressed in words, into perceptual forms, most commonly into visual images. Now our thoughts originated in such perceptual forms; their earliest material and the first stages in their development consisted of sense-impressions, or, more accurately, of memory-pictures of these. It was later that words were attached to these pictures and then connected so as to form thoughts. So that the dream-work subjects our thoughts to a regressive process and retraces the steps in their development; in the course of this REGRESSION all new acquisitions won during this development of memory-pictures into thoughts must necessarily fall away.

This then is what we mean by the dream-work. Beside what we have learnt of its processes our interest in the manifest dream is bound to recede far into the background; I will, however, devote still a few more remarks to the manifest dream, for, after all, that is the only part of the dream with which we have any direct acquaintance.

It is natural that the manifest dream should lose some of its importance in our eyes. It must strike us as a matter of indifference whether it is carefully composed or split up into a succession of disconnected pictures. Even when the outward form of the dream is apparently full of meaning, we know that this appearance has been arrived at by the process of dream-distortion, and can have as little organic connection with the inner content of the dream as exists between the façade of an Italian church and its general structure and ground-plan. At times, however, this façade of the dream has a meaning too, reproducing an important part of the latent thoughts with little or no distortion. But we cannot know this until we have interpreted the dream and thus arrived at an opinion with regard to the degree of distortion present. A similar doubt obtains where two elements seem to be closely connected; such connection may contain a valuable hint that the corresponding elements in the latent dream are similarly related, but at other times we can convince ourselves that what is connected in thought has become widely separated in the dream.

In general we must refrain from attempting to explain one part of the manifest dream by another part, as though the dream were a coherent conception and a pragmatic representation. It is in most cases comparable rather to a piece of Breccia stone, composed of fragments of different kinds of stone cemented together in such a way that the markings upon it are not those of the original pieces contained in it. There is, as a matter of fact, one mechanism in the dream-work, known as SECONDARY ELABORATION, the object of which is to combine the immediate results of the work into a single and fairly coherent whole; during this process the material is often so arranged as to give rise to total misunderstanding, and for this purpose any necessary interpolations are made.

On the other hand, we should not overrate the dream-work or attribute to it more than is its due. Its activity is limited to the achievements here enumerated; condensation, displacement, plastic representation and secondary elaboration of the whole dream; these are all that it can effect. Such manifestations of judgement, criticism, surprise, or deductive reasoning, as are met with in dreams are not brought about by the dream-work and are only very rarely the expression of subsequent reflection about the dream; but are for the most part fragments of the latent thoughts introduced into the manifest dream with more or less modification and in a form suited to the context. Again, the dream-work cannot create conversation in dreams; save in a few exceptional cases, it is imitated from, and made up of, things heard or even said by the dreamer himself on the previous day, which have entered into the latent thoughts as the material or incitement of his dream. Neither do mathematical calculations come into the province of the dream-work; anything of the sort appearing in the manifest dream is generally a mere combination of numbers, a pseudo-calculation, quite absurd as such, and again only a copy of some calculation comprised in the latent thoughts. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the interest which was felt in the dream-work soon becomes directed instead towards the latent thoughts which disclose themselves in a more or less distorted form through the manifest dream. We are not justified, however, in a theoretical consideration of the subject, in letting our interest stray so far that we altogether substitute the latent thoughts for the dream as a whole, and make some pronouncement on the latter which is only true of the former. It is strange that the findings of psycho-analysis could be so misused as to result in confusion between the two. The term “dream” can only be applied to the results of the dream-work, i.e. to the form into which the latent thoughts have been rendered by the dream-work.

This work is a process of a quite peculiar type; nothing like it has hitherto been known in mental life. This kind of condensation, displacement, and regressive translation of thoughts into images, is a novelty, the recognition of which in itself richly rewards our efforts in the field of psycho-analysis. You will again perceive, from the parallels to dream-work, the connections revealed between psycho-analytic and other research, especially in the fields of the development of speech and thought. You will only realize the further significance of the insight so acquired when you learn that the mechanism of the dream-work is a kind of model for the formation of neurotic symptoms.

I know too that it is not possible for us yet to grasp the full extent of the fresh gain accruing to psychology from these labours. We will only hint at the new proofs thereby afforded of the existence of unconscious mental activities—for this indeed is the nature of the latent dream-thoughts—and at the promise dream-interpretation gives of an approach, wider than we ever guessed at, to the knowledge of the unconscious life of the mind.

Now, however, I think the time has come to give you individual examples of various short dreams, which will illustrate the points for which I have already prepared you.

Twelfth Lecture — Examples of Dreams and Analysis of Them

You must not be disappointed if I present you once more with fragments of dream-interpretations, instead of inviting you to participate in the interpretation of one fine long dream. You will say that after so much preparation you surely have a right to expect that; and you will express your conviction that, after successful interpretations of so many thousands of dreams, it should long ago have been possible to collect a number of striking examples by which the truth of all our assertions about the dream-work and dream-thoughts could be demonstrated. Yes, but there are too many difficulties in the way of fulfilling this wish of yours.

In the first place, I must confess that there is nobody who makes the interpretation of dreams his main business. In what circumstances, then, do we come to interpret them? At times we may occupy ourselves, for no particular purpose, with the dreams of a friend, or we may work out our own dreams over a period of time in order to train ourselves for psycho-analytic work; but chiefly we have to do with the dreams of nervous patients who are undergoing psycho-analytic treatment. These last dreams provide splendid material and are in no respect inferior to those of healthy persons, but the technique of the treatment obliges us to subordinate dream-interpretation to therapeutic purposes and to desist from the attempt to interpret a large number of the dreams as soon as we have extracted from them something of use for the treatment. Again, many dreams which occur during the treatment elude full interpretation altogether; since they have their origin in the whole mass of material in the mind which is as yet unknown to us, it is not possible to understand them until the completion of the cure. To relate such dreams would necessarily involve revealing all the secrets of a neurosis; this will not do for us, since we have taken up the problem of dreams in preparation for the study of the neuroses.

Now I expect you would willingly dispense with this material and would prefer to listen to the explanation of dreams of healthy persons or perhaps of your own. But the content of these dreams makes that impossible. One cannot expose oneself, nor anyone whose confidence has been placed in one, so ruthlessly as a thorough interpretation of a dream would necessitate; for, as you already know, they touch upon all that is most intimate in the personality. Apart from the difficulty arising out of the nature of the material, there is another difficulty as regards relating the dreams. You are aware that the dream seems foreign and strange to the dreamer himself; how much more so to an outsider to whom his personality is unknown. The literature of psycho-analysis shows no lack of good and detailed dream-analyses; I myself have published some which formed part of the history of certain pathological cases. Perhaps the best example of a dream-interpretation is that published by O. Rank, consisting of the analysis of two mutually-related dreams of a young girl. These cover about two pages of print, while the analysis of them runs into 76 pages. It would need almost a whole term’s lectures in order to take you through a work of this magnitude. If we selected some fairly long and considerably distorted dream we should have to enter into so many explanations, to adduce so much material in the shape of associations and recollections, and to go down so many sidetracks, that a single lecture would be quite unsatisfying and would give no clear idea of it as a whole. So I must ask you to be content if I pursue a less difficult course, and relate some fragments from dreams of neurotic patients, in which this or that isolated feature may be recognized. Symbols are the easiest features to demonstrate and, after them, certain peculiarities of the regressive character of dream-representation. I will tell you why I regard each of the following dreams as worth relating.

1. A dream consisted only of two short pictures: The dreamer’s uncle was smoking a cigarette, although it was Saturday.—A woman was fondling and caressing the dreamer as though he were her child.

With reference to the first picture, the dreamer (a Jew) remarked that his uncle was a very pious man who never had done, and never would do, anything so sinful as smoking on the Sabbath. The only association to the woman in the second picture was that of the dreamer’s mother. These two pictures or thoughts must obviously be related to one another; but in what way? Since he expressly denied that his uncle would in reality perform the action of the dream, the insertion of the conditional “if” will at once suggest itself. “If my uncle, that deeply religious man, were to smoke a cigarette on the Sabbath, then I myself might be allowed to let my mother fondle me.” Clearly, that is as much as to say that being fondled by the mother was something as strictly forbidden as smoking on the Sabbath is to the pious Jew. You will remember my telling you that in the dream-work all relations among the dream-thoughts disappear; the thoughts are broken up into their raw material, and our task in interpreting is to re-insert these connections which have been omitted.

2. My writings on the subject of dreams have placed me to some extent in the position of public consultant on the question, and for many years now I have received letters from the most diverse quarters communicating dreams to me or asking for my opinion. Naturally I am grateful to all those who have given me sufficient material with their dreams to make an interpretation possible, or have themselves volunteered one. The following dream of a medical student in Munich dating from 1910, belongs to this category; and I quote it because it may prove to you how hard it is, generally speaking, to understand a dream until the dreamer has given us what information he can about it. For I have a suspicion that in the bottom of your hearts you think that the translating of the symbols is the ideal method of interpretation and that you would like to discard that of free association; I want, therefore, to clear your minds of so pernicious an error.

July 18th, 1910. Towards morning I had the following dream: I was bicycling down a street in Tübingen, when a brown dachshund came rushing after me and caught hold of one of my heels. I rode a little further and then dismounted, sat down on a step and began to beat the creature off, for it had set its teeth fast in my heel. (The dog’s biting me and the whole scene roused no unpleasant sensations.) Two elderly ladies were sitting opposite, watching me with grinning faces. Then I woke up and, as has frequently happened before, with the transition to waking consciousness the whole dream was clear to me.

