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August 16 - August 27, 2018
The ancients’ pre-scientific conception of dream was undoubtedly consonant with their entire worldview, which was in the habit of projecting as reality in the outside world that which had reality only in the life of the mind.
Dream is something quite separate from reality as experienced in the waking state; one might almost say it represents a hermetically sealed existence, divided from real life by an unbridgeable gulf. It detaches us from reality, erases normal recall of the same in us, and places us in a different world and in a quite different life-story, which deep down has nothing to do with the real one…’
One thing that happens is that material will figure in dream-content that a person does not, in his waking life, recognize as forming part of his knowledge and experience. He recalls dreaming the material concerned well enough but cannot recall experiencing it or when he experienced it. That leaves him unclear as to what sources dream has drawn on,
The ancients, for whom dream was a divine missive of some kind, had no need to seek a stimulus for it; dream flowed from the will of the divine or demonic power, its content from what that power knew or intended.
Where the enumeration of sources of dream is complete, the eventual result is four types, which are also used for classifying dreams themselves: 1. external (objective) sensory arousal 2. internal (subjective) sensory arousal 3. internal (organic) physical stimulus 4. purely psychical stimuli.
At this point, we face a choice. We can concede that the laws of dream-formation really cannot be pursued any further, thus neglecting to enquire whether interpreting the illusion evoked by the sense impression is not subject to different conditions. Or we can surmise that the objective sensory stimulus operating in sleep plays only a minor role as a source of dream and that other factors determine the selection of the memory-images to be evoked.
The darkness in which the core of our being (what Tissié calls the moi splanchnique) is shrouded so far as our cognition is concerned and the darkness of dream-genesis make too good a match not to be brought into relationship with each other.
At night, however, when the deadening influence of daytime impressions has ceased, the impressions forcing their way up from the interior are able to gain attention – much as at night we hear the bubbling of the spring that the day’s din made imperceptible. But how else is the intellect to react to those stimuli than by performing its own peculiar function? In other words, it moulds the stimuli into figures that occupy space and time and dance to the strings of causality – and this gives rise to dream.
If sensations, ideas, thoughts and so on are to achieve a certain magnitude for the purposes of memory, they must lose their isolation and form suitable connections and associations with one another.
Dreams, in most instances, lack comprehensibility and order. Dream-compositions, inherently incapable of being remembered, are forgotten for the reason that they usually fall apart in the next few moments.
We accept dream-images as reality because in sleep we have no other impressions to compare them with, being detached from the external world. However, the reason why we believe in the truth of our hallucinations is not that we have no opportunity, in sleep, to put them to the test. Dream is capable of feigning all such tests for our benefit – of showing us, for example, that we are touching the rose we can see, yet at the same time dreaming.
Dream is incoherent; it unhesitatingly combines the most blatant contradictions and contemplates utter impossibilities, disregarding the knowledge that so influences us by day and portraying us as ethically and morally stupid persons. If anyone behaved in the waking state as dream with its situations suggests, we should judge him mad; if in the waking state a person spoke or sought to communicate such things as occur in dream-content, that person would strike us as confused or feeble-minded. In other words, we believe we are only expressing the way things are when we rate psychical activity in
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That dream is able to resume the intellectual labours of the day and bring them to a conclusion that the day failed to reach, that it is capable of solving doubts and problems and of providing writers and composers with a source of fresh inspiration – these things, by a wide variety of accounts and after the anthology put together by Chabaneix [1897], appear beyond dispute.
‘Involuntary ideas’ is perhaps a good heading under which to gather all the ideational material that so disconcerts us when it occurs in either immoral or absurd dreams. The only difference that matters is that, in the moral sphere, such involuntary ideas are recognizably opposed to our normal sensibility, whereas the others we simply find strange. Nothing has yet been undertaken that would enable us to remove that distinction as a result of some deeper understanding.
Dreams are excretions of thoughts that have failed to germinate.
The lay world has therefore, since time began, sought to ‘interpret’ dream, and in the process it has experimented with two radically different methods. The first looks at the content of a particular dream as a whole and tries to substitute for it a different, comprehensible and in certain respects similar content. This is symbolic dream-interpretation, and of course it fails from the outset with those dreams that appear not only incomprehensible but also confused.
of dream-interpretation remotely lays claim. The second method might be called the ‘decoding method’; it treats dream as a kind of secret writing in which, following a fixed key, each character is translated into a different character whose meaning is known.
