Autobiographical note 52 страница

This view is not traversed by the fact that there are marginal cases in which the dream - as happens with anxiety-dreams - can no longer perform its function of preventing an interruption of sleep, but assumes instead the other function of promptly bringing sleep to an end. In doing so it is merely behaving like a conscientious night-watchman, who first carries out his duty by suppressing disturbances so that the townsmen may not be woken up, but afterwards continues to do his duty by himself waking the townsmen up, if the causes of the disturbance seem to him serious and of a kind that he cannot cope with alone.

The function of the dream as a guardian of sleep becomes particularly evident when an external stimulus impinges upon the senses of a sleeper. It is generally recognized that sensory stimuli arising during sleep influence the content of dreams; this can be proved experimentally and is among the few certain (but, incidentally, greatly overvalued) findings of medical investigation into dreams. But this finding involves a puzzle which has hitherto proved insoluble. For the sensory stimulus which the experimenter causes to impinge upon the sleeper is not correctly recognized in the dream; it is subjected to one of an indefinite number of possible interpretations, the choice being apparently left to an arbitrary psychical determination. But there is, of course, no such thing as arbitrary determination in the mind. There are several ways in which a sleeper may react to an external sensory stimulus. He may wake up or he may succeed in continuing his sleep in spite of it. In the latter case he may make use of a dream in order to get rid of the external stimulus, and here again there is more than one method open to him. For instance, he may get rid of the stimulus by dreaming that he is in a situation which is absolutely incompatible with the stimulus. Such was the line taken by a sleeper who was subject to disturbance by a painful abscess on the perineum. He dreamt that he was riding on a horse, making use of the poultice that was intended to mitigate his pain as a saddle, and in this way he avoided being disturbed. Or, as happens more frequently, the external stimulus is given an interpretation which brings it into the context of a repressed wish which is at the moment awaiting fulfilment; in this way the external stimulus is robbed of its reality and is treated as though it were a portion of the psychical material. Thus someone dreamt that he had written a comedy with a particular plot; it was produced in a theatre, the first act was over, and there were thunders of applause; the clapping was terrific.... The dreamer must have succeeded in prolonging his sleep till after the interference had ceased; for when he woke up he no longer heard the noise, but rightly concluded that someone must have been beating a carpet or mattress. Every dream which occurs immediately before the sleeper is woken by a loud noise has made an attempt at explaining away the arousing stimulus by providing another explanation of it and has thus sought to prolong sleep, even if only for a moment.

XII

No one who accepts the view that the censorship is the chief reason for dream-distortion will be surprised to learn from the results of dream-interpretation that most of the dreams of adults are traced back by analysis to erotic wishes. This assertion is not aimed at dreams with an undisguised sexual content, which are no doubt familiar to all dreamers from their own experience and are as a rule the only ones to be described as ‘sexual dreams.’ Even dreams of this latter kind offer enough surprises in their choice of the people whom they make into sexual objects, in their disregard of all the limitations which the dreamer imposes in his waking life upon his sexual desires, and by their many strange details, hinting at what are commonly known as ‘perversions.’ A great many other dreams, however, which show no sign of being erotic in their manifest content, are revealed by the work of interpretation in analysis as sexual wish-fulfilments; and, on the other hand, analysis proves that a great many of the thoughts left over from the activity of waking life as ‘residues of the previous day’ only find their way to representation in dreams through the assistance of repressed erotic wishes.

There is no theoretical necessity why this should be so; but to explain the fact it may be pointed out that no other group of instincts has been submitted to such far-reaching suppression by the demands of cultural education, while at the same time the sexual instincts are also the ones which, in most people, find it easiest to escape from the control of the highest mental agencies. Since we have become acquainted with infantile sexuality: which is often so unobtrusive in its manifestations and is always overlooked and misunderstood, we are justified in saying that almost every civilized man retains the infantile forms of sexual life in some respect or other. We can thus understand how it is that repressed infantile sexual wishes provide the most frequent and strongest motive-forces for the construction of dreams.¹

