Autobiographical note 8 страница

Leaving this house-symbolism on one side, any number of other kinds of things may be used to represent the parts of the body from which the stimulus to the dream has arisen. ‘Thus the breathing lung will be symbolically represented by a blazing furnace, with flames roaring with a sound like the passage of air; the heart will be represented by hollow boxes or baskets, the bladder by round, bag-shaped objects or, more generally, by hollow ones. A dream caused by stimuli arising from the male sexual organs may cause the dreamer to find the top part of a clarinet in the street or the mouth-piece of a tobacco-pipe, or again, a piece of fur. Here the clarinet and the tobacco-pipe represent the approximate shape of the male organ, while the fur stands for the pubic hair. In the case of a sexual dream in a woman, the narrow space where the thighs come together may be represented by a narrow courtyard surrounded by houses, while the vagina may be symbolized by a soft, slippery and very narrow foot-path leading across the yard, along which the dreamer has to pass, in order, perhaps, to take a gentleman a letter.’ (Ibid., 34.) It is of special importance that, at the end of dreams with a somatic stimulus, such as these, the dream imagination often throws aside its veil, as it were, by openly revealing the organ concerned or its function. Thus a dream ‘with a dental stimulus’ usually ends by the dreamer picturing himself pulling a tooth out of his mouth.

Dream-imagination may, however, not merely direct its attention to the form of the stimulating organ; it may equally well symbolize the substance contained in that organ. In this way, a dream with an intestinal stimulus may lead the dreamer along muddy streets, or one with a urinary stimulus may lead him to a foaming stream. Or the stimulus as such, the nature of the excitement it produces, or the object it desires, may be symbolically represented. Or the dream-ego may enter into concrete relations with the symbols of its own state; for instance, in the case of painful stimuli the dreamer may engage in a desperate struggle with fierce dogs or savage bulls, or a woman in a sexual dream may find herself pursued by a naked man. Quite apart from the wealth of the means that it employs, the symbolizing activity of the imagination remains the central force in every dream. The task of penetrating more deeply into the nature of this imagination and of finding a place for it in a system of philosophical thought is attempted by Volkelt in the pages of his book. But, though it is well and feelingly written, it remains excessively hard to understand for anyone whose early education has not prepared him for a sympathetic grasp of the conceptual constructions of philosophy.

There is no utilitarian function attached to Scherner’s symbolizing imagination. The mind plays in its sleep with the stimuli that impinge upon it. One might almost suspect that it plays with them mischievously. But I might also be asked whether my detailed examination of Scherner’s theory of dreams can serve any utilitarian purpose, since its arbitrary character and its disobedience to all the rules of research seem only too obvious. By way of rejoinder, I might register a protest against the arrogance which would dismiss Scherner’s theory unexamined. His theory is built upon the impression made by his dreams upon a man who considered them with the greatest attention and seems to have had a great personal gift for investigating the obscure things of the mind. Moreover it deals with a subject that for thousands of years has been regarded by mankind as enigmatic, no doubt, but also as important in itself and its implications - a subject to the elucidation of which exact science, on its own admission, has contributed little apart from an attempt (in direct opposition to popular feeling) to deny it any meaning or significance. And finally it may honestly be said that in attempting to explain dreams it is not easy to avoid being fantastic. Ganglion cells can be fantastic too. The passage which I quoted on p. 584 from a sober and exact investigator like Binz, and which describes the way in which the dawn of awakening steals over the mass of sleeping cells in the cerebral cortex, is no less fantastic - and no less improbably - than Scherner’s attempts at interpretation. I hope to be able to show that behind the latter there is an element of reality, though it has only been vaguely perceived and lacks the attribute of universality which should characterize a theory of dreams. Meanwhile the contrast between Scherner’s theory and the medical one will show us the extremes between which explanations of dream-life doubtfully oscillate to this very day.

