Autobiographical note 45 страница

The dream-process has by now either acquired sufficient intensity though the dream-work to attract consciousness to itself and arouse the preconscious, irrespectively of the time and depth of sleep; or its intensity is insufficient to achieve this and it must remain in a state of readiness until, just before waking, attention becomes more mobile and comes to meet it. The majority of dreams appear to operate with comparatively low psychical intensities, for they mostly wait until the moment of waking. But this also explains the fact that, if we are suddenly woken from deep sleep, we usually perceive something that we have dreamt. In such cases, just as when we wake of our own accord, the first thing we see is the perceptual content that has been constructed by the dream-work and immediately afterwards we see the perceptual content that is offered to us from outside ourselves.

Greater theoretical interest, however, attaches to the dreams which have the power to rouse us in the middle of our sleep. Bearing in mind the expediency which is everywhere else the rule, we may ask why a dream, that is, an unconscious wish, is given the power to interfere with sleep, that is, with the fulfilment of the preconscious wish. The explanation no doubt lies in relations of energy of which we have no knowledge. If we possessed such knowledge, we should probably find that allowing the dream to take its course and expending a certain amount of more or less detached attention on it is an economy of energy compared with holding the unconscious as tightly under control at night as in the daytime. Experience shows that dreaming is compatible with sleeping, even if it interrupts sleep several times during the night. One wakes up for an instant and then falls asleep again at once. It is like brushing away a fly in one’s sleep: a case of ad hoc awakening. If one falls asleep again, the interruption has been disposed of. As is shown by such familiar examples as the sleep of a nursing mother or wet nurse, the fulfilment of the wish to sleep is quite compatible with maintaining a certain expenditure of attention in some particular direction.

At this point an objection arises, which is based on a better knowledge of unconscious processes. I myself have asserted that unconscious wishes are always active. But in spite of this they seem not to be strong enough to make themselves perceptible during the day. If, however, while a state of sleep prevails, an unconscious wish has shown itself strong enough to construct a dream and arouse the preconscious with it, why should this strength fail after the dream has been brought to knowledge? Should not the dream continue to recur perpetually, precisely as the vexatious fly keeps on coming back after it has been driven away? What right have we to assert that dreams get rid of the disturbance of sleep?

It is perfectly true that unconscious wishes always remain active. They represent paths which can always be traversed, whenever a quantity of excitation makes use of them. Indeed it is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indestructible. In the unconscious nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten. This is brought most vividly home to one in studying the neuroses, and especially hysteria. The unconscious path of thoughts, which leads to discharge in a hysterical attack, immediately becomes traversable once more, when sufficient excitation has accumulated. A humiliation that was experienced thirty years ago acts exactly like a fresh one throughout the thirty years, as soon as it has obtained access to the unconscious sources of emotion. As soon as the memory of it is touched, it springs into life again and shows itself cathected with excitation which finds a motor discharge in an attack. This is precisely the point at which psychotherapy has to intervene. Its task is to make it possible for the unconscious processes to be dealt with finally and be forgotten. For the fading of memories and the emotional weakness of impressions which are no longer recent, which we are inclined to regard as self-evident and to explain as a primary effect of time upon mental memory-traces, are in reality secondary modifications which are only brought about by laborious work. What performs this work is the preconscious, and psychotherapy can pursue no other course than to bring the Ucs. under the domination of the Pcs.