¹ See my Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d).5

There is only one method by which a dream which expresses erotic wishes can succeed in appearing innocently non-sexual in its manifest content. The material of the sexual ideas must not be represented as such, but must be replaced in the content of the dream by hints, allusions and similar forms of indirect representation. But, unlike other forms of indirect representation, that which is employed in dreams must not be immediately intelligible. The modes of representation which fulfil these conditions are usually described as ‘symbols’ of the things which they represent. Particular interest has been directed to them since it has been noticed that dreamers speaking the same language make use of the same symbols, and that in some cases, indeed, the use of the same symbols extends beyond the use of the same language. Since dreamers themselves are unaware of the meaning of the symbols they use, it is difficult at first sight to discover the source of the connection between the symbols and what they replace and represent. The fact itself, however, is beyond doubt, and it is important for the technique of dream-interpretation. For, with the help of a knowledge of dream-symbolism, it is possible to understand the meaning of separate elements of the content of a dream or separate pieces of a dream or in some cases even whole dreams, without having to ask the dreamer for his associations. Here we are approaching the popular ideal of translating dreams and on the other hand are returning to the technique of interpretation used by the ancients, to whom dream-interpretation was identical with interpretation by means of symbols.

Although the study of dream-symbols is far from being complete, we are in a position to lay down with certainty a number of general statements and a quantity of special information on the subject. There are some symbols which bear a single meaning almost universally: thus the Emperor and Empress (or the King and Queen) stand for the parents, rooms represent women¹ and their entrances and exits the openings of the body. The majority of dream-symbols serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with erotic interest; in particular, the genitals are represented by a number of often very surprising symbols, and the greatest variety of objects are employed to denote them symbolically. Sharp weapons, long and stiff objects, such as tree-trunks and sticks, stand for the male genital; while cupboards, boxes, carriages or ovens may represent the uterus. In such cases as these the tertium comparationis, the common element in these substitutions, is immediately intelligible; but there are other symbols in which it is not so easy to grasp the connection. Symbols such as a staircase or going upstairs to represent sexual intercourse, a tie or cravat for the male organ, or wood for the female one, provoke our unbelief until we can arrive at an understanding of the symbolic relation underlying them by some other means. Moreover a whole number of dream-symbols are bisexual and can relate to the male or female genitals according to the context.

¹ Cf. ‘Frauenzimmer’ [literally ‘women’s apartment’, commonly used in German as a slightly derogatory word for ‘woman.’]6

Some symbols are universally disseminated and can be met with in all dreamers belonging to a single linguistic or cultural group; there are others which occur only within the most restricted and individual limits, symbols constructed by an individual out of his own ideational material. Of the former class we can distinguish some whose claim to represent sexual ideas is immediately justified by linguistic usage (such, for instance, as those derived from agriculture, e.g. ‘fertilization’ or ‘seed’) and others whose relation to sexual ideas appears to reach back into the very earliest ages and to the most obscure depths of our conceptual functioning. The power of constructing symbols has not been exhausted in our own days in the case of either of the two sorts of symbols which I have distinguished at the beginning of this paragraph. Newly discovered objects (such as airships) are, as we may observe, at once adopted as universally available sexual symbols.

It would, incidentally, be a mistake to expect that if we had a still profounder knowledge of dream-symbolism (of the ‘language of dreams’) we could do without asking the dreamer for his associations to the dream and go back entirely to the technique of dream-interpretation of antiquity. Quite apart from individual symbols and oscillations in the use of universal ones, one can never tell whether any particular element in the content of a dream is to be interpreted symbolically or in its proper sense, and one can be certain that the whole content of a dream is not to be interpreted symbolically. A knowledge of dream-symbolism will never do more than enable us to translate certain constituents of the dream-content, and will not relieve us of the necessity for applying the technical rules which I gave earlier. It will, however, afford the most valuable assistance to interpretation precisely at points at which the dreamer’s associations are insufficient or fail altogether.

Dream-symbolism is also indispensable to an understanding of what are known as ‘typical’ dreams, which are common to everyone, and of ‘recurrent’ dreams in individuals.

If the account I have given in this short discussion of the symbolic mode of expression in dreams appears incomplete, I can justify my neglect by drawing attention to one of the most important pieces of knowledge that we possess on this subject. Dream-symbolism extends far beyond dreams: it is not peculiar to dreams, but exercises a similar dominating influence on representation in fairy-tales, myths and legends, in jokes and in folk-lore. It enables us to trace the intimate connections between dreams and these latter productions. We must not suppose that dream-symbolism is a creation of the dream-work; it is in all probability a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement and dramatization.¹

¹ Further information on dream-symbolism may be found in the works of early writers on dream-interpretation, e.g. Artemidorus of Daldis and Scherner (1861), and also in my own Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), in the mythological studies of the psycho-analytic school, as well as in some of W. Stekel’s writings (e.g. 1911).8

XIII

I lay no claim to having thrown light in these pages upon all the problems of dreams, nor to having dealt in a convincing way with those that I have discussed. Anyone who is interested in the whole extent of the literature of dreams may be referred to a work by Sante de Sanctis (I sogni, 1899); and anyone who wishes to hear more detailed arguments in favour of the view of dreams which I myself have put forward should turn to my volume The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900. It only remains for me now to indicate the direction in which my exposition of the subject of the dream-work calls for pursuit.

