Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning 3 страница

But I think the time has come to break off. For we are all agreed on one thing - that the subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible.5

A NOTE ON THE UNCONSCIOUS IN PSYCHO-ANALYSIS (1912)

I wish to expound in a few words and as plainly as possible what the term ‘unconscious’ has come to mean in Psycho-analysis and in Psycho-analysis alone.

A conception - or any other psychical element - which is now present to my consciousness may become absent the next moment, and may become present again, after an interval, unchanged, and, as we say, from memory, not as a result of a fresh perception by our senses. It is this fact which we are accustomed to account for by the supposition that during the interval the conception has been present in our mind, although latent in consciousness. In what shape it may have existed while present in the mind and latent in consciousness we have no means of guessing.

At this very point we may be prepared to meet with the philosophical objection that the latent conception did not exist as an object of psychology, but as a physical disposition for the recurrence of the same psychical phenomenon, i.e. of the said conception. But we may reply that this is a theory far overstepping the domain of psychology proper; that it simply begs the question by asserting ‘conscious’ to be an identical term with ‘psychical’, and that it is clearly at fault in denying psychology the right to account for its most common facts, such as memory, by its own means.

Now let us call ‘conscious’ the conception which is present to our consciousness and of which we are aware, and let this be the only meaning of the term ‘conscious’. As for latent conceptions, if we have any reason to suppose that they exist in the mind - as we had in the case of memory - let them be denoted by the term ‘unconscious’.

Thus an unconscious conception is one of which we are not aware, but the existence of which we are nevertheless ready to admit on account of other proofs or signs.

This might be considered an uninteresting piece of descriptive or classificatory work if no experience appealed to our judgement other than the facts of memory, or the cases of association by unconscious links. The well-known experiment, however, of the ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’ teaches us to insist upon the importance of the distinction between conscious and unconscious and seems to increase its value.8

In this experiment, as performed by Bernheim, a person is put into a hypnotic state and is subsequently aroused. While he was in the hypnotic state, under the influence of the physician, he was ordered to execute a certain action at a certain fixed moment after his awakening, say half an hour later. He awakes, and seems fully conscious and in his ordinary condition; he has no recollection of his hypnotic state, and yet at the prearranged moment there rushes into his mind the impulse to do such and such a thing, and he does it consciously, though not knowing why. It seems impossible to give any other description of the phenomenon than to say that the order had been present in the mind of the person in a condition of latency, or had been present unconsciously, until the given moment came, and then had become conscious. But not the whole of it emerged into consciousness: only the conception of the act to be executed. All the other ideas associated with this conception - the order, the influence of the physician, the recollection of the hypnotic state, remained unconscious even then.

But we have more to learn from such an experiment. We are led from the purely descriptive to a dynamic view of the phenomenon. The idea of the action ordered in hypnosis not only became an object of consciousness at a certain moment, but the more striking aspect of the fact is that this idea grew active: it was translated into action as soon as consciousness became aware of its presence. The real stimulus to the action being the order of the physician, it is hard not to concede that the idea of the physician’s order became active too. Yet this last idea did not reveal itself to consciousness, as did its outcome, the idea of the action; it remained unconscious, and so it was active and unconscious at the same time.

A post-hypnotic suggestion is a laboratory production, an artificial fact. But if we adopt the theory of hysterical phenomena first put forward by P. Janet and elaborated by Breuer and myself, we shall not be at a loss for plenty of natural facts showing the psychological character of the post-hypnotic suggestion even more clearly and distinctly.9

The mind of the hysterical patient is full of active yet unconscious ideas; all her symptoms proceed from such ideas. It is in fact the most striking character of the hysterical mind to be ruled by them. If the hysterical woman vomits, she may do so from the idea of being pregnant. She has, however, no knowledge of this idea, although it can easily be detected in her mind, and made conscious to her, by one of the technical procedures of psycho-analysis. If she is executing the jerks and movements constituting her ‘fit’, she does not even consciously represent to herself the intended actions, and she may perceive those actions with the detached feelings of an onlooker. Nevertheless analysis will show that she was acting her part in the dramatic reproduction of some incident in her life, the memory of which was unconsciously active during the attack. The same preponderance of active unconscious ideas is revealed by analysis as the essential fact in the psychology of all other forms of neurosis.

