Autobiographical note 46 страница

It has naturally not occurred to us to throw any doubt on the significance, which has been experimentally demonstrated, of external sensory stimuli during sleep; but we have shown that such material stands in the same relation to the dream-wish as do the residues of thought left over from day time activity. Nor have we seen any reason to dispute the view that dreams interpret objective sensory stimuli just as illusions do; but we have found the motive which provides the reason for that interpretation, a reason which has been left unspecified by other writers. Interpretation is carried out in such a way that the object perceived shall not interrupt sleep and shall be usable for purposes of wish-fulfilment. As regards subjective states of excitation in the sense organs during sleep, the occurrence of which seems to have been proved by Trumbull Ladd, it is true that we have not accepted them as a particular source of dreams; but we have been able to explain them as resulting from the regressive revival of memories that are in operation behind the dream.

Internal organic sensations, which have commonly been taken as a cardinal point in explanations of dreaming, have retained a place, though a humbler one, in our theory. Such sensations - sensations of falling, for instance, or floating, or being inhibited - provide a material which is accessible at any time and of which the dream-work makes use, whenever it has need of it, for expressing the dream-thoughts.

The view that the dream-process is a rapid or instantaneous one is in our opinion correct as regards the perception by consciousness of the preconstructed dream-content; it seems probable that the preceding portions of the dream-process run a slow and fluctuating course. We have been able to contribute towards the solution of the riddle of dreams which contain a great amount of material compressed into the briefest moment of time; we have suggested that it is a question in such cases of getting hold of ready-made structures already present in the mind.

The fact that dreams are distorted and mutilated by memory is accepted by us but in our opinion constitutes no obstacle; for it is no more than the last and manifest portion of a distorting activity which has been in operation from the very start of the dream’s formation.

As regards the embittered and apparently irreconcilable dispute as to whether the mind sleeps at night or is as much in command of all its faculties as it is by day, we have found that both parties are right but that neither is wholly right. We have found evidence in the dream-thoughts of a highly complex intellectual function, operating with almost the whole resources of the mental apparatus. Nevertheless it cannot be disputed that these dream-thoughts originated during the day, and it is imperative to assume that there is such a thing as a sleeping state of the mind. Thus even the theory of partial sleep has shown its value, though we have found that what characterizes the state of sleep is not the disintegration of mental bonds but the concentration of the psychical system which is in command during the day upon the wish to sleep. The factor of withdrawal from the external world retains its significance in our scheme; it helps, though not as the sole determinant, to make possible the regressive character of representation in dreams. The renunciation of voluntary direction of the flow of ideas cannot be disputed; but this does not deprive mental life of all purpose, for we have seen how, after voluntary purposive ideas have been abandoned, involuntary ones assume command. We have not merely accepted the fact of the looseness of associative connections in dreams, but we have shown that it extends far further than had been suspected; we have found, however, that these loose connections are merely obligatory substitutes for others which are valid and significant. It is quite true that we have described dreams as absurd; but examples have taught us how sensible a dream can be even when it appears to be absurd.

We have no difference of opinion over the functions that are to be assigned to dreams. The view that dreams act as a safety valve to the mind and that, in the words of Robert, all kinds of harmful things are made harmless by being presented in a dream - not only does this view coincide exactly with our theory of the double wish-fulfilment brought about by dreams, but the way in which it is phrased is more intelligible to us than to Robert himself. The view that the mind has free play in its functioning in dreams is represented in our theory by the fact of the preconscious activity allowing dreams to take their course. Such phrases as ‘the return of the mind in dreams to an embryonic point of view’ or the words used by Havelock Ellis to describe dreams - ‘an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts’ - strike us as happy anticipations of our own assertions that primitive modes of activity which are suppressed during the day are concerned in the construction of dreams. We have been able to accept entirely as our own what Sully has written: ‘Our dreams are a means of conserving these successive personalities. When asleep we go back to the old ways of looking at things and of feeling about them, to impulses and activities which long ago dominated us’. For us no less than for Delage what has been ‘suppressed’ has become ‘the motive force of dreams.’