(H)THE RELATIONS BETWEEN DREAMS AND MENTAL DISEASES

When we speak of the relation of dreams to mental disorders we may have three things in mind: (1) aetiological and clinical connections, as when a dream represents a psychotic state, or introduces it, or is left over from it; (2) modifications to which dream-life is subject in cases of mental disease; and (3) intrinsic connections between dreams and psychoses, analogies pointing to their being essentially akin. These numerous relations between the two groups of phenomena were a favourite topic among medical writers in earlier times and have become so once again to-day, as is shown by the bibliographies of the subject collected by Spitta, Radestock, Maury and Tissié. Quite recently Sante de Sanctis has turned his attention to this subject.¹ It will be enough for the purpose of my thesis if I do no more than touch upon this important question.

As regards the clinical and aetiological connections between dreams and psychoses, the following observations may be given as samples. Hohnbaum, quoted by Krauss, reports that a first outbreak of delusional insanity often originates in an anxious or terrifying dream, and that the dominant idea is connected with the dream. Sante de Sanctis brings forward similar observations in cases of paranoia and declares that in some of these the dream was the ‘vraie cause déterminante de la folie’. The psychosis, says de Sanctis, may come to life at a single blow with the appearance of the operative dream which brings the delusional material to light; or it may develop slowly in a series of further dreams, which have still to overcome a certain amount of doubt. In one of his cases the significant dream was followed by mild hysterical attacks and later by a condition of anxious melancholia. Férée (quoted by Tissié, 1898) reports a dream which resulted in a hysterical paralysis. In these instances the dreams are represented as the aetiology of the mental disorder; but we should be doing equal justice to the facts if we said that the mental disorder made its first appearance in dream-life, that it first broke through in a dream. In some further examples the pathological symptoms are contained in dream-life, or the psychosis is limited to dream-life. Thus Thomayer (1897) draws attention to certain anxiety-dreams which he thinks should be regarded as equivalents of epileptic fits. Allison (quoted by Radestock, 1879) has described a ‘nocturnal insanity’, in which the patient appears completely healthy during the day but is regularly subject at night to hallucinations, fits of frenzy, etc. Similar observations are reported by de Sanctis (a dream of an alcoholic patient which was equivalent to a paranoia, and which represented voices accusing his wife of unfaithfulness) and Tissié. The latter (1898) gives copious recent examples in which acts of a pathological nature, such as conduct based on delusional premises and obsessive impulses, were derived from dreams. Guislain describes a case in which sleep was replaced by an intermittent insanity.

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Among later writers who deal with these relations are Féré, Ideler, Lasègue, Pichon, Régis, Vespa, Giessler, Kazowsky, Pachantoni, etc. There can be no doubt that alongside of the psychology of dreams physicians will some day have to turn their attention to a psychopathology of dreams.

In cases of recovery from mental diseases it can often be quite clearly observed that, while functioning is normal during the day, dream-life is still under the influence of the psychosis. According to Krauss (1859, 270), Gregory first drew attention to this fact. Macario, quoted by Tissié, describes how a manic patient, a week after his complete recovery was still subject in his dreams to the flight of ideas and the violent passions which were characteristic of his illness.

Very little research has hitherto been carried out into the modifications occurring in dream-life during chronic psychoses. On the other hand, attention was long ago directed to the underlying kinship between dreams and mental disorders, exhibited in the wide measure of agreement between their manifestations. Maury (1854, 124) tells us that Cabanis (1802) was the first to remark on them, and after him Lélut, J. Moreau (1855) and, in particular, Maine de Biran the philosopher. No doubt the comparison goes back still earlier. Radestock (1879, 217) introduces the chapter in which he deals with it by a number of quotations drawing an analogy between dreams and madness. Kant writes somewhere: ‘The madman is a waking dreamer.’ Krauss (1859, 270) declares that ‘insanity is a dream dreamt while the senses are awake’. Schopenhauer calls dreams a brief madness and madness a long dream. Hagen describes delirium as dream-life induced not by sleep but by illness. Wundt writes: ‘We ourselves, in fact, can experience in dreams almost all the phenomena to be met with in insane asylums.’