Thus there are two possible outcomes for any particular unconscious excitatory process. Either it may be left to itself, in which case it eventually forces its way through at some point and on this single occasion finds discharge for its excitation in movement; or it may come under the influence of the preconscious, and its excitation, instead of being discharged, may be bound by the preconscious. This second alternative is the one which occurs in the process of dreaming. The cathexis from the Pcs. which goes halfway to meet the dream after it has become perceptual, having been directed on to it by the excitation in consciousness, binds the dream’s unconscious excitation and makes it powerless to act as a disturbance. If it is true that the dreamer wakes for an instant, yet he really has brushed away the fly that was threatening to disturb his sleep. It begins to dawn on us that it actually is more expedient and economical to allow the unconscious wish to take its course, to leave the path to regression open to it so that it can construct a dream, and then to bind the dream and dispose of it with a small expenditure of preconscious work - rather than to continue keeping a tight rein on the unconscious throughout the whole period of sleep. It was indeed to be expected that dreaming, even though it may originally have been a process without a useful purpose, would have procured itself some function in the interplay of mental forces. And we can now see what that function is. Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs. which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs. excitation, serves it as a safety valve and at the same time preserves the sleep of the preconscious in return for a small expenditure of waking activity. Thus, like all the other psychical structures in the series of which it is a member, it constitutes a compromise; it is in the service of both of the two systems since it fulfils the two wishes in so far as they are compatible with each other. If we turn back to the ‘excretion theory’ of dreams put forward by Robert, which I explained on p. 586 ff., we shall see at a glance that in its essence we must accept his account of the function of dreams, though differing from him in his premises and in his view of the dream-process itself.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] Is this the only function that can be assigned to dreams? I know of no other. It is true that Maeder has attempted to show that dreams have other, ‘secondary’, functions. He started out from the correct observation that some dreams contain attempts at solving conflicts, attempts which are later carried out in reality and which thus behave as though they were trial practices for waking actions. He therefore drew a parallel between dreams and the play of animals and children, which may be regarded as practice in the operation of innate instincts and as preparation for serious activity later on, and put forward the hypothesis that dreams have a ‘fonction ludique’ [‘play function’]. Shortly before Maeder, Alfred Adler, too, had insisted that dreams possessed a function of ‘thinking ahead.’ (In an analysis which I published in 1905, a dream, which could only be regarded as expressing an intention, was repeated every night until it was carried out.)

A little reflection will convince us, however, that this ‘secondary’ function of dreams has no claim to be considered as a part of the subject of dream-interpretation. Thinking ahead, forming intentions, framing attempted solutions which may perhaps be realized later in waking life, all these, and many other similar things, are products of the unconscious and preconscious activity of the mind; they may persist in the state of sleep as ‘the day’s residues’ and combine with an unconscious wish (cf. p. 982 ff.) in forming a dream. Thus the dream’s function of ‘thinking ahead’ is rather a function of preconscious waking thought, the products of which may be revealed to us by the analysis of dreams or of other phenomena. It has long been the habit to regard dreams as identical with their manifest content; but we must now beware equally of the mistake of confusing dreams with latent dream-thoughts.

8 The qualification ‘in so far as the two wishes are compatible with each other’ implies a hint at the possible case in which the function of dreaming may come to grief. The dream-process is allowed to begin as a fulfilment of an unconscious wish; but if this attempted wish-fulfilment jars upon the preconscious so violently that it is unable to continue sleeping, then the dream has made a breach in the compromise and has failed to carry out the second half of its task. In that case the dream is immediately broken off and replaced by a state of complete waking. Here again it is not really the fault of the dream if it has now to appear in the role of a disturber of sleep instead of in its normal one of a guardian of sleep; and this fact need not prejudice us against its having a useful purpose. This is not the only instance in the organism of a contrivance which is normally useful becoming useless and disturbing as soon as the conditions that give rise to it are somewhat modified; and the disturbance at least serves the new purpose of drawing attention to the modification and of setting the organism’s regulative machinery in motion against it. What I have in mind is of course the case of anxiety-dreams, and in order that I may not be thought to be evading this evidence against the theory of wish-fulfilment whenever I come across it, I will at all events give some hints of their explanation.

There is no longer anything contradictory to us in the notion that a psychical process which develops anxiety can nevertheless be the fulfilment of a wish. We know that it can be explained by the fact that the wish belongs to one system, the Ucs., while it has been repudiated and suppressed by the other system, the Pcs.¹ Even where psychical health is perfect, the subjugation of the Ucs. by the Pcs. is not complete; the measure of suppression indicates the degree of our psychical normality. Neurotic symptoms show that the two systems are in conflict with each other; they are the products of a compromise which brings the conflict to an end for the time being. On the one hand, they allow the Ucs. an outlet for the discharge of its excitation, and provide it with a kind of sally-port, while, on the other hand they make it possible for the Pcs. to control the Ucs. to some extent. It is instructive to consider, for instance, the significance of a hysterical phobia or an agoraphobia. Let us suppose that a neurotic patient is unable to cross the street alone - a condition which we rightly regard as a ‘symptom.’ If we remove this symptom by compelling him to carry out the act of which he believes himself incapable, the consequence will be an attack of anxiety; and indeed the occurrence of an anxiety-attack in the street is often the precipitating cause of the onset of an agoraphobia. We see, therefore, that the symptom has been constructed in order to avoid an outbreak of anxiety; the phobia is erected like a frontier fortification against the anxiety.