We have fully appreciated the importance of the part ascribed by Scherner to ‘dream-imagination’, as well as Scherner’s own interpretations, but we have been obliged to transport them, as it were, to a different position in the problem. The point is not that dreams create the imagination, but rather that the unconscious activity of the imagination has a large share in the construction of the dream-thoughts. We remain in Scherner’s debt for having indicated the source of the dream-thoughts; but nearly everything that he ascribes to the dream-work is really attributable to the activity of the unconscious during daytime, which is the instigating agent of dreams no less than of neurotic symptoms. We have been obliged to distinguish the ‘dream-work’ as something quite different and with a much narrower connotation.

Finally, we have by no means abandoned the relation between dreams and mental disorders, but have established it more firmly on fresh ground.9 We have thus been able to find a place in our structure for the most various and contradictory findings of earlier writers, thanks to the novelty of our theory of dreams, which combines them, as it were, into a higher unity. Some of those findings we have put to other uses, but we have wholly rejected only a few. Nevertheless our edifice is still uncompleted. Apart from the many perplexing questions in which we have become involved in making our way into the obscurities of psychology, we seem to be troubled by a fresh contradiction. On the one hand we have supposed that the dream-thoughts arise through entirely normal mental activity; but on the other hand we have discovered a number of quite abnormal processes of thought among the dream-thoughts, which extend into the dream-content, and which we then repeat in the course of our dream-interpretation. Everything that we have described as the ‘dream-work’ seems to depart so widely from what we recognize as rational thought-processes that the most severe strictures passed by earlier writers on the low level of psychical functioning in dreams must appear fully justified.

It may be that we shall only find enlightenment and assistance in this difficulty by carrying our investigation still further. And I will begin by picking out for closer examination one of the conjunctures which may lead to the formation of a dream.0

A dream, as we have discovered, takes the place of a number of thoughts which are derived from our daily life and which form a completely logical sequence. We cannot doubt, then, that these thoughts originate from our normal mental life. All the attributes which we value highly in our trains of thought, and which characterize them as complex achievements of a high order, are to be found once more in dream-thoughts. There is no need to assume, however, that this activity of thought is performed during sleep - a possibility which would gravely confuse what has hitherto been our settled picture of the psychical state of sleep. On the contrary, these thoughts may very well have originated from the previous day, they may have proceeded unobserved by our consciousness from their start, and may already have been completed at the onset of sleep. The most that we can conclude from this is that it proves that the most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness - a fact which we could not fail to learn in any case from every psycho-analysis of a patient suffering from hysteria or from obsessional ideas. These dream-thoughts are certainly not in themselves inadmissible to consciousness; there may have been a number of reasons for their not having become conscious to us during the day. Becoming conscious is connected with the application of a particular psychical function, that of attention - a function which, as it seems, is only available in a specific quantity, and this may have been diverted from the train of thought in question on to some other purpose. There is another way, too, in which trains of thought of this kind may be withheld from consciousness. The course of our conscious reflections shows us that we follow a particular path in our application of attention. If, as we follow this path, we come upon an idea which will not bear criticism, we break off: we drop the cathexis of attention. Now it seems that the train of thought which has thus been initiated and dropped can continue to spin itself out without attention being turned to it again, unless at some point or other it reaches a specially high degree of intensity which forces attention to it. Thus, if a train of thought is initially rejected (consciously, perhaps) by a judgement that it is wrong or that it is useless for the immediate intellectual purposes in view, the result may be that this train of thought will proceed, unobserved by consciousness, until the onset of sleep.

To sum up - we describe a train of thought such as this as ‘preconscious’; we regard it as completely rational and believe that it may either have been simply neglected or broken off and suppressed. Let us add a frank account of how we picture the occurrence of a train of ideas. We believe that, starting from a purposive idea, a given amount of excitation, which we term ‘cathectic energy’, is displaced along the associative paths selected by that purposive idea. A train of thought which is ‘neglected’ is one which has not received this cathexis; a train of thought which is ‘suppressed’ or ‘repudiated’ is one from which this cathexis has been withdrawn. In both cases they are left to their own excitations. Under certain conditions a train of thought with a purposive cathexis is capable of attracting the attention of consciousness to itself and in that event, through the agency of consciousness, receives a ‘hypercathexis.’ We shall be obliged presently to explain our view of the nature and function of consciousness.

