The Interpretation of Dreams quotes

The most shocking death in our family, the impressions of which keep us awake long into the night, becomes obliterated from our memories, until the first moment of awakening brings it back to us with depressing force.

On the other hand, the wart on the forehead of a passing stranger, of whom we did not think for a second after he was out of sight, plays its part in our dreams.

”

It is, so far as the immediate past is concerned, mostly the trifling, the incidental, the “forgotten” impressions of daily life which reappear in our dreams.

The psychic activities that are awake most intensely are those that sleep most profoundly.

”

87). This is also aided by the fact that, upon awakening, the attention is immediately seized by the inrushing sensory world, and only very few dream pictures can withstand this power.

They fade away before the impressions of the new day like the glow of the stars before the sunlight.

As a last factor favouring the forgetting of dreams, we may mention the fact that most people generally take little interest in their dreams.

Unconsciously and unwittingly we fill up the gaps and supplement the dream pictures. Rarely, and perhaps never, has a connected dream been as connected as it appears to us in memory.

Even the most truth-loving person can hardly relate a dream without exaggerating and embellishing it.

The tendency of the human mind to conceive everything in connection is so great that it unwittingly supplies the deficiencies of connection if the dream is recalled somewhat disconnectedly.”

The dream is disconnected, it unites without hesitation the worst contradictions, it allows impossibilities, it disregards our authoritative knowledge from the day, and evinces ethical and moral dulness.

He who would behave in the waking state as the dream does in its situations would be considered insane.

He who in the waking state would speak in such manner or report such things as occur in the dream content, would impress us as confused and weak-minded.

Fechner[52] says (p. 522): “

It is as if the psychological activity were transferred from the brain of a reasonable being into the brain of a fool.

”

But it has been repeatedly observed that the associations which connect the dream presentations with one another are of a particular kind, and different from those found in the waking mental activity. Thus Volkelt[72] says: “

In the dream, the ideas chase and hunt each other on the strength of accidental similarities and barely perceptible connections.

All dreams are pervaded by such loose and free associations.” Maury[48] attaches great value to this characteristic of connection between presentations, which allows him to bring the dream life in closer analogy to certain mental disturbances. He recognises two main characters of the délire:

“Dans le sommeil, hormis la perception, toutes les facultés de l’esprit, intelligence, imagination, mémoire, volonté, moralité, restant intactes dans leur essence; seulement, elles s’appliquent à des objets imaginaires et mobiles.

Le songeur est un acteur qui joue à volonté les fous et les sages, les bourreaux et les victimes, les nains et les géants, les démons et les anges

” (p. 222). The Marquis of Hervey, who is sharply controverted by Maury,[48] and whose work I could not obtain despite all effort, seems to combat most energetically the under-estimation of the psychic capacity in the dream. Maury speaks of him as follows (p. 19):

… comes to light a profundity and sincerity of emotion, a tenderness of feeling, a clearness of view, a fineness of observation, and a readiness of wit, all which we should modestly have to deny that we possess as a constant property during the waking life?

The dream has a wonderful poetry, an excellent allegory, an incomparable humour, and a charming irony.

It views the world under the guise of a peculiar idealisation, and often raises the effect of its manifestations into the most ingenious understanding of the essence lying at its basis.

The Roman emperor who ordered one of his subjects to be executed because he dreamed that he cut off the emperor’s head, was not wrong in justifying his action on the ground that he who has such dreams must have similar thoughts while awake.

About a thing that can have no place in our mind we therefore say significantly: ‘I would never dream of such a thing.’

”

Pfaff,[O] varying a familiar proverb, says:

“Tell me for a time your dreams, and I will tell you what you are within.”

The short work of Hildebrandt,[35] from which I have already taken so many quotations, a contribution to the dream problem as complete and as rich in thought as I found in the literature, places the problem of morality in the dream as the central point …

“The dream is a bulwark against the regularity and commonness of life, a free recreation of the fettered phantasy, in which it mixes together all the pictures of life and interrupts the continued earnestness of grown-up men with a joyous children’s play.

Without the dream we should surely age earlier, and thus the dream may be considered perhaps not a gift directly from above, but a delightful task, a friendly companion, on our pilgrimage to the grave.

”

following him came Lelut, J. Moreau, and more particularly the philosopher Maine de Biran. To be sure, the comparison is still older. Radestock[54] begins the chapter dealing with this comparison, by giving a collection of expressions showing the analogy between the dream and insanity.

Kant somewhere says: “The lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state.”

According to Krauss “Insanity is a dream with the senses awake.” Schopenhauer terms the dream a short insanity, and insanity a long dream. Hagen describes the delirium as dream life which has not been caused by sleep but by disease.

Radestock[54] begins the chapter dealing with this comparison, by giving a collection of expressions showing the analogy between the dream and insanity. Kant somewhere says: “The lunatic is a dreamer in the waking state.” According to Krauss “Insanity is a dream with the senses awake.”

Schopenhauer terms the dream a short insanity, and insanity a long dream.

Hagen describes the delirium as dream life which has not been caused by sleep but by disease. Wundt, in the Physiological Psychology, declares:

naturally least attention has been bestowed upon it by the so-called “investigators of dreams,” who have thus afforded a splendid example of the aversion characteristic of scientific men to learning something new.

“Les savants ne sont pas curieux,” said the scoffer Anatole France.

If there were such a thing in science as right to revenge, I in turn should be justified in ignoring the literature since the appearance of this book.

I have come, however, to think differently.

I have been forced to admit that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases where an ancient and stubbornly retained popular belief seems to have come nearer to the truth of the matter than the judgment of the science which prevails to-day.

I must insist that the dream actually has significance, and that a scientific procedure in dream interpretation is possible. I have come upon the knowledge of this procedure in the following manner:—

In the case of a creative mind, however, the intelligence has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, the ideas rush in pell-mell, and it is only then that the great heap is looked over and critically examined.

Messrs. Critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, you are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and transitory madness which is found in all creators, and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer.

Hence your complaints about barrenness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely” (Letter of December 1, 1788).