Spitta (1882, 199), in much the same way as Maury (1854), enumerates as follows the different points of agreement which constitute the basis for this comparison: ‘(1) Self-consciousness is suspended or at least retarded, which results in a lack of insight into the nature of the condition, with consequent inability to feel surprise and loss of moral consciousness. (2) Perception by the sense organs is modified: being diminished in dreams but as a rule greatly increased in insanity. (3) Interconnection of ideas occurs exclusively according to the laws of association and reproduction; ideas thus fall into sequences automatically and there is a consequent lack of proportion in the relation between ideas (exaggerations and illusions). All this leads to (4) an alteration or in some cases a reversal of personality and occasionally of character traits (perverse conduct).’

Radestock (1879, 219) adds a few more features - analogies between the material in the two cases: ‘The majority of hallucinations and illusions occur in the region of the senses of sight and hearing and of coenaesthesia. As in the case of dreams, the senses of smell and taste provide the fewest elements. - Both in patients suffering from fever and in dreamers memories arise from the remote past; both sleeping and sick men recollect things which waking and healthy men seem to have forgotten.’ The analogy between dreams and psychoses is only fully appreciated when it is seen to extend to the details of expressive movement and to particular characteristics of facial expression.

‘A man tormented by physical and mental suffering obtains from dreams what reality denies him: health and happiness. So too in mental disease there are bright pictures of happiness, grandeur, eminence and wealth. The supposed possession of property and the imaginary fulfilment of wishes - the withholding or destruction of which actually affords a psychological basis for insanity - often constitute the chief content of a delirium. A woman who has lost a loved child experiences the joys of motherhood in her delirium; a man who has lost his money believes himself immensely rich; a girl who has been deceived feels that she is tenderly loved.’

(This passage from Radestock is actually a summary of an acute observation made by Griesinger (1861, 106), who shows quite clearly that ideas in dreams and in psychoses have in common the characteristic of being fulfilments of wishes. My own researches have taught me that in this fact lies the key to a psychological theory of both dreams and psychoses.)

‘The chief feature of dreams and of insanity lies in their eccentric trains of thought and their weakness of judgement.’ In both states we find an over-valuation of the subject’s own mental achievements which seems senseless to a sober view; the rapid sequence of ideas in dreams is paralleled by the flight of ideas in psychoses. In both there is a complete lack of sense of time. In dreams the personality may be split - when, for instance, the dreamer’s own knowledge is divided between two persons and when, in the dream, the extraneous ego corrects the actual one. This is precisely on a par with the splitting of the personality that is familiar to us in hallucinatory paranoia; the dreamer too hears his own thoughts pronounced by extraneous voices. Even chronic delusional ideas have their analogy in stereotyped recurrent pathological dreams (le rêve obsédant

). - It not infrequently happens that after recovering from a delirium patients will say that the whole period of their illness seems to them like a not unpleasant dream: indeed they will sometimes tell us that even during the illness they have occasionally had a feeling that they are only caught up in a dream - as is often the case in dreams occurring in sleep.

After all this, it is not surprising that Radestock sums up his views, and those of many others, by declaring that ‘insanity, an abnormal pathological phenomenon, is to be regarded as an intensification of the periodically recurrent normal condition of dreaming’. (Ibid., 228.)

Krauss (1859, 270 f.) has sought to establish what is perhaps a still more intimate connection between dreams and insanity than can be demonstrated by an analogy between these external manifestations. This connection he sees in their aetiology or rather in the sources of their excitation. The fundamental element common to the two states lies according to him, as we have seen, in organically determined sensations, in sensations derived from somatic stimuli, in the coenaesthesia which is based upon contributions arising from all the organs. (Cf. Peisse, 1857, 2, 21, quoted by Maury, 1878, 52.)