In this instance symbolism cannot help us much, but the dreamer goes on to tell us: “I recently fell in love with a girl, just from seeing her in the street; but I had no means of introduction to her. I should have liked best to make her acquaintance through her dachshund, for I am a great animal-lover myself and was attracted by seeing that she was one too.” He adds that several times he had separated fighting dogs very skilfully, often to the amazement of the onlookers. Now we learn that the girl who had taken his fancy was always seen walking with this particular dog. She, however, has been eliminated from the manifest dream; only the dog associated with her has remained. Possibly the elderly ladies who grinned at him represented her, but the rest of what he tells us does not clear up this point. The fact that he was riding a bicycle in the dream was a direct repetition of the situation as he remembered it, for he had not met the girl with the dog except when he was bicycling.

3. When a man has lost someone dear to him, for a considerable period afterwards he produces a special type of dream, in which the most remarkable compromises are effected between his knowledge that that person is dead and his desire to call him back to life. Sometimes the deceased is dreamt of as being dead, and yet still alive because he does not know that he is dead, as if he would only really die if he did know it; at other times he is half dead and half alive, and each of these conditions has its distinguishing marks. We must not call these dreams merely nonsensical, for to come to life again is no more inadmissible in dreams than in fairy tales, in which it is quite a common fate. As far as I have been able to analyse such dreams, it appeared that they were capable of a reasonable explanation, but that the pious wish to recall the departed is apt to manifest itself in the strangest ways. I will submit a dream of this sort to you, which certainly sounds strange and absurd enough, and the analysis of which will demonstrate many points already indicated in our theoretical discussions. The dreamer was a man who had lost his father some years previously:—

My father was dead but had been exhumed and looked ill. He went on living, and I did all I could to prevent his noticing it. Then the dream goes on to other matters, apparently very remote.

That the father was dead we know to be a fact; but the exhumation had not taken place in reality: indeed, the question of real fact has nothing to do with anything that follows. But the dreamer went on to say that after he returned from his father’s funeral one of his teeth began to ache. He wanted to treat it according to the Jewish precept: “If thy tooth offend thee, pluck it out,” and accordingly went to the dentist. The latter, however, said that that was not the way to treat a tooth; one must have patience with it. “I will put something in it,” he said, “to kill the nerve, and you must come back in three days’ time, when I will take it out again.” “This ‘taking out,’” said the dreamer suddenly, “is the exhuming.”

Now was he right? True, the parallel is not exact, for it was not the tooth which was taken out, but only a dead part of it. As a result of experience, however, we can well credit the dream-work with inaccuracies of this sort. We must suppose that the dreamer had, by a process of condensation, combined the dead father with the tooth, which was dead and which he yet retained. No wonder then that an absurdity was the result in the manifest dream, for obviously not all that was said about the tooth could apply to the father. What then are we to regard as the tertium comparationis between the father and the tooth,—what common factor makes the comparison possible?

Such a factor must have existed, for the dreamer went on to observe that he knew the saying that if one dreams of losing a tooth it means that one is about to lose a member of his family.

We know that this popular interpretation is incorrect or at least correct only in a very distorted sense. We shall therefore be the more surprised actually to discover the subject thus touched upon behind the other elements of the dream-content.

Without being pressed further, the dreamer then began to talk of his father’s illness and death, and of the relations which had existed between father and son. The illness had been a long one, and the care and treatment of the invalid had cost the son a large sum of money. Yet it never seemed too much to him, nor did his patience ever fail or the wish occur to him that the end should come. He prided himself on his true Jewish filial piety and on his strict observance of the Jewish law. Does not a certain contradiction strike us here in the thoughts relating to the dream? He had identified the tooth with the father. He wanted to treat the former according to the Jewish law which commanded that a tooth which causes pain and annoyance should be plucked out. His father he also wanted to treat according to the precepts of the law, but here the command was that he must pay no heed to expense and annoyance, must take the whole burden upon himself, and not allow any hostile intention to arise against the cause of the trouble. Would not the agreement between the two situations be much more convincing if he had really gradually come to have the same feelings towards his sick father as he had towards his diseased tooth, that is to say, if he had wished for death to put a speedy end to his father’s superfluous, painful and costly existence?

I have no doubt that this was, in reality, his attitude towards his father during the protracted illness and that his boastful assertions of filial piety were designed to divert his mind from any recollections of the sort. Under conditions such as these it is no uncommon thing for the death-wish against the father to be roused, and to mask itself with some ostensibly compassionate reflection, such as: “It would be a blessed release for him.” But I want you particularly to notice that here in the latent thoughts themselves a barrier has been broken down. The first part of the thoughts was, we may be sure, only temporarily unconscious, that is, during the actual process of the dream-work; the hostile feelings towards the father, on the other hand, had probably been permanently so, possibly dating from childhood and having at times, during the father’s illness, crept as it were timidly and in a disguised form into consciousness. We can maintain this with even greater certainty of other latent thoughts which have unmistakably contributed to the content of the dream. There are, it is true, no indications in it of hostile feelings towards the father; but when we enquire into the origin of such hostility in the life of the child we remember that fear of the father arises from the fact that in the earliest years of life it is he who opposes the sexual activity of the boy, as he is usually compelled to do again, after puberty, from motives of social expediency. This was the relation in which our dreamer stood to his father; his affection for him had been tinged with a good deal of respect and dread, the source of which was early sexual intimidation.

We can now explain the further phrases in the dream from the onanism complex. “He looked ill” was an allusion to another remark of the dentist’s—that it did not look well for a tooth to be missing just there—but it also refers at the same time to the “looking ill” by which the young man, during the period of puberty, betrays, or fears lest he might betray, his excessive sexual activity. It was with a lightening of his own heart that in the manifest dream the dreamer transferred the look of illness from himself to his father, an inversion with which you are familiar as a device of the dream-work. “He went on living” accords both with the wish to recall the father to life and the promise of the dentist to save the tooth. The phrase “I did everything I could to prevent his noticing” is extremely subtly designed to lead us to complete it with the words “that he was dead.” The only completion of them that really makes sense, however, is again to be traced to the onanism complex, where it is a matter of course that the young man should do all he can to conceal his sexual life from his father. Finally, I would remind you that the so-called “toothache dreams” always refer to onanism, and the punishment for it that is feared.

You see how this incomprehensible dream is built up by a piece of remarkable and misleading condensation, by omitting from it all the thoughts that belong to the core of the latent train of thought, and by the creation of ambiguous substitute-formations to represent those thoughts which were deepest and most remote in time.

4. We have already tried repeatedly to get to the bottom of those prosaic and banal dreams which have nothing absurd or strange in them, but which suggest the question: Why should we dream about such trivialities at all? I will therefore quote a fresh example of this sort in the shape of three dreams connected with one another and dreamt by a young lady in the course of a single night.

(a) She was going through the hall in her house and struck her head on a low-hanging chandelier with such force as to draw blood. This episode did not remind her of anything that had actually happened; her remarks led in quite another direction: “You know how terribly my hair is coming out. Well, yesterday my mother said to me: ‘My dear child, if it goes on like this, your head will soon be as bald as your buttocks.’” We see here that the head stands for the other end of the body. No further assistance is required to understand the symbolism of the chandelier: all objects capable of elongation are symbols of the male organ. The real subject of the dream then is a bleeding at the lower end of the body, caused by contact with the penis. This might still have other meanings; the dreamer’s further associations show that the dream has to do with the belief that menstruation results from sexual intercourse with a man, a notion about sexual matters which is by no means uncommon amongst immature girls.

(b) The dreamer saw in a vineyard a deep hole which she knew had been caused by the uprooting of a tree. Her remark on this point was that “the tree was missing,” meaning that she did not see the tree in the dream; but the same phrase serves to express another thought, which leaves us in no doubt as to the symbolic interpretation. The dream refers to another infantile notion on the subject of sex, to the belief that girls originally had the same genital organ as boys and that the later conformation of this organ has been brought about by castration (uprooting the tree).

(c) The dreamer was standing in front of her writing-table drawer which she knows so well that, if anyone touched it, she would immediately be aware of it. The writing-table drawer, like all drawers, chests and boxes, is a symbol of the female genital. She knew that when sexual intercourse (or, as she thought, any contact at all) has taken place the genital shows certain indications of the fact, and she had long had a fear of being convicted of this. I think that in all three dreams the main emphasis lies on the idea of knowing. She had in mind the time of childish investigations into sexual matters, of the results of which she had been very proud at the time.

5. Here is another example of symbolism. But this time I must preface it with a short account of the mental situation in which the dream occurred. A man and a woman who were in love had spent a night together; he described her nature as maternal, she was one of those women whose desire to have a child comes out irresistibly during caresses. The conditions of their meeting, however, made it necessary to take precautions to prevent the semen from entering the womb. On waking the next morning, the woman related the following dream:—

An officer with a red cap was pursuing her in the street. She fled from him and ran up the staircase, with him after her. Breathless, she reached her rooms and slammed and locked the door behind her. The man remained outside and, peeping through the keyhole in the door, she saw him sitting on a bench outside, weeping.

In the pursuit by the officer with the red cap and the breathless climbing of the stairs you will recognize the representation of the sexual act. That the dreamer shuts her pursuer out may serve as an example of the device of inversion so frequently employed in dreams, for in reality it was the man who withdrew before the completion of the sexual act. In the same way, she has projected her own feeling of grief on to her partner, for it is he, who weeps in the dream, his tears at the same time alluding to the seminal fluid.