I have laid it down as the task of dream-interpretation to replace the dream by the latent dream-thoughts, that is, to unravel what the dream-work has woven. In so doing I have raised a number of new psychological problems dealing with the mechanism of this dream-work itself, as well as with the nature and conditions of what is described as repression; on the other hand I have asserted the existence of the dream-thoughts - a copious store of psychical structures of the highest order, which is characterized by all the signs of normal intellectual functioning, but is nevertheless withdrawn from consciousness till it emerges in distorted form in the dream-content. I cannot but assume that thoughts of this kind are present in everyone, since almost everyone, including the most normal people, is capable of dreaming. The unconscious material of the dream-thoughts and its relation to consciousness and to repression raise further questions of significance to psychology, the answers to which must no doubt be postponed until analysis has clarified the origin of other psychopathological structures, such as hysterical symptoms and obsessional ideas.

THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE (1901)

Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bungled Actions, Superstitions and Errors

Nun ist die Luft von solchem Spuk so voll,

Dass niemand weiss, wie er ihn meiden soll.

Faust, Part II, Act V, Scene 5

Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,

That no one knows how best he may escape.

(Bayard Taylor’s translation)0

CHAPTER I THE FORGETTING OF PROPER NAMES

In the 1898 volume of the Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie I published under the title of ‘The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness’ a short paper the substance of which I shall recapitulate here and take as the starting-point for more extensive discussions. In it I applied psychological analysis to the frequent circumstance of proper names being temporarily forgotten, by exploring a highly suggestive example drawn from my self-observation; and I reached the conclusion that this particular instance (admittedly commonplace and without much practical significance), in which a psychical function - the memory - refuses to operate, admits of an explanation much more far-reaching than that which the phenomenon is ordinarily made to yield.

If a psychologist were asked to explain why it is that on so many occasions a proper name which we think we know perfectly well fails to enter our heads, he would, unless I am much mistaken, be satisfied with answering that proper names succumb more easily to the process of being forgotten than other kinds of memory-content. He would bring forward the plausible reasons why proper names should thus be singled out for special treatment, but would not suspect that any other conditions played their part in such occurrences.

My close preoccupation with the phenomenon of names being temporarily forgotten arose out of my observation of certain characteristics which could be recognized sufficiently clearly in individual cases, though not, it is true, in all of them. These are cases in which a name is in fact not only forgotten, but wrongly remembered. In the course of our efforts to recover the name that has dropped out, other ones - substitute names - enter our consciousness; we recognize them at once, indeed, as incorrect, but they keep on returning and force themselves on us with great persistence. The process that should lead to the reproduction of the missing name has been so to speak displaced and has therefore led to an incorrect substitute. My hypothesis is that this displacement is not left to arbitrary psychical choice but follows paths which can be predicted and which conform to laws. In other words, I suspect that the name or names which are substituted are connected in a discoverable way with the missing name: and I hope, if I am successful in demonstrating this connection, to proceed to throw light on the circumstances in which names are forgotten.

The name that I tried without success to recall in the example I chose for analysis in 1898 was that of the artist who painted the magnificent frescoes of the ‘Four Last Things’ in Orvieto cathedral. Instead of the name I was looking for - Signorelli - the names of two other painters - Botticelli and Boltraffio - thrust themselves on me, though they were immediately and decisively rejected by my judgement as incorrect. When I learnt the correct name from someone else, I recognized it at once and without hesitation. The investigation into the influences and the associative paths by which the reproducing of the name had been displaced in this way from Signorelli to Botticelli and Boltraffio led to the following results

(a) The reason why the name Signorelli was lost is not to be found in anything special about the name itself or in any psychological characteristic of the context into which it was introduced. The name I had forgotten was just as familiar to me as one of the substitute names - Botticelli - and much more familiar than the other substitute name - Boltraffio - about whose owner I could scarcely produce any information other than that he belonged to the Milanese school. Moreover the context in which the name was forgotten seemed to me harmless and did not enlighten me further. I was driving in the company of a stranger from Ragusa in Dalmatia to a place in Herzegovina: our conversation turned to the subject of travel in Italy, and I asked my companion whether he had ever been to Orvieto and looked at the famous frescoes there, painted by...