But I see in the speech which I make to Irma in the dream, that above all things I do not want to be to blame for the pains which she still feels.

If it is Irma’s own fault, it cannot be mine.

Should the purpose of the dream be looked for in this quarter?

the dream avenges me upon him by turning the reproach back upon himself. The dream acquits me of responsibility for Irma’s condition by referring it to other causes, which indeed furnish a great number of explanations.

The dream represents a certain condition of affairs as I should wish it to be; the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish.

This much is apparent at first sight. But many things in the details of the dream become intelligible when regarded from the point of view of wish-fulfilment.

they even exclude one another. The whole pleading—this dream is nothing else—recalls vividly the defensive argument of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle to him in a damaged condition.

In the first place, he said, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second, it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbour at all.

But so much the better; if even one of these three methods of defence is recognised as valid, the man must be acquitted.

When after passing a defile one has reached an eminence where the ways part and where the view opens out broadly in different directions, it is permissible to stop for a moment and to consider where one is to turn next.

Something like this happens to us after we have mastered this first dream interpretation. We find ourselves in the open light of a sudden cognition.

If I succeed in assuaging my thirst by means of the dream that I am drinking, I need not wake up in order to satisfy it. It is thus a dream of convenience.

The dream substitutes itself for action, as elsewhere in life.

Unfortunately the need of water for quenching thirst cannot be satisfied with a dream, like my thirst for revenge upon Otto and Dr. M., but the intention is the same. This same dream recently appeared in modified form.

But the water in it tasted so salty (apparently from the ashes) that I had to wake. It may be seen how conveniently the dream is capable of arranging matters; since the fulfilment of a wish is its only purpose, it may be perfectly egotistic.

Love of comfort is really not compatible with consideration for others.

The introduction of the cinerary urn is probably again the fulfilment of a wish; I am sorry that I no longer possess this vase; it, like the glass of water at my wife’s side, is inaccessible to me.

“Mr. Joe, get up; you must go to the hospital.” Whereupon the sleeper dreamt of a room in the hospital, a bed in which he was lying, and a chart pinned over his head reading: “Joe H.... cand. med. 22 years old.”

He said to himself in the dream: “If I am already at the hospital, I don’t have to go there,” turned over and slept on.

He had thus frankly admitted to himself his motive for dreaming.

She did not want to leave the boat at the landing, and cried bitterly. The next morning she told us: “Last night I was sailing on the lake.”

Let us hope that the duration of this dream ride was more satisfactory to her.

My eldest boy, at that time eight years of age, was already dreaming of the realisation of his fancies. He had been riding in a chariot with Achilles, with Diomed as charioteer.

My youngest girl, at that time nineteen months old, had vomited one morning, and had therefore been kept without food throughout the day. During the night which followed upon this day of hunger, she was heard to call excitedly in her sleep:

“Anna Feud, strawberry, huckleberry, omelette, pap!”

She used her name in this way in order to express her idea of property; the menu must have included about everything which would seem to her a desirable meal;

On the day after the birthday, he awakened joyfully with the information which could have had its origin only in a dream: “He(r)man eat up all the cherries!”[AC]

What animals dream of I do not know. A proverb for which I am indebted to one of my readers claims to know, for it raises the question: “What does the goose dream of?” the answer being: “Of maize!”

The whole theory that the dream is the fulfilment of a wish is contained in these sentences.[AD]

The wisdom of proverbs, it is true, sometimes speaks contemptuously enough of the dream—it apparently tries to justify science in expressing the opinion that “Dreams are mere bubbles;” but still for colloquial usage the dream is the gracious fulfiller of wishes.

“I should never have fancied that in the wildest dream,” exclaims one who finds his expectations surpassed in reality.

If not, the two objections are no longer valid against us; there always remains the possibility that even painful and fearful dreams may be discovered to be wish fulfilments upon interpretation.[AE]

In scientific work it is often advantageous, when the solution of one problem presents difficulties, to take up a second problem, just as it is easier to crack two nuts together instead of separately.

Accordingly we are confronted not merely with the problem: How can painful and fearful dreams be the fulfilments of wishes? but we may also, from our discussion so far, raise the question:

I had no reason to suppose I should fare better. I resolved then to comfort myself. I am not, so far as I know, ambitious, and I engage in medical practice with satisfying results even without the recommendation of a title.

Moreover, it was not a question whether I considered the grapes sweet or sour, for they undoubtedly hung much too high for me.

One evening I was visited by a friend of mine, one of those colleagues whose fate I had taken as a warning for myself.

I know from my psychoanalytical treatments how such condemnation is to be interpreted. It has no value as affording information, but only as the registration of an affect.

If my little daughter does not like an apple which is offered her, she asserts that the apple has a bitter taste, without even having tasted it.

If my patients act like the little girl, I know that it is a question of a notion which they want to suppress. The same applies to my dream. I do not want to interpret it because it contains something to which I object.

If my patients act like the little girl, I know that it is a question of a notion which they want to suppress. The same applies to my dream.

I do not want to interpret it because it contains something to which I object.

After the interpretation of the dream has been completed, I find out what it was I objected to; it was the assertion that R. is a simpleton. I may refer the affection which I feel for R.

Only where two persons are in question, one of whom possesses a certain power, while the other must have a certain consideration for this power. This second person will then disfigure his psychic actions, or, as we may say, he will dissimulate.

The politeness which I practise every day is largely dissimulation of this kind.

If I interpret my dreams for the benefit of the reader I am forced to make such distortions. The poet also complains about such disfigurement:

Or he must disguise his objectionable statement in a garb that seems harmless. He may, for instance, tell of an occurrence between two mandarins in the Orient, while he has the officials of his own country in view.

The stricter the domination of the censor, the more extensive becomes the disguise, and often the more humorous the means employed to put the reader back on the track of the real meaning.

The correspondence between the phenomena of the censor and those of dream distortion, which may be traced in detail, justifies us in assuming similar conditions for both.

with a profusion of extraordinary tenderness, because the wish activities of the first system, in accordance with a particular interest which they happen to be pursuing, are inclined to put him down as a simpleton.[AH]

Perhaps we shall now begin to suspect that dream interpretation is capable of giving us hints about the structure of our psychic apparatus which we have thus far expected in vain from philosophy.