We learn therefore by the analysis of neurotic phenomena that a latent or unconscious idea is not necessarily a weak one, and that the presence of such an idea in the mind admits of indirect proofs of the most cogent kind, which are equivalent to the direct proof furnished by consciousness. We feel justified in making our classification agree with this addition to our knowledge by introducing a fundamental distinction between different kinds of latent or unconscious ideas. We were accustomed to think that every latent idea was so because it was weak and that it grew conscious as soon as it became strong. We have not gained the conviction that there are some latent ideas which do not penetrate into consciousness, however strong they may have become. Therefore we may call the latent ideas of the first type foreconscious,¹ while we reserve the term unconscious (proper) for the latter type which we came to study in the neuroses. The term unconscious, which was used in the purely descriptive sense before, now comes to imply something more. It designates not only latent ideas in general, but especially ideas with a certain dynamic character, ideas keeping apart from consciousness in spite of their intensity and activity.

¹ [In the 1925 English version, throughout the paper, ‘foreconscious’ was altered to ‘preconscious’, which has, of course, become the regular translation of the German ‘vorbewusst’.]0

Before continuing my exposition I will refer to two objection which are likely to be raised at this point. The first of these may be stated thus: instead of subscribing to the hypothesis of unconscious ideas of which we know nothing, we had better assume that consciousness can be split up, so that certain ideas or other psychical acts may constitute a consciousness apart; which has become detached and estranged from the bulk of conscious psychical activity. Well-known pathological cases like that of Dr. Azam seem to go far to show that the splitting up of consciousness is no fanciful imagination.

I venture to urge against this theory that it is a gratuitous assumption, based on the abuse of the word ‘conscious’. We have no right to extend the meaning of this word so for as to make it include a consciousness of which its owner himself is not aware. If philosophers find difficulty in accepting the existence of unconscious ideas, the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more objectionable. The cases described as splitting of consciousness, like Dr. Azam’s, might better be denoted as shifting of consciousness, - that function - or whatever it be - oscillating between two different psychical complexes which become conscious and unconscious in alternation.

The other objection that may probably be raised would be that we apply to normal psychology conclusions which are drawn chiefly from the study of pathological conditions. We are enabled to answer it by another fact, the knowledge of which we owe to psycho-analysis. Certain deficiencies of function of most frequent occurrence among healthy people, e.g. lapsus linguae, errors in memory and speech, forgetting of names, etc., may easily be shown to depend on the action of strong unconscious ideas in the same way as neurotic symptoms. We shall meet with another still more convincing argument at a later stage of this discussion.

By the differentiation of foreconscious and unconscious ideas, we are led on to leave the field of classification and to form an opinion about functional and dynamical relations in psychical action. We have found a foreconscious activity passing into consciousness with no difficulty, and an unconscious activity which remains so and seems to be cut off from consciousness.1