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] ‘A second factor, which is much more important and far-reaching, but which is equally overlooked by laymen is the following. No doubt a wish-fulfilment must bring pleasure; but the question then arises "To whom?" To the person who has the wish, of course. But, as we know, a dreamer’s relation to his wishes is a quite peculiar one. He repudiates them and censors them - he has no liking for them, in short. So that their fulfilment will give him no pleasure, but just the opposite; and experience shows that this opposite appears in the form of anxiety, a fact which has still to be explained. Thus a dreamer in his relation to his dream-wishes can only be compared to an amalgamation of two separate people who are linked by some important common element. Instead of enlarging on this, I will remind you of a familiar fairy tale in which you will find the same situation repeated. A good fairy promised a poor married couple to grant them the fulfilment of their first three wishes. They were delighted, and made up their minds to choose their three wishes carefully. But a smell of sausages being fried in the cottage next door tempted the woman to wish for a couple of them. They were there in a flash; and this was the first wish-fulfilment. But the man was furious, and in his rage wished that the sausages were hanging on his wife’s nose. This happened too; and the sausages were not to be dislodged from their new position. This was the second wish-fulfilment; but the wish was the man’s, and its fulfilment was most disagreeable for his wife. You know the rest of the story. Since after all they were in fact one - man and wife - the third wish was bound to be that the sausages should come away from the woman’s nose. This fairy tale might be used in many other connections; but here it serves only to illustrate the possibility that if two people are not at one with each other the fulfilment of a wish of one of them may bring nothing but unpleasure to the other.’ (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Lecture XIV.)

Our discussion cannot be carried any further without examining the part played by the affects in these processes; but we can only do so imperfectly in the present connection. Let us assume, then, that the suppression of the Ucs. is necessary above all because, if the course of ideas in the Ucs. were left to itself, it would generate an affect which was originally of a pleasurable nature, but became unpleasurable after the process of ‘repression’ occurred. The purpose, and the result too, of suppression is to prevent this release of unpleasure. The suppression extends over the ideational content of the Ucs., since the release of unpleasure might start from that content. This presupposes a quite specific assumption as to the nature of the generation of affect. It is viewed as a motor or secretory function, the key to whose innervation lies in the ideas in the Ucs. Owing to the domination established by the Pcs. these ideas are, as it were, throttled, and inhibited from sending out impulses which would generate affect. If, therefore, the cathexis from the Pcs. ceases, the danger is that the unconscious excitations may release affect of a kind which (as a result of the repression which has already occurred) can only be experienced as unpleasure, as anxiety.

This danger materializes if the dream-process is allowed to take its course. The conditions which determine its realization are that repressions must have occurred and that the suppressed wishful impulses shall be able to grow sufficiently strong. These determinants are thus quite outside the psychological framework of dream-formation. If it were not for the fact that our topic is connected with the subject of the generation of anxiety by the single factor of the liberation of the Ucs. during sleep, I should be able to omit any discussion of anxiety-dreams and avoid the necessity for entering in these pages into all the obscurities surrounding them.

The theory of anxiety-dreams, as I have already repeatedly declared, forms part of the psychology of the neuroses. We have nothing more to do with it when once we have indicated its point of contact with the topic of the dream-process. There is only one thing more that I can do. Since I have asserted that neurotic anxiety arises from sexual sources, I can submit some anxiety-dreams to analysis in order to show the sexual material present in their dream-thoughts.1

I have good reasons for leaving on one side in the present discussion the copious examples afforded by my neurotic patients, and for preferring to quote some anxiety-dreams dreamt by young people.

It is dozens of years since I myself had a true anxiety-dream, but I remember one from my seventh or eighth year, which I submitted to interpretation some thirty years later. It was a very vivid one, and in it I saw my beloved mother, with a peculiarly peaceful, sleeping expression on her features, being carried into the room by two (or three) people with bird’s beaks and laid upon the bed. I awoke in tears and screaming, and interrupted my parents’ sleep. The strangely draped and unnaturally tall figures with birds’ beaks were derived from the illustrations to Philippson’s Bible. I fancy they must have been gods with falcons’ heads from an ancient Egyptian funerary relief. Besides this, the analysis brought to mind an ill-mannered boy, a son of a concierge, who used to play with us on the grass in front of the house when we were children, and who I am inclined to think was called Philipp. It seems to me that it was from this boy that I first heard the vulgar term for sexual intercourse, instead of which educated people always use a Latin word, ‘to copulate’, and which was clearly enough indicated by the choice of the falcons’ heads. I must have guessed the sexual significance of the word from the face of my young instructor, who was well acquainted with the facts of life. The expression on my mother’s features in the dream was copied from the view I had had of any grandfather a few days before his death as he lay snoring in a coma. The interpretation carried out in the dream by the ‘secondary revision’ must therefore have been that my mother was dying; the funerary relief fitted in with this. I awoke in anxiety, which did not cease till I had woken my parents up. I remember that I suddenly grew calm when I saw my mother’s face, as though I had needed to be reassured that she was not dead. But this ‘secondary’ interpretation of the dream had already been made under the influence of the anxiety which had developed. I was not anxious because I had dreamt that my mother was dying; but I interpreted the dream in that sense in my preconscious revision of it because I was already under the influence of the anxiety. The anxiety can be traced back, when repression is taken into account, to an obscure and evidently sexual craving that had found appropriate expression in the visual content of the dream.

