The Interpretation of Dreams (AmazonClassics Edition)

by Sigmund Freud

In the following pages I shall prove that there exists a psychological technique by which dreams may be interpreted, and that upon the application of this method every dream will show itself to be a senseful psychological structure which may be introduced into an assignable place in the psychic activity of the waking state.

Aristotle asserts that the dream is of demoniacal, though not of divine nature, which indeed contains deep meaning, if it be correctly interpreted.

They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.

“The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with

one subject, when profound sorrow has torn our hearts or when a task has claimed the whole power of our mentality, the dream either gives us something entirely strange, or it takes for its combinations only a few elements from reality, or it only enters into the strain of our mood and symbolises reality.”

“The content of dreams is more or less determined by the individual personality, by age, sex, station in life, education, habits, and by events and experiences of the whole past life.”

the dream gives proof of knowing and recollecting matters unknown to the waking person.

One of the sources from which the dream draws material for reproduction—material which in part is not recalled or employed in waking thought—is to be found in childhood.

impressions which have intensely occupied the waking mind appear in the dream only after they have been to some extent pushed aside from the elaboration of the waking thought.

Hildebrandt: “For it is a remarkable fact that dreams do not, as a rule, take their elements from great and deep-rooted events or from the powerful and urgent interests of the preceding day, but from unimportant matters, from the most worthless fragments of recent experience or of a more remote past.

It teaches us that “nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost” (Scholz); or as Delbœuf puts it, “any impression, even the most insignificant, leaves an unalterable trace, indefinitely susceptible to resurface,”

The judgment of the apparently highest psychic function, the consciousness, presents for the dream a special difficulty. As we can know anything only through consciousness, there can be no doubt as to its retention;

(Dugas) states: “A dream is not irrationality or even pure irreason,”

the dream phantasy copies objects not in detail, but only in outline and even this in the broadest manner.

wish fulfilment as a characteristic of the imagination, common to the dream and the psychosis.

I have made it my task to show that dreams are capable of interpretation, and contributions to the solution of the dream problems that have just been treated can only be yielded as possible by-products of the settlement of my own particular problem.

the dream has a meaning, albeit a hidden one; that it is intended as a substitute for some other thought process, and that it is only a question of revealing this substitute correctly in order to reach the hidden signification of the dream.

For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention, it is advantageous that the patient occupy a restful position and close his eyes; he must be explicitly commanded to resign the critique of the thought-formations which he perceives. He must be told further that the success of the psychoanalysis depends upon his noticing and telling

everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical.

At a point in his correspondence with Koerner, for the noting of which we are indebted to Mr. Otto Rank, Schiller answers a friend who complains of his lack of creativeness in the following words: “The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intelligence imposes upon your imagination.

The dream fulfils several wishes,

many things in the details of the dream become intelligible when regarded from the point of view of wish-fulfilment.

Useful.

Wherever a wish-fulfilment is unrecognisable and concealed, there must be present a feeling of repulsion towards this wish, and in consequence of this repulsion the wish is unable to gain expression except in a disfigured state.

I wrote down the expression plagiarism—without any reason—because it presented itself to me, and now I perceive that it must belong to the latent dream content, because it will serve as a bridge between different parts of the manifest dream content. The chain of associations—Pélagie—plagiarism—plagiostomi59 (sharks)—fish bladder—connects the old novel with the affair of Knoedl and with the overcoats (German, Überzieher = thing drawn over—overcoat or condom), which obviously refer to an object belonging to the technique of sexual life.60 This, it is true, is a very forced and irrational connection, but it is nevertheless one which I could not establish in waking life if it had not been already established by the activity of the dream.

If somatic sources of excitement occurring during sleep—that is, the sensations of sleep—are not of unusual intensity, they play a part in the formation of dreams similar, in my judgment, to that of the impressions of the day which have remained recent but indifferent.

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 this is justifiably so; for we may expect that within this very period of life which we call childhood, altruistic impulses and morality will come to life in the little egotist, and that, in the words of Meynert, a secondary ego will overlay and restrain the primary one.

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 material furnished by the psychic impulses, which has been formed during the infantile period, and which is of such great importance for the symptoms appearing in the later neurosis. But I do not think that psychoneurotics are here sharply distinguished from normal human beings,

in their loving or hostile wishes towards their parents psychoneurotics only show in exaggerated form feelings which are present less distinctly and less intensely in the minds of most children.

The intimate connection between flying and the idea of a bird makes it comprehensible that the dream of flying in the case of men usually has a significance of coarse sensuality.

Dr. Paul Federn (Vienna) has propounded the fascinating theory that a great many flying dreams are erection dreams, since the remarkable phenomena of erection which so constantly occupy the human phantasy must strongly impress upon it a notion of the suspension of gravity (see the winged phalli of the ancients).

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.

In this dream parts of the human body are treated as objects, as is usually the case in dreams.

Even Pharaoh’s dream in the Bible of the ears and the kine, which Joseph interpreted, was of this kind.

What is signified by the sensation of impeded movement, which so often occurs in the dream, and which is so closely allied to anxiety?

Anxiety is a libidinous impulse which emanates from the unconscious, and is inhibited by the fore-conscious. 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.

Really?

The part played by words in the formation of dreams ought not to surprise us. A word being a point of junction for a number of conceptions, it possesses, so to speak, a predestined ambiguity, and neuroses (obsessions, phobias) take advantage of the conveniences which words offer for the purposes of condensation and disguise quite as readily as the dream.

Wherever the neurosis employs a disguise of this sort, it treads the paths once trodden by the whole of humanity in the early ages of civilisation—paths of whose existence customs of speech,

superstitions, and morals still give testimony to this day.

Examples for the individual thesis are convincing only when considered in connection with a dream interpretation; when they are torn from their context they lose their significance, and, furthermore, a dream interpretation, though not at all profound, soon becomes so extensive that it obscures the thread of the discussion which it is intended to illustrate.

Dream activity does not calculate at all, whether correctly or incorrectly; it joins together in the form of a calculation numerals which

occur in the dream thoughts, and which may serve as allusions to material which is incapable of being represented.

a deep impression is made upon the reader—in Brutus’s 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.”

Strangely enough I once actually played the part of Brutus.

Freud performed Shakespeare

If the affects in the dream thoughts are compared with those in the dream, it at once becomes clear that wherever there is an emotion in the dream, this is also to be found in the dream thoughts; the converse, however, is not true. In general, the dream is less rich in affects than the psychic material from which it is elaborated.

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.

(a) Forgetting in Dreams

A common problem for me and for many people.

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

These ever active and, as it were, immortal wishes from the unconscious recall the legendary Titans who from time immemorial have borne the ponderous mountains which were once rolled upon them by the victorious gods, and which even now quiver from time to time from the convulsions of their mighty limbs;