My VIews on the part played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses 15 страница

I have on the contrary shown that this strange ‘manifest’ content of the dream can regularly be made intelligible as a mutilated and altered transcript of certain rational psychical structures which deserve the name of ‘

latent dream-thoughts’. We arrive at a knowledge of these by dividing the dream’s manifest content into its component parts, without considering any apparent meaning it may have, and by then following the associative threads which start from each of what are now isolated elements. These interweave with one another and finally lead to a tissue of thoughts which are not only perfectly rational but can also be easily fitted into the known context of our mental processes. In the course of this ‘analysis’, the content of the dream will have cast off all the peculiarities that puzzled us. But if the analysis is to succeed, we must, while it proceeds, firmly reject the critical objections which will unceasingly arise to the reproduction of the various intermediary associations.

A comparison of the recollected manifest content of the dream with the latent dream-thoughts thus discovered gives rise to the concept of the ‘dream-work’. The dream-work is the name for the whole sum of transforming processes which have converted the dream-thoughts into the manifest dream. The surprise with which we formerly regarded the dream now attaches to the dream-work.6

The achievements of the dream-work can, however, be described as follows. A tissue of thoughts, usually a very complicated one, which has been built up during the day and has not been completely dealt with - ‘a day’s residue’ - continues during the night to retain the quota of energy - the ‘interest’- claimed by it, and threatens to disturb sleep. This ‘day’s residue’ is transformed by the dream-work into a dream and made innocuous to sleep. In order to provide a fulcrum for the dream-work, the ‘day’s residue’ must be capable of constructing a wish - which is not a very hard condition to fulfil. The wish arising from the dream-thoughts forms the preliminary stage and later the core of the dream. Experience derived from analyses - and not the theory of dreams - informs us that in children any wish left over from waking life is sufficient to call up a dream, which emerges as connected and ingenious but usually short, and which is easily recognized as a ‘wish-fulfilment’. In the case of adults it seems to be a generally binding condition that the wish which creates the dream shall be one that is alien to conscious thinking - a repressed wish - or will possibly at least have reinforcements that are unknown to consciousness. Without assuming the existence of the unconscious in the sense explained above, I should not be able to develop the theory of dreams further or to interpret the material met with in dream-analyses. The action of this unconscious wish upon the consciously rational material of the dream-thoughts produces the dream. While this happens, the dream is, as it were, dragged down into the unconscious, or, more precisely, is submitted to a treatment such as is met with at the level of unconscious thought-processes and is characteristic of that level. Hitherto it is only from the results of the ‘dream-work’ that we are in fact acquainted with the characteristics of unconscious thinking and its differences from thinking that is capable of becoming conscious - ‘preconscious’ thinking.

A theory which is novel, which lacks simplicity and which runs counter to our habits of thought, can scarcely gain in clarity from a concise presentation. All I can aim at in these remarks, therefore, is to draw attention to the fuller treatment of the unconscious in my Interpretation of Dreams and to the writings of Lipps, which seem to me of the highest importance. I am aware that anyone who is under the spell of a good academic philosophical education, or who takes his opinions at long range from some so-called system of philosophy, will be opposed to the assumption of an ‘unconscious psychical’ in the sense in which Lipps and I use the term, and will prefer to prove its impossibility on the basis of a definition of the psychical. But definitions are a matter of convention and can be altered. I have often found that people who dispute the unconscious as being something absurd and impossible have not formed their impressions from the sources from which I at least was brought to the necessity of recognizing it. These opponents of the unconscious had never witnessed the effect of a post-hypnotic suggestion, and when I have told them examples from my analyses with non-hypnotized neurotics they have been filled with the greatest astonishment. They had never realized the idea that the unconscious is something which we really do not know, but which we are obliged by compelling inferences to supply; they had understood it as being something capable of becoming conscious but which was not being thought of at the moment, which did not occupy ‘the focal point of attention’. Nor had they ever tried to convince themselves of the existence in their own minds of unconscious thoughts like these by analysing one of their own dreams; and when I attempted to do so with them they could only greet their own associations with surprise and confusion. I have also formed an impression that fundamental emotional resistances stand in the way of accepting the ‘unconscious’, and that these are based on the fact that no one wants to get to know his unconscious and that the most convenient plan is to deny its possibility altogether.

