PARAPRAXES 8 страница

These objections are obviously a threat to the success of our work. We must guard against them, and in our own case we do so by firmly resolving not to give way to them. If we are analysing someone else’s dream, we do so by laying it down as an inviolable rule that he must not hold back any idea from us, even if it gives rise to one of the four objections - of being too unimportant or too senseless or of being irrelevant or too distressing to be reported. The dreamer promises to obey the rule, and we may be annoyed afterwards to find how badly he keeps his promise when the occasion arises. We may explain this to ourselves to begin with by supposing that, in spite of our authoritative assurance, he has not yet realized the justification for free association, and we may perhaps have the notion of first convincing him theoretically by giving him books to read or by sending him to lectures which may convert him into a supporter of our views on free association. But we shall be held back from blunders like this when we consider that in the case of ourselves, as to the strength of whose convictions we can, after all, hardly be in doubt, the same objections arise to certain ideas and are only set aside subsequently - by a court of appeal, as it were.

Instead of being annoyed by the dreamer’s disobedience, we may take advantage of these experiences by learning something new from them - something which is all the more important the less we are expecting it. We perceive that the work of interpreting dreams is carried out in the face of a resistance, which opposes it and of which the critical objections are manifestations. This resistance is independent of the dreamer’s theoretical conviction. We learn still more, indeed. We discover that a critical objection of this kind never turns out to be justified. On the contrary, the ideas which people try to suppress in this way turn out invariably to be the most important ones and those which are decisive in our search for the unconscious material. It amounts, in fact, to a special distinguishing mark, if an idea is accompanied by an objection like this.

This resistance is something entirely new: a phenomenon which we have come upon in connection with our premisses, but one which was not included among them. The appearance of this new factor in our reckoning comes to us as a not altogether pleasant surprise. We suspect at once that it is not going to make our work any easier. It might mislead us into abandoning our whole concern with dreams: something so unimportant as a dream and, on top of that, all these difficulties instead of a simple straightforward technique! But, on the other hand, the difficulties might act precisely as a stimulus and make us suspect that the work will be worth the trouble. We regularly come up against resistance when we try to make our way forward from the substitute which is the dream-element to the unconscious material hidden behind it. So we may conclude that there must be something of importance concealed behind the substitute. Otherwise, what is the point