Now we do not know whether these two modes of psychical activity are identical or essentially divergent from their beginning, but we may ask why they should become different in the course of psychical action. To this last question psycho-analysis gives a clear and unhesitating answer. It is by no means impossible for the product of unconscious activity to pierce into consciousness, but a certain amount of exertion is needed for this task. When we try to do it in ourselves, we become aware of a distinct feeling of repulsion¹ which must be overcome, and when we produce it in a patient we get the most unquestionable signs of what we call his resistance to it. So we learn that the unconscious idea is excluded from consciousness by living forces which oppose themselves to its reception, while they do not object to other ideas, the foreconscious ones. Psycho-analysis leaves no room for doubt that the repulsion from unconscious ideas is only provoked by the tendencies embodied in their contents. The next and most probable theory which can be formulated at this stage of our knowledge is the following. Unconsciousness is a regular and inevitable phase in the processes constituting our psychical activity; every psychical act begins as an unconscious one, and it may either remain so or go on developing into consciousness, according as it meets with resistance or not. The distinction between foreconscious and unconscious activity is not a primary one, but comes to be established after repulsion has sprung up. Only then the difference between foreconscious ideas, which can appear in consciousness and reappear at any moment, and unconscious ideas which cannot do so gains a theoretical as well as a practical value. A rough but not inadequate analogy to this supposed relation of conscious to unconscious activity might be drawn from the field of ordinary photography. The first stage of the photograph is the ‘negative’; every photographic picture has to pass through the ‘negative process’, and some of these negatives which have held good in examination are admitted to the ‘positive process’ ending in the picture.

¹ [In the German translation the word ‘repulsion’, here and lower down, is rendered by ‘Abwehr’, of which the usual English version is ‘defence’ or ‘fending off ‘.]2

But the distinction between foreconscious and unconscious activity, and the recognition of the barrier which keeps them asunder, is not the last or the most important result of the psycho-analytic investigation of psychical life. There is one psychical product to be met with in the most normal persons, which yet presents a very striking analogy to the wildest productions of insanity, and was no more intelligible to philosophers than insanity itself. I refer to dreams. Psycho-analysis is founded upon the analysis of dreams; the interpretation of dreams is the most complete piece of work the young science has done up to the present. One of the most common types of dream-formation may be described as follows: a train of thoughts has been aroused by the working of the mind in the daytime, and retained some of its activity, escaping from the general inhibition of interests which introduces sleep and constitutes the psychical preparation for sleeping. During the night this train of thoughts succeeds in finding connections with one of the unconscious tendencies present ever since his childhood in the mind of the dreamer, but ordinarily repressed and excluded from his conscious life. By the borrowed force of this unconscious help, the thoughts, the residue of the day’s work,¹ now become active again, and emerge into consciousness in the shape of the dream. Now three things have happened:

(1) The thoughts have undergone a change, a disguise and a distortion, which represents the part of the unconscious helpmate.

(2) The thoughts have occupied consciousness at a time when they ought not.

(3) Some part of the unconscious, which could not otherwise have done so, has emerged into consciousness.

We have learnt the art of finding out the ‘residual thoughts’, the latent thoughts of the dream, and, by comparing them with the apparent² dream, we are able to form a judgement on the changes they underwent and the manner in which these were brought about.

The latent thoughts of the dream differ in no respect from the products of our regular conscious activity; they deserve the name of foreconscious thoughts, and may indeed have been conscious at some moment of waking life. But by entering into connection with the unconscious tendencies during the night they have become assimilated to the latter, degraded as it were to the condition of unconscious thoughts, and subjected to the laws by which unconscious activity is governed. And here is the opportunity to learn what we could not have guessed from speculation, or from another source of empirical information - that the laws of unconscious activity differ widely from those of the conscious. We gather in detail what the peculiarities of the Unconscious are, and we may hope to learn still more about them by a profounder investigation of the processes of dream-formation.

¹ [In the 1925 English version the word ‘mental’ was inserted before ‘work’. In the German translation the whole phrase is rendered ‘Tagesreste’, for which the usual English equivalent is ‘day’s residues’.]

² [This word was altered to ‘manifest’ in the 1925 English version.]3

This inquiry is not yet half finished, and an exposition of the results obtained hitherto is scarcely possible without entering into the most intricate problems of dream-analysis. But I would not break off this discussion without indicating the change and progress in our comprehension of the Unconscious which are due to our psycho-analytic study of dreams.