A train of thought that has been set going like this in the preconscious may either cease spontaneously or persist. We picture the first of these outcomes as implying that the energy attaching to the train of thought is diffused along all the associative paths that radiate from it; this energy sets the whole network of thoughts in a state of excitation which lasts for a certain time and then dies away as the excitation in search of discharge becomes transformed into a quiescent cathexis. If this first outcome supervenes, the process is of no further significance so far as dream-formation is concerned. Lurking in our preconscious, however, there are other purposive ideas, which are derived from sources in our unconscious and from wishes which are always on the alert. These may take control of the excitation attaching to the group of thoughts which has been left to its own devices, they may establish a connection between it and an unconscious wish, and they may ‘transfer’ to it the energy belonging to the unconscious wish. Thenceforward the neglected or suppressed train of thought is in a position to persist, though the reinforcement it has received gives it no right of entry into consciousness. We may express this by saying that what has hitherto been a preconscious train of thought has now been ‘drawn into the unconscious.’

There are other conjunctures which may lead to the formation of a dream. The preconscious train of thought may have been linked to the unconscious wish from the first and may for that reason have been repudiated by the dominant purposive cathexis; or an unconscious wish may become active for other reasons (from somatic causes, perhaps) and may seek to effect a transference on to the psychical residues that are uncathected by the Pcs. without their coming halfway to meet it. But all three cases have the same final outcome: a train of thought comes into being in the preconscious which is without a preconscious cathexis but has received a cathexis from an unconscious wish.

From this point onwards the train of thought undergoes a series of transformations which we can no longer recognize as normal psychical processes and which lead to a result that bewilders us - a psychopathological structure. I will enumerate these processes and classify them.

(1) The intensities of the individual ideas become capable of discharge en bloc and pass over from one idea to another, so that certain ideas are formed which are endowed with great intensity. And since this process is repeated several times, the intensity of a whole train of thought may eventually be concentrated in a single ideational element. Here we have the fact of ‘compression’ or ‘condensation’, which has become familiar in the dream-work. It is this that is mainly responsible for the bewildering impression made on us by dreams, for nothing at all analogous to it is known to us in mental life that is normal and accessible to consciousness. In normal mental life too, we find ideas which, being the nodal points or end results of whole chains of thought, possess a high degree of psychical significance; but their significance is not expressed by any feature that is obvious in a sensory manner to internal perception; their perceptual presentation is not in any respect more intense on account of their psychical significance. In the process of condensation, on the other hand, every psychical interconnection is transformed into an intensification of its ideational content. The case is the same as when, in preparing a book for the press, I have some word which is of special importance for understanding the text printed in spaced or heavy type; or in speech I should pronounce the same word loudly and slowly and with special emphasis. The first of these two analogies reminds us at once of an example provided by the dream-work itself: the word ‘trimethylamin’ in the dream of Irma’s injection. Art historians have drawn our attention to the fact that the earliest historical sculptures obey a similar principle: they express the rank of the persons represented by their size. A king is represented twice or three times as large as his attendants or as his defeated enemies. A sculpture of Roman date would make use of subtler means for producing the same result. The figure of the Emperor would be placed in the middle, standing erect, and would be modelled with especial care, while his enemies would be prostrate at his feet; but he would no longer be a giant among dwarfs. The bows with which inferiors greet their superiors among ourselves to-day are an echo of the same ancient principle of representation.

The direction in which condensations in dreams proceed is determined on the one hand by the rational preconscious relations of the dream-thoughts, and on the other by the attraction exercised by visual memories in the unconscious. The outcome of the activity of condensation is the achievement of the intensities required for forcing a way through into the perceptual systems.3

(2) Owing, once more, to the freedom with which the intensities can be transferred, ‘intermediate ideas’, resembling compromises, are constructed under the sway of condensation. (Cf. the numerous instances I have given of this.) This is again something unheard-of in normal chains of ideas, where the main stress is laid on the selection and retention of the ‘right’ ideational element. On the other hand, composite structures and compromises occur with remarkable frequency when we try to express preconscious thoughts in speech. They are then regarded as species of ‘slips of the tongue.’

(3) The ideas which transfer their intensities to each other stand in the loosest mutual relations. They are linked by associations of a kind that is scorned by our normal thinking and relegated to the use of jokes. In particular, we find associations based on homonyms and verbal similarities treated as equal in value to the rest.