(b) Light was only thrown on the forgetting of the name when I recalled the topic we had been discussing directly before, and it was revealed as a case in which a topic that has just been raised is disturbed by the preceding topic. Shortly before I put the question to my travelling companion whether he had ever been to Orvieto, we had been talking about the customs of the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had told him what I had heard from a colleague practising among those people - that they are accustomed to show great confidence in their doctor and great resignation to fate. If one has to inform them that nothing can be done for a sick person, their reply is: ‘Herr: what is there to be said? If he could be saved, I know you would have saved him.’ In these sentences we for the first time meet with the words and names Bosnia, Herzegovina and Herr, which can be inserted into an associative series between Signorelli and Botticelli-Boltraffio.

(c) I assume that the series of thoughts about the customs of the Turks in Bosnia, etc., acquired the capacity to disturb the next succeeding thought from the fact that I had withdrawn my attention from that series before it was brought to an end. I recall in fact wanting to tell a second anecdote which lay close to the first in my memory. These Turks place a higher value on sexual enjoyment than on anything else, and in the event of sexual disorders they are plunged in a despair which contrasts strangely with their resignation towards the threat of death. One of my colleague’s patients once said to him: ‘Herr, you must know that if that comes to an end then life is of no value.’ I suppressed my account of this characteristic trait, since I did not want to allude to the topic in a conversation with a stranger. But I did more: I also diverted my attention from thoughts which might have arisen in my mind from the topic of ‘death and sexuality.’ On this occasion I was still under the influence of a piece of news which had reached me a few weeks before while making a brief stay at Trafoi. A patient over whom I had taken a great deal of trouble had put an end to his life on account of an incurable sexual disorder. I know for certain that this melancholy event and everything related to it was not recalled to my conscious memory during my journey to Herzegovina. But the similarity between ‘Trafoi’ and ‘Boltraffio’ forces me to assume that this reminiscence, in spite of my attention being deliberately diverted from it, was brought into operation in me at the time.

(d) It is no longer possible for me to take the forgetting of the name Signorelli as a chance event. I am forced to recognize the influence of a motive in the process. It was a motive which caused me to interrupt myself while recounting what was in my mind (concerning the customs of the Turks, etc.), and it was a motive which further influenced me so that I debarred the thoughts connected with them, the thoughts which had led to the news at Trafoi, from becoming conscious in my mind. I wanted, therefore, to forget something; I had repressed something. What I wanted to forget was not, it is true, the name of the artist at Orvieto but something else - something, however, which contrived to place itself in an associative connection with his name, so that my act of will missed its target and I forgot the one thing against my will, while I wanted to forget the other thing intentionally. The disinclination to remember was aimed against one content; the inability to remember emerged in another. It would obviously be a simpler case if disinclination and inability to remember related to the same content. Moreover the substitute names no longer strike me as so entirely unjustified as they did before the matter was elucidated: by a sort of compromise they remind me just as much of what I wanted to forget as of what I wanted to remember; and they show me that my intention to forget something was neither a complete success nor a complete failure.

(e) The way in which the missing name and the repressed topic (the topic of death and sexuality, etc., in which the names of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Trafoi appeared) became linked is very striking. The schematic diagram which I have inserted at this point, and which is repeated from the 1898 paper, aims at giving a clear picture of this.Fig. 1.

The name Signorelli has undergone a division into two pieces. One of the pairs of syllables (elli) recurs without alteration in one of the substitute names: while the other, by means of the translation of Signor into Herr, has acquired a numerous and miscellaneous set of relations to the names contained in the repressed topic, but for this reason is not available for reproduction. The substitute for it has been arrived at in a way that suggests that a displacement along the connected names of ‘Herzegovina and Bosnia’ had taken place, without consideration for the sense or for the acoustic demarcation of the syllables. Thus the names have been treated in this process like the pictograms in a sentence which has had to be converted into a picture-puzzle (or rebus). Of the whole course of events that have in ways like these produced the substitute names instead of the name Signorelli no information has been given to consciousness. At first sight it seems impossible to discover any relation between the topic in which the name Signorelli occurred and the repressed topic which preceded it in time, apart from this recurrence of the same syllables (or rather sequence of letters).

