Autobiographical note 39 страница

Nor is it necessary that this long-prepared phantasy should have been gone through during sleep; it would have been sufficient for it to be merely touched on. What I mean is this. If a few bars of music are played and someone comments that it is from Mozart’s Figaro (as happens in Don Giovanni) a number of recollections are roused in me all at once, none of which can enter my consciousness singly at the first moment. The key-phrase serves as a port of entry through which the whole network is simultaneously put in a state of excitation. It may well be the same in the case of unconscious thinking. The rousing stimulus excites the psychical port of entry which allows access to the whole guillotine phantasy. But the phantasy is not gone through during sleep but only in the recollection of the sleeper after his awakening. After waking he remembers in all its details the phantasy which was stirred up as a whole in his dream. One has no means of assuring oneself in such a case that one is really remembering something one has dreamt. This same explanation - that it is a question of ready-made phantasies which are brought into excitation as a whole by the rousing stimulus - can be applied to other dreams which are focused upon a rousing stimulus, such, for instance, as Napoleon’s battle dream before the explosion of the infernal machine.

Among the dreams collected by Justine Tobowolska in her dissertation on the apparent passage of time in dreams, the most informative seems to me to be the one reported by Macario (1857) as having been dreamt by a dramatic author, Casimir Bonjour. One evening Bonjour wanted to attend the first performance of one of his pieces; but he was so fatigued that as he was sitting behind the scenes he dozed off just at the moment the curtain went up. During his sleep he went through the whole five acts of the play, and observed all the various signs of emotion shown by the audience during the different scenes. At the end of the performance he was delighted to hear his name being shouted with the liveliest demonstrations of applause. Suddenly he woke up. He could not believe either his eyes or his ears, for the performance had not gone beyond the first few lines of the first scene; he could not have been asleep for longer than two minutes. It is surely not too rash to suppose in the case of this dream that the dreamer’s going through all five acts of the play and observing the attitude of the public to different passages in it need not have arisen from any fresh production of material during his sleep, but may have reproduced a piece of phantasy-activity (in the sense I have described) which had already been completed. Tobowolska, like other writers, emphasizes the fact that dreams with an accelerated passage of ideas have the common characteristic of seeming specially coherent, quite unlike other dreams, and that the recollection of them is summary far more than detailed. This would indeed be a characteristic which ready-made phantasies of this kind, touched upon by the dream-work, would be bound to possess, though this is a conclusion which the writers in question fail to draw. I do not assert, however, that all arousal dreams admit of this explanation, or that the problem of the accelerated passage of ideas in dreams can be entirely dismissed in this fashion.

At this point it is impossible to avoid considering the relation between this secondary revision of the content of dreams and the remaining factors of the dream-work. Are we to suppose that what happens is that in the first instance the dream-constructing factors - the tendency towards condensation, the necessity for evading the censorship, and considerations of representability by the psychical means open to dreams - put together a provisional dream-content out of the material provided, and that this content is subsequently re-cast so as to conform so far as possible to the demands of a second agency! This is scarcely probable. We must assume rather that from the very first the demands of this second factor constitute one of the conditions which the dream must satisfy and that this condition, like those laid down by condensation, the censorship imposed by resistance, and representability, operates simultaneously in a conducive and selective sense upon the mass of material present in the dream-thoughts. In any case, however, of the four conditions for the formation of dreams, the one we have come to know last is the one whose demands appear to have the least cogent influence on dreams.

The following consideration makes it highly probable that the psychical function which carries out what we have described as the secondary revision of the content of dreams is to be identified with the activity of our waking thought. Our waking (preconscious) thinking behaves towards any perceptual material with which it meets in just the same way in which the function we are considering behaves towards the content of dreams. It is the nature of our waking thought to establish order in material of that kind, to set up relations in it and to make it conform to our expectations of an intelligible whole. In fact, we go too far in that direction. An adept in sleight of hand can trick us by relying upon this intellectual habit of ours. In our efforts at making an intelligible pattern of the sense-impressions that are offered to us, we often fall into the strangest errors or even falsify the truth about the material before us.