The dream-work, then - to which I return after this digression - submits the thought-material, which is brought forward in the optative mood, to a most strange revision. First, it takes the step from the optative to the present indicative; it replaces ‘Oh! if only...’ by ‘It is’. The ‘It is’ is then given a hallucinatory representation; and this I have called the ‘regression’ in the dream-work - the path that leads from thoughts to perceptual images, or, to use the terminology of the still unknown topography of the mental apparatus (which is not to be taken anatomically), from the region of thought-structures to that of sensory perceptions. On this path, which is in the reverse direction to that taken by the course of development of mental complications, the dream-thoughts are given a pictorial character; and eventually a plastic situation is arrived at which is the core of the manifest ‘dream-picture’. In order for it to be possible for the dream-thoughts to be represented in sensory form, their expression has to undergo far-reaching modifications. But while the thoughts are being changed back into sensory images still further alterations occur in them, some of which can be seen to be necessary while others are surprising. We can understand that, as a subsidiary result of regression, almost all the internal relations between the thoughts which linked them together will be lost in the manifest dream. The dream-work, as we might say, only undertakes to represent the raw material of the ideas and not the logical relations in which they stand to one another; or at all events it reserves the liberty to disregard the latter. On the other hand, there is another part of the dream-work which we cannot attribute to regression, to the change back into sensory images; and it is precisely this part which has an important bearing on our analogy with the formation of jokes. In the course of the dream-work the material of the dream-thoughts is subjected to a quite extraordinary compression or condensation. A starting point for it is provided by any common elements that may be present in the dream-thoughts, whether by chance or from the nature of their content. Since these are not as a rule sufficient for any considerable condensation, new artificial and transient common elements are created in the dream-work, and to this end there is actually a preference for the use of words the sound of which expresses different meanings. The newly-created common elements of condensation enter the manifest content of the dream as representatives of the dream-thoughts, so that an element in the dream corresponds to a nodal point or junction in the dream-thoughts, and, as compared with these latter, must quite generally be described as ‘overdetermined’. The fact of condensation is the piece of the dream-work which can be most easily recognized; it is only necessary to compare the text of a dream as it is noted down with the record of the dream-thoughts arrived at by analysis in order to get a good impression of the extensiveness of dream-condensation.

It is less easy to convince oneself of the second great modification of the dream-thoughts that is brought about by the dream-work - the process that I have named ‘dream-displacement’. This is exhibited in the fact that things that lie on the periphery of the dream-thoughts and are of minor importance occupy a central position and appear with great sensory intensity in the manifest dream, and vice versa. This gives the dream the appearance of being displaced in relation to the dream-thoughts, and this displacement is precisely what brings it about that the dream confronts waking mental life as something alien and incomprehensible. In order that a displacement of this kind may occur, it must be possible for the cathectic energy to pass over uninhibited from the important ideas to the unimportant ones - which, in normal thought that is capable of being conscious, can only give an impression of ‘faulty reasoning’.

Transformation with a view to the possibility of representation, condensation and displacement are the three major achievements that may be ascribed to the dream-work. A fourth, which was perhaps too shortly considered in The Interpretation of Dreams, is not relevant for our present purposes. If the ideas of a ‘topography of the mental apparatus’ and of ‘regression’ are consistently followed up (and only in that way could these working hypotheses come to have any value), we must attempt to determine the stages of regression at which the various transformations of the dream-thoughts take place. This attempt has not yet been seriously undertaken; but it can at least be stated with certainty that displacement must take place in the thought-material while it is at the stage of the unconscious processes, while condensation must probably be pictured as a process stretching over the whole course of events till the perceptual region is reached. But in general we must be content to assume that all the forces which take part in the formation of dreams operate simultaneously. Though one must, as will be realized, exercise reserve in dealing with such problems, and though there are fundamental doubts, which cannot be entered into here, as to whether the question should be framed in this manner, yet I should like to venture on the assertion that the process of the dream-work preparatory to the dream must be located in the region of the unconscious. Thus, speaking roughly, there would in all be three stages to be distinguished in the formation of a dream: first, the transplanting of the preconscious day’s residues into the unconscious, in which the conditions governing the state of sleep must play a part; then, the dream-work proper in the unconscious; and thirdly, the regression of the dream-material, thus revised, to perception, in which form the dream becomes conscious.