Unconsciousness seemed to us at first only an enigmatical characteristic of a definite psychical act. Now it means more for us. It is a sign that this act partakes of the nature of a certain psychical category known to us by other and more important characters¹ and that it belongs to a system of psychical activity which is deserving of our fullest attention. The index-value of the unconscious has far outgrown its importance as a property. The system revealed by the sign that the single acts forming parts of it are unconscious we designate by the name ‘The Unconscious’, for want of a better and less ambiguous term. In German, I propose to denote this system by the letters Ubw, an abbreviation of the German word ‘Unbewusst’.² And this is the third and most significant sense which the term ‘unconscious’ has acquired in psycho-analysis.

¹ [This was altered to ‘features’ in the 1925 English version.]

² [Equivalent English abbreviation: ‘Ucs.’.]4

AN EVIDENTIAL DREAM (1913)

A lady suffering from doubting mania and obsessive ceremonials insisted that her nurses should never let her out of their sight for a single moment: otherwise she would begin to brood about forbidden actions that she might have committed while she was not being watched. One evening, while she was resting on the sofa, she thought she saw that the nurse on duty had fallen asleep. She called out: ‘Did you see me?’ The nurse started up and replied: ‘Of course I did.’ This gave the patient grounds for a fresh doubt, and after a time she repeated her question, which the nurse met with renewed protestations; just at that moment another attendant came in bringing the patient’s supper.

This incident occurred one Friday evening. Next morning the nurse recounted a dream which had the effect of dispelling the patient’s doubts.

DREAM. - Someone had entrusted a child to her. Its mother had left home, and she had lost it. As she went along, she enquired from the people in the street whether they had seen the child. Then she came to a large expanse of water and crossed a narrow footbridge. (There was an addendum: Suddenly there appeared before her on the footbridge, like a ‘fata Morgana’, the figure of another nurse.) Then she found herself in a familiar place, where she met a woman whom she had known as a girl and who had in those days been a saleswoman in a provision shop and later had got married. She asked the woman, who was standing in front of her door: ‘Did you see the child?’ The woman paid no attention to the question but informed her that she was now divorced from her husband, adding that marriage is not always happy either. She woke up feeling reassured and thought that the child would turn up all right in a neighbour’s house.

ANALYSIS. - The patient assumed that this dream referred to the falling asleep which the nurse had denied. From additional information volunteered by the latter, she was able to interpret the dream in a fashion which, although incomplete in some respects, was sufficient for all practical purposes. I myself heard only the lady’s report and did not interview the nurse. I shall first quote the patient’s interpretation, and then supplement it with whatever our general understanding of the laws governing dream-formation allows us to add.

‘The nurse told me that the child in the dream reminded her of a case the nursing of which had given her the most lively satisfaction. It was that of a child who was unable to see on account of inflammation of the eyes (blennorrhoea). The mother, however, did not leave home: she helped to nurse the child. On the other hand I remember too that when my husband, who thinks highly of this nurse, went away, he left me in her care and she promised to look after me as she would after a child.’

Furthermore, we know from the patient’s analysis that by insisting on never being let out of sight she had put herself back in the position of being a child once more.

‘Her having lost the child’, continued the patient, ‘signified that she had not seen me; she had lost sight of me. This was her admission that she had actually gone to sleep for a time and had not told me the truth afterwards.’

She was in the dark about the meaning of the small piece of the dream in which the nurse enquired from the people in the street whether they had seen the child; on the other hand, she was able to elucidate the later details of the manifest dream.

‘The large expanse of water made the nurse think of the Rhine; she added, however, that it was much larger than the Rhine. Then she remembered that on the previous evening I had read her the story of Jonah and the whale, and had told her that I myself once saw a whale in the English Channel. I fancy that the large expanse of water was the sea and was an allusion to the story of Jonah.