As regards the scientific treatment of the subject, the uselessness of both popular dream-interpretation methods cannot be in doubt for a moment. The symbolic method is limited in its application and not susceptible of general exposition. As for the decoding method, everything would depend on the ‘key’ (the codebook) being reliable, and of that there is no guarantee.
When the task of interpretation is complete, dream can be seen to constitute wish-fulfilment.
If, as our interpretation suggests, dream represents a wish fulfilled, why does that act of wish-fulfilment find expression in so conspicuous and disconcerting a form – where does that come from?
If we value childhood as a time of happiness as yet innocent of sexual desire,7 we must not forget what a rich source of disappointment, renunciation and hence dream-arousal life’s other major business can become.
The fact is, anxiety-dreams especially would seem to make it impossible to give general validity to the principle that we distilled from the examples of the previous chapter – namely, that dream is wish-fulfilment. Indeed, they appear to brand that principle an absurdity.
We can assume, in other words, that dream-formation stems from two psychical forces (tendencies, systems) in the individual, one of which shapes the wish expressed in dream while the other exercises censorship over that dream-wish, thereby imposing distortion on the way in which it is expressed.
The other motive of counter-wish dreams is so obvious that there is a great danger of our overlooking it, as I did myself for quite a long time. The sexual make-up of so many people contains a masochistic element that as a result of total reversal stems from the aggressive, sadistic side. Such people are termed ‘ideational’ masochists if they seek pleasure not from having physical pain inflicted on them but from humiliation and mental torment. It is immediately apparent that such people may entertain counter-wish dreams and aversion dreams that so far as they are concerned are in fact
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I once maintained that neurotic anxiety stems from the sexual life and corresponds to a libido that has been diverted from its purpose and remained unused. That formulation has always turned out to be more than sound since. From it can now be derived the principle that anxiety-dreams are dreams with a sexual content, the attendant libido of which has undergone a transformation into anxiety.
three distinguishing features of dream-memory that have been so frequently remarked upon but never explained: 1) that dream has a clear preference for the impressions of the last few days (Robert [1886], Strümpell [1877], Hildebrandt [1875], and also Weed and Hallam [1896]); 2) that dream makes its selection according to different principles than those used by our waking memory in that it remembers not what is essential and significant but what is peripheral and disregarded; 3) that dream has access to our earliest childhood impressions and even fetches out details from that period
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Dream can choose its material from any time of life, provided only that there is a mental thread connecting the experiences of the dream-day (‘still-vivid’ impressions) with those earlier experiences.
we interpret the fact that dream-content takes into itself leftovers of trivial experiences as an expression of dream-distortion (as a result of a shift or displacement) and remind the reader that we have recognized dream-distortion as a consequence of the transit censorship existing between two psychical authorities.
The links between our typical dreams and folk tales and other writings are of course neither isolated nor accidental. Every now and then the transformation process (whose instrument the writer usually represents) is seen analytically by some sharp-eyed poet and traced in the opposite direction – in other words, the tale goes back to the dream.
The inmost, ageless essence of mankind, which is what poets and storytellers usually rely on arousing among their audience, consists of those stirrings of the life of the mind that have their roots in a childhood subsequently become ‘prehistoric’. Behind the irreproachable wishes of the homeless wanderer, which are accessible to consciousness, other dreams break through, dreams of childhood that have been suppressed as inadmissible,
From the outset, such dreams must be divided into two categories: one in which the mourning dreamed of leaves the dreamer unaffected, with the result that, on waking, one is surprised at one’s lack of feeling, the other in which one feels deep sorrow at the death, even giving expression to one’s grief by shedding fervent tears while asleep.