A twenty-seven-year-old man, who had been seriously ill for a year, reported that when he was between eleven and thirteen he had repeatedly dreamt (to the accompaniment of severe anxiety) that a man with a hatchet was pursuing him; he tried to run away, but seemed to be paralysed and could not move from the spot. This is a good example of a very common sort of anxiety-dream, which would never be suspected of being sexual. In analysis, the dreamer first came upon a story (dating from a time later than the dream) told him by his uncle, of how he had been attacked in the street one night by a suspicious-looking individual; the dreamer himself concluded from this association that he may have heard of some similar episode at the time of the dream. In connection with the hatchet, he remembered that at about that time he had once injured his hand with a hatchet while he was chopping up wood. He then passed immediately to his relations with his younger brother. He used to ill-treat this brother and knock him down; and he particularly remembered an occasion when he had kicked him on the head with his boot and had drawn blood, and how his mother had said: ‘I’m afraid he’ll be the death of him one day.’ While he still seemed to be occupied with the subject of violence, a recollection from his ninth year suddenly occurred to him. His parents had come home late and had gone to bed while he pretended to be asleep; soon he had heard sounds of panting and other noises which had seemed to him uncanny, and he had also been able to make out their position in the bed. Further thoughts showed that he had drawn an analogy between this relation between his parents and his own relation to his younger brother. He had subsumed what happened between his parents under the concept of violence and struggling; and he had found evidence in favour of this view in the fact that he had often noticed blood in his mother’s bed.

It is, I may say, a matter of daily experience that sexual intercourse between adults strikes any children who may observe it as something uncanny and that it arouses anxiety in them. I have explained this anxiety by arguing that what we are dealing with is a sexual excitation with which their understanding is unable to cope and which they also, no doubt, repudiate because their parents are involved in it, and which is therefore transformed into anxiety. At a still earlier period of life sexual excitations directed towards a parent of the opposite sex have not yet met with repression and, as we have seen, are freely expressed. (See p. 735 ff.)

I should have no hesitation in giving the same explanation of the attacks of night terrors accompanied by hallucinations (pavor nocturnus) which are so frequent in children. In this case too it can only be a question of sexual impulses which have not been understood and which have been repudiated. Investigation would probably show a periodicity in the occurrence of the attacks, since an increase in sexual libido can be brought about not only by accidental exciting impressions but also by successive waves of spontaneous developmental processes.

I lack a sufficiency of material based upon observation to enable me to confirm this explanation.¹

Paediatricians, on the other hand, seem to lack the only line of approach which can make this whole class of phenomena intelligible, whether from the somatic or from the psychical aspect. I cannot resist quoting an amusing instance of the way in which the blinkers of medical mythology can cause an observer to miss an understanding of such cases by a narrow margin. My instance is taken from a thesis on pavor nocturnus by Debacker (1881, 66):

A thirteen-year-old boy in delicate health began to be apprehensive and dreamy. His sleep became disturbed and was interrupted almost once a week by severe attacks of anxiety accompanied by hallucinations. He always retained a very clear recollection of these dreams. He said that the Devil had shouted at him: ‘Now we’ve got you, now we’ve got you!’ There was then a smell of pitch and brimstone and his skin was burnt by flames. He woke up from the dream in terror, and at first could not cry out. When he had found his voice he was clearly heard to say: ‘No, no, not me; I’ve not done anything!’ or ‘Please not! I won’t do it again!’ or sometimes: ‘Albert never did that!’ Later, he refused to undress ‘because the flames only caught him when he was undressed.’ While he was still having these devil-dreams, which were a threat to his health, he was sent into the country. There he recovered in the course of eighteen months, and once, when he was fifteen, he confessed: ‘Je n’osais pas l’avouer, mais j’éprouvais continuellement des picotements et des surexcitations aux parties; à la fin, cela m’énervait tant que plusieurs fois j’ai pensé me jeter par la fenêtre du dortoir.’³

¹ [Footnote added 1919:] Since I wrote this a great quantity of such material has been brought forward in psycho-analytic literature.

