On Dreams
by
Sigmund Freud
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Contents
On Dreams
Sigmund Freud
On Dreams (1901)
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
Sigmund Freud
Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856, in the Moravian town of Příbor, now part of the Czech Republic.
Sigmund was the eldest of eight children to Jewish Galician parents, Jacob and Amalia Freud. After Freud’s father lost his business as a result of the Panic of 1857, the family were forced to move to Leipzig and then Vienna to avoid poverty. It was in Vienna that the nine-year-old Sigmund enrolled at the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium before beginning his medical training at the University of Vienna in 1873, at the age of just 17. He studied a variety of subjects, including philosophy, physiology, and zoology, graduating with an MD in 1881.
The following year, Freud began his medical career in Theodor Meynert’s psychiatric clinic at the Vienna General Hospital. He worked there until 1886 when he set up in private practice and began specialising in “nervous disorders”. In the same year he married Merth Bernays, with whom he had 6 children between 1887 and 1895.
In the period between 1896 and 1901, Freud isolated himself from his colleagues and began work on developing the basics of his psychoanalytic theory. He published The Interpretation of Dreams, in 1899, to a lacklustre reception, but continued to produce works such as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). He held a weekly meeting at his home known as the “Wednesday Psychological Society” which eventually developed into the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society. His ideas gained momentum and by the end of the decade his methods were being used internationally by neurologists and psychiatrists.
Freud made a huge and lasting contribution to the field of psychology with many of his methods still being used in modern psychoanalysis. He inspired much discussion on the wealth of theories he produced and the reactions to his works began a century of great psychological investigation.
In 1930 Freud fled Vienna due to rise of Nazism and resided in England until his death from mouth cancer on 23rd September 1939.
On Dreams (1901)
I
During the epoch which may be described as pre-scientific, men had no difficulty in finding an explanation of dreams. When they remembered a dream after waking up, they regarded it as either a favourable or a hostile manifestation by higher powers, daemonic and divine. When modes of thought belonging to natural science began to flourish, all this ingenious mythology was transformed into psychology, and to-day only a small minority of educated people doubt that dreams are a product of the dreamer’s own mind.
Since the rejection of the mythological hypothesis, however, dreams have stood in need of explanation. The conditions of their origin, their relation to waking mental life, their dependence upon stimuli which force their way upon perception during the state of sleep, the many peculiarities of their content which are repugnant to waking thought, the inconsistency between their ideational images and the affects attaching to them, and lastly their transitory character, the manner in which waking thought pushes them on one side as something alien to it, and mutilates or extinguishes them in memory - all of these and other problems besides have been awaiting clarification for many hundreds of years, and till now no satisfactory solution of them has been advanced. But what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams, a question which bears a double sense. It enquires in the first place as to the psychical significance of dreaming, as to the relation of dreams to other mental processes, and as to any biological function that they may have; in the second place it seeks to discover whether dreams can be interpreted, whether the content of individual dreams has a ‘meaning’, such as we are accustomed to find in other psychical structures.
In the assessment of the significance of dreams three lines of thought can be distinguished. One of these, which echoes, as it were, the ancient overvaluation of dreams, is expressed in the writings of certain philosophers. They consider that the basis of dream-life is a peculiar state of mental activity, and even go so far as to acclaim that state as an elevation to a higher level. For instance, Schubert declares that dreams are a liberation of the spirit from the power of external nature, and a freeing of the soul from the bonds of the senses. Other thinkers, without going so far as this, insist nevertheless that dreams arise essentially from mental impulses and represent manifestations of mental forces which have been prevented from expanding freely during the daytime. (Cf. the ‘dream imagination’ of Scherner and Volkelt.) A large number of observers agree in attributing to dream-life a capacity for superior functioning in certain departments at least (e.g. in memory).
In sharp contrast to this, the majority of medical writers adopt a view according to which dreams scarcely reach the level of being psychical phenomena at all. On their theory, the sole instigators of dreams are the sensory and somatic stimuli which either impinge upon the sleeper from outside or become active accidentally in his internal organs. What is dreamt, they contend, has no more claim to sense and meaning than, for instance, the sounds which would be produced if ‘the ten fingers of a man who knows nothing of music were wandering over the keys of a piano.’ Dreams are described by Binz as being no more than ‘somatic processes which are in every case useless and in many cases positively pathological.’ All the characteristics of dream-life would thus be explained as being due to the disconnected activity of separate organs or groups of cells in an otherwise sleeping brain, an activity forced upon them by physiological stimuli.
Popular opinion is but little affected by this scientific judgement, and is not concerned as to the sources of dreams; it seems to persist in the belief that nevertheless dreams have a meaning, which relates to the prediction of the future and which can be discovered by some process of interpretation of a content which is often confused and puzzling. The methods of interpretation employed consist in transforming the content of the dream as it is remembered, either by replacing it piecemeal in accordance with a fixed key, or by replacing the dream as a whole by another whole to which it stands in a symbolic relation. Serious-minded people smile at these efforts: ‘Träume sind Schäume’ - ‘dreams are froth’.