The indisputable analogy between dreams and insanity, extending as it does down to their characteristic details, is one of the most powerful props of the medical theory of dream-life, which regards dreaming as a useless and disturbing process and as the expression of a reduced activity of the mind. Nevertheless it is not to be expected that we shall find the ultimate explanation of dreams in the direction of mental disorders; for the unsatisfactory state of our knowledge of the origin of these latter conditions is generally recognized. It is quite likely, on the contrary, that a modification of our attitude towards dreams will at the same time affect our views upon the internal mechanism of mental disorders and that we shall be working towards an explanation of the psychoses while we are endeavouring to throw some light on the mystery of dreams.

POSTSCRIPT, 1909

The fact that I have not extended my account of the literature dealing with the problems of dreams to cover the period between the first and second editions of this book stands in need of a justification. It may strike the reader as an unsatisfactory one, but for me it was none the less decisive. The motives which led me to give any account at all of the way in which earlier writers have dealt with dreams were exhausted with the completion of this introductory chapter; to continue the task would have cost me an extraordinary effort - and the result would have been of very little use or instruction. For the intervening nine years have produced nothing new or valuable either in factual material or in opinions that might throw light on the subject. In the majority of publications that have appeared during the interval my work has remained unmentioned and unconsidered. It has, of course, received least attention from those who are engaged in what is described as ‘research’ into dreams, and who have thus provided a shining example of the repugnance to learning anything new which is characteristic of men of science. In the ironical words of Anatole France, ‘les savants ne sont pas curieux’. If there were such a thing in science as a right to retaliate, I should certainly be justified in my turn in disregarding the literature that has been issued since the publication of this book. The few notices of it that have appeared in scientific periodicals show so much lack of understanding and so much misunderstanding that my only reply to the critics would be to suggest their reading the book again - or perhaps, indeed, merely to suggest their reading it.

A large number of dreams have been published and analysed in accordance with my directions in papers by physicians who have decided to adopt the psycho-analytic therapeutic procedure, as well as by other authors. In so far as these writings have gone beyond a mere confirmation of my views I have included their findings in the course of my exposition. I have added a second bibliography at the end of the volume containing a list of the most important works that have appeared since this book was first published. The extensive monograph on dreams by Sante de Sanctis (1899), of which a German translation appeared soon after its issue, was published almost simultaneously with my Interpretation of Dreams, so that neither I nor the Italian author was able to comment upon each other’s work. I have unfortunately been unable to escape the conclusion that his painstaking volume is totally deficient in ideas- so much so, in fact, that it would not even lead one to suspect the existence of the problems with which I have dealt.

Only two publications require to be mentioned which come near to my own treatment of the problems of dreams. Hermann Swoboda (1904), a youthful philosopher, has undertaken the task of extending to psychical events the discovery of a biological periodicity (in 23-day and 28-day periods) made by Wilhelm Fliess. In the course of his highly imaginative work he has endeavoured to use this key for the solution, among other problems, of the riddle of dreams. His findings would seem to underestimate the significance of dreams; the subject matter of a dream, on his view, is to be explained as an assemblage of all the memories which, on the night on which it is dreamt, complete one of the biological periods, whether for the first or for the nth time. A personal communication from the author led me at first to suppose that he himself no longer took this theory seriously, but it seems that this was a mistaken conclusion on my part. At a later stage I shall report upon some observations which I made in connection with Swoboda’s suggestion but which led me to no convincing conclusion. I was the more pleased when, in an unexpected quarter, I made the chance discovery of a view of dreams which coincides entirely with the core of my own theory. It is impossible, for chronological reasons, that the statement in question can have been influenced by my book. I must therefore hail it as the single discoverable instance in the literature of the subject of an independent thinker who is in agreement with the essence of my theory of dreams. The book which contains the passage upon dreaming which I have in mind appeared in its second edition in 1900 under the title of Phantasien eines Realisten by ‘Lynkeus’.¹POSTSCRIPT, 1914