We shall not, however, follow this track, but return to our original problem as soon as we have cleared up the subject of dream-disfigurement. The question has arisen how dreams with disagreeable content can be analysed as the fulfilments of wishes.

Identification is most often used in hysteria to express sexual community. An hysterical woman identifies herself most readily—although not exclusively—with persons with whom she has had sexual relations, or who have sexual intercourse with the same persons as herself.

Language takes such a conception into consideration: two lovers are “one.”

In the hysterical phantasy, as well as in the dream, it is sufficient for the identification if one thinks of sexual relations, whether or not they become real.

It likewise recalls the story of the young girl who was advised against accepting her suitor because he was a man of quick temper who would surely treat her to blows after they were married.

The answer of the girl was: “I wish he would strike me!”

Her wish to be married is so strong that she takes into the bargain the discomfort which is said to be connected with matrimony, and which is predicted for her, and even raises it to a wish.

Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor. We shall take into consideration everything which the analysis of disagreeable dreams has brought to light if we reword our formula as follows:

The dream is the (disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.

[AN]

I became a book-worm (cf. herbarium). I have always referred this first passion of my life—since I am engaging in retrospect—to this childhood impression, or rather I have recognised in this childish scene a “concealing recollection” for my subsequent love of books.[AR]

Of course I also learned at an early age that our passions are often our sorrows.

When I was seventeen years old I had a very respectable bill at the book store, and no means with which to pay it, and my father would hardly accept the excuse that my inclination had not been fixed on something worse.

Since it was the impression of the monograph and no other that had this fate, this impression was probably the most suitable for the establishment of the connection.

One need not be astonished, like Lessing’s Hänschen Schlau, because “it is the rich people of the world who possess the most money.”

Still the psychological process by which, according to our conception, the indifferent experience is substituted for the psychologically important one, seems odd to us and open to question. In a later chapter we shall undertake the task of making this seemingly incorrect operation more intelligible.

Incidentally our attention is called to the fact that important changes in the material comprised by our ideas and our memory may be brought about unconsciously and at night.

The injunction that one should sleep for a night upon any affair before making a final decision about it is obviously fully justified.

But we see that at this point we have proceeded from the psychology of dreaming to that of sleep, a step for which there will often be occasion.

Whatever one may dream, it is either manifestly recognisable as psychically significant or it is disfigured, and can be judged correctly only after a complete interpretation, when, as before, it may be recognised as possessing psychic significance.

The dream never concerns itself with trifles; we do not allow ourselves to be disturbed in our sleep by matters of slight importance.

Dreams which are apparently harmless turn out to be sinister if one takes pains to interpret them; if I may be permitted the expression, they all have “the mark of the beast.”

The dream never concerns itself with trifles; we do not allow ourselves to be disturbed in our sleep by matters of slight importance.

Dreams which are apparently harmless turn out to be sinister if one takes pains to interpret them; if I may be permitted the expression, they all have “the mark of the beast.”

As this is another point on which I may expect opposition, and as I am glad of an opportunity to show dream-disfigurement at work, I shall here subject a number of dreams from my collection to analysis.

… how he is caught and is treated more and more unkindly at each call for tickets by the conductor, and how he tells a friend, whom he meets at one of the stations during his miserable journey, and who asks him where he is travelling:

“To Karlsbad, if my constitution will stand it.”

Associated with this in memory is another story about a Jew who is ignorant of French, and who has express instructions to ask in Paris for the way to the Rue Richelieu.

Then, when I came finally to understand the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-semitic sentiment among my class-mates to assume a definite attitude, the figure of the semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my eyes.

Hannibal and Rome symbolised for me as a youth the antithesis between the tenaciousness of the Jews and the organisation of the Catholic Church.

The significance for our emotional life which the anti-semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of that earlier time.

Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one blow and shouts: “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” “And what did you do?” “I went into the street and picked up the cap,” was the calm answer.

That did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand.

I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings—the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar[BC] Barka made his boy swear at the domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans.

… this martial ideal can be traced still further back into my childhood, to the wish which the now friendly, now hostile, intercourse during my first three years with a boy a year older than myself must have actuated in the weaker of the two playmates.

The deeper one goes in the analysis of dreams, the more often one is put on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream sources in the latent dream content.

We have learned (p. 16) that the dream very rarely reproduces experiences in such a manner that they constitute the sole manifest dream content, unabridged and unchanged.

… surface the three Parcæ who spin the fate of man, and I know that one of the three women, the hostess in the dream, is the mother who gives life, and who, moreover, as in my case, gives the first nourishment to the living creature.

Love and hunger meet at the mother’s breast.

A young man—so runs an anecdote—who became a great admirer of womanly beauty, once when the conversation turned upon a beautiful wet nurse who had nourished him as a child, expressed himself to the effect that he was sorry that he had not taken better …

His name was Popovic̓, a suspicious name, which, by the way, has given the humorist Stettenheim a chance to make a significant remark:

“He told me his name, and blushingly shook my hand.”

[BI] Moreover, there is the same abuse of names as above with Pélagie, Knoedl, Bruecke, Fleischl. That such playing with names is childish nonsense can be asserted without fear of contradiction;

(Missing an opportunity at the breast of the nurse, see above.) Another dream thought, occasioned in the dreamer by the sensation of hunger, is as follows:

One should let nothing which one can have escape, even if a little wrong is done; no opportunity should be missed, life is so short, death inevitable.

Owing to the fact that this also has a sexual significance, and that desire is unwilling to stop at a wrong, this philosophy of carpe diem must fear the censor and must hide behind a dream.

“That boy will never amount to anything.”

It must have terribly mortified my ambition, for allusions to this scene return again and again in my dreams, and are regularly coupled with enumerations of my accomplishments and successes, as though I wanted to say: “You see, I have amounted to something after all.”