The following forces may be recognized as having a share in the formation of dreams: the wish to sleep, the cathexis of energy that still remains in the day’s residues after it has been lowered by the state of sleep, the psychical energy of the dream-constructing unconscious wish and the opposing force of the ‘censorship’, which dominates daytime life and is not completely lifted during sleep. The task of dream-formation is above all to overcome the inhibition from the censorship; and it is precisely this task which is solved by the displacements of psychical energy within the material of the dream-thoughts.

Let us now recall what it was during our investigation of jokes that gave us occasion to think of dreams. We found that the characteristics and effects of jokes are linked with certain forms of expression or technical methods, among which the most striking are condensation, displacement and indirect representation. Processes, however, which lead to the same results - condensation, displacement and indirect representation - have become known to us as peculiarities of the dream-work. Does not this agreement suggest the conclusion that joke-work and dream-work must, at least in some essential respect, be identical? The dream-work has, I think, been revealed to us as regards its most important characteristics. Of the psychical processes in jokes the part that is hidden from us is precisely the one that may be compared to the dream-work - namely, what happens during the formation of a joke in the first person. Shall we not yield to the temptation to construct that process on the analogy of the formation of a dream? A few of the characteristics of dreams are so alien to jokes that the part of the dream-work corresponding to those characteristics cannot be transferred to the formation of jokes. There is no doubt that the regression of the train of thought to perception is absent in jokes. But the other two stages of dream-formation, the sinking of a preconscious thought into the unconscious and its unconscious revision, if they could be supposed to occur in joke-formation, would present the precise outcome that we can observe in jokes. Let us decide, then, to adopt the hypothesis that this is the way in which jokes are formed in the first person: a preconscious thought is given over for a moment to unconscious revision and the outcome of this is at once grasped by conscious perception.

Before we examine this hypothesis in detail, we will consider an objection which might threaten our premiss. We have started from the fact that the techniques of jokes indicate the same processes that are known to us as peculiarities of the dream-work. Now it is easy to argue against this that we should not have described the techniques of jokes as condensation, displacement, etc., and should not have arrived at such far reaching conformities between the methods of representation in jokes and dreams, if our previous knowledge of the dream-work had not prejudiced our view of the technique of jokes; so that at bottom we are only finding in jokes a confirmation of the expectations with which we approached them from dreams. If this was the basis of the conformity, there would be no certain guarantee of its existence apart from our prejudice. Nor indeed have condensation, displacement and indirect representation been taken by any other author as explaining the forms of expression of jokes. This would be a possible objection, but not on that account a just one. It would be equally possible that it was indispensable for our views to be sharpened by a knowledge of the dream-work before we could recognize the real conformity. A decision will after all depend only on whether a critical examination can prove on the basis of individual examples that this view of the technique of jokes is a forced one in whose favour other more plausible and deeper-going views have been suppressed, or whether such an examination is obliged to admit that the expectations derived from dreams can really be confirmed in jokes. I am of the opinion that we have nothing to fear from such criticism and that our procedure of ‘reduction’ (p. 1629) has shown us reliably in what forms of expression to look for the techniques of jokes. And if we gave those techniques names which already anticipated the discovery of the conformity between joke-technique and dream-work, we had a perfect right to do so and it was in fact nothing more than an easily justifiable simplification.

There is another objection which would not affect our case so seriously but which is also not so open to a fundamental disproof. It might be said that, while it is true that these techniques of joking which fit in so well with our scheme deserve to be recognized, they are nevertheless not the only possible techniques of joking nor the only ones used in practice. It might be argued that under the influence of the model of the dream-work we have only looked for techniques of joking which fitted in with it, while others, overlooked by us, would have proved that this conformity was not invariably present. I really cannot venture to assert that I have succeeded in elucidating the technique of every joke in circulation; and I must therefore leave open the possibility that my enumeration of joke-techniques will show some incompleteness. But I have not intentionally excluded from discussion any kind of technique that was clear to me, and I can declare that the commonest, most important and most characteristic methods of joking have not escaped my attention.