‘I think, too, the narrow footbridge came from the same story, which was amusingly written in dialect. The anecdote related how a religious instructor described to his pupils the wonderful adventures of Jonah; whereupon a boy objected that it could not be true, since the teacher himself had told them before that whales could swallow only the smallest creatures owing to the narrowness of their gullets. The teacher got out of the difficulty by saying that Jonah was a Jew, and that Jews would squeeze in anywhere. My nurse is very pious but inclined to religious doubts, and I reproached myself in case what I had read to her might have stirred them up.

‘On this narrow footbridge she now saw the apparition of another nurse, whom she knew. She told me the story of this nurse: she had drowned herself in the Rhine because she had been discharged from a case owing to something she had been guilty of.¹ She herself had feared, therefore, that she would be discharged for having fallen asleep. Moreover, on the day following the incident and after relating the dream, the nurse cried bitterly, and when I asked her why, replied quite rudely: "You know why as well as I do; and now you won’t trust me any more!"‘

Since the apparition of the drowned nurse was an addendum and an especially distinct one, we would have advised the lady to begin her dream-interpretation at that point. According to the dreamer’s report, too, this first half of her dream was accompanied by acute anxiety; the second part paved the way for the feeling of reassurance with which she awoke.

‘I regard the next part of the dream’, said the lady, continuing her analysis, ‘as certain corroboration of my view that the dream had to do with what happened on Friday evening, for the person who had formerly been a saleswoman in a provision shop can only have referred to the attendant who brought in the supper on that occasion. I noticed, too, that the nurse had complained of nausea all day long. The question she put to this woman: "Did you see the child?" is obviously traceable to my question: "Did you see me!" which I had put to her for the second time just as the attendant came in with the dishes.’

¹ At this point I have been guilty of making a condensation of the material, which I have been able to put right after going through my draft with the lady who told me the story. The nurse who met the dreamer as an apparition on the footbridge had not been guilty of anything in her nursing. She was discharged because the child’s mother, who had to leave home at the time, wanted to leave her child in charge of an older attendant - thus in point of fact a more trustworthy one. This was followed by a second story about another nurse who had actually been discharged on account of neglect, but who did not on that account drown herself. The material necessary for the interpretation of the dream-element came, as is so often the way, from two sources. My memory carried out the synthesis that led to the interpretation. For the rest, this story of the drowned nurse contains the factor of the mother leaving home, which the lady connected with the departure of her husband. We thus have here an overdetermination which detracts somewhat from the elegance of the interpretation.

In the dream, too, enquiry after the child was made on two occasions. The fact that the woman did not reply - paid no attention - we may regard as a depreciation of this other attendant made in the dreamer’s favour: she represented herself in the dream as being superior to the other woman, precisely because she herself had to face reproaches on account of her own lack of attention.

‘The woman who appeared in the dream was not in actual fact divorced from her husband. The situation was taken from an incident in the life of the other attendant, who had been separated - "divorced" - from a man by her parents’ command. The remark that "marriage does not always run smoothly either" was probably a consolation used in the course of conversation between the two women. This consolation prefigured another, with which the dream ended: "The child will turn up all right."

‘I concluded from this dream that on the evening in question the nurse really did fall asleep and that she was afraid of being dismissed on that account. Because of this I no longer felt any doubt about the correctness of my observation. Incidentally, after relating the dream, she added that she was very sorry she had not got a dream-book with her. To my comment that such books were full of the most ignorant superstitions, she replied that, although she was not at all superstitious, still all the unpleasant happenings of her life had taken place on a Friday. I must add that at the present time her treatment of me is not at all satisfactory, and she is touchy and irritable and makes scenes about nothing.’