Now this childhood scene furnishes the elements for the last image of the dream, in which of course, the rôles are interchanged for the sake of revenge.

The same arguments which Burdach used in 1830, later reappear unchanged in the works of Lipps in the year 1883, where they are employed for the purpose of attacking the theory of somatic stimuli.

According to this the mind seems to be like the sleeper in the anecdote, who, upon being asked, “Are you asleep?” answers “No,” and upon being again addressed with the words, “Then lend me ten florins,” takes refuge in the excuse: “I am asleep.”

The inadequacy of the theory of somatic dream stimuli may also be demonstrated in another manner. Observations show that I am not urged to dream by external stimulations, even if these stimulations appear in the dream as soon as, and in case that, I dream.

Probably I did not feel anything of my pain—as I was thus taken care of—during the first few hours of sleeping. Then the painful sensations announced themselves and tried to wake me up, whereupon the dream came and said soothingly:

“Keep on sleeping, you won’t wake up anyway! You have no furuncle at all, for you are riding on a horse, and with a furuncle where you have it riding is impossible!”

And the dream was successful; the pain was stifled, and I went on sleeping.

The latter is obviously a dream of convenience; the sleeper frankly admits to himself the motive for his dreaming; but he thereby reveals one of the secrets of dreaming in general.

In a certain sense all dreams are dreams of convenience; they serve the purpose of continuing sleep instead of awakening.

The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it. We shall justify this conception with respect to the psychic factors of awakening elsewhere; it is possible, however, at this point to prove its applicability to the influence exerted by objective external excitements.

the sleeper frankly admits to himself the motive for his dreaming; but he thereby reveals one of the secrets of dreaming in general. In a certain sense all dreams are dreams of convenience; they serve the purpose of continuing sleep instead of awakening.

The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it.

We shall justify this conception with respect to the psychic factors of awakening elsewhere; it is possible, however, at this point to prove its applicability to the influence exerted by objective external excitements.

From among the interpretations of the excitement which are at the moment possible, that one is selected which can secure the best connection with the wish-possibilities that are lying in wait in the mind. Thus everything is definitely determined, and nothing is left to caprice.

The misinterpretation is not an illusion, but—if you will—an excuse.

Here again, however, there is admitted an action which is a modification of the normal psychic procedure, as in the case where substitution by means of displacement is effected for the purposes of the dream-censor.

hence, of those interpretations which are possible at all, only those are admitted which are agreeable to the absolute censorship of the somatic wish. It is something like this:

It’s the nightingale and not the lark. For if it’s the lark, love’s night is at an end.

From among the interpretations of the excitement which are at the moment possible, that one is selected which can secure the best connection with the wish-possibilities that are lying in wait in the mind. Thus everything is definitely determined, and nothing is left to caprice.

furthermore, that in the development of the obsessions and phobias similar misunderstandings, likewise within the same psychic personality, play a leading part. The source from which in our dream the material for this transformation is taken can also be explained.

The impostor is the dream, the Emperor is the dreamer himself, and the moralising tendency betrays a hazy knowledge of the fact that the latent dream content is occupied with forbidden wishes which have become the victims of repression.

The connection in which such dreams appear during my analysis of neurotics leaves no room for doubting that the dream is based upon a recollection from earliest childhood.

in paranoia the desire to be observed while dressing and undressing may be directly traced to these experiences; among those remaining perverted there is a class which has accentuated the childish impulse to a compulsion—they are the exhibitionists.

This age of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to our later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but a composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual.

It is for this reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked and are not ashamed until the moment arrives when the sense of shame and of fear are aroused; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin.

and you will suddenly discover that you are going about in rags, naked and covered with dust. A nameless feeling of shame and fear seizes you, you try to cover yourself and to hide, and you awaken bathed in sweat.

As long as men exist, this will be the dream of the care-laden, fortune-battered man, and thus Homer has taken his situation from the profoundest depths of the eternal character of humanity.

”

They may also be dead, discarded, covered, and repressed wishes, which we must nevertheless credit with a sort of continuous existence on account of their reappearance in the dream.

They are not dead like persons who have died in our sense, but they resemble the shades in the Odyssey which awaken a certain kind of life as soon as they have drunk blood.

In the dream of the dead child in the box (p. 130) we were concerned with a wish that had been actual fifteen years before, and which had been frankly admitted from that time.

The parents say that the children do not agree, and cannot find the reason for it. It is not difficult to see that the character even of a well-behaved child is not what we wish to find in a grown-up person.

The child is absolutely egotistical; it feels its wants acutely and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially with its competitors, other children, and in the first instance with its brothers and sisters.

For doing this we do not call the child wicked—we call it naughty; it is not responsible for its evil deeds either in our judgment or in the eyes of the penal law. And this is justifiably so;

The child is absolutely egotistical; it feels its wants acutely and strives remorselessly to satisfy them, especially with its competitors, other children, and in the first instance with its brothers and sisters.

For doing this we do not call the child wicked—we call it naughty; it is not responsible for its evil deeds either in our judgment or in the eyes of the penal law.

And this is justifiably so;

It is particularly interesting to observe little children up to three years old in their attitude towards their brothers and sisters. So far the child has been the only one; he is now informed that the stork has brought a new child.

The younger surveys the arrival, and then expresses his opinion decidedly: “The stork had better take it back again.”

[BY]

I know in the case of a lady of my acquaintance who agrees very well with a sister four years younger than herself, that she responded to the news of her younger sister’s arrival with the following words:

“But I shan’t give her my red cap, anyway.”

If the child comes to this realisation only at a later time, its enmity will be aroused at that point.

“What becomes of children when they are dead?” The answer probably was: “They get wings and become angels.” According to this explanation all the brothers and sisters and cousins in the dream now have wings like angels and—this is the important thing—they fly away.

Our little angel-maker remains alone, think of it, the only one after such a multitude!

The feature that the children are romping about on a meadow points with little ambiguity to butterflies, as though the child had been led by the same association which induced the ancients to conceive Psyche as having the wings of a butterfly.