II
One day I discovered to my great astonishment that the view of dreams which came nearest to the truth was not the medical but the popular one, half-involved though it still was in superstition. For I had been led to fresh conclusions on the subject of dreams by applying to them a new method of psychological investigation which had done excellent service in the solution of phobias, obsessions and delusions, etc. Since then, under the name of ‘psycho-analysis’, it has found acceptance by a whole school of research workers. The numerous analogies that exist between dream-life and a great variety of conditions of psychical illness in waking life have indeed been correctly observed by many medical investigators. There seemed, therefore, good ground for hoping that a method of investigation which had given satisfactory results in the case of p
sychopathic structures would also be of use in throwing light upon dreams. Phobias and obsessions are as alien to normal consciousness as dreams are to waking consciousness; their origin is as unknown to consciousness as that of dreams. In the case of these psychopathic structures practical considerations led to an investigation of their origin and mode of development; for experience had shown that the discovery of the trains of thought which, concealed from consciousness, connect the pathological ideas with the remaining contents of the mind is equivalent to a resolution of the symptoms and has as its consequence the mastering of ideas which till then could not be inhibited. Thus psychotherapy was the starting-point of the procedure of which I made use for the explanation of dreams.
This procedure is easily described, although instruction and practice would be necessary before it could be put into effect.
If we make use of it on someone else, let us say on a patient with a phobia, we require him to direct his attention on to the idea in question, not, however, to reflect upon it as he has done so often already, but to take notice of whatever occurs to his mind without any exception and report it to the physician. If he should then assert that his attention is unable to grasp anything at all, we dismiss this with an energetic assurance that a complete absence of any ideational subject-matter is quite impossible. And in fact very soon numerous ideas will occur to him and will lead on to others; but they will invariably be prefaced by a judgement on the part of the self-observer to the effect that they are senseless or unimportant, that they are irrelevant, and that they occurred to him by chance and without any connection with the topic under consideration. We perceive at once that it was this critical attitude which prevented the subject from reporting any of these ideas, and which indeed had previously prevented them from becoming conscious. If we can induce him to abandon his criticism of the ideas that occur to him, and to continue pursuing the trains of thought which will emerge so long as he keeps his attention turned upon them, we find ourselves in possession of a quantity of psychical material, which we soon find is clearly connected with the pathological idea which was our starting-point; this material will soon reveal connections between the pathological idea and other ideas, and will eventually enable us to replace the pathological idea by a new one which fits into the nexus of thought in an intelligible fashion.
This is not the place in which to give a detailed account of the premises upon which this experiment was based, or the consequences which follow from its invariable success. It will therefore be enough to say that we obtain material that enables us to resolve any pathological idea if we turn our attention precisely to those associations which are ‘involuntary’, which ‘interfere with our reflection’, and which are normally dismissed by our critical faculty as worthless rubbish.
If we make use of this procedure upon ourselves, we can best assist the investigation by at once writing down what are at first unintelligible associations.
I will now show what results follow if I apply this method of investigation to dreams. Any example of a dream should in fact be equally appropriate for the purpose; but for particular reasons I will choose some dream of my own, one which seems obscure and meaningless as I remember it, and one which has the advantage of brevity. A dream which I actually had last night will perhaps meet these requirements. Its content, as I noted it down immediately after waking up, was as follows:
Company at table or table d’hôte . . . spinach was being eaten . . . Frau E. L. was sitting beside me; she was turning her whole attention to me and laid her hand on my knee in an intimate manner. I removed her hand unresponsively. She then said: “But you’ve always had such beautiful eyes.” . . . I then had an indistinct picture of two eyes, as though it were a drawing or like the outline of a pair of spectacles . . . .’
This was the whole of the dream, or at least all that I could remember of it. It seemed to me obscure and meaningless, but above all surprising. Frau E. L. is a person with whom I have hardly at any time been on friendly terms, nor, so far as I know, have I ever wished to have any closer relations with her. I have not seen her for a long time, and her name has not, I believe, been mentioned during the last few days. The dream-process was not accompanied by affects of any kind.
Reflecting over this dream brought me no nearer to understanding it. I determined, however, to set down without any premeditation or criticism the associations which presented themselves to my self-observation. As I have found, it is advisable for this purpose to divide a dream-into its elements and to find the associations attaching to each of these fragments separately.
Company at table or table d’hôte. This at once reminded me of an episode which occurred late yesterday evening. I came away from a small party in the company of a friend who offered to take a cab and drive me home in it. ‘I prefer taking a cab with a taximeter’, he said, ‘it occupies one’s mind so agreeably; one always has something to look at.’ When we had taken our places in the cab and the driver had set the dial, so that the first charge of sixty hellers became visible, I carried the joke further. ‘We’ve only just got in’, I said, ‘and already we owe him sixty hellers. A cab with a taximeter always reminds me of a table d’hôte. It makes me avaricious and selfish, because it keeps on reminding me of what I owe. My debt seems to be growing too fast, and I’m afraid of getting the worst of the bargain; and in just the same way at a table d’hôte I can’t avoid feeling in a comic way that I’m getting too little, and must keep an eye on my own interests.’ I went on to quote, somewhat discursively:
‘Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden.’¹
¹ [These lines are from one of the Harp-player’s songs in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. In the original the words are addressed to the Heavenly Powers and may be translated literally: ‘You lead us into life, you make the poor creature guilty.’ But the words ‘Armen’ and ‘schuldig’ are both capable of bearing another meaning. ‘Armen’ might mean ‘poor’ in the financial sense and ‘schulding’ might mean ‘in debt.’ So in the present context the last line could be rendered: ‘You make the poor man fall into debt.’]