You will certainly have heard it said at some time or other that psycho-analysis maintains that all dreams have a sexual meaning. You are now in a position yourselves to form an opinion as to the falseness of this reproach. You have learnt of wish-fulfilment dreams, dealing with the gratification of the most obvious needs—hunger, thirst, and the longing for liberty—comfort-dreams and impatience-dreams, as well as those which are frankly avaricious and egoistical. You may, however, certainly bear it in mind that, according to the results of psycho-analysis, dreams in which a marked degree of distortion is present mainly (but here again not exclusively) give expression to sexual desires.

6. I have a special motive in giving many instances of the use of symbols in dreams. In our first lecture I complained of the difficulty of demonstrating my statements in such a way as to carry conviction with regard to the findings of psycho-analysis, and since then you have doubtless agreed with me. Now the separate propositions of psycho-analysis are nevertheless so intimately related that conviction on a single point easily leads to acceptance of the greater part of the whole theory. It might be said of psycho-analysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand. If you accept the explanation of errors as satisfactory, you cannot logically stop short of belief in all the rest. Now dream-symbolism provides another, equally good, approach to such acceptance. I will recount to you a dream, which has already been published, of a woman of the poorer classes, whose husband was a watchman and of whom we may be sure that she had never heard of dream-symbolism and psycho-analysis. You can then judge for yourselves whether the interpretation arrived at with the help of sexual symbols can justly be called arbitrary or forced.

“... Then someone broke into the house and in terror she cried for a watchman. But the watchman, accompanied by two tramps, had gone into a church, which had several steps leading up to it. Behind the church there was a mountain and, up above, a thick wood. The watchman wore a helmet, gorget and cloak, and had a full brown beard. The two tramps, who had gone along peaceably with him, had aprons twisted round their hips like sacks. A path led from the church to the mountain and was overgrown on both sides with grass and bushes which grew denser and denser, and at the top of the mountain there was a regular wood.”

You will recognize without any trouble the symbols here employed: the male organ is represented by the trinity of three persons appearing, whilst the female sexual organs are symbolized by a landscape with a chapel, a mountain and a wood, and once more you have the act of going up steps as symbolic of the sexual act. The part of the body called in the dream “a mountain” is similarly termed in anatomy the mons veneris.

7. I will tell you another dream which is to be explained in the light of symbolism, a dream, moreover, which is noteworthy and convincing from the fact that the dreamer himself translated all the symbols, though he brought no previous theoretical knowledge to the interpretation. This is a very unusual circumstance and we have no accurate idea of the conditions which give rise to it.

He was walking with his father in a place which must have been the Prater,41 for they saw the Rotunda with a little building in front of it, to which was made fast a captive balloon which looked rather slack. His father asked him what it was all for; the son wondered at his asking, but explained it nevertheless. Then they came to a court-yard, where a large sheet of metal lay spread out. His father wanted to break off a big piece, but looked round first in case anyone should notice him. He said to his son that all the same he need only tell the overseer and then he could take it straightaway. Some steps led down from this court to a shaft, the sides of which were upholstered with some soft stuff, something like a leather armchair. At the bottom of this shift was a rather long platform and, beyond it, another shaft.

The following is the dreamer’s own interpretation:—“The Rotunda stands for my genitals and the captive balloon in front of it for the penis, which I have had to complain of for being limp.” A more detailed translation would then run thus: the rotunda stands for the buttocks (regularly included by children amongst the genitals), the smaller structure in front is the scrotum. In the dream, his father asks him what all this is, i.e. what are the purpose and function of the genitals. To invert this situation so that the son asks the questions is an obvious idea, and, since these questions were never asked in reality, we must construe the dream-thoughts as a wish or take them in a conditional sense: “If I had asked my father to explain....” The sequel to this thought we shall find presently.

The court-yard where the sheet-metal lay is not in the first place to be explained symbolically, but is a reference to the father’s place of business. From motives of discretion I have substituted “sheet-metal” for the actual material dealt with by him, but otherwise I have made no alteration in the words of the dream. The dreamer had entered his father’s business and had been much scandalized by the extremely questionable practices upon which the high profits largely depended. Hence the sequel to the dream-thought mentioned above would run: “(If I had asked him), he would have deceived me as he deceives his customers.” The dreamer himself gives a second explanation for the pulling off the piece of metal which serves to represent commercial dishonesty: it means, he says, the practice of masturbation. Not only is this an explanation with which we have long been familiar, but it is well in accordance with this interpretation that the secret practice of masturbation should be expressed by the opposite idea (“We may do it openly”). So the fact that this practice is imputed to the father, as was the questioning in the first scene of the dream, is exactly what we should expect. The dreamer immediately interpreted the shaft, on account of the soft upholstering of the walls, as the vagina, and I, on my own account, offer the remark that going-down as well as going-up stands for sexual intercourse.

The details of the long platform at the bottom of the first shaft, and beyond that the second shaft, were explained by the dreamer himself from his own history. He had practised intercourse for some time and then given it up on account of inhibitions, but hoped to be able to resume it by the help of the treatment.

8. I quote the two following dreams, dreamt by a foreigner with marked polygamous tendencies, because they may serve to illustrate the statement that the dreamer’s own person is present in every dream, even when it is disguised in the manifest content. The trunks in the dreams are female symbols.

(a) The dreamer was going on a journey and his luggage was being taken to the station on a carriage. There were a number of trunks piled one on the top of the other, and amongst them two large black boxes like those of a commercial traveller. He said consolingly to someone: “You see those are only going as far as the station.”

He does, as a matter of fact, travel with a great deal of luggage, and he also brings many stories about women to the treatment. The two black trunks stand for two dark women who at the moment are playing the principal part in his life. One of them wanted to follow him to Vienna, but on my advice he had telegraphed to put her off.

(b) A scene at a customs house:—A fellow-traveller opened his trunk and said nonchalantly, smoking a cigarette: “There is nothing to declare in that.” The customs official seemed to believe him, but felt in the trunk again and found a strictly prohibited article. The traveller then said in a resigned way: “Well, it can’t be helped.” The dreamer himself is the traveller and I am the official. He is generally very straightforward with me, but had made up his mind to conceal from me a relation which he had recently formed with a lady, for he assumed quite correctly that I knew her. He displaces on to a stranger the embarrassing situation of being detected, so that he himself does not seem to come into the dream at all.

9. Here we have an example of a symbol which I have not yet mentioned:—

The dreamer met his sister with two friends who were themselves sisters. He shook hands with these two, but not with his sister.

There was no real episode connected with this in his mind. Instead, his thoughts went back to a time when his observations led him to wonder why a girl’s breasts are so late in developing. The two sisters, therefore, stand for the breasts; he would have liked to grasp them with his hand, if only it had not been his sister.

10. Here is an example of death symbolism in dreams:—The dreamer was crossing a very high, steep, iron bridge, with two people whose names he knew, but forgot on waking. Suddenly both of them had vanished and he saw a ghostly man in a cap and an overall. He asked him whether he were the telegraph messenger.... “No.” Or the coachman?... “No.” He then went on, and in the dream, had a feeling of great dread; on waking, he followed it up with the phantasy that the iron bridge suddenly broke and that he fell into the abyss.

When stress is laid upon the fact that people in a dream are unknown to the dreamer, or that he has forgotten their names, they are, as a rule, persons with whom he is intimately connected. The dreamer was one of a family of three children; if he had ever wished for the death of the other two, it would be only just that he should be visited with the fear of death. With reference to the telegraph messenger, he remarked that they always bring bad news. From his uniform, the man in the dream might have been a lamp-lighter, who also puts out the lights, as the spirit of death extinguishes the torch of life. With the coachman he associated Uhland’s poem of the voyage of King Karl, and recalled a dangerous sail on a lake with two companions, when he played the part of the king in the poem. The iron bridge suggested to him a recent accident, also the stupid saying: “Life is a suspension bridge.”

11. The following may be regarded as another example of a death-dream:—

An unknown gentleman was leaving a black-edged visiting card on the dreamer.

12. I give another dream which will interest you from several points of view; it is to be traced partly, however, to a neurotic condition in the dreamer:—

He was in a train which stopped in the open country. He thought there was going to be an accident and that he must make his escape, so he went through all the compartments, killing everyone he met,—driver, guard, and so on.

This dream recalls a story told him by a friend. On a certain Italian line, an insane man was being conveyed in a small compartment, but by some mistake a passenger was allowed to get in with him. The madman murdered the other traveller. Thus the dreamer identified himself with this insane man, his reason being that he was at times tormented by an obsession that he must make away with “everyone who shared his knowledge.” Then he himself found a better motivation for the dream. The day before, he had seen at the theatre a girl he had meant to marry but had given up because she gave him cause for jealousy. Knowing the intensity which jealousy could assume in him, he would really have been mad to want to marry her. That is to say, he thought her so unreliable that his jealousy would have led him to murder everyone who got in his way. The going through a number of rooms, or, as here, compartments, we have already learnt to know as a symbol of marriage (the expression of monogamy according to the rule of opposites).

With reference to the train’s stopping in the open country and the fear of an accident, he told the following story:—

Once when such a sudden halt occurred on the line outside a station, a young lady who was in the carriage said that perhaps there was going to be a collision, and that the best thing to do was to raise the legs high. This phrase “raise the legs” had associations with many walks and excursions into the country, which he had shared with the girl mentioned above in the happy early days of their love. Here was a new argument for the contention that he would be mad to marry her now; nevertheless, my knowledge of the situation led me to regard it as certain that there existed in him all the same the desire to fall a victim to this form of madness.

