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If you reject the unpleasant, you are repeating the mechanism of dream construction instead of understanding and mastering it. Perhaps you will promise to overlook the repulsive character
dream distortion is a consequence of the censorship practised by accredited tendencies of the ego
against those wish-impulses that are in any way shocking, impulses which stir in us nightly during sleep. Why these wish-impulses come just at night, and whence they come—these are questions
remember that previously, when we were investigating the relationship between dream elements and their actuality, I drew three distinctions, viz., that of the part of the whole, that of the allusion, and that of the imagery. I then announced that there was a fourth, but did not name it. This fourth is the symbolic relationship here
symbolism in the dream was not discovered through psychoanalysis, although the latter is not poor otherwise in making startling discoveries. The discoverer of dream symbolism, if we insist on a discovery in modern times, was the philosopher K. A. Scherner (1861). Psychoanalysis affirmed Scherner's discovery and modified it considerably.
In the first place, the holy figure 3 is a symbolical substitute for the entire male genital. The more conspicuous and more interesting
part of the whole person and pictures the person himself as flying. Do not feel disturbed because the dreams of flying, often so beautiful, and which we all have had, must be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitement, as erection dreams. P. Federn, among the psychoanalytical students, has confirmed this interpretation beyond any doubt, and even Mourly Vold,
The female genital is symbolically represented by all those objects which share its peculiarity of enclosing a space capable of being filled by something—viz., by pits, caves, and hollows,
satisfaction in one's own genital is suggested by all types of play, in which may be included piano-playing. Exquisite symbolic representations of onanism are sliding and coasting as well as tearing
particularly remarkable dream symbol is that of having one's teeth fall out, or having them pulled. Certainly its most immediate interpretation is castration as a punishment for onanism. Special
be tempted to say that a room represents a woman in the dream because of the German colloquialism which uses the term Frauenzimmer instead of Frau, in other words, it substitutes for the human person the idea of that room that is set aside for her exclusive
degree. The opposite is never true, that is, it never occurs that the manifest dream is more extensive in scope and content than the latent.
Condensation occurs in the following ways: 1. Certain latent elements are entirely omitted; 2. only a fragment of the many complexes of the latent dream is carried over into the manifest dream;
material at the disposal of the dream-work consists of thoughts, thoughts which may be offensive and unacceptable, but which are nevertheless correctly formed and expressed.
The consequence of condensation for the relation between latent and manifest dreams is the fact that no simple relations can exist between the elements of the one and the other. A manifest element corresponds simultaneously to several latent ones, and vice versa, a latent element may partake of several
The second process of the dream-work is displacement. Fortunately we are already prepared for this, since we know that it is entirely the work of dream censorship. The two evidences of this are firstly, that a latent element is not replaced by one of its constituent parts but by something further removed from it, that is, by a sort of allusion; secondly, that the psychic accent
The third process of the dream-work is the most interesting from a psychological point of view. It consists of the translation of thoughts into visual images. Let us bear in mind that by no means all dream thoughts undergo this translation; many of them
We already know the inversion of the sense, substitution by the opposite. Besides there are inversions of situations, of relations between two people, and so in dreams we are in a sort of topsy-turvy world. In a dream it is frequently the rabbit that shoots the hunter.
"Dream" can mean nothing but the result of the dream-work, that is, the form into which the latent dream thoughts have been translated by the dream-work. Dream-work is a process of a very peculiar sort, the like of which has hitherto not been discovered in psychic life.
These condensations, displacements, regressive translations of thoughts into pictures, are new discoveries which richly repay our efforts in the field of psychoanalysis. You will realize from the parallel
You may conclude that as a result of the deeper study of the dream-work we gain valuable information about the rather unknown beginnings of our intellectual development. I trust this will be true, but this work has not, up to the present time, been undertaken.
These impressions have never really been forgotten, they have only been inaccessible, latent, have belonged to the unconscious.
tendencies thereto, or real remnants thereof, show themselves. For the child loves itself first, and later learns to love others, to sacrifice something of its ego for another. Even those persons whom the child seems
even when looked at from the viewpoint of the child. This is in accord with our expectation; we find it much more offensive for love between parents and children to be lacking than for love between brothers and sisters. We have, so to speak, made something holy in the first instance which in the other case we permitted to remain profane. But daily observation can show us how
The daughter finds in her mother the authority that hems in her will and that is entrusted with the task of causing her to carry out the abstention from sexual liberty which society demands; in certain cases also she is the rival who objects to being displaced. The same type of thing occurs in a more glaring manner between father and son. To the son the father is the embodiment of every social restriction, borne with such great opposition; the father bars the way to freedom of will, to early sexual satisfaction, and where there is family property held in common, to the enjoyment thereof.
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for his mother, whom he considers as his own property, and feels his father to be a rival who puts into question his individual possession; and in the same manner the little daughter sees in her mother a person who is a disturbing element in
parents, and intimately associated therewith we find what we call the castration complex, the reaction to sexual intimidation or restriction, ascribed to the father, of early infantile sexuality.