Jokes possess yet another characteristic which fits satisfactorily into the view of the joke-work which we have derived from dreams. We speak, it is true, of ‘making’ a joke; but we are aware that when we do so our behaviour is different from what it is when we make a judgement or make an objection. A joke has quite outstandingly the characteristic of being a notion that has occurred to us ‘involuntarily’. What happens is not that we know a moment beforehand what joke we are going to make, and that all it then needs is to be clothed in words. We have an indefinable feeling, rather, which I can best compare with an ‘absence’¹, a sudden release of intellectual tension, and then all at once the joke is there - as a rule ready-clothed in words. Some of the techniques of jokes can be employed apart from them in the expression of a thought - for instance, the techniques of analogy or allusion. I can deliberately decide to make an allusion. In such a case I begin by having a direct expression of my thought in my mind (in my inner ear); I inhibit myself from expressing it owing to a misgiving related to the external situation, and can almost be said to make up my mind to replace the direct expression by another form of indirect expression; and I then produce an allusion. But the allusion which arises in this way and which is formed under my continuous supervision is never a joke, however serviceable it may be in other ways. A joking allusion, on the other hand, emerges without my being able to follow these preparatory stages in my thoughts. I will not attach too much importance to this behaviour; it is scarcely decisive, though it agrees well with our hypothesis that in the formation of a joke one drops a train of thought for a moment and that it then suddenly emerges from the unconscious as a joke.

¹ [The French term.]3

Jokes show a special way of behaving, too, in regard to association. Often they are not at the disposal of our memory when we want them; but at other times, to make up for this, they appear involuntarily, as it were, and at points in our train of thought where we cannot see their relevance. These, again, are only small features, but nevertheless indicate their origin from the unconscious.

Let us now bring together those characteristics of jokes which can be referred to their formation in the unconscious. First and foremost there is the peculiar brevity of jokes - not, indeed, an essential, but an extremely distinctive feature. When we first came across it, we were inclined to regard it as an expression of the tendency to economy, but abandoned this view ourselves owing to obvious objections. It now seems to us rather a mark of the unconscious revision to which the joke-thought has been subjected. For we cannot connect what corresponds to it in dreams, condensation, with any factor other than localization in the unconscious; and we must suppose that the determinants for such condensations, which are absent in the preconscious, are present in the unconscious thought-process.¹ It is to be expected that in the process of condensation a few of the elements subjected to it will be lost, while others, which take over the cathectic energy of the former, will become intensified or over-intensified through the condensation. Thus the brevity of jokes, like that of dreams, would be a necessary concomitant of the condensations which occur in both of them - in both cases a result of the process of condensation. This origin would also account for the special character of the brevity of jokes, a character that cannot be further defined but which is felt as a striking one.

¹ Apart from the dream-work and the technique of jokes, there is another kind of mental event in which I have been able to show that condensation is a regular and important process: namely the mechanism of normal (non-tendentious) forgetting. Unique impressions offer difficulties to forgetting; those that are analogous in any way are forgotten by being condensed in regard to their points of resemblance. Confusion between analogous impressions is one of the preliminary stages of forgetting.

In an earlier passage (p. 1715) we regarded one of the outcomes of condensation - multiple use of the same material, play upon words, and similarity of sound - as a localized economy, and the pleasure produced by an (innocent) joke as derived from that economy, and later we inferred that the original intention of jokes was to obtain a yield of pleasure of this kind from words - a thing which had been permitted at the stage of play but had been dammed up by rational criticism in the course of intellectual development. We have now adopted the hypothesis that condensations of this kind, such as serve the technique of jokes, arise automatically, without any particular intention, during thought-processes in the unconscious. Have we not before us here two different views of the same fact which seem incompatible with each other? I do not think so. It is true that they are two different views, and that they need to be brought into harmony with each other; but they are not contradictory. One of them is merely foreign to the other; and when we have established a connection between them, we shall probably have made some advance in knowledge. The fact that such condensations are sources for a yield of pleasure is far from incompatible with the hypothesis that conditions for their production are easily found in the unconscious. We can, on the contrary, see a reason for the plunge into the unconscious in the circumstance that the pleasure-yielding condensations of which jokes are in need arise there easily. There are, moreover, two other factors which at a first glance seem to be completely foreign to each other and to have come together as though by some undesired chance, but which on deeper investigation turn out to be intimately linked and indeed essentially one. I have in mind the two assertions that, on the one hand, jokes during their development at the stage of play (that is, during the childhood of reason) are able to bring about these pleasurable condensations and that, on the other hand, at higher stages they accomplish the same effect by plunging the thought into the unconscious. For the infantile is the source of the unconscious, and the unconscious thought-processes are none other than those - the one and only ones - produced in early childhood. The thought which, with the intention of constructing a joke, plunges into the unconscious is merely seeking there for the ancient dwelling-place of its former play with words. Thought is put back for a moment to the stage of childhood so as once more to gain possession of the childish source of pleasure. If we did not already know it from research into the psychology of the neuroses, we should be led by jokes to a suspicion that the strange unconscious revision is nothing else than the infantile type of thought-activity. It is merely that it is not very easy for us to catch a glimpse in children of this infantile way of thinking, with its peculiarities that are retained in the unconscious of adults, because it is for the most part corrected, as it were, in statu nascendi. But in a number of cases we succeed in doing so, and we then laugh at the children’s ‘silliness’. Any uncovering of unconscious material of this kind strikes us in general as ‘comic’.¹