Perhaps it is not superfluous to remark that the conditions which psychologists assume to be necessary for reproducing and for forgetting, and which they look for in certain relations and dispositions, are not inconsistent with the above explanation. All we have done is, in certain cases, to add a motive to the factors that have been recognized all along as being able to bring about the forgetting of a name; and, in addition, we have elucidated the mechanism of false recollection (paramnesia). These dispositions are indispensable to our case as well, in order to make it possible for the repressed element to get hold of the missing name by association and draw it with itself into repression. In the case of another name with more favourable conditions for reproduction this perhaps would not happen. It is probable indeed that a suppressed element always strives to assert itself elsewhere, but is successful in this only when suitable conditions meet it half way. At other times the suppression succeeds without any functional disturbance, or, as we can justly say, without any symptom.

The conditions necessary for forgetting a name, when forgetting it is accompanied by paramnesia, may then be summarized as follows: (1) a certain disposition for forgetting the name, (2) a process of suppression carried out shortly before, (3) the possibility of establishing an external association between the name and the element previously suppressed. The difficulty of fulfilling the last condition need probably not be rated very high, since, considering the low standards expected of an association of this kind, one could be established in the great majority of cases. There is, however, the profounder question whether an external association like this can really be a sufficient condition for the repressed element’s disturbing the reproduction of the lost name - whether some more intimate connection between the two topics is required. On a superficial consideration one would be inclined to reject the latter demand, and accept as sufficient a temporal contiguity between the two, even if the contents are completely different. On close enquiry, however, one finds more and more frequently that the two elements which are joined by an external association (the repressed element and the new one) possess in addition some connection of content; and such a connection is in fact demonstrable in the Signorelli example.

6 The value of the insight that we have gained in analysing the Signorelli example naturally depends on whether we want to pronounce that instance as typical or as an isolated occurrence. I must affirm, that the forgetting of names, accompanied by paramnesia, takes place with uncommon frequency in the way in which we have explained it in the Signorelli case. In almost every instance in which I could observe this phenomenon in myself, I have also been able to explain it in the way described above, i.e. as motivated by repression. I must also draw attention to another consideration which supports the typical nature of our analysis. I think there is no justification for making a theoretical separation between those cases in which the forgetting of names is accompanied by paramnesia and the sort where incorrect substitute names have not presented themselves. These substitute names occur spontaneously in a number of cases; in others, where they have not emerged spontaneously, it is possible to force them to emerge by an effort of attention; and they then show the same relation to the repressed element and the missing name as they would if they had appeared spontaneously. Two factors seem to be decisive in bringing the substitute names to consciousness: first, the effort of attention, and secondly, an inner condition that attaches to the psychical material. We might look for the latter in the greater or lesser facility with which the necessary external association between the two elements establishes itself. A good portion of the cases of name-forgetting without paramnesia can thus be added to the cases in which substitute names are formed - to which the mechanism of the Signorelli example applies. I shall certainly not venture to affirm that all cases of name-forgetting are to be classed in the same group. There is no question that instances of it exist which are much simpler. We shall, I think, have stated the facts of the case with sufficient caution if we affirm: By the side of simple cases where proper names are forgotten there is a type which is motivated by repression.

CHAPTER II

THE FORGETTING OF FOREIGN WORDS

The current vocabulary of our own language, when it is confined to the range of normal usage, seems to be protected against being forgotten. With the vocabulary of a foreign language it is notoriously otherwise. The disposition to forget it extends to all parts of speech, and an early stage in functional disturbance is revealed by the fluctuations in the control we have over our stock of foreign words - according to the general condition of our health and to the degree of our tiredness. In a number of cases this kind of forgetting exhibits the same mechanism disclosed to us by the Signorelli example. In proof of this I shall give only a single analysis, one which is distinguished, however, by some useful characteristics: it concerns the forgetting of a non-substantival word in a Latin quotation. Perhaps I may be allowed to present a full and clear account of this small incident.

Last summer - it was once again on a holiday trip - I renewed my acquaintance with a certain young man of academic background. I soon found that he was familiar with some of my psychological publications. We had fallen into conversation - how I have now forgotten - about the social status of the race to which we both belonged; and ambitious feelings prompted him to give vent to a regret that his generation was doomed (as he expressed it) to atrophy, and could not develop its talents or satisfy its needs. He ended a speech of impassioned fervour with the well-known line of Virgil’s in which the unhappy Dido commits to posterity her vengeance on Aeneas: ‘Exoriare...’ Or rather, he wanted to end it in this way, for he could not get hold of the quotation and tried to conceal an obvious gap in what he remembered by changing the order of the words: ‘Exoriar(e) ex nostris ossibus ultor.’ At last he said irritably: ‘Please don’t look so scornful: you seem as if you were gloating over my embarrassment. Why not help me? There’s something missing in the line; how does the whole thing really go?’

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