The child is wholly egoistic, experiencing its needs intensely and striving ruthlessly to satisfy them, particularly against its rivals – other children, but in the first instance its own siblings. However, we do not call the child ‘bad’ because of that; we call it ‘naughty’. It is not responsible for its misdeeds, either before our judgement or before the law. And rightly so; because even within phases of existence that we include within childhood we can expect the little egoist to show stirrings of altruism and morality
Hitherto the child was unique; now he is told that the stork has brought a new child. Eyeing the newcomer, the child avers determinedly, ‘The stork should take it away again.’10
Someone may object at this point that, while the hostile impulses of children towards their siblings can possibly be conceded, how does it happen that this childish ill-will reaches such a pitch of wickedness as to wish the rival or stronger playmate dead, as if every misdemeanour can be atoned for only by the death penalty? Anyone who does so object is forgetting that the child’s idea of ‘being dead’ has little in common with our own. It uses the same word, that’s about all. The child knows nothing of the horrors of decay, of shuddering in an icy tomb, of the dread of everlasting night that
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The relationship between parents and children harbours more than one occasion for hostility; conditions in which wishes may be engendered that do not stand up to censorship exist in plenty.
At the lowest as at the highest levels of human society, respect for parents tends to be overshadowed by other interests. The sombre messages that myth and legend bring us from the primeval years of human society give a nasty impression of the power of the father and the ruthlessness with which it has been wielded. Cronus eats his children, rather as the boar eats the sow’s litter, and Zeus castrates his father18 and rules in his stead. The more absolutely the father lorded it over the ancient family, the more the son (as designated successor) must have moved into the position of enemy and the
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Occasions for conflict between mother and daughter occur when the daughter grows up and finds her mother standing guard while she longs for sexual freedom, whereas the mother, alerted by her daughter’s blooming, realizes that the time has come for her to forgo sexual desires.
Sexual choice is usually made early, falling on one of the child’s parents; a natural trait ensures that the husband pampers his little daughters and the wife sticks up for her sons, while both of them, where the magic of sex does not cloud their judgement, work sternly towards bringing up their children. The child, well aware of the preference, tends to rebel against the parent who opposes it. To find love among adults is not only, so far as the child is concerned, to satisfy a particular requirement; finding such love also means that the child’s wishes will be complied with in every other
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being in love with one parent and hating the other constitute an integral part of the stock of psychical stirrings that is formed at that time and is of such importance for the symptomatology of the neurosis to come.
a myth whose far-reaching, universal effectiveness is explicable only in terms of a similar universal validity for the foregoing premise from the field of child psychology.
King Oedipus is what is called a ‘tragedy of fate’; its tragic effect is said to rest on the contrast between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of mankind, threatened with disaster, to thwart it; surrender to the divine will and an understanding of their own powerlessness are the lessons the deeply moved audience is meant to take away from the tragedy.
If King Oedipus is no less unsettling for modern man than it was for contemporary Greeks, the answer can presumably only be that the effect of Greek tragedy does not rest on the contrast between fate and human will but must be sought in the special nature of the material used to demonstrate that contrast. There must be a voice deep inside us that is prepared to acknowledge the compelling power of fate in the case of Oedipus
The only reason why his fate grips us is because it might also have been our own, because prior to our birth the oracle uttered the same curse over us as over him. It was given to us all, possibly, to direct our first sexual stirring at our mother, our first hatred and violent wish at our father; our dreams persuade us of that.
The dream of having sexual intercourse with one’s mother is also, then as now, a dream that many men share – and recount in outraged amazement. For obvious reasons, it is the key to the tragedy and complements the dream of the father’s death. The Oedipus story is the imagination’s reaction to these two typical dreams, and as the dreams are experienced by the adult with feelings of disapproval, the legend must include in its content horror and self-punishment.
Hamlet represents the type of person in whom spontaneity of action is paralysed by the rampant overgrowth of ratiocination
According to others, the poet has tried to describe a morbid, vacillating, almost neurasthenic character.
Dream-thoughts are comprehensible to us anyway, as soon as we have found out what they are. Dream-content is embedded, as it were, in a hieroglyphic script whose characters need to be translated one by one into the language of the dream-thoughts.
compression
The actual dream is paltry, laconic, terse, compared to the broad compass and richly varied nature of the dream-thoughts. A dream, written down, fills half a page; analysis of it, which includes the dream-thoughts, requires six, eight, twelve times as much space. The ratio is different for different dreams; it never, so far as I have been able to ascertain, comes out the other way around.
the conclusion should be that compression occurs by way of omission, in that a dream is not a faithful translation or point-by-point projection of dream-thoughts but an extremely sketchy and incomplete reproduction of the same.