The evidences of this are too universally known for there to be any need to insist upon them further. In our reading we pass over misprints which destroy the sense, and have the illusion that what we are reading is correct. The editor of a popular French periodical is said to have made a bet that he would have the words ‘in front’ or ‘behind’ inserted by the printer in every sentence of a long article without a single one of his readers noticing it. He won his bet. Many years ago I read in a newspaper a comic instance of a false connection. On one occasion during a sitting of the French Chamber a bomb thrown by an anarchist exploded in the Chamber itself and Dupuy subdued the consequent panic with the courageous words: ‘La séance continue.’ The visitors in the gallery were asked to give their impressions as witnesses of the outrage. Among them were two men from the provinces. One of these said that it was true that he had heard a detonation at the close of one of the speeches but had assumed that it was a parliamentary usage to fire a shot each time a speaker sat down. The second one, who had probably already heard several speeches, had come to the same conclusion, except that he supposed that a shot was only fired as a tribute to a particularly successful speech.

There is no doubt, then, that it is our normal thinking that is the psychical agency which approaches the content of dreams with a demand that it must be intelligible, which subjects it to a first interpretation and which consequently produces a complete misunderstanding of it. For the purposes of our interpretation it remains an essential rule invariably to leave out of account the ostensible continuity of a dream as being of suspect origin, and to follow the same path back to the material of the dream-thoughts, no matter whether the dream itself is clear or confused.

We now perceive, incidentally, on what it is that the range in the quality of dreams between confusion and clarity which was discussed on p. 779 f. depends. Those parts of a dream on which the secondary revision has been able to produce some effect are clear, while those parts on which its efforts have failed are confused. Since the confused parts of a dream are so often at the same time the less vivid parts, we may conclude that the secondary dream-work is also to be held responsible for a contribution to the plastic intensity of the different dream-elements.

If I look around for something with which to compare the final form assumed by a dream as it appears after normal thought has made its contribution, I can think of nothing better than the enigmatic inscriptions with which Fliegende Blätter has for so long entertained its readers. They are intended to make the reader believe that a certain sentence - for the sake of contrast, a sentence in dialect and as scurrilous as possible - is a Latin inscription. For this purpose the letters contained in the words are torn out of their combination into syllables and arranged in a new order. Here and there a genuine Latin word appears; at other points we seem to see abbreviations of Latin words before us; and at still other points in the inscription we may allow ourselves to be deceived into overlooking the senselessness of isolated letters by parts of the inscription seeming to be defaced or showing lacunae. If we are to avoid being taken in by the joke, we must disregard everything that makes it seem like an inscription, look firmly at the letters, pay no attention to their ostensible arrangement, and so combine them into words belonging to our own mother tongue.

Secondary revision is the one factor in the dream-work which has been observed by the majority of writers on the subject and of which the significance has been appreciated. Havelock Ellis (1911, 10-11) has given an amusing account of its functioning: ‘Sleeping consciousness we may even imagine as saying to itself in effect: "Here comes our master, Waking Consciousness, who attaches such mighty importance to reason and logic and so forth. Quick! gather things up, put them in order - any order will do - before he enters to take possession."'

The identity of its method of working with that of waking thought has been stated with particular clarity by Delacroix (1904, 926): ‘Cette fonction d’interprétation n’est pas particulère au rêve; c’est le même travail de coordination logique que nous faisons sur nos sensations pendant la veille.’¹ James Sully is of the same opinion. So, too, is Tobowolska (1900, 93): ‘Sur ces successions incohérentes d’hallucinations, l’esprit s’efforce de faire le même travail de coordination logique qu’il fait pendant la veille sur les sensations. Il relie entre elles par un lien imaginaire toutes ces images décousues et bouche les écarts trop grands qui se trouvaient entre elles.’²

¹ [‘This interpretative function is not peculiar to dreams. It is the same work of logical co-ordination which we carry out upon our sensations while we are awake.’]

² [‘The mind endeavours to carry out upon these incoherent trains of hallucinations the same work of logical co-ordination that it carries out upon sensations during the daytime. It connects up all these detached images by an imaginary link and stops up any excessively wide gaps between them.’]