What we call "perverse" in the life of the adult, differs from the normal in the following respects: first, in disregard for the dividing line of species (the gulf between man and animal); second, being insensible to the conventional feeling of disgust; third, the incest-limitation (being prohibited from seeking sexual satisfaction with near blood-relations); fourth, homosexuality, and fifth, transferring the role of the genitals to other organs and other parts of the body. None of these limitations exist in the beginning, but are gradually built up in the course of development and education.
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they give us an insight into childhood sex-life and thereby into the sex life of man. When we rediscover in the background of our distorted dreams all these perverse wish-impulses, it means only that the dream has in this field traveled back to the infantile condition.
We found not only that the materials of forgotten childhood experiences are accessible to the dream, but we saw also that the psychic life of children, with all its peculiarities, its egoism, its incestuous love-choice, etc., continues, for the purposes of the dream, in the unconscious, and that the dream nightly leads us back to this infantile stage. Thus it becomes more certain that the unconscious in our psychic life is the infantile. The estranging impression
First: the regression of dream-work is not only formal, it is also of greater import. It not only translates our thoughts into a primitive form of expression, but it reawakens the peculiarities of our primitive psychic life, the ancient predominance of the ego, the earliest impulses of our sexual life, even our old intellectual property, if we may consider the symbolic
unconscious is an especial psychic realm with wish-impulses of its own, with its own method of expression and with a psychic
we call it the day-remnants—combines in the dream-fabrication with something else out of the realm of the unconscious. Between these two parts the dream-work completes itself. The influencing
so that it is not recognized until the dream is interpreted. We know, too, that the wishes in these distorted dreams are prohibited wishes, are wishes rejected by the censor and that their existence lit the very cause of the dream distortion and the reason for the intrusion of the dream censor. But it is hard to convince the lay-critic
following: A wish-fulfillment certainly must bring pleasure—but to whom? Naturally, to him who has the wish. But we know from the
this, that it is the obvious fulfillment of a suppressed wish. Anxiety is the mark which shows that the suppressed wish showed itself stronger than the censorship, that it put through its wish-fulfillment despite the censorship, or was about to put it through. We understand
answer can only be an assumption which is based on the nature of the condition of sleep. During the day the heavy pressure of a censorship weighs upon these wishes, making it impossible, as a rule, for them to express themselves in any manner. At
slackening of the censorship. So you can readily see that this withdrawal of the censor does not in itself signify rank carelessness. Sleep weakens our power to move; our evil intentions, even if they do begin to stir, can accomplish nothing but a dream, which for
are bound, however, to establish wish-fulfillment in every dream no matter how distorted, and we certainly do not wish to withdraw from this task. Let us go back to the dream, already interpreted,
dream something that applies specifically and solely to the latter. For it is entirely correct that the dream can represent, and be replaced by all those things we enumerated: a resolution, a warning, reflection, preparation, an attempt to solve a problem, etc. But if you look closely, you will recognize that all these things are true only of the latent dream thoughts, which have been changed about in the dream. You learn from the interpretation of the dreams that the person's unconscious thinking is occupied with
purpose of drawing your attention to the latent, dream thoughts, now pushed to the fore. I beg of you not to forget first,
the unconscious wish which is essential to making them suitable for the dream? You discern correctly. Here lies the salient point of the whole affair. They are not unconscious in the same sense. The dream wish belongs to a different unconsciousness, that which we have recognized as of infantile origin, fitted out with special mechanisms. It is entirely appropriate to separate these
of the dream is rather characteristic and necessarily to be expected. Recollect that we said that the dream work translates the dream thoughts into primitive expressions analogous to picture writing. All these primitive systems of expression are, however,
forms of the words by means of which we might recognize sex, number, ending, tense or mood. The language, therefore, might be said to consist of raw material, much in the same manner as our thought language is broken up by the dream work into its raw materials when the expressions of relationship are left out. In the Chinese, in all cases of vagueness the decision is left to
It is with the help of displacements that the dream censor creates substitute-formations which we have designated as allusions. But
inconclusive on almost all points. But that is due to the relation which the phenomena of the dream have to those of the neuroses. We studied the dream by way of introduction to the study of the neuroses, and that was surely more correct than
Psychiatry does not apply the technical methods of psychoanalysis, and neglects to look for any significance in the content of the obsession. Instead of first seeking out more specific and immediate causes, psychiatry refers us to the very general and remote source—heredity. But does this imply a contradiction, a conflict between them? Do they not rather supplement
Psychoanalysis stands in about the same relation to psychiatry as does histology to anatomy. The one studies the outer forms of organs,
of the patient. The meaning of neurotic symptoms was first discovered by J. Breuer in the study and felicitous cure of a case of hysteria which has since become famous (1880-82). It is true that
confess that for a considerable period of time I was willing to estimate very highly the credit due to P. Janet in the explanation of neurotic symptoms, because he saw in them the expression of subconscious ideas (idées inconscientes) with which the patients were obsessed. But since then Janet has expressed himself most conservatively, as though he wanted to confess that the term "subconscious" had been for him nothing more than a mode of speech, a shift, "une façon de parler," by the use of which he had nothing definite in mind. I now no longer understand Janet's discussions,