Whoever talks in this manner forgets that the childish idea of “being dead” has little else but the words in common with our own.

The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shivering in the cold grave, of the terror of the infinite Nothing, which the grown-up person, as all the myths concerning the Great Beyond testify, finds it so hard to bear in his conception.

Fear of death is strange to the child; therefore it plays with the horrible word and threatens another child:

It is still possible, even for a child eight years old, on returning from a museum of natural history, to say to its mother:

“Mamma, I love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can always, always see you!”

So little does the childish conception of being dead resemble our own.[CA]

“Mamma, I love you so; if you ever die, I am going to have you stuffed and set you up here in the room so I can always, always see you!” So little does the childish conception of being dead resemble our own.[CA]

Being dead means for the child, which has been spared the scenes of suffering previous to dying, the same as “being gone,” not disturbing the survivors any more.

The child does not distinguish the manner and means by which this absence is brought about, whether by travelling, estrangement, or death.

A physician often has occasion to notice that the son’s grief at the loss of his father cannot suppress his satisfaction at the liberty which he has at last obtained.

Every father frantically holds on to whatever of the sadly antiquated potestas patris still remains in the society of to-day, and every poet who, like Ibsen, puts the ancient strife between father and son in the foreground of his fiction is sure of his effect.

The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter grows up and finds a guardian in her mother, while she desires sexual freedom, and when, on the other hand, the mother has been warned by the budding beauty of her daughter that …

“Now I shall be Mamma; Charles, do you want some more vegetables? Have some, I beg you,” &c. A particularly gifted and vivacious girl, not yet four years old, with whom this bit of child psychology is unusually transparent, says outright:

“Now mother can go away; then father must marry me and I shall be his wife.”

Nor does this wish by any means exclude from child life the possibility that the child may love his mother affectionately.

After the painful illness and death of the father, the obsessive reproach transferred to strangers in the form of the afore-mentioned phobia, appeared when the young man was thirty-one years old.

Anyone capable of wishing to push his own father from a mountain-top into an abyss is certainly not to be trusted to spare the lives of those who are not so closely bound to him; he does well to lock himself into his room.

According to my experience, which is now large, parents play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all later neurotics, and falling in love with one member of the parental couple and hatred of the other help to make up that fateful sum of …

And there must be a factor corresponding to this inner voice in the story of King Oedipus.

His fate moves us only for the reason that it might have been ours, for the oracle has put the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.

Perhaps we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first hatred and violent washes towards our fathers; our dreams convince us of it.

Perhaps we are all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first hatred and violent washes towards our fathers; our dreams convince us of it.

King Oedipus, who has struck his father Laius dead and has married his mother Jocasta, is nothing but the realised wish of our childhood.

But more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, unless we have become psychoneurotics, in withdrawing our sexual impulses from our mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.

I have spoken above of the egotism of the infantile mind, and I may now resume this subject in order to suggest that dreams preserve this characteristic—thus showing their connection with infantile life.

Every dream is absolutely egotistical; in every dream the beloved ego appears, even though it may be in a disguised form.

The wishes that are realised in dreams are regularly the wishes of this ego; it is only a deceptive appearance if interest in another person is thought to have caused the dream. I shall subject to analysis several examples which appear to contradict this assertion.

at the time of the occurrence which has been mentioned. And that is the point. For Professor R. has pursued his way independently outside the schools, somewhat as I have done, and has only in later years received the title which he earned long ago.

I am therefore again wishing to be a professor!

The very phrase “in later years” is the fulfilment of wish, for it signifies that I shall live long enough to pilot my boy through the age of puberty myself.

On account of their similar affective impression dreams of missing a train deserve to be placed next to examination dreams. Their explanation also justifies this relationship. They are consolation dreams directed against another feeling of fear perceived in the dream, the fear of dying.

“To depart” is one of the most frequent and one of the most easily reached symbols of death.

The dream thus says consolingly: “Compose yourself, you are not going to die (to depart),” just as the examination dream calms us by saying “Fear not, nothing will happen to you even this time.”

In relation to this he remarked that the Gradus is only a stairway, and that the piano itself is only a stairway as it has a scale.

It is correct to say that there is no series of associations which cannot be adapted to the representation of sexual facts.

I conclude with the dream of a chemist, a young man, who has been trying to give up his habit of masturbation by replacing it with intercourse with women.

… I take pains to replace each picture by the syllable or word which it is capable of representing by means of any sort of reference, the words which are thus brought together are no longer meaningless, but may constitute a most beautiful and sensible expression.

Now the dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort, and our predecessors in the field of dream interpretation have made the mistake of judging the rebus as an artistic composition.

As such it appears nonsensical and worthless.

The first thing which becomes clear to the investigator in the comparison of the dream content with the dream thoughts is that a tremendous work of condensation has taken place.

The dream is reserved, paltry, and laconic when compared with the range and copiousness of the dream thoughts.

The dream when written down fills half a page; the analysis, in which the dream thoughts are contained, requires six, eight, twelve times as much space. The ratio varies with different dreams;

There a beautiful but vain and quite stupid girl is placed side by side with an ugly but high-minded one. The aristocrat who seduces the little goose, is opposed to the working man who feels aristocratic, and behaves accordingly.

It is impossible to tell character from people’s looks. Who could tell from her looks that she is tormented by sensual desires?

In the same year in which the little girl started her butterfly collection, the region in which they were staying suffered much from a pest of June bugs. The children made havoc among the bugs, and crushed them cruelly.

As a correlative to this the converse of this thesis is also true. That which is clearly the essential thing in the dream thoughts need not be represented in the dream at all.

The dream, as it were, is eccentric; its contents are grouped about other elements than the dream thoughts as a central point.

Thus, for example, in the dream about the botanical monograph the central point of the dream content is apparently the element “botanical”;

The process which we assume here is nothing less than the essential part of the dream activity; it merits the designation of dream displacement.

Dream displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream.

I think we also have an easy task in recognising the psychic force which makes itself felt in the circumstances of dream displacement.

In a few cases the division of the dream into two equal parts expresses the alternative which the dream finds it so difficult to represent.