The preceding plea of justification was written in 1909. I am bound to admit that since then the situation has changed; my contribution to the interpretation of dreams is no longer neglected by writers on the subject. The new state of affairs, however, has now made it quite out of the question for me to extend my previous account of the literature. The Interpretation of Dreams has raised a whole series of fresh considerations and problems which have been discussed in a great variety of ways. I cannot give an account of these works, however, before I have expounded those views of my own on which they are based. I have therefore dealt with whatever seems to me of value in the latest literature at its appropriate place in the course of the discussion which now follows.

¹ [Footnote added 1930:] Cf. my paper on Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the theory of dreams (1923f).

CHAPTER IITHE METHOD OF INTERPRETING DREAMS:

AN ANALYSIS OF A SPECIMEN DREAM

The title that I have chosen for my work makes plain which of the traditional approaches to the problem of dreams I am inclined to follow. The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted; and any contributions I may be able to make towards the solution of the problems dealt with in the last chapter will only arise as by products in the course of carrying out my proper task. My presumption that dreams can be interpreted at once puts me in opposition to the ruling theory of dreams and in fact to every theory of dreams with the single exception of Scherner’s; for ‘interpreting’ a dream implies assigning a ‘meaning’ to it - that is, replacing it by something which fits into the chain of our mental acts as a link having a validity and importance equal to the rest. As we have seen, the scientific theories of dreams leave no room for any problem of interpreting them, since in their view a dream is not a mental act at all, but a somatic process signalizing its occurrence by indications registered in the mental apparatus. Lay opinion has taken a different attitude throughout the ages. It has exercised its indefeasible right to behave inconsistently; and, though admitting that dreams are unintelligible and absurd, it cannot bring itself to declare that they have no significance at all. Led by some obscure feeling, it seems to assume that, in spite of everything, every dream has a meaning, though a hidden one, that dreams are designed to take the place of some other process of thought, and that we have only to undo the substitution correctly in order to arrive at this hidden meaning.

Thus the lay world has from the earliest times concerned itself with ‘interpreting’ dreams and in its attempts to do so it has made use of two essentially different methods.

The first of these procedures considers the content of the dream as a whole and seeks to replace it by another content which is intelligible and in certain respects analogous to the original one. This is ‘symbolic’ dream-interpreting; and it inevitably breaks down when faced by dreams which are not merely unintelligible but also confused. An example of this procedure is to be seen in the explanation of Pharaoh’s dream propounded by Joseph in the Bible. The seven fat kine followed by seven lean kine that ate up the fat kine - all this was a symbolic substitute for a prophecy of seven years of famine in the land of Egypt which should consume all that was brought forth in the seven years of plenty. Almost of the artificial dreams constructed by imaginative writers are designed for a symbolic interpretation of this sort: they reproduce the writer’s thoughts under a disguise which is regarded as harmonizing with the recognized characteristics of dreams.¹ The idea of dreams being chiefly concerned with the future and being able to foretell it - a remnant of the old prophetic significance of dreams - provides a reason for transposing the meaning of the dream, when it has been arrived at by symbolic interpretation, into the future tense. It is of course impossible to give instructions upon the method of arriving at a symbolic interpretation. Success must be a question of hitting on a clever idea, of direct intuition, and for that reason it was possible for dream-interpretation by means of symbolism to be exalted into an artistic activity dependent on the possession of peculiar gifts.²

¹ [Footnote added 1909:] I found by chance in Gradiva, a story written by Wilhelm Jensen, a number of artificial dreams which were perfectly correctly constructed and could be interpreted just as though they had not been invented but had been dreamt by real people. In reply to an enquiry, the author confirmed the fact that he had no knowledge of my theory of dreams. I have argued that the agreement between my researches and this writer’s creations is evidence in favour of the correctness of my analysis of dreams. (See Freud, 1907a.)