Thirteenth Lecture — Archaic and Infantile Features in Dreams

Let us start afresh from our conclusion that, under the influence of the censorship, the dream-work translates the latent dream-thoughts into another form. These thoughts are of the same nature as the familiar, conscious thoughts of waking life; the new form in which they are expressed is, owing to many peculiar characteristics, incomprehensible to us. We have said that it goes back to phases in our intellectual development which we have long outgrown—to hieroglyphic writing, to symbolic-connections, possibly to conditions which existed before the language of thought was evolved. On this account we called the form of expression employed by the dream-work archaic or regressive.

From this you may draw the inference that a more profound study of the dream-work must lead to valuable conclusions about the initial stages of our intellectual development, of which at present little is known. I hope it will be so, but so far this task has not been attempted. The era to which the dream-work takes us back is “primitive” in a twofold sense: in the first place, it means the early days of the individual—his childhood—and, secondly, in so far as each individual repeats in some abbreviated fashion during childhood the whole course of the development of the human race, the reference is phylogenetic. I believe it not impossible that we may be able to discriminate between that part of the latent mental processes which belongs to the early days of the individual and that which has its roots in the infancy of the race. It seems to me, for instance, that symbolism, a mode of expression which has never been individually acquired, may claim to be regarded as a racial heritage.

This, however, is not the only archaic feature in dreams. You are all familiar from actual experience with the peculiar amnesia of childhood to which we are subject. I mean that the first years of life, up to the age of five, six, or eight, have not left the same traces in memory as our later experiences. True, we come across individuals who can boast of continuous recollection from early infancy to the present time, but it is incomparably more common for the opposite, a blank in memory, to be found. In my opinion, this has not aroused sufficient surprise. At two years old the child can speak well and soon shows his capacity for adapting himself to complicated mental situations, and, moreover, says things which he himself has forgotten when they are repeated to him years later. And yet memory is more efficient in early years, being less overburdened than it is later. Again, there is no reason to regard the function of memory as an especially high or difficult form of mental activity; on the contrary, excellent memory may be found in people who are yet on a very low plane intellectually.

But I must draw your attention to a second peculiarity, based upon the first—namely, that from the oblivion in which the first years of childhood are shrouded certain clearly retained recollections emerge, mostly in the form of plastic images, for the retention of which there seems no adequate ground. Memory deals with the mass of impressions received in later life by a process of selection, retaining what is important and omitting what is not; but with the recollections retained from childhood this is not so. They do not necessarily reflect important experiences in childhood, not even such as must have seemed important from the child’s standpoint, but are often so banal and meaningless in themselves that we can only ask ourselves in amazement why just this particular detail has escaped oblivion. I have tried, with the help of analysis, to attack the problem of childhood amnesia and of the fragments of recollection which break through it, and have come to the conclusion that, whatever may appear to the contrary, the child no less than the adult only retains in memory what is important; but that what is important is represented (by the processes of condensation and, more especially, of displacement, already familiar to you) in the memory by something apparently trivial. For this reason I have called these childhood recollections screen-memories; a thorough analysis can evolve from them all that has been forgotten.

It is a regular task in psycho-analytic treatment to fill in the blank in infantile memories, and, in so far as the treatment is successful to any extent at all (very frequently, therefore) we are enabled to bring to light the content of those early years long buried in oblivion. These impressions have never really been forgotten, but were only inaccessible and latent, having become part of the unconscious. But sometimes it happens that they emerge spontaneously from the unconscious, and it is in connection with dreams that this happens. It is clear that the dream-life knows the way back to these latent, infantile experiences. Many good illustrations of this are to be found in psycho-analytical literature, and I myself have been able to furnish a contribution of the sort. I once dreamt in a particular connection of someone who had evidently done me a service and whom I saw plainly. He was a one-eyed man, short, fat and high-shouldered; from the context I gathered that he was a doctor. Fortunately I was able to ask my mother, who was still living, what was the personal appearance of the doctor who attended us at the place where I was born and which I left at the age of three; she told me that he had only one eye and was short, fat and high-shouldered; I learnt also of the accident which was the occasion of this doctor’s being called in and which I had forgotten. This command of the forgotten material of the earliest years of childhood is thus a further ‘archaic’ feature of dreams.

This knowledge has a bearing on another of the problems which up to the present have proved insoluble. You will remember the astonishment caused by our discovery that dreams have their origin in actively evil or in excessive sexual desires, which have made both the dream-censorship and dream-distortion necessary. Supposing now that we have interpreted a dream of this sort, and the circumstances are specially favourable in that the dreamer does not quarrel with the interpretation itself, he does nevertheless invariably ask how any such wish could come into his mind, since it seems quite foreign to him and he is conscious of desiring the exact opposite. We need have no hesitation in pointing out to him the origin of the wish he repudiates: these evil impulses may be traced to the past, often indeed to a past which is not so very far away. It may be demonstrated that he once knew and was conscious of them, even if this is no longer so. A woman who had a dream meaning that she wished to see her only daughter (then seventeen years old) lying dead found, with our help, that at one time she actually had cherished this death-wish. The child was the offspring of an unhappy marriage, which ended in the speedy separation of husband and wife. Once when the child was as yet unborn the mother, in an access of rage after a violent scene with her husband, beat her body with her clenched fists in order to kill the baby in her womb. How many mothers who to-day love their children tenderly, perhaps with excessive tenderness, yet conceived them unwillingly and wished that the life within them might not develop further; and have indeed turned this wish into various actions, fortunately of a harmless kind. The later death-wish against beloved persons, which appears so puzzling, thus dates from the early days of the relationship to them.

A father, whose dream when interpreted shows that he wished for the death of his eldest and favourite child, is in the same way obliged to recall that there was a time when this wish was not unknown to him. The man, whose marriage had proved a disappointment, often thought when the child was still an infant that if the little creature who meant nothing to him were to die he would again be free and would make better use of his freedom. A large number of similar impulses of hate are to be traced to a similar source; they are recollections of something belonging to the past, something which was once in consciousness and played its part in mental life. From this you will be inclined to draw the conclusion that such dreams and such wishes would not occur in cases where there have been no changes of this sort in the relations between two persons, that is to say, where the relation has been of the same character from the beginning. I am prepared to grant you this conclusion, only I must warn you that you have to consider, not the literal meaning of the dream, but what it signifies on interpretation. It may be that the manifest dream of the death of some beloved person was only using this as a terrible mask, whilst really meaning something totally different, or it is possible that the beloved person is an illusory substitute for someone else.

This situation will, however, raise in you another and much more serious question. You will say: “Even though this death-wish did at one time actually exist and this is confirmed by recollection, that is still no true explanation; for the desire has long since been overcome and surely at the present time can exist in the unconscious merely as a recollection, of no affective value, and not as a powerful exciting agent. For this later assumption we have no evidence. Why is the wish recollected at all in dreams?” This is a question which you are really justified in asking; the attempt to answer it would take us far afield and would oblige us to define our position with regard to one of the most important points in the theory of dreams. But I must keep within the limits of our discussion and must forbear to follow up this question; so you must be reconciled to leaving it for the present. Let us content ourselves with the actual evidence that this wish, long since subdued, can be proved to have given rise to the dream, and let us continue our enquiry whether other evil wishes also can be traced in the same way to the past.

Let us keep to the death-wishes, which we shall certainly find mostly derived from the unbounded egoism of the dreamer. Wishes of this sort are very often found to be the underlying agents of dreams. Whenever anyone gets in our way in life—and how often must this happen when our relations to one another are so complicated!—a dream is immediately prepared to make away with that person, even if it be father, mother, brother or sister, husband or wife. It appeared to us amazing that such wickedness should be innate in humanity, and certainly we were not inclined to admit without further evidence that this result of our interpretation of dreams was correct. But, when once we had seen that the origin of wishes of this sort must be looked for in the past, we had little difficulty in finding the period in the past of the individual in which there is nothing strange in such egoism and such wishes, even when directed against the nearest and dearest. A child in his earliest years (which later are veiled in oblivion) is just the person who frequently displays such egoism in boldest relief; invariably, unmistakable tendencies of this kind, or, more accurately, surviving traces of them, are plainly visible in him. For a child loves himself first and only later learns to love others and to sacrifice something of his own ego to them. Even the people whom he seems to love from the outset are loved in the first instance because he needs them and cannot do without them—again therefore, from motives of egoism. Only later does the impulse of love detach itself from egoism: it is a literal fact that the child learns how to love through his own egoism.

In this connection it will be instructive to compare a child’s attitude towards his brothers and sisters with his attitude towards his parents. The little child does not necessarily love his brothers and sisters, and often he is quite frank about it. It is unquestionable that in them he sees and hates his rivals, and it is well known how commonly this attitude persists without interruption for many years, till the child reaches maturity and even later. Of course it often gives place to a more tender feeling, or perhaps we should say it is overlaid by this, but the hostile attitude seems very generally to be the earlier. We can most easily observe it in children of two and a half to four years old when a new baby arrives, which generally meets with a very unfriendly reception; remarks such as “I don’t like it. The stork is to take it away again” are very common. Subsequently every opportunity is seized to disparage the new-comer; attempts are even made to injure it and actual attacks upon it are by no means unheard-of. If the difference in age is less, by the time the child’s mental activity is more fully developed the rival is already in existence and he adapts himself to the situation; if on the other hand there is a greater difference between their ages, the new baby may rouse certain kindly feelings from the first, as an object of interest, a sort of living doll; and when there is as much as eight years or more between them, especially if the elder child is a girl, protective, motherly impulses may at once come into play. But, speaking honestly, when we find a wish for the death of a brother or a sister latent in a dream we need seldom be puzzled, for we find its origin in early childhood without much trouble, or indeed, quite often in the later years when they still lived together.