² I have italicized this word, but it is impossible to misunderstand it.

³ [‘I didn’t dare admit it; but I was continually having prickly feelings and overexcitement in my parts; in the end it got on my nerves so much that I often thought of jumping out of the dormitory window.’]4

There is really very little difficulty in inferring: (1) that the boy had masturbated when he was younger, that he had probably denied it, and that he had been threatened with severe punishment for his bad habit (cf. his admission: ‘Je ne le ferais plus’, and his denial: ‘Albert n’a jamais fait ça’); (2) that with the onset of puberty the temptation to masturbate had revived with the tickling in his genitals; but (3) that a struggle for repression had broken out in him, which had suppressed his libido and transformed it into anxiety, and that the anxiety had taken over the punishments with which he had been threatened earlier.

And now let us see the inferences drawn by our author (ibid., 69): ‘The following conclusions can be drawn from this observation: ‘(1) The influence of puberty upon a boy in delicate health can lead to a condition of great weakness and can result in a considerable degree of cerebral anaemia.¹

‘(2) This cerebral anaemia produces character changes, demonomanic hallucinations and very violent nocturnal (and perhaps also diurnal) anxiety-states.

‘(3) The boy’s demonomania and self-reproaches go back to the influences of his religious education, which affected him as a child.

‘(4) All the symptoms disappeared in the course of a somewhat protracted visit to the country, as the result of physical exercise and the regaining of strength with the passage of puberty.

‘(5) A predisposing influence upon the origin of the child’s brain condition may perhaps be attributed to heredity and to a past syphilitic infection in his father.’

And here is the final conclusion: ‘Nous avons fait entrer cette observation dans le cadre des délires apyrétiques d’inanition, car c’est à l’ischémie cérébrale que nous rattachons cet état particulier.’²

¹ The italics are mine. ² [‘We have classified this case among the apyretic deliria of inanition, for we attribute this particular state to cerebral ischaemia.’]5

(E)THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES - REPRESSION

In venturing on an attempt to penetrate more deeply into the psychology of dream-processes, I have set myself a hard task and one to which my powers of exposition are scarcely equal. Elements in this complicated whole which are in fact simultaneous can only be represented successively in my description of them, while, in putting forward each point, I must avoid appearing to anticipate the grounds on which it is based: difficulties such as these it is beyond my strength to master. In all this I am paying the penalty for the fact that in my account of dream-psychology I have been unable to follow the historical development of my own views. Though my own line of approach to the subject of dreams was determined by my previous work on the psychology of the neuroses, I had not intended to make use of the latter as a basis of reference in the present work. Nevertheless I am constantly being driven to do so, instead of proceeding, as I should have wished, in the contrary direction and using dreams as a means of approach to the psychology of the neuroses. I am conscious of all the trouble in which my readers are thus involved, but I can see no means of avoiding it.

In my dissatisfaction at this state of things, I am glad to pause for a little over another consideration which seems to put a higher value on my efforts. I found myself faced by a topic on which, as has been shown in my first chapter, the opinions of the authorities were characterized by the sharpest contradictions. My treatment of the problems of dreams has found room for the majority of these contradictory views. I have only found it necessary to give a categorical denial of two of them - the view that dreaming is a meaningless process and the view that it is a somatic one. Apart from this, I have been able to find a justification for all these mutually contradictory opinions at one point or other of my complicated thesis and to show that they had lighted upon some portion of the truth.

The view that dreams carry on the occupations and interests of waking life has been entirely confirmed by the discovery of the concealed dream-thoughts. These are only concerned with what seems important to us and interests us greatly. Dreams are never occupied with minor details. But we have also found reason for accepting the contrary view, that dreams pick up indifferent refuse left over from the previous day and that they cannot get control of any major day time interest until it has been to some extent withdrawn from waking activity. We have found that this holds good of the dream’s content, which gives expression to the dream-thoughts in a form modified by distortion. For reasons connected with the mechanism of association, as we have seen, the dream-process finds it easier to get control of recent or indifferent ideational material which has not yet been requisitioned by waking thought-activity; and for reasons of censorship it transfers psychical intensity from what is important but objectionable on to what is indifferent.

The fact that dreams are hypermnesic and have access to material from childhood has become one of the corner-stones of our teaching. Our theory of dreams regards wishes originating in infancy as the indispensable motive force for the formation of dreams.

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