According to some writers, this process of arranging and interpreting begins during the dream itself and is continued after waking. Thus Paulhan (1894, 546): ‘Cependant j’ai souvent pensé qu’il pouvait y avoir une certaine déformation, ou plutôt reformation, du rêve dans le souvenir.... La tendence systématisante de l’imagination pourrait fort bien achever après le réveil ce qu’elle a ébauché pendant le sommeil. De la sorte, la rapidité réelle de la pensée serait augmentée en apparence par les perfectionnements dus à l’imagination éveillée.’¹ Bernard-Leroy and Tobowolska (1901, 592): ‘Dans le rêve, au contraire, l’interprétation et la coordination se font non selllement à l’aide des données du rêve, mais encore à l’aide de celles de la veille....’²

Inevitably, therefore, this one recognized factor in the formation of dreams has had its importance over-estimated, so that it has been credited with the whole achievement of the creation of dreams. This act of creation, as Goblot (1896, 280 f.) and still more Foucault (1906) suppose, is performed at the moment of waking; for these two writers attribute to waking thought an ability to construct a dream out of the thoughts that emerge during sleep. Bernard-Leroy and Tobowolska (1901) comment on this view: ‘On a cru pouvoir placer le rêve au moment du réveil, et ils ont attribué à la pensée de la veille la fonction de construire le rêve avec les images présentes dans li pensée du sommeil.’³

¹ [‘I have often thought, however, that dreams may be to some extent misshaped, or rather reshaped, in memory.... The tendency of the imagination towards systematization might very well complete after waking what it had started upon in sleep. In that way the real speed of thought would be given an apparent increase by the improvements due to the waking imagination.’]

² [‘In a dream, on the contrary, interpretation and co-ordination are carried out by the help not only of the data presented in the dream, but of the data available in waking life....’]

³ [‘It has been thought possible to locate dreams at the moment of waking, and have ascribed to waking thought the function of constructing dreams out of the images present in sleeping thought.’] From this discussion of secondary revision I will go on to consider a further factor in the dream-work which has recently been brought to light by some finely perceptive observations carried out by Herbert Silberer. As I have mentioned earlier (p. 814 ff.), Silberer has, as it were, caught in the very act the process of transforming thoughts into images, by forcing himself into intellectual activity while he was in a state of fatigue and drowsiness. At such moments the thought with which he was dealing vanished and was replaced by a vision which turned out to be a substitute for what were as a rule abstract thoughts, (Cf. the examples in the passage just referred to.) Now it happened during these experiments that the image which arose, and which might be compared to an element of a dream, sometimes represented something other than the thought that was being dealt with - namely, the fatigue itself, the difficulty and unpleasure involved in the work. It represented, that is to say, the subjective state and mode of functioning of the person making the effort instead of the object of his efforts. Silberer described occurrences of this kind, which were very frequent in his case, as a ‘functional phenomenon’ in contrast to the ‘material phenomenon’ which would have been expected.

For instance: ‘One afternoon I was lying on my sofa feeling extremely sleepy; nevertheless I forced myself to think over a philosophical problem. I wanted to compare the views of Kant and Schopenhauer upon Time. As a result of my drowsiness I was unable to keep the arguments of both of them before my mind at once, which was necessary in order to make the comparison. After a number of vain attempts, I once more impressed Kant’s deductions upon my mind with all the strength of my will, so that I might apply them to Schopenhauer’s statement of the problem. I then directed my attention to the latter; but when I tried to turn back again to Kant, I found that his argument had once more escaped me and I tried vainly to pick it up once more. This vain effort at recovering the Kant dossier which was stored away somewhere in my head was suddenly represented before my closed eyes as a concrete and plastic symbol, as though it were a dream-picture: I was asking for information from a disobliging secretary who was bent over his writing-table and refused to put himself out at my insistent demand. He half straightened himself and gave me a disagreeable and uncomplying look’. (Silberer, 1909, 513 f.)

Here are some other instances, which relate to the oscillation between sleeping and waking:

‘Example No. 2. - Circumstances: In the morning, at waking. While I was at a certain depth of sleep (a twilight state) and reflecting over a previous dream and in a sort of way continuing to dream it, I felt myself approaching nearer to waking consciousness but wanted to remain in the twilight state.