There is probably no nursery without violent conflicts between the inhabitants, actuated by rivalry for the love of the parents, competition for possessions shared by them all, even for the actual space in the room they occupy. Such hostility is directed against older as well as younger brothers and sisters. I think it was Bernard Shaw who said: “If there is anyone whom a young English lady hates more than her mother it is her elder sister.” Now there is something in this dictum which jars upon us; it is hard enough to bring ourselves to understand hatred and rivalry between brothers and sisters, but how can feelings of hate force themselves into the relation between mother and daughter, parents and children?

This relationship is no doubt a more favourable one, also from the children’s point of view; and this too is what our expectations require: we find it far more offensive for love to be lacking between parents and children than between brothers and sisters. We have, so to speak, sanctified the former love while allowing the latter to remain profane. Yet everyday observation may show us how frequently the sentiments entertained towards each other by parents and grown-up children fall short of the ideal set up by society, and how much hostility lies smouldering, ready to burst into flame if it were not stifled by considerations of filial or parental duty and by other, tender impulses. The motives for this hostility are well known, and we recognize a tendency for those of the same sex to become alienated, daughter from mother and father from son. The daughter sees in her mother the authority which imposes limits to her will, whose task it is to bring her to that renunciation of sexual freedom which society demands; in certain cases, too, the mother is still a rival, who objects to being set aside. The same thing is repeated still more blatantly between father and son. To the son the father is the embodiment of the social compulsion to which he so unwillingly submits, the person who stands in the way of his following his own will, of his early sexual pleasures and, when there is family property, of his enjoyment of it. When a throne is involved this impatience for the death of the father may approach tragic intensity. The relation between father and daughter or mother and son would seem less liable to disaster; the latter relation furnishes the purest examples of unchanging tenderness, undisturbed by any egoistic considerations.

Why, you ask, do I speak of things so banal and so well-known to everybody? Because there exists an unmistakable tendency in people’s minds to deny the significance of these things in real life and to pretend that the social ideal is much more frequently realized than it actually is. But it is better that psychology should tell the truth than that it should be left to cynics to do so. This general denial is only applied to real life, it is true; for fiction and drama are free to make use of the motives laid bare when these ideals are rudely disturbed.

There is nothing to wonder at therefore if the dreams of a great number of people bring to light the wish for the removal of their parents, especially of the parent whose sex is the same as the dreamer’s. We may assume that the wish exists in waking life as well, sometimes even in consciousness if it can disguise itself behind another motive, as the dreamer in our third example disguised his real thought by pity for his father’s useless suffering. It is but rarely that hostility reigns alone,—far more often it yields to more tender feelings which finally suppress it, when it has to wait in abeyance till a dream shows it, as it were, in isolation. That which the dream shows in a form magnified by this very isolation resumes its true proportions when our interpretation has assigned to it its proper place in relation to the rest of the dreamer’s life. (H. Sachs.) But we also find this death-wish where there is no basis for it in real life and where the adult would never have to confess to entertaining it in his waking life. The reason for this is that the deepest and most common motive for estrangement, especially between parent and child of the same sex, came into play in the earliest years of childhood.

I refer to that rivalry of affections in which sexual elements are plainly emphasized. The son, when quite a little child, already begins to develop a peculiar tenderness towards his mother, whom he looks upon as his own property, regarding his father in the light of a rival who disputes this sole possession of his; similarly the little daughter sees in her mother someone who disturbs her tender relation to her father and occupies a place which she feels she herself could very well fill. Observation shows us how far back these sentiments date, sentiments which we describe by the term Oedipus complex, because in the Oedipus myth the two extreme forms of the wishes arising from the situation of the son—the wish to kill the father and to marry the mother—are realized in an only slightly modified form. I do not assert that the Oedipus complex exhausts all the possible relations which may exist between parents and children; these relations may well be a great deal more complicated. Again, this complex may be more or less strongly developed, or it may even become inverted, but it is a regular and very important factor in the mental life of the child; we are more in danger of underestimating than of overestimating its influence and that of the developments which may follow from it. Moreover, the parents themselves frequently stimulate the children to react with an Oedipus complex, for parents are often guided in their preferences by the difference in sex of their children, so that the father favours the daughter and the mother the son; or else, where conjugal love has grown cold, the child may be taken as a substitute for the love-object which has ceased to attract.

It cannot be said that the world has shown great gratitude to psycho-analytic research for the discovery of the Oedipus complex; on the contrary, the idea has excited the most violent opposition in grown-up people; and those who omitted to join in denying the existence of sentiments so universally reprehended and tabooed have later made up for this by proffering interpretations so wide of the mark as to rob the complex of its value. My own unchanged conviction is that there is nothing in it to deny or to gloss over. We ought to reconcile ourselves to facts in which the Greek myth itself saw the hand of inexorable destiny. Again, it is interesting to find that the Oedipus complex, repudiated in actual life and relegated to fiction, has there come to its own. O. Rank in a careful study of this theme has shown how this very complex has supplied dramatic poetry with an abundance of motives in countless variations, modifications and disguises, in short, subject to just the distortion familiar to us in the work of the dream-censorship. So we may look for the Oedipus complex even in those dreamers who have been fortunate enough to escape conflicts with their parents in later life; and closely connected with this we shall find what is termed the castration complex, the reaction to that intimidation in the field of sex or to that restraint of early infantile sexual activity which is ascribed to the father.

What we have already ascertained has guided us to the study of the 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.

On the whole then, I have made no concession to your objections to the wish-fulfilment theory; we are bound, however, to demonstrate its presence in any and every distorted dream, and we have certainly no desire to shirk this task. Let us go back to the dream we have already interpreted, about the three bad theatre tickets for one florin and a half, from which we have already learnt a good deal. I hope you still remember it: A lady, whose husband told her one day about the engagement of her friend Elise who was only three months younger than herself, dreamt on the following night that she and her husband were at the theatre and that one side of the stalls was almost empty. Her husband told her that Elise and her fiancé had wanted to go to the theatre too; but could not, because they could only get such bad seats, three tickets for a florin and a half. His wife said that they had not lost much by it. We discovered that the dream-thoughts had to do with her vexation at having been in such a hurry to marry and her dissatisfaction with her husband. We may well be curious how these gloomy thoughts can have been transformed into a wish-fulfilment, and what trace of it can be found in the manifest content. Now we know already that the element “too soon, too great a hurry,” was eliminated by the censorship; the empty stalls are an allusion to this element. The puzzling phrase three for one and a half florins is now more comprehensible to us than at first, through the knowledge of symbolism that we have acquired since then.42 The number three really stands for a man and we can easily translate the manifest element to mean: “to buy a man (husband) with the dowry.” (“I could have bought one ten times better for my dowry.”) Going to the theatre obviously stands for marriage. Getting the tickets too soon is in fact a direct substitute for “marrying too soon.” Now this substitution is the work of the wish-fulfilment. The dreamer had not always felt so dissatisfied with her premature marriage as she was on the day when she heard of her friend’s engagement. She had been proud of her marriage at the time and considered herself more highly favoured than her friend. One hears that naïve girls, on becoming engaged, frequently express their delight at the idea that they will now soon be able to go to all plays and see everything hitherto forbidden them.

The indication of curiosity and a desire to “look on” evinced here comes, without doubt, originally from the sexual ‘gazing-impulse,’ especially regarding the parents, and this became a strong motive impelling the girl to marry early; in this manner going to the theatre became an obvious allusive substitute for getting married. In her vexation at the present time on account of her premature marriage she therefore reverted to the time when this same marriage fulfilled a wish, by gratifying her skoptophilia; and so, guided by this old wish-impulse, she replaced the idea of marriage by that of going to the theatre.

We may say that the example we have chosen to demonstrate a hidden wish-fulfilment is not the most convenient one, but in all other distorted dreams we should have to proceed in a manner analogous to that employed above. It is not possible for me to do this here and now, so I will merely express my conviction that such procedure will invariably meet with success. But I wish to dwell longer upon this point in our theory: experience has taught me that it is one of the most perilous of the whole theory of dreams, exposed to many contradictions and misunderstandings. Besides, you are perhaps still under the impression that I have already retracted part of my statement by saying that the dream may be either a wish-fulfilment, or its opposite, an anxiety or a punishment, brought to actuality; and you may think this a good opportunity to force me to make further reservations. Also I have been reproached with presenting facts that seem obvious to myself in a manner too condensed to carry conviction.

When anyone has gone as far as this in dream-interpretation and has accepted all our conclusions up to this point, it often happens that he comes to a standstill at this question of wish-fulfilment and asks: “Admitting that every dream means something and that this meaning may be discovered by employing the technique of psycho-analysis, why must it always, in face of all the evidence to the contrary, be forced into the formula of wish-fulfilment? Why must our thoughts at night be any less many-sided than our thoughts by day; so that at one time a dream might be a fulfilment of some wish; at another time, as you say yourself, the opposite, the actualization of a dread; or, again, the expression of a resolution, a warning, a weighing of some problem with its pro’s and con’s, or a reproof, some prick of conscience, or an attempt to prepare oneself for something which has to be done—and so forth? Why this perpetual insistence upon a wish or, at the most, its opposite?”

It might be supposed that a difference of opinion on this point is a matter of no great moment, if there is agreement on all others. Cannot we be satisfied with having discovered the meaning of dreams and the ways by which we can find out the meaning? We surely go back on the advance we have made if we try to limit this meaning too strictly. But this is not so. A misunderstanding on this head touches what is essential to our knowledge of dreams and imperils its value for the understanding of neuroses. Moreover, that readiness to “oblige the other party” which has its value in business life is not only out of place but actually harmful in scientific matters.