(4) Thoughts which are mutually contradictory make no attempt to do away with each other, but persist side by side. They often combine to form condensations, just as though there were no contradiction between them, or arrive at compromises such as our conscious thoughts would never tolerate but such as are often admitted in our actions.

These are some of the most striking of the abnormal processes to which the dream-thoughts, previously constructed on rational lines, are subjected in the course of the dream-work. It will be seen that the chief characteristic of these processes is that the whole stress is laid upon making the cathecting energy mobile and capable of discharge; the content and the proper meaning of the psychical elements to which the cathexes are attached are treated as of little consequence. It might have been supposed that condensation and the formation of compromises is only carried out for the sake of facilitating regression, that is, when it is a question of transforming thoughts into images. But the analysis - and still more the synthesis - of dreams which include no such regression to images, e.g. the dream of ‘Autodidasker’, exhibits the same processes of displacement and condensation as the rest.

4 Thus we are driven to conclude that two fundamentally different kinds of psychical process are concerned in the formation of dreams. One of these produces perfectly rational dream-thoughts, of no less validity than normal thinking; while the other treats these thoughts in a manner which is in the highest degree bewildering and irrational. We have already in Chapter VI segregated this second psychical process as being the dream-work proper. What light have we now to throw upon its origin?

It would not be possible for us to answer this question if we had not made some headway in the study of the psychology of the neuroses, and particularly of hysteria. We have found from this that the same irrational psychical processes, and others that we have not specified, dominate the production of hysterical symptoms. In hysteria, too, we come across a series of perfectly rational thoughts, equal in validity to our conscious thoughts; but to begin with we know nothing of their existence in this form and we can only reconstruct them subsequently. If they force themselves upon our notice at any point, we discover by analysing the symptom which has been produced that these normal thoughts have been submitted to abnormal treatment: they have been transformed into the symptom by means of condensation and the formation of compromises, by way of superficial associations and in disregard of contradictions, and also, it may be, along the path of regression. In view of the complete identity between the characteristic features of the dream-work and those of the psychical activity which issues in psychoneurotic symptoms, we feel justified in carrying over to dreams the conclusions we have been led to by hysteria.

We accordingly borrow the following thesis from the theory of hysteria: a normal train of thought is only submitted to abnormal psychical treatment of the sort we have been describing if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression has been transferred on to it. In accordance with this thesis we have constructed our theory of dreams on the assumption that the dream-wish which provides the motive power invariably originates from the unconscious - an assumption which, as I myself am ready to admit, cannot be proved to hold generally, though neither can it be disproved. But in order to explain what is meant by ‘repression’, a term with which we have already made play so many times, it is necessary to proceed a stage further with our psychological scaffolding.

We have already explored the fiction of a primitive psychical apparatus whose activities are regulated by an effort to avoid an accumulation of excitation and to maintain itself so far as possible without excitation. For that reason it is built upon the plan of a reflex apparatus. The power of movement, which is in the first instance a means of bringing about internal alterations in its body, is at its disposal as the path to discharge. We went on to discuss the psychical consequences of an ‘experience of satisfaction’; and in that connection we were already able to add a second hypothesis, to the effect that the accumulation of excitation (brought about in various ways that need not concern us) is felt as unpleasure and that it sets the apparatus in action with a view to repeating the experience of satisfaction, which involved a diminution of excitation and was felt as pleasure. A current of this kind in the apparatus, starting from unpleasure and aiming at pleasure, we have termed a ‘wish’; and we have asserted that only a wish is able to set the apparatus in motion and that the course of the excitation in it is automatically regulated by feelings of pleasure and unpleasure. The first wishing seems to have been a hallucinatory cathecting of the memory of satisfaction. Such hallucinations, however, if they were not to be maintained to the point of exhaustion, proved to be inadequate to bring about the cessation of the need or, accordingly, the pleasure attaching to satisfaction.

A second activity - or, as we put it, the activity of a second system - became necessary, which would not allow the mnemic cathexis to proceed as far as perception and from there to bind the psychical forces; instead, it diverted the excitation arising from the need along a roundabout path which ultimately, by means of voluntary movement, altered the external world in such a way that it became possible to arrive at a real perception of the object of satisfaction. We have already outlined our schematic picture of the psychical apparatus up to this point; the two systems are the germ of what, in the fully developed apparatus, we have described as the Ucs. and Pcs.