And now a second association to ‘table d’hôte.’ A few weeks ago, while we were at table in a hotel at a mountain resort in the Tyrol, I was very much annoyed because I thought my wife was not being sufficiently reserved towards some people sitting near us whose acquaintance I had no desire at all to make. I asked her to concern herself more with me than with these strangers. This was again as though I were getting the worst of the bargain at the table. I was struck too by the contrast between my wife’s behaviour at table and that of Frau E. L. in the dream, who ‘turned her whole attention to me.’
To proceed. I now saw that the events in the dream were a reproduction of a small episode of a precisely similar kind which occurred between my wife and me at the time at which I was secretly courting her. The caress which she gave me under the table-cloth was her reply to a pressing love letter. In the dream, however, my wife was replaced by a comparative stranger - E. L.
Frau E. L. is the daughter of a man to whom I was once in debt. I could not help noticing that this revealed an unsuspected connection between parts of the content of the dream and my associations. If one follows the train of association starting out from one element of a dream’s content, one is soon brought back to another of its elements. My associations to the dream were bringing to light connections which were not visible in the dream itself.
If a person expects one to keep an eye on his interests without any advantage to oneself, his artlessness is apt to provoke the scornful question: ‘Do you suppose I’m going to do this or that for the sake of your beaux yeux [beautiful eyes]?’ That being so, Frau E. L.’s speech in the dream, ‘You’ve always had such beautiful eyes’, can only have meant: ‘People have always done everything for you for love; you have always had everything without paying for it.’ The truth is, of course, just the contrary: I have always paid de
arly for whatever advantage I have had from other people. The fact that my friend took me home yesterday in a cab without my paying for it must, after all, have made an impression on me.
Incidentally, the friend whose guests we were yesterday has often put me in his debt. Only recently I allowed an opportunity of repaying him to slip by. He has had only one present from me - an antique bowl, round which there are eyes painted: what is known as an ‘occhiale’, to avert the evil eye. Moreover he is an eye surgeon. The same evening I asked him after a woman patient, whom I had sent on to him for a consultation to fit her with spectacles.
As I now perceived, almost all the elements of the dream’s content had been brought into the new context. For the sake of consistency, however, the further question might be asked of why spinach, of all things, was being served in the dream. The answer was that spinach reminded me of an episode which occurred not long ago at our family table, when one of the children - and precisely the one who really deserves to be admired for his beautiful eyes - refused to eat any spinach. I myself behaved in just the same way when I was a child; for a long time I detested spinach, till eventually my taste changed and promoted that vegetable into one of my favourite foods. My own early life and my child’s were thus brought together by the mention of this dish. ‘You ought to be glad to have spinach’, the little gourmet’s mother exclaimed; ‘there are children who would be only too pleased to have spinach.’ Thus I was reminded of the duties of parents to their children. Goethe’s words gained a fresh meaning in this connection.
‘Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden.’
I will pause here to survey the results I had so far reached in my dream-analysis. By following the associations which arose from the separate elements of the dream divorced from their context, I arrived at a number of thoughts and recollections, which I could not fail to recognize as important products of my mental life. This material revealed by the analysis of the dream was intimately connected with the dream’s content, yet the connection was of such a kind that I could never have inferred the fresh material from that content. The dream was unemotional, disconnected and unintelligible; but while I was producing the thoughts behind the dream, I was aware of intense and well-founded affective impulses; the thoughts themselves fell at once into logical chains, in which certain central ideas made their appearance more than once. Thus, the contrast between ‘selfish’ and ‘unselfish’, and the elements ‘being in debt’ and ‘without paying for it’ were central ideas of this kind, not represented in the dream itself. I might draw closer together the threads in the material revealed by the analysis, and I might then show that they converge upon a single nodal point, but considerations of a personal and not of a scientific nature prevent my doing so in public. I should be obliged to betray many things which had better remain my secret, for on my way to discovering the solution of the dream all kinds of things were revealed which I was unwilling to admit even to myself. Why then, it will be asked, have I not chosen some other dream, whose analysis is better suited for reporting, so that I could produce more convincing evidence of the meaning and connectedness of the material uncovered by analysis? The answer is that every dream with which I might try to deal would lead to things equally hard to report and would impose an equal discretion upon me. Nor should I avoid this difficulty by bringing up someone else’s dream for analysis, unless circumstances enabled me to drop all disguise without damage to the person who had confided in me.
On Dreams Page 1