My first answer to the question why dreams should not be many-sided in their meaning is the usual one in such a case: I do not know why they should not be so, and should have no objection if they were. As far as I am concerned, they can be so! But there is just one trifling obstacle in the way of this wider and more convenient conception of dreams—that as a matter of fact they are not so. My second answer would emphasize the point that to assume that dreams represent manifold modes of thought and intellectual operations is by no means a novel idea to myself: once, in the history of a pathological case, I recorded a dream which occurred three nights running and never again; and gave it as my explanation that this dream corresponded to a resolution, the repetition of which became unnecessary as soon as that resolution was carried out. Later on, I published a dream which represented a confession. How is it possible for me then to contradict myself and assert that dreams are always and only wish-fulfilments?

I do it rather than permit a stupid misunderstanding which might cost us the fruit of all our labours on the subject of dreams; a misunderstanding that confounds the dream with the latent dream-thoughts, and makes statements with regard to the former which are applicable to the latter and to the latter only. For it is perfectly true that dreams can represent, and be themselves replaced by, all the modes of thought just enumerated: resolutions, warnings, reflections, preparations or attempts to solve some problem in regard to conduct, and so on. But when you look closely, you will recognize that all this is true only of the latent thoughts which have been transformed into the dream. You learn from interpretations of dreams that the unconscious thought-processes of mankind are occupied with such resolutions, preparations and reflections, out of which dreams are formed by means of the dream-work. If your interest at any given moment is not so much in the dream-work, but centres on the unconscious thought-processes in people, you will then eliminate the dream-formation and say of dreams themselves, what is for all practical purposes correct, that they represent a warning, a resolve, and so on. This is what is often done in psycho-analytic work: generally we endeavour simply to demolish the manifest form of dreams and to substitute for it the corresponding latent thoughts in which the dream originated.

Thus it is that we learn quite incidentally from our attempt to assess the latent dream-thoughts that all the highly complicated mental acts we have enumerated can be performed unconsciously—a conclusion surely as tremendous as it is bewildering.

But to go back a little: you are quite right in speaking of dreams as representing these various modes of thought, provided that you are quite clear in your own minds that you are using an abbreviated form of expression and do not imagine that the manifold variety of which you speak is in itself part of the essential nature of dreams. When you speak of “a dream” you must mean either the manifest dream, i.e. the product of the dream-work, or at most that work itself, i.e. the mental process which forms the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream. To use the word in any other sense is a confusion of ideas which is bound to be mischievous. If what you say is meant to apply to the latent thoughts behind the dream, then say so plainly, and do not add to the obscurity of the problem by your loose way of expressing yourselves. The latent dream-thoughts are the material which is transformed by the dream-work into the manifest dream. What makes you constantly confound the material with the process which deals with it? If you do that, in what way are you superior to those who know of the final product only, without being able to explain where it comes from or how it is constructed?

The only thing essential to the dream itself is the dream-work which has operated upon the thought-material; and when we come to theory we have no right to disregard this, even if in certain practical situations it may be neglected. Further, analytic observation shows that the dream-work never consists merely in translating the latent thoughts into the archaic or regressive forms of expression described. On the contrary, something is invariably added which does not belong to the latent thoughts of the day-time, but which is the actual motive force in dream-formation; this indispensable component being the equally unconscious wish, to fulfil which the content of the dream is transformed. In so far, then, as you are considering only the thoughts represented in it, the dream may be any conceivable thing—a warning, a resolve, a preparation, and so on; but besides this, it itself is always the fulfilment of an unconscious wish, and, when you regard it as the result of the dream-work, it is this alone. A dream then is never simply the expression of a resolve or warning, and nothing more: in it the resolve, or whatever it may be, is translated into the archaic form with the assistance of an unconscious wish, and metamorphosed in such a way as to be a fulfilment of that wish. This single characteristic, that of fulfilling a wish, is the constant one: the other component varies; it may indeed itself be a wish; in which event the dream represents the fulfilment of a latent wish from our waking hours brought about by the aid of an unconscious wish.

Now all this is quite clear to myself, but I do not know whether I have succeeded in making it equally clear to you; and it is difficult to prove it to you; for, on the one hand, proof requires the evidence afforded by a careful analysis of many dreams and, on the other hand, this, the crucial and most important point in our conception of dreams, cannot be presented convincingly without reference to considerations upon which we have not yet touched. Seeing how closely linked up all phenomena are, you can hardly imagine that we can penetrate very far into the nature of any one of them without troubling ourselves about others of a similar nature. Since as yet we know nothing about those phenomena which are so nearly akin to dreams—neurotic symptoms—we must once more content ourselves with what we actually have achieved. I will merely give you the explanation of one more example and adduce a new consideration.

Let us take once more that dream to which we have already reverted several times, the one about the three theatre tickets for one florin and a half. I can assure you that I had no ulterior motive in selecting it in the first instance for an illustration. You know what the latent thoughts were: the vexation, after hearing that her friend had only just become engaged, that she herself should have married so hastily; depreciation of her husband and the idea that she could have found a better one if only she had waited. We also know already that the wish which made a dream out of these thoughts was the desire to “look on,” to be able to go to the theatre—very probably an offshoot of an old curiosity to find out at last what really does happen after marriage. It is well known that in children this curiosity is regularly directed towards the sexual life of the parents; that is to say, it is an infantile impulse and, wherever it persists later in life, it has its roots in the infantile period. But the news received on the day previous to the dream gave no occasion for the awakening of this skoptophilia; it only roused vexation and regret. This wish-impulse (of skoptophilia) was not at first connected with the latent thoughts, and the results of the dream-interpretation could have been used by the analysis without taking it into consideration at all. But again, the vexation was not in itself capable of producing a dream: no dream could be formed out of the thought: “It was folly to be in such a hurry to marry” until that thought had stirred up the early wish to see at last what happened after marriage. Then this wish formed the dream-content, substituting for marriage the going to the theatre; and the form was that of the fulfilment of the earlier wish: “Now I may go to the theatre and look at all that we have never been allowed to see; and you may not. I am married and you have got to wait.” In this way the actual situation was transformed into its opposite and an old triumph substituted for the recent discomfiture; and incidentally, satisfaction both of a ‘gazing’ impulse and of one of egoistic rivalry was brought about. It is this latter satisfaction which determines the manifest content of the dream; for in it she is actually sitting in the theatre, while her friend cannot get in. Those portions of the dream-content behind which the latent thoughts still conceal themselves are to be found in the form of inappropriate and incomprehensible modifications of the gratifying situation. The business of interpretation is to put aside those features in the whole which merely represent a wish-fulfilment and to reconstruct the painful latent dream-thoughts from these indications.

The consideration which I said I wished to call to your notice is intended to direct your attention to these latent dream-thoughts now brought into prominence. I must beg you not to forget that, first, the dreamer is unconscious of them; secondly that they are quite reasonable and coherent, so that we can understand them as comprehensible reactions to whatever stimulus has given rise to the dream; and, thirdly, that they may have the value of any mental impulse or intellectual operation. I will designate these thoughts more strictly now than hitherto as the residue from the previous day; the dreamer may acknowledge them or not. I then distinguish between this ‘residue’ and ‘latent dream-thoughts,’ so that, as we have been accustomed to do all along, I will call everything which we learn from the interpretation of the dream ‘the latent dream-thoughts,’ while ‘the residue from the previous day’ is only a part of the latent dream-thoughts. Then our conception of what happens is this: something has been added to the residue from the previous day, something which also belongs to the unconscious, a strong but repressed wish-impulse, and it is this alone which makes the formation of a dream possible. The wish-impulse, acting upon the ‘residue,’ creates the other part of the latent dream-thoughts, that part which no longer need appear rational or comprehensible from the point of view of our waking life.

To illustrate the relation between the residue and the unconscious wish I have elsewhere made use of a comparison which I cannot do better than repeat here. Every business undertaking requires a capitalist to defray the expenses and an entrepreneur who has the idea and understands how to carry it out. Now the part of the capitalist in dream-formation is always and only played by the unconscious wish; it supplies the necessary fund of mental energy for it: the entrepreneur is the residue from the previous day, determining the manner of the expenditure. It is, of course, quite possible for the capitalist himself to have the idea and the special knowledge needed, or for the entrepreneur himself to have capital. This simplifies the practical situation but makes the theory of it more difficult. In economics we discriminate between the man in his function of capitalist and the same man in his capacity as entrepreneur; and this distinction restores the fundamental situation upon which our comparison is based. The same variations are to be found in the formation of dreams: I leave you to follow them out for yourselves.

We cannot go any further at this point; for I think it likely that a disturbing thought has long since occurred to you and it deserves a hearing. You may ask: “Is the so-called ‘residue’ really unconscious in the sense in which the wish necessary for the formation of the dream is unconscious?” Your suspicion is justified: this is the salient point in the whole matter. They are not both unconscious in the same sense. The dream-wish belongs to a different type of UNCONSCIOUS, which, as we have seen, has its roots in the infantile period and is furnished with special mechanisms. It is very expedient to distinguish the two types of “unconscious” from one another by speaking of them in different terms. But, all the same, we will rather wait until we have familiarized ourselves with the phenomena of the neuroses. If our conception of the existence of any kind of unconscious be already regarded as fantastic, what will people say if we admit that to reach our solution we have had to assume two kinds?

Let us break off at this point. Once more you have heard only an incomplete statement; but is it not a hopeful thought that this knowledge will be carried further, either by ourselves or by those who come after us? And have not we ourselves learnt enough that is new and startling?