I think we must credit the lady with having correctly interpreted and evaluated her nurse’s dream. As so often happens with dream-interpretation during analysis, the translation of the dream does not depend solely on the products of association, but we have also to take into account the circumstances of its narration, the behaviour of the dreamer before and after the analysis of the dream, as well as every remark or disclosure made by the dreamer at about the same time - during the same analytic session. If we take into consideration the nurse’s touchiness, her attitude to unlucky Fridays, etc., we shall confirm the conclusion that the dream contained an admission that, in spite of her denial, she had actually dozed off, and was afraid she would be sent away from the ‘child’ in her care.¹

¹ A few days later, indeed, the nurse confessed to a third person that she had fallen asleep that evening, and thus confirmed the lady’s interpretation.0 While, however, for the lady who reported it to me this dream had practical significance, for us it stimulates theoretical interest in two directions. It is true that it ended in a consolation, but in the main it represented an important admission in regard to the nurse’s relation to her patient. How does it come about that a dream, which is supposed, after all, to serve as the fulfilment of a wish, could take the place of an admission which was not even of any advantage to the dreamer? Must we really concede that in addition to wishful (and anxiety) dreams, there are also dreams of admission, as well as of warning, reflection, adaptation, and so on?

I must confess that I still do not quite understand why the stand I took against any such temptation in my Interpretation of Dreams has given rise to misgivings in the minds of so many psycho-analysts, among them some well-known ones. It seems to me that the differentiation between dreams of wishing, admission, warning, adaptation, and so on, has not much more sense than the differentiation, which is accepted perforce, of medical specialists into gynaecologists, paediatricians, and dentists. Let me recapitulate here as briefly as possible what I have said on this question in my Interpretation of Dreams.¹

The so-called ‘day’s residues’ can act as disturbers of sleep and constructors of dreams; they are affectively cathected thought-processes from the dream-day, which have resisted the general lowering through sleep. These day’s residues are uncovered by tracing back the manifest dream to the latent dream-thoughts; they constitute portions of the latter and are thus among the activities of waking life - whether conscious or unconscious - which have been able to persist into the period of sleep. In accordance with the multiplicity of thought-processes in the conscious and preconscious, these day’s residues have the most numerous and varied meanings: they may be wishes or fears that have not been disposed of, or intentions, reflections, warnings, attempts at adaptation to current tasks, and so on. To this extent the classification of dreams that is under consideration seems to be justified by the content which is uncovered by interpretation. These day’s residues, however, are not the dream itself: they lack the main essential of a dream. Of themselves they are not able to construct a dream. They are, strictly speaking, only the psychical material for the dream-work, just as sensory and somatic stimuli, whether accidental or produced under experimental conditions, constitute the somatic material for the dream-work. To attribute to them the main part in the construction of dreams is simply to repeat at a new point the pre-analytic error which explained dreams by referring them to bad digestion or to pressure on the skin. Scientific errors, indeed, are tenacious of life, and even when they have been refuted are ready to creep in again under new disguises.

¹ p. 992 ff..1

The present state of our knowledge leads us to conclude that the essential factor in the construction of dreams is an unconscious wish - as a rule an infantile wish, now repressed - which can come to expression in this somatic or psychical material (in the day’s residues too, therefore) and can thus supply these with a force which enables them to press their way through to consciousness even during the suspension of thought at night. The dream is in every case a fulfilment of this unconscious wish, whatever else it may contain - warning, reflection, admission, or any other part of the rich content of preconscious waking life that has persisted undealt-with into the night. It is this unconscious wish that gives the dream-work its peculiar character as an unconscious revision of preconscious material. A psycho-analyst can characterize as dreams only the products of the dream-work: in spite of the fact that the latent dream-thoughts are only arrived at from the interpretation of the dream, he cannot reckon them as part of the dream, but only as part of preconscious reflection. (Secondary revision by the conscious agency is here reckoned as part of the dream-work. Even if one were to separate it, this would not involve any alteration in our conception. We should then have to say: dreams in the analytic sense comprise the dream-work proper together with the secondary revision of its products.) The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that one cannot put the wish-fulfilling character of dreams on a par with their character as warnings, admissions, attempts at solution, etc., without denying the concept of a psychical dimension of depth - that is to say, without denying the standpoint of psycho-analysis.

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