The attitude of the dream towards the category of antithesis and contradiction is most striking. This category is unceremoniously neglected; the word “No” does not seem to exist for the dream.

Antitheses are with peculiar preference reduced to unity or represented as one.

It has been my experience—and to this I have found no exception—that every dream treats of one’s own person.

Dreams are absolutely egotistic.

In cases where not my ego, but only a strange person occurs in the dream content, I may safely assume that my ego is concealed behind that person by means of identification. I am permitted to supplement my ego.

From my explanation of anxiety, it is easy to understand why the sensation of thwarted will is so closely allied to anxiety, and why it is so often connected with it in the dream.

Anxiety is a libidinous impulse which emanates from the unconscious, and is inhibited by the foreconscious.

Therefore, when a sensation of inhibition in the dream is accompanied by anxiety, there must also be present a volition which has at one time been capable of arousing a libido; there must be a sexual impulse.

… has derived an entirely new meaning from them.[EO] Upon closer inspection the more distinct and compact constituents of the dream speech may be distinguished from others which serve as connectives and have probably been supplied, just as we supply omitted letters and syllables in reading.

The dream speech thus has the structure of breccia stones, in which larger pieces of different material are held together by a solidified cohesive mass.

In a very strict sense this description is correct, to be sure, only for those speeches in the dream which have something of the sensational character of a speech, and which are described as “speeches.”

Such a parallel is to be found in a single place, where, however, a deep impression is made upon the reader—in Brutus’ speech of justification in Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar:

“As Cæsar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.”

Is not this which I have discovered, the same sentence structure and thought contrast as in the dream thought? I thus play Brutus in the dream. If I could only find in the dream thoughts, one further trace of confirmation for this astonishing collateral connection!

But the month of July is named after Julius Cæsar, and might therefore very well furnish the required allusion to the intermediary thought that I am playing the part of Brutus.[EQ]

Strangely enough I once actually played the part of Brutus.

I presented the scene between Brutus and Cæsar from Schiller’s poems to an audience of children when I was a boy of fourteen years.

The daughter of the dead man was profoundly unhappy at having this ugly detail stain her memory of her father. We have now penetrated to the wish that is embodied in this dream.

To stand before one’s children pure and great after one’s death, who would not wish that?

What has become of the absurdity of the dream?

I now perceive that the dream is allowed to make sport of my father for the reason that in the dream thought he is held up as an example to another man, in full recognition of his merit.

It is in the nature of every censorship that it permits the telling of untruth about forbidden things rather than truth.

The next sentence, in which my father remembers having once been drunk, and having been locked up for it, also contains nothing which is actually true of my father.

After the child has said his word of parting on the one side, he calls out its opposite on the other side, as though in order to establish an equilibrium. He is acting, as it were, in obedience to bilateral symmetry!

Thus the dream frequently has the profoundest meaning in places where it seems most absurd.

In all ages those who had something to say and were unable to say it without danger to themselves gladly put on the cap and bells.

Thus the dream frequently has the profoundest meaning in places where it seems most absurd.

In all ages those who had something to say and were unable to say it without danger to themselves gladly put on the cap and bells.

The listener for whom the forbidden saying was intended was more likely to tolerate it if he was able to laugh at it, and to flatter himself with the comment that what he disliked was obviously something absurd.

I now perceive that she is a mouthpiece for someone else, and I become silent. I think of the effort it costs me to publish even my work on the Dream, in which I have to surrender so much of my own intimate character.

“The best that you know you can’t tell to the children.”

The preparation of my own body, which I am ordered to make in the dream, is thus the self-analysis necessitated in the communication of my dreams. The elder Bruecke very properly finds a place here;

She has read a story in which a negro who has incited his fellows to revolt is hunted with bloodhounds and climbs a tree to save himself. Then follow fragments in wanton mood, like the following. Directions for catching lions from Die Fliegende Blaetter: “

Take a desert and strain it; the lions will remain.

” Also a very amusing, but not very proper anecdote about an official who is asked why he does not take greater pains to win the favour of his superior officer, and who answers that he has been trying to insinuate himself, but that the …

The dream which results from it sounds indifferent; I have written a monograph; it is lying before me; it is fitted with coloured plates, and dried plants are to be found with each copy.

It is like the peacefulness of a battlefield; there is no trace left of the tumult of battle.

… speak to him in polite words, but accompany them by looks or gestures of hatred and disdain, the effect which I produce upon this person is not very different from what it would have been if I had recklessly thrown my contempt into his face.

Above all, then, the censor bids me suppress my emotions, and if I am master of the art of dissimulation, I can hypocritically show the opposite emotion—smiling where I should like to be angry, and pretending affection where I should like to destroy.

We already know of an excellent example of such an inversion of emotion for the purposes of the dream censor.

This case is generally typical of society, where persons who have aroused antipathy or are adherents of an unpopular minority incur guilt.

Their punishment does not correspond to their transgression but to their transgression plus the ill-will directed against them that has hitherto been ineffective.

Those who execute the punishment doubtless commit an injustice, but they are prevented from becoming aware of it by the satisfaction arising from the release within themselves of a suppression of long standing.

In such cases the emotion is justified according to its quality, but not according to its quantity; and the self-criticism that has been appeased as to the one point is only too ready to neglect examination of the second point.

Once you have opened the doors, more people get through than you originally intended to admit.

The striking feature of the neurotic character, that incitements capable of producing emotion bring about a result that is qualitatively justified but is quantitatively excessive, is to be explained in this manner, in so far as it admits of a psychological explanation at all.

I knew, of course, that this request did not proceed from my friend, but that it was due to clumsiness or excessive timidity on the part of the messenger, but the concealed reproach made me feel very badly because it was not altogether unjustified.

Only reproaches which “have something in them” have power to irritate, as everyone knows.

For long before, in the case of two persons who were friendly to each other and who were willing to honour me with their friendship, I had quite needlessly tattled what the one had said about the other;

In a certain sense all my friends are incarnations of this first figure, “which early appeared to my blurred sight”; they are all revenants. My nephew himself returned in the years of adolescence, and then we acted Cæsar and Brutus.