‘Scene: I was stepping across a brook with one foot but drew it back again at once with the intention of remaining on this side.’ (Silberer, 1912, 625.)

‘Example No. 6. - Conditions as in example No. 4' (in which he had wanted to lie in bed a little longer, though without oversleeping). ‘I wanted to give way to sleep for a little longer.

‘Scene: I was saying good-bye to someone and was arranging with him (or her) to meet him (or her) again soon.’ (Ibid., 627.)

The ‘functional’ phenomenon, ‘the representation of a state instead of an object’, was observed by Silberer principally in the two conditions of falling asleep and waking up. It is obvious that dream-interpretation is only concerned with the latter case. Silberer has given examples which show convincingly that in many dreams the last pieces of the manifest content, which are immediately followed by waking, represent nothing more nor less than an intention to wake or the process of waking. The representation may be in terms of such images as crossing a threshold (‘threshold symbolism’), leaving one room and entering another, departure, home-coming, parting with a companion, diving into water, etc. I cannot, however, refrain from remarking that I have come across dream-elements which can be related to threshold symbolism, whether in my own dreams or in those of subjects whom I have analysed, far less frequently than Silberer’s communications would have led one to expect.

It is by no means inconceivable or improbable that this threshold symbolism might throw light upon some elements in the middle of the texture of dreams - in places, for instance, where there is a question of oscillations in the depth of sleep and of an inclination to break off the dream. Convincing instances of this, however, have not been produced. What seem to occur more frequently are cases of overdetermination, in which a part of a dream which has derived its material content from the nexus of dream-thoughts is employed to represent in addition some state of mental activity.

This very interesting functional phenomenon of Silberer’s has, through no fault of its discoverer’s, led to many abuses; for it has been regarded as lending support to the old inclination to give abstract and symbolic interpretations to dreams. The preference for the ‘functional category’ is carried so far by some people that they speak of the functional phenomenon wherever intellectual activities or emotional processes occur in the dream-thoughts, although such material has neither more nor less right than any other kind to find its way into a dream as residues of the previous day.

We are ready to recognize the fact that Silberer’s phenomena constitute a second contribution on the part of waking thought to the construction of dreams; though it is less regularly present and less significant than the first one, which has already been introduced under the name of ‘secondary revision.’ It has been shown that a part of the attention which operates during the day continues to be directed towards dreams during the state of sleep, that it keeps a check on them and criticizes them and reserves the power to interrupt them. It has seemed plausible to recognize in the mental agency which thus remains awake the censor to whom we have had to attribute such a powerful restricting influence upon the form taken by dreams. What Silberer’s observations have added to this is the fact that in certain circumstances a species of self-observation plays a part in this and makes a contribution to the content of the dream. The probable relations of this self-observing agency, which may be particularly prominent in philosophical minds, to endopsychic perception, to delusions of observation, to conscience and to the censor of dreams can be more appropriately treated elsewhere.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1914:] ‘On Narcissism’ (Freud, 1914c). I will now try to sum up this lengthy disquisition on the dream-work. We were faced by the question whether the mind employs the whole of its faculties without reserve in constructing dreams or only a functionally restricted fragment of them. Our investigations led us to reject entirely the form in which the question was framed as being inadequate to the circumstances. If, however, we had to reply to the question on the basis of the terms in which it was stated, we should be obliged to reply in the affirmative to both the alternatives, mutually exclusive though they appear to be. Two separate functions may be distinguished in mental activity during the construction of a dream: the production of the dream-thoughts, and their transformation into the content of the dream. The dream-thoughts are entirely rational and are constructed with an expenditure of all the psychical energy of which we are capable. They have their place among thought-processes that have not become conscious - processes from which, after some modification, our conscious thoughts, too, arise. However many interesting and puzzling questions the dream-thoughts may involve, such questions have, after all, no special relation to dreams and do not call for treatment among the problems of dreams.¹ On the other hand, the second function of mental activity during dream-construction, the transformation of the unconscious thoughts into the content of the dream, is peculiar to dream-life and characteristic of it. This dream-work proper diverges further from our picture of waking thought than has been supposed even by the most determined depreciator of psychical functioning during the formation of dreams. The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not immediately comparable with it. It does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form. It is exhaustively described by an enumeration of the conditions which it has to satisfy in producing its result. That product, the dream, has above all to evade the censorship, and with that end in view the dream-work makes use of a displacement of psychical intensities to the point of a transvaluation of all psychical values. The thoughts have to be reproduced exclusively or predominantly in the material of visual and acoustic memory-traces, and this necessity imposes upon the dream-work considerations of representability which it meets by carrying out fresh displacements. Greater intensities have probably to be produced than are available in the dream-thoughts at night, and this purpose is served by the extensive condensation which is carried out with the constituents of the dream-thoughts. Little attention is paid to the logical relations between the thoughts; those relations are ultimately given a disguised representation in certain formal characteristics of dreams. Any affect attached to the dream-thoughts undergoes less modification than their ideational content. Such affects are as a rule suppressed; when they are retained, they are detached from the ideas that properly belong to them, affects of a similar character being brought together. Only a single portion of the dream-work and one which operates to an irregular degree, the working over of the material by partly aroused waking thought, tallies to some extent with the view which other writers have sought to apply to the entire activity of dream-construction.