¹ Many of my neurotic patients who are under psycho-analytic treatment are regularly in the habit of confirming the fact by a laugh when I have succeeded in giving a faithful picture of their hidden unconscious to their conscious perception; and they laugh even when the content of what is unveiled would by no means justify this. This is subject, of course, to their having arrived close enough to the unconscious material to grasp it after the doctor has detected it and presented it to them.

It is easier to perceive the characteristics of these unconscious thought-processes in the remarks made by sufferers from certain mental diseases. We should most probably be able (as Griesinger suggested long ago) to understand the deliria of the insane and to make use of them as pieces of information, if we ceased to apply the demands of conscious thinking to them and if we treated them, like dreams, with our interpretative technique.¹ Indeed we have confirmed the fact that ‘there is a return of the mind in dreams to an embryonic point of view’.²

We have entered so closely, in connection with the processes of condensation, into the importance of the analogy between jokes and dreams that we may be briefer in what follows. As we know, the displacements in the dream-work point to the operation of the censorship of conscious thinking, and accordingly, when we come across displacement among the techniques of jokes, we shall be inclined to suppose that an inhibitory force plays a part in the formation of jokes as well. And we already know that this is quite generally the case. The effort made by jokes to recover the old pleasure in nonsense or the old pleasure in words finds itself inhibited in normal moods by objections raised by critical reason; and in every individual case this has to be overcome. But the manner in which the joke-work accomplishes this task shows a sweeping distinction between jokes and dreams. In the dream-work it is habitually accomplished by displacements, by the selection of ideas which are sufficiently remote from the objectionable one for the censorship to allow them to pass, but which are nevertheless derivatives of that idea and have taken over its psychical cathexis by means of a complete transference. For this reason displacements are never absent in a dream and are far more comprehensive.

Among displacements are to be counted not merely diversions from a train of thought but every sort of indirect representation as well, and in particular the replacement of an important but objectionable element by one that is indifferent and that appears innocent to the censorship, something that seems like a very remote allusion to the other one - substitution by a piece of symbolism, or an analogy, or something small. It cannot be disputed that portions of such indirect representation are already present in the dream’s preconscious thoughts - for instance, representation by symbols or analogies - because otherwise the thought would not have reached the stage of preconscious expression at all. Indirect representations of this kind, and allusions whose reference to the thing intended is easy to discover, are indeed permissible and much-used methods of expression in our conscious thinking as well. The dream-work, however, exaggerates this method of indirect expression beyond all bounds. Under the pressure of the censorship, any sort of connection is good enough to serve as a substitute by allusion, and displacement is allowed from any element to any other. Replacement of internal associations (similarity, causal connection, etc.) by what are known as external ones (simultaneity in time, contiguity in space, similarity of sound) is quite specially striking and characteristic of the dream-work.

¹ In doing so we should not forget to take into account the distortion due to the censorship which is still at work even in psychoses.

² The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).6

All these methods of displacement appear too as techniques of joking. But when they appear, they usually respect the limits imposed on their employment in conscious thinking; and they may be altogether absent, although jokes too have invariably a task to accomplish of dealing with an inhibition. We can understand the subordinate place taken by displacements in the joke-work when we recall that jokes always have another technique at their command for keeping off inhibition and indeed that we have found nothing more characteristic of them than precisely this technique. For jokes do not, like dreams, create compromises; they do not evade the inhibition, but they insist on maintaining play with words or with nonsense unaltered. They restrict themselves, however, to a choice of occasions in which this play or this nonsense can at the same time appear allowable (in jests) or sensible (in jokes), thanks to the ambiguity of words and the multiplicity of conceptual relations. Nothing distinguishes jokes more clearly from all other psychical structures than this double-sidedness and this duplicity in speech. From this point of view at least the authorities come closest to an understanding of the nature of jokes when they lay stress on ‘sense in nonsense’.

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