An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable requirements for my emotional life; I have always been able to create them anew

, and not infrequently my childish ideal has been so closely approached that friend and enemy coincided in the same person, not simultaneously, of course, nor in repeated alterations, as had been the case in my first childhood years.

This satisfaction, coming from sources in childhood, at the fact that I claim the field, covers the larger part of the emotion which appears in the dream.

I am glad that I am the survivor—I express this sentiment with the naïve egotism of the husband who says to his wife: “If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.”

It is such a matter of course for my expectation that I am not to be the one.

“If one of us dies, I shall move to Paris.” It is such a matter of course for my expectation that I am not to be the one.

It cannot be denied that great self-control is necessary to interpret one’s dreams and to report them.

It is necessary for you to reveal yourself as the one scoundrel among all the noble souls with whom you share the breath of life.

It cannot be denied that great self-control is necessary to interpret one’s dreams and to report them.

It is necessary for you to reveal yourself as the one scoundrel among all the noble souls with whom you share the breath of life.

Thus, I consider it quite natural that revenants exist only as long as they are wanted, and that they can be obviated by a wish. This is the thing for which my friend Joseph has been punished.

I insisted that the names should not be chosen according to the fashion of the day but should be determined by regard for the memory of beloved persons. The children’s names make them “revenants.”

And, finally, is not the having of children the only access to immortality for us all?

I shall add only a few remarks about the emotions of the dream from another point of view.

It is too late to suppress the dream, and the instance therefore carries with it that note of fear or of painful feeling which presents itself in the dream.

It is an expression of the esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychic censor.

In this example we have faultless proof that not everything which the dream contains comes from the dream thoughts, but that a psychic function which cannot be differentiated from our waking thoughts may make contributions to the dream content.

If we trace their formation, we see how the wish motive, which is active in their production, has taken the material of which they are built, mixed it together, rearranged it, and composed it into a new unit.

They bear the same relation to the childish memories, to which they go back, as some of the quaint palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins, whose freestones and pillars have furnished the material for the structure built in modern form.

In the “secondary elaboration” of the dream content which we have ascribed to our fourth dream-making factor, we again find the same activity which in the creation of day dreams is allowed to manifest itself unhampered by other influences.

Now, this peculiar dream-work is much further removed from the model of waking thought than even the most decided depreciators of psychic activity in dream formation have thought.

It is not, one might say, more negligent, more incorrect, more easily forgotten, more incomplete than waking thought; it is something qualitatively altogether different from waking thought, and therefore not in any way comparable to it.

It does not in general think, calculate, or judge at all, but limits itself to transforming. It can be exhaustively described if the conditions which must be satisfied at its creation are kept in mind.

it comes to his bed and clasps his arms, as it probably did on the occasion which gave origin to the first part of the speech in the dream. It was for the sake of this wish-fulfilment that the father slept a moment longer.

The dream triumphed over the conscious reflection because it could show the child once more alive.

If the father had awakened first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led him into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child’s life by this one moment.

indeed, if we were confronted by a senseless or insufficient wording betraying an unsuccessful effort to translate the dream in the proper style, we have even respected these defects of expression.

In brief, what the authorities have considered arbitrary improvisation, concocted hastily to suit the occasion, we have treated like a sacred text.

This contradiction requires an explanation.

But he never expresses himself thus; and it is just this disturbing influence of doubt in the analysis that stamps it as an offshoot and instrument of the psychic resistance.

Psychoanalysis is justly suspicious. One of its rules reads: Whatever disturbs the continuation of the work is a resistance.

The forgetting of dreams, too, remains unfathomable as long as we do not consider the force of the psychic censor in its explanation.

In the best interpreted dreams we must often leave one portion in obscurity because we observe in the interpretation that it represents the beginning of a tangle of dream thoughts which cannot be unravelled but which has furnished no new contribution to the dream content.

This, then, is the keystone of the dream, the place at which it mounts into the unknown.

For the dream thoughts which we come upon in the interpretation must generally remain without a termination, and merge in all directions into the net-like entanglement of our world of thoughts.

For the dream thoughts which we come upon in the interpretation must generally remain without a termination, and merge in all directions into the net-like entanglement of our world of thoughts.

It is from some denser portion of this texture that the dream-wish then arises like the mushroom from its mycelium.

Let us now return to the facts of dream-forgetting, as we have really neglected to draw an important conclusion from them.

… are the work of a censor which no longer makes any effort to conceal its sway, which, instead of lending its support to a revision no longer obnoxious to it, cancels regardlessly that which it raises objections against, thus causing the remnant to appear disconnected.

This censor behaves analogously to the Russian newspaper censor on the frontier, who allows to fall into the hands of his protected readers only those foreign journals that have passed under the black pencil.

The free play of the presentations following any associative concatenation perhaps makes its appearance in destructive organic brain lesions.

of this we have in our dream analysis found many surprising examples. No connection was there too loose and no wit too objectionable to serve as a bridge from one thought to another. But the correct understanding of such tolerance is not remote.

Whenever one psychic element is connected with another through an obnoxious or superficial association, there also exists a correct and more profound connection between the two which succumbs to the resistance of the censor.

The correct explanation for the predominance of the superficial associations is the pressure of the censor, and not the suppression of the end-presentations. The superficial associations supplant the deep ones in the presentation whenever the censor renders the normal connective paths impassable.

The dream therefore employs the present in the same manner and with the same right as the day dream.

The present is the tense in which the wish is represented as fulfilled.

The second quality, however, is peculiar to the dream as distinguished from the day dream, namely, that the presentation content is not thought, but changed into perceptible images to which we give credence and which we believe we experience.

No one, so far as I know, has ever ventured to attempt to discover the composition of the psychic instrument through such analysis. I see no harm in such an attempt.

I believe that we may give free rein to our assumptions provided we at the same time preserve our cool judgment and do not take the scaffolding for the building.

As we need nothing except auxiliary ideas for the first approach to any unknown subject, we shall prefer the crudest and most tangible hypothesis to all others.