¹ [Footnote added 1925:] I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts. Again and again arguments and objections would be brought up based upon some uninterpreted dream in the form in which it had been retained in the memory, and the need to interpret it would be ignored. But now that analysts at least have become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning revealed by its interpretation, many of them have become guilty of falling into another confusion which they cling to with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature. I say this in order to make it possible to assess the value of the notorious ‘prospective purpose’ of dreams. The fact that dreams concern themselves with attempts at solving the problems by which our mental life is faced is no more strange than that our conscious waking life should do so; beyond this it merely tells us that that activity can also be carried on in the preconscious - and this we already knew.

CHAPTER VII THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM PROCESSES

Among the dreams which have been reported to me by other people, there is one which has special claims upon our attention at this point. It was told to me by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is still unknown to me. Its content made an impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to ‘re-dream’ it, that is, to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own, so that, by taking it over in this way, she might express her agreement with it on one particular point.

The preliminaries to this model dream were as follows. A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing besides his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.

The explanation of this moving dream is simple enough and, so my patient told me, was correctly given by the lecturer. The glare of light shone though the open door into the sleeping man’s eyes and led him to the conclusion which he would have arrived at if he had been awake, namely that a candle had fallen over and set something alight in the neighbourhood of the body. It is even possible that he had felt some concern when he went to sleep as to whether the old man might not be incompetent to carry out his task.

Nor have I any changes to suggest in this interpretation except to add that the content of the dream must have been overdetermined and that the words spoken by the child must have been made up of words which he had actually spoken in his lifetime and which were connected with important events in the father’s mind. For instance, ‘I’m burning’ may have been spoken during the fever of the child’s last illness, and ‘Father, don’t you see?’ may have been derived from some other highly emotional situation of which we are in ignorance.

But, having recognized that the dream was a process with a meaning, and that it can be inserted into the chain of the dreamer’s psychical experiences, we may still wonder why it was that a dream occurred at all in such circumstances, when the most rapid possible awakening was called for. And here we shall observe that this dream, too, contained the fulfilment of a wish. The dead child behaved in the dream like a living one: he himself warned his father, came to his bed, and caught him by the arm, just as he had probably done on the occasion from the memory of which the first part of the child’s words in the dream were derived. For the sake of the fulfilment of this wish the father prolonged his sleep by one moment. The dream was preferred to a waking reflection because it was able to show the child as once more alive. If the father had woken up first and then made the inference that led him to go into the next room, he would, as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of time.

There can be no doubt what the peculiar feature is which attracts our interest to this brief dream. Hitherto we have been principally concerned with the secret meaning of dreams and the method of discovering it and with the means employed by the dream-work for concealing it. The problems of dream-interpretation have hitherto occupied the centre of the picture. And now we come upon a dream which raises no problem of interpretation and the meaning of which is obvious, but which, as we see, nevertheless retains the essential characteristics that differentiate dreams so strikingly from waking life and consequently call for explanation. It is only after we have disposed of everything that has to do with the work of interpretation that we can begin to realize the incompleteness of our psychology of dreams.

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