² [Footnote added 1914:] Aristotle remarked in this connection that the best interpreter of dreams was the man who could best grasp similarities; for dream-pictures, like pictures on water, are pulled out of shape by movement, and the most successful interpreter is the man who can detect the truth from the misshapen picture. (Büchenschütz, 1868, 65.)

The second of the two popular methods of interpreting dreams is far from making any such claims. It might be described as the ‘decoding’ method, since it treats dreams as a kind of cryptography in which each sign can be translated into another sign having a known meaning, in accordance with a fixed key. Suppose, for instance, that I have dreamt of a letter and also of a funeral. If I consult a ‘dream-book’, I find that ‘letter’ must be translated by ‘trouble’ and ‘funeral’ by ‘betrothal’. It then remains for me to link together the key words which I have deciphered in this way and, once more, to transpose the result into the future tense. An interesting modification of the process of decoding, which to some extent corrects the purely mechanical character of its method of transposing, is to be found in the book written upon the interpretation of dreams by Artemidorus of Daldis.¹ This method takes into account not only the content of the dream but also the character and circumstances of the dreamer; so that the same dream-element will have a different meaning for a rich man, a married man or, let us say, an orator, from what it has for a poor man, a bachelor or a merchant. The essence of the decoding procedure, however, lies in the fact that the work of interpretation is not brought to bear on the dream as a whole but on each portion of the dream’s content independently, as though the dream were a geological conglomerate in which each fragment of rock required a separate assessment. There can be no question that the invention of the decoding method of interpretation was suggested by disconnected and confused dreams.²

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Artemidorus of Daldis, who was probably born at the beginning of the second century A.D., has left us the most complete and painstaking study of dream-interpretation as practised in the Graeco-Roman world. As Theodor Gomperz (1866, 7 f.) points out, he insisted on the importance of basing the interpretation of dreams on observation and experience, and made a rigid distinction between his own art and others that were illusory. The principle of his interpretative art, according to Gomperz, is identical with magic, the principle of association. A thing in a dream means what it recalls to the mind - to the dream-interpreter’s mind, it need hardly be said. An insuperable source of arbitrariness and uncertainty arises from the fact that the dream-element may recall various things to the interpreter’s mind and may recall something different to different interpreters. The technique which I describe in the pages that follow differs in one essential respect from the ancient method: it imposes the task of interpretation upon the dreamer himself. It is not concerned with what occurs to the interpreter in connection with a particular element of the dream, but with what occurs to the dreamer. - Recent reports, however, from a missionary, Father Tfinkdji (1913), show that modern dream-interpreters in the East also make free use of the dreamer’s collaboration. He writes as follows of dream-interpreters among the Arabs of Mesopotamia: ‘Pour interprêter exactement un songe, les oniromanciens les plus habiles s’informent de ceux qui les consultent de toutes les circonstances qu’ils regardent nécessaires pour la bonne explication.... En un mot, nos oniromanciens ne laissent aucune circonstance leur échapper et ne donnent l’interprétation désirée avant d’avoir parfaitement saisi et reçu toutes les interrogations désirables.’ [‘In order to give a precise interpretation of a dream, the most skilful dream-diviners find out from those who consult them all the circumstances which they consider essential in order to arrive at a right explanation.... In short, these dream-diviners do not allow a single point to escape them and only give their interpretation after they have completely mastered the replies to all the necessary enquiries.’] Among these enquiries are habitually included questions as to the dreamer’s closest family relations - his parents, wife and children - as well as such a typical formula as: ‘Habuistine in hac nocte copulam conjugam ante vel post somnium?’ [‘Did you copulate with your wife that night before or after you had the dream?’] -’L’idée dominante dans l’interprétation des songes consiste à expliquer le rêve par son opposée.’ [‘The principal idea in interpreting dreams lies in explaining a dream by its opposite.’]

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