Following this conception, we may further describe the dream as a modified substitute for the infantile scene produced by transference to recent material.

The infantile cannot enforce its renewal, and must therefore be satisfied to return as a dream.

This reference to the significance of the infantile scenes (or of their phantastic repetitions), as in a manner furnishing the pattern for the dream content, renders superfluous the assumption made by Scherner and his pupils, of an inner source of excitement.

It is quite possible that this first part of our psychological utilisation of the dream does not entirely satisfy even us.

We must, however, console ourselves with the fact that we are compelled to build in the dark.

If we have not altogether strayed from the right path, we shall be sure to reach about the same ground from another starting-point, and thereafter perhaps be better able to see our way.

Just one further remark about the day remnants.

There is no doubt that they are the actual disturbers of sleep, and not the dream, which, on the contrary, strives to guard sleep.

But we shall return to this point later.

The wants of life first manifested themselves to it in the form of the great physical needs. The excitement aroused by the inner want seeks an outlet in motility, which may be designated as “inner changes” or as an “expression of the emotions.”

The hungry child cries or fidgets helplessly, but its situation remains unchanged; for the excitation proceeding from an inner want requires, not a momentary outbreak, but a force working continuously.

A change can occur only if in some way a feeling of gratification is experienced—which in the case of the child must be through outside help—in order to remove the inner excitement.

But this entire complicated mental activity which works its way from the memory picture to the establishment of the perception identity from the outer world merely represents a detour which has been forced upon the wish-fulfilment by experience.[FS]

Thinking is indeed nothing but the equivalent of the hallucinatory wish; and if the dream be called a wish-fulfilment this becomes self-evident, as nothing but a wish can impel our psychic apparatus to activity.

The dream, which in fulfilling its wishes follows the short regressive path, thereby preserves for us only an example of the primary form of the psychic apparatus which has been abandoned as inexpedient.

The dream, which in fulfilling its wishes follows the short regressive path, thereby preserves for us only an example of the primary form of the psychic apparatus which has been abandoned as inexpedient.

What once ruled in the waking state when the psychic life was still young and unfit seems to have been banished into the sleeping state, just as we see again in the nursery the bow and arrow, the discarded primitive weapons of grown-up humanity.

The dream is a fragment of the abandoned psychic life of the child.

What once ruled in the waking state when the psychic life was still young and unfit seems to have been banished into the sleeping state, just as we see again in the nursery the bow and arrow, the discarded primitive weapons of grown-up humanity.

The dream is a fragment of the abandoned psychic life of the child.

In the psychoses these modes of operation of the psychic apparatus, which are normally suppressed in the waking state, reassert themselves, and then betray their inability to satisfy our wants in the outer world.

may roam about on the scene, they need not be interfered with; they remain harmless because they are unable to put in motion the motor apparatus which alone can exert a modifying influence upon the outer world.

Sleep guarantees the security of the fortress which is under guard.

Conditions are less harmless when a displacement of forces is produced, not through a nocturnal diminution in the operation of the critical censor, but through pathological enfeeblement of the latter or through pathological reinforcement of the unconscious excitations, and this while the foreconscious is charged …

This is the same manner of consenting to a wish-fulfilment which the queen of the Parthians chose for the triumvir Crassus.

Believing that he had undertaken the campaign out of greed for gold, she caused molten gold to be poured into the throat of the corpse. “Now hast thou what thou hast longed for.”

As yet we know of the dream only that it expresses a wish-fulfilment of the unconscious; and apparently the dominating foreconscious permits this only after it has subjected the wish to some distortions.

But this wish to continue to sleep must also participate in the formation of all other dreams which may disturb the sleeping state from within only.

“Now, then, sleep on; why, it’s but a dream”

; this is in many cases the suggestion of the Forec. to consciousness when the dream goes too far; and this also describes in a general way the attitude of our dominating psychic activity toward dreaming, though the thought remains tacit.

One is inclined to believe that the final picture of the dream is so strong that it forces the dreamer to awaken; but, as a matter of fact, this picture is strong only because the dreamer is already very near awakening when it appears.

“Un rêve c’est un réveil qui commence.”

It has already been emphasized by Dugas[18] that Goblot was forced to repudiate many facts in order to generalise his theory. There are, moreover, dreams from which we do not awaken, e.g., some dreams in which we dream that we dream.

To be sure, from now on the process is accelerated, as the dream is henceforth subjected to the same treatment as any other perception.

It is like fireworks, which require hours of preparation and only a moment for ignition.

Through the dream-work the dream process now gains either sufficient intensity to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the foreconscious, which is quite independent of the time or profundity of sleep, or, its intensity being insufficient it must wait until it meets the attention which …

That the unconscious wishes always remain active is quite true. They represent paths which are passable whenever a sum of excitement makes use of them. Moreover, a remarkable peculiarity of the unconscious processes is the fact that they remain indestructible.

Nothing can be brought to an end in the unconscious; nothing can cease or be forgotten.

This impression is most strongly gained in the study of the neuroses, especially of hysteria. The unconscious stream of thought which leads to the discharge through an attack becomes passable again as soon as there is an accumulation of a sufficient amount of excitement.

The result will be an attack of anxiety, just as an attack of anxiety in the street has often been the cause of establishing an agoraphobia. We thus learn that the symptom has been constituted in order to guard against the outbreak of the anxiety.

The phobia is thrown before the anxiety like a fortress on the frontier.

Unless we enter into the part played by the affects in these processes, which can be done here only imperfectly, we cannot continue our discussion.

That the dream continues the impulses and interests of the waking state has been quite generally confirmed through the discovery of the latent thoughts of the dream. These thoughts concern themselves only with things that seem important and of momentous interest to us.

The dream never occupies itself with trifles.

But we have also concurred with the contrary view, viz.

4.

Contradictory thoughts do not strive to eliminate one another, but remain side by side.

They often unite to produce condensation as if no contradiction existed, or they form compromises for which we should never forgive our thoughts, but which we frequently approve of in our actions.