Fifteenth Lecture — Doubtful Points and Critical Observations

We will not leave the subject of dreams without dealing with the most common doubts and uncertainties arising in connection with the novel ideas and conceptions we have been discussing: those of you who have followed these lectures attentively will have collected some material of the kind.

1. You may have received an impression that even with strict adherence to technique our work of dream-interpretation leaves so much room for uncertainty that reliable translation of manifest dreams into their latent dream-thoughts will be thereby frustrated. You will urge first that one never knows whether any particular element in a dream is to be understood literally or symbolically, since things employed as symbols do not thereby cease to be themselves. Where there is no objective evidence to decide the question the interpretation on that particular point will be left to be arbitrarily determined by the interpreter. Further, since in the dream-work opposites coincide, it is in every instance uncertain whether a specific dream-element is to be understood in a positive or a negative sense, as itself or as its opposite—another opportunity for the interpreter to exercise a choice. Thirdly, on account of the frequency with which inversion of every kind is employed in dreams, it is open to him to assume whenever he chooses that such an inversion has taken place. Finally you will point to having heard that one is seldom certain that the interpretation arrived at is the only possible one, and that there is danger of overlooking another perfectly admissible interpretation of the same dream. In these circumstances, you will conclude, the discretion of the interpreter has a latitude that seems incompatible with any objective certainty in the result. Or you may also assume that the fault does not lie in dreams themselves, but that something erroneous in our conceptions and premises produces the unsatisfactory character of our interpretations.

All that you say is undeniable and yet I do not think it justifies either of your conclusions: that dream-interpretation as practised by us is at the mercy of the interpreter’s arbitrary decisions or that the inadequacy of the results calls in question the correctness of our procedure. If for the “arbitrary decision” of the interpreter you will substitute his skill, his experience and his understanding, then I am with you. This kind of personal factor is of course indispensable, especially when interpretation is difficult; it is just the same in other scientific work, however; it can’t be helped that one man will use any given technique less well, or apply it better, than another. The impression of arbitrariness made, for example, by the interpretation of symbols is corrected by the reflection that as a rule the connection of the dream-thoughts with one another, and of the dream with the life of the dreamer and the whole mental situation at the time of the dream, points directly to one of all the possible interpretations and renders all the rest useless. The conclusion that the imperfect character of the interpretations proceeds from fallacious hypotheses loses its force when consideration shows that, on the contrary, the ambiguity or indefiniteness of dreams is a quality which we should necessarily expect in them.

Let us call to mind our statement that the dream-work undertakes a translation of the dream-thoughts into a primitive mode of expression, analogous to hieroglyphics. Now all such primitive systems of expression are necessarily accompanied by ambiguity and indefiniteness; but we should not on that account be justified in doubting their practicability. You know that the coincidence of opposites in the dream-work is analogous to what is called the antithetical sense of primal words in the oldest languages. The philologist, R. Abel, to whom we owe this information, writing in 1884, begs us not on any account to imagine that there was any ambiguity in what one person said to another by means of ambivalent words of this sort. On the contrary, intonation, gestures and the whole context can have left no doubt whatever which of the two opposites the speaker had in mind to convey. In writing where gestures are absent the addition of little pictorial signs, not meant to receive separate oral expression, replaced them: e.g. a drawing of a little man, either crouching or standing upright, according as the ambiguous ken of the hieroglyphic meant “weak” or “strong.” So that misunderstanding was avoided in spite of the ambiguity of sounds and signs.

In ancient systems of expression, for instance, in the scripts of the oldest languages, indefiniteness of various kinds is found with a frequency which we should not tolerate in our writings to-day. Thus in many Semitic writings only the consonants of the words appear: the omitted vowels have to be supplied by the reader from his knowledge and from the context. Hieroglyphic writing follows a similar principle, although not exactly the same; and this is the reason why nothing is known of the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian. There are besides other kinds of indefiniteness in the sacred writings of the Egyptians: for example, it is left to the writer’s choice to inscribe the pictures from right to left or from left to right. To be able to read them, we have to remember that we must be guided by the direction of the faces of the figures, birds, and so forth. But it was also open to the writer to set the pictures in vertical columns and, in the case of inscriptions on smaller objects, he was led by considerations of what was pleasing to the eye, and of the space at his disposal, to introduce still further alterations in the arrangement of the signs. The most confusing feature in hieroglyphic script is that there is no spacing between the words. The pictures are all placed at equal intervals on the page, and it is generally impossible to know whether any given sign goes with the preceding one or forms the beginning of a new word. In Persian cuneiform writing, on the other hand, a slanting sign is used to separate the words.

The Chinese language, both spoken and written, is exceedingly ancient but is still used to-day by four hundred million people. Don’t suppose that I understand it at all; I only obtained some information about it because I hoped to find in it analogies to the kinds of indefiniteness occurring in dreams; nor was I disappointed in my expectation, for Chinese is so full of uncertainties as positively to terrify one. As is well known, it consists of a number of syllabic sounds which are pronounced singly or doubled in combination. One of the chief dialects has about four hundred of these sounds, and since the vocabulary of this dialect is estimated at somewhere about four thousand words it is evident that every sound has an average of ten different meanings—some fewer, but some all the more. For this reason there are a whole series of devices to escape ambiguity, for the context alone will not show which of the ten possible meanings of the syllable the speaker wishes to convey to the hearer. Amongst these devices is the combining of two sounds into a single word and the use of four different “tones” in which these syllables may be spoken. For purposes of our comparison a still more interesting fact is that this language is practically without grammar: it is impossible to say of any of the one-syllabled words whether it is a noun, a verb or an adjective; and, further, there are no inflections to show gender, number, case, tense or mood. The language consists, as we may say, of the raw material only; just as our thought-language is resolved into its raw material by the dream-work omitting to express the relations in it. Wherever there is any uncertainty in Chinese the decision is left to the intelligence of the listener, who is guided by the context. I made a note of a Chinese saying, which literally translated runs thus: “Little what see, much what wonderful.” This is simple enough to understand. It may mean: “The less a man has seen, the more he finds to wonder at,” or “There is much to wonder at for the man who has seen little.” Naturally there is no occasion to choose between these two translations which differ only in grammatical construction. We are assured that in spite of these uncertainties the Chinese language is a quite exceptionally good medium of expression; so it is clear that indefiniteness does not necessarily lead to ambiguity.

Now we must certainly admit that the position of affairs is far less favourable in regard to the mode of expression in dreams than it is with these ancient tongues and scripts; for these latter were originally designed as a means of communication; that is, they were intended to be understood, no matter what ways or means they had to employ. But just this character is lacking to dreams: their object is not to tell anyone anything; they are not a means of communication; on the contrary, it is important to them not to be understood. So we ought not to be surprised or misled if the result is that a number of the ambiguities and uncertainties in dreams cannot be determined. The only certain piece of knowledge gained from our comparison is that this indefiniteness (which people would like to make use of as an argument against the accuracy of our dream-interpretations) is rather to be recognized as a regular characteristic of all primitive systems of expression.

Practice and experience alone can determine the extent to which dreams can in actual fact be understood. My own opinion is that this is possible to a very great extent; and a comparison of the results obtained by properly-trained analysts confirms my view. It is well known that the lay public, even in scientific circles, delights to make a parade of superior scepticism in the face of the difficulties and uncertainties which beset a scientific achievement; I think they are wrong in so doing. You may possibly not at all know that the same thing happened at the time when the Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions were being deciphered. There was a point at which public opinion was active in declaring that the men deciphering the cuneiform writing were victims of a chimera and that the whole business of investigation was a fraud. But in the year 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society made a conclusive test. They challenged four of the most distinguished men engaged in this branch of research—Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot and Oppert—to send to the Society in sealed envelopes independent translations of a newly-discovered inscription, and, after comparing the four versions, they were able to announce that there was sufficient agreement between the four to justify belief in what had been achieved and confidence in further progress. The mockery of the learned laity then gradually came to an end, and certainty in the reading of cuneiform documents has advanced enormously since then.

2. A second series of objections is closely connected with an impression which you also have probably not escaped; namely, that a number of the solutions achieved by our method of dream-interpretation seem strained, specious, “dragged in,”—in other words, forced, or even comical or joking. These criticisms are so frequent that I will take at random the last that has come to my ears. Now listen: a head-master in Switzerland—that free country—was recently asked to resign his post on account of his interest in psycho-analysis. He protested and a Berne paper published the decision of the school authorities on his case. I shall quote a few sentences from the article which refer to psycho-analysis: “Further, we are amazed at the far-fetched and factitious character of many of the examples given in the said book by Dr. Pfister of Zurich.... It is indeed a matter for surprise that the head-master of a Training College should accept so credulously all these assertions and such specious evidence.” These sentences purport to be the final opinion of “One who judges calmly.” I am much more inclined to think this “calm” factitious. Let us examine these remarks more closely in the expectation that a certain amount of reflection and knowledge of the subject will do no harm, even to a “calm judgement.”

It is really quite refreshing to see how swiftly and unerringly anyone relying merely on his first impressions can arrive at an opinion on some critical question of psychology in its more abstruse aspects. The interpretations seem to him far-fetched and strained, and do not commend themselves to him; consequently, they are wrong and the whole business is rubbish. Such critics never give even a passing thought to the possibility that there may be good reasons why the interpretations are bound to convey this very impression—a thought which would lead to the further question what these good reasons are.

The circumstance which calls forth this criticism is essentially related to the effect of displacement, which you have learnt to know as the most powerful instrument in the service of the dream-censorship. With its aid the substitute-formations which we call allusions are created; but these allusions are of a kind not easy to recognize as such; nor is it easy to discover the thought proper by working back from them, for they are connected with it by the most extraordinary and unusual extrinsic associations. But the whole matter throughout concerns things which are meant to be hidden, intended to be concealed: that is exactly the object of the dream-censorship. We must not expect, though, to find something that has been hidden by looking in the very place where it ordinarily belongs. The frontier surveillance authorities nowadays are a good deal more cunning in this respect than the Swiss school authorities; for they are not content with examining portfolios and letter-cases when hunting for documents and plans; but consider the possibility that spies and smugglers may conceal anything compromising about their persons, in places where it is most difficult to detect and where such things certainly do not belong, for example, between the double soles of their boots. If the concealed articles are found there, it is certainly true that they have been “dragged” to light, but they are none the less a very good “find.”

In admitting the possibility that the connection between a latent dream-element and its manifest substitute may appear most remote and extraordinary, sometimes even comical or joking, we are guided by our wide experience of instances in which we did not as a rule find the meaning ourselves. It is often impossible to arrive at such interpretations by our own efforts: no sane person could guess the bridge connecting the two. The dreamer either solves the riddle straightaway by a direct association (he can do it because it is in his mind that the substitute-formation originated); or else he provides so much material that there is no longer any need for special penetration in order to solve it—the solution thrusts itself upon us as inevitable. If the dreamer does not help us in either of these two ways the manifest element in question will remain for ever incomprehensible. Let me give you one more instance of this kind which happened recently. A patient of mine lost her father during the course of the treatment, after which she seized every opportunity to bring him back to life in her dreams. In one of these her father appeared in a certain connection otherwise not applicable and said: “It is quarter past eleven, it is half past eleven, it is quarter to twelve.” For the interpretation of this curious detail she could only provide the association that her father was pleased when his older children were punctual at the midday meal. This certainly fitted in with the dream-element, but it threw no light on its origin. The situation which had just been reached in the treatment gave good grounds for the suspicion that a carefully-suppressed critical antagonism to her much loved and honoured father had played a part in this dream. Following out her further associations, apparently quite remote from the dream, she told how she had heard a long discussion of psychological questions on the day before and a relative had said: “Primitive man (Urmensch) survives in all of us.” Now a light dawns on us. Here was again a splendid opportunity for her to imagine that her dead father survived, and so in the dream she made him a “clock-man” (Uhrmensch), telling the quarters up to the time of the midday meal.

The likeness to a pun in this cannot be ignored, and as a matter of fact it has often happened that a dreamer’s pun has been ascribed to the interpreter; there are yet other examples in which it is not at all easy to decide whether we are dealing with a joke or a dream. But you will remember that the same sort of doubt arose with some slips of the tongue. A man related as a dream that he and his uncle were sitting in the latter’s auto (automobile) and his uncle kissed him. The dreamer himself instantly volunteered the interpretation: it meant “auto-erotism” (a term used in our theory of the libido, signifying gratification obtained without any external love-object). Now was this man allowing himself a joke at our expense and pretending that a pun which occurred to him was part of a dream? I do not think so: he really did dream it. But where does this bewildering resemblance between dreams and jokes come from? At one time this question took me somewhat out of my way, for it necessitated my making a thorough investigation into the question of wit itself. This led to the conclusion that wit originates as follows: a preconscious train of thought is for a moment left to a process of unconscious elaboration, from which it emerges in the form of a witticism. While under the influence of the unconscious it is subject to the mechanisms there operative—to condensation and displacement; that is to say, to the same processes as we found at work in the dream-work; and the similarity sometimes found between dreams and wit is to be ascribed to this character common to both. But the unintentional “dream joke” does not amuse us as does an ordinary witticism; a deeper study of wit may show you why this is so. The “dream joke” strikes us as a poor form of wit; it does not make us laugh, it leaves us cold.

Now in this we are following the path of the ancient method of dream-interpretation, which has given us, besides much that is useless, many a valuable example of interpretation upon which we ourselves could not improve. I will tell you a dream of historic importance which is related in slightly different versions by Plutarch and Artemidorus of Daldis, the dreamer being Alexander the Great. When he was laying siege to the city of Tyre, which was putting up an obstinate resistance (B.C. 322), he dreamt one night that he saw a dancing satyr. The dream-interpreter Aristandros, who accompanied the army on its campaigns, interpreted this dream by dividing the word “satyros” into σὰ Τύρος (“Tyre is thine”), and prophesied from this the king’s victory over the city. This interpretation decided Alexander to continue the siege and eventually the city fell. The interpretation, factitious as it seems, was undoubtedly the right one.

3. I can well imagine that you will be especially impressed on being told that even people who have long studied the interpretation of dreams in the course of their work as psycho-analysts have raised objections to our conception of dreams. It would indeed have been exceptional if so excellent an opportunity for new mistakes had been let slip; and so assertions have been made, due to confusion of ideas and based on unjustifiable generalizations, which are hardly less incorrect than the medical conception of dreams. One of these statements you know already: that dreams deal with attempts at adaptation to the situation at the moment and with the solution of future problems; in other words, that they pursue a “prospective tendency” or aim (A. Maeder). We have already demonstrated that this statement rests upon a confusion between dreams and the latent dream-thoughts and ignores the process of dream-work. If those who speak of this “prospective tendency” mean thereby to characterize the unconscious mental activity to which the latent thoughts belong, then, on the one hand, they tell us nothing new and, on the other hand, the description is not exhaustive; for unconscious mental activity occupies itself with many other things besides preparation for the future. There seems to be a much worse confusion behind the assurance that the “death clause” may be found underlying every dream; I am not quite clear what this formula is intended to mean, but I suspect that behind it the dream is confounded with the whole personality of the dreamer.

An unjustifiable generalization, based on a few striking examples, is contained in the statement that every dream admits of two kinds of interpretation: one of the kind we have described, the so-called “psycho-analytic” interpretation, and the other the so-called “anagogic,” which disregards the instinctive tendencies and aims at a representation of the higher mental functions (H. Silberer); there are dreams of this kind, but you will seek in vain to extend this conception to include even a majority of dreams. After all you have heard, the statement that all dreams are to be interpreted bisexually, as a combination of two tendencies which may be called male and female (A. Adler), will seem to you quite incomprehensible. Here again, single dreams of this sort do of course occur and later on you may learn that their structure is similar to that of certain hysterical symptoms. I mention all these discoveries of new general characteristics of dreams in order to warn you against them, or at least to leave you in no doubt about my own opinion of them.

4. At one time the objective value of research into dreams seemed to be discredited by the fact that patients treated analytically appeared to suit the content of their dreams to the favourite theories of their doctors, one class dreaming mainly of sexual impulses, and another of impulses for mastery, others again even of rebirth (W. Stekel). The force of this observation is weakened by the reflection that people dreamed dreams before there was any such thing as psycho-analytic treatment to influence their dreams and that the patients undergoing treatment nowadays also used to dream before they began it. The actual fact in this supposedly new observation is soon shown to be self-evident and of no consequence for the theory of dreams. The residue from the previous day which gives rise to dreams is a residue from the great interests of waking life. If the physician’s words and the stimuli which he gives have become of importance to the patient they then enter into whatever constitutes the residue and can act as mental stimuli for dream-formation, just like other interests of affective value roused on the preceding day which have not subsided; they operate in the same way as bodily stimuli which affect the sleeper during sleep. Like these other factors inciting dreams, the trains of thought roused by the physician can appear in the manifest dream-content or be revealed in the latent thoughts. We know indeed that dreams can be experimentally produced, or, to speak more accurately, a part of the dream-material can be thus introduced into the dream. In influencing his patients thus the analyst plays a part no different from that of an experimenter, like Mourly Void, who placed in certain positions the limbs of the person upon whom he experimented.

We can often influence what a man shall dream about, but never what he will dream; for the mechanism of the dream-work and the unconscious dream-wish are inaccessible to external influence of any sort. We realized, when we were considering dreams arising out of bodily stimuli, that in the reaction to the bodily or mental stimuli brought to bear upon the dreamer the peculiarity and independence of dream-life is clearly seen. The criticism I have just discussed which tends to cast a doubt upon the objectivity of dream investigation is again an assertion based upon confounding, this time confounding dreams with—their material.

I wanted to tell you as much as this about the problems of dreams. You will guess that I have passed over a great deal and will have discovered for yourselves that my treatment of nearly every point has necessarily been incomplete; but this is due to the phenomena of dreams being so closely connected with those of the neuroses. Our plan was to study dreams as an introduction to the study of the neuroses and it was certainly a better one than beginning the other way about; but since dreams prepare us for comprehension of the neuroses, so also can a correctly-formed estimate of dreams be acquired only after some knowledge of neurotic manifestations has been gained.

I do not know how you may think about it, but I can assure you that I do not regret having taken up so much of your interest and of the time at our disposal in the consideration of problems connected with dreams. I know no other way by which one can so speedily arrive at conviction of the correctness of those statements by which psycho-analysis stands or falls. It requires strenuous work for many months, and even years, to demonstrate that the symptoms in a case of neurotic illness have a meaning, serve a purpose, and arise from the patient’s experiences in life. On the other hand, a few hours’ effort may be enough to show these things in some dream which at first seemed utterly confused and incomprehensible, and in this way to confirm all the premises upon which psycho-analysis rests—the existence of unconscious mental processes, the special mechanisms which they obey, and the instinctive propelling forces which are expressed by them. And when we remember how far-reaching is the analogy in the structure of dreams to that of neurotic symptoms and, with that, reflect how rapid is the transformation of a dreamer into a wide-awake, reasonable human being, we acquire an assurance that the neuroses too depend only upon an alteration in the balance of the forces at work in mental life.