In order to be able to employ the power of movement to make alterations in the external world that shall be effective, it is necessary to accumulate a great number of experiences in the mnemic systems and a multiplicity of permanent records of the associations called up in this mnemic material by different purposive ideas. We can now carry our hypotheses a step further. The activity of this second system, constantly feeling its way, and alternately sending out and withdrawing cathexes, needs on the one hand to have the whole of the material of memory freely at its command; but on the other hand it would be an unnecessary expenditure of energy if it sent out large quantities of cathexis along the various paths of thought and thus caused them to drain away to no useful purpose and diminish the quantity available for altering the external world. I therefore postulate that for the sake of efficiency the second system succeeds in retaining the major part of its cathexes of energy in a state of quiescence and in employing only a small part on displacement. The mechanics of these processes are quite unknown to me; anyone who wished to take these ideas seriously would have to look for physical analogies to them and find a means of picturing the movements that accompany excitation of neurones. All that I insist upon is the idea that the activity of the first Ø-system is directed towards securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one, no doubt with a simultaneous raising of its level. I presume, therefore, that under the dominion of the second system the discharge of excitation is governed by quite different mechanical conditions from those in force under the dominion of the first system. When once the second system has concluded its exploratory thought-activity, it releases the inhibition and damming-up of the excitations and allows them to discharge themselves in movement.

Some interesting reflections follow if we consider the relations between this inhibition upon discharge exercised by the second system and the regulation effected by the unpleasure principle. Let us examine the antithesis to the primary experience of satisfaction - namely, the experience of an external fright. Let us suppose that the primitive apparatus is impinged upon by a perceptual stimulus which is a source of painful excitation. Unco-ordinated motor manifestations will follow until one of them withdraws the apparatus from the perception and at the same time from the pain. If the perception reappears, the movement will at once be repeated (a movement of flight, it may be) till the perception has disappeared once more. In this case, no inclination will remain to recathect the perception of the source of pain, either hallucinatorily or in any other way. On the contrary, there will be an inclination in the primitive apparatus to drop the distressing mnemic image immediately, if anything happens to revive it, for the very reason that if its excitation were to overflow into perception it would provoke unpleasure (or, more precisely, would begin to provoke it). The avoidance of the memory, which is no more than a repetition of the previous flight from the perception, is also facilitated by the fact that the memory, unlike the perception, does not possess enough quality to excite consciousness and thus to attract fresh cathexis to itself. This effortless and regular avoidance by the psychical process of the memory of anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype and first example of psychical repression. It is a familiar fact that much of this avoidance of what is distressing - this ostrich policy - is still to be seen in the normal mental life of adults.

As a result of the unpleasure principle, then, the first Ø-system is totally incapable of bringing anything disagreeable into the context of its thought. It is unable to do anything but wish. If things remained at that point, the thought-activity of the second system would be obstructed, since it requires free access to all the memories laid down by experience. Two possibilities now present themselves. Either the activity of the second system might set itself entirely free from the unpleasure principle and proceed without troubling about unpleasure of memories; or it might find a method of cathecting unpleasurable memories which would enable it to avoid releasing the unpleasure. We may dismiss the first of these possibilities, for the unpleasure principle clearly regulates the course of excitation in the second system as much as in the first. We are consequently left with the remaining possibility that the second system cathects memories in such a way that there is an inhibition of their discharge, including, therefore, an inhibition of discharge (comparable to that of a motor innervation) in the direction of the development of unpleasure. We have therefore been led from two directions to the hypothesis that cathexis by the second system implies a simultaneous inhibition of the discharge of excitation: we have been led to it by regard for the unpleasure principle and also by the principle of the least expenditure of innervation. Let us bear this firmly in mind, for it is the key to the whole theory of repression: the second system can only cathect an idea if it is a position to inhibit any development of unpleasure that may proceed from it. Anything that could evade that inhibition would be inaccessible to the second system as well as to the first; for it would promptly be dropped in obedience to the unpleasure principle. The inhibition of unpleasure need not, however, be a complete one: a beginning of it must be allowed, since that is what informs the second system of the nature of the memory concerned and of its possible unsuitability for the purpose which the thought-process has in view.

I propose to describe the psychical process of which the first system alone admits as the ‘primary process’, and the process which results from the inhibition imposed by the second system as the ‘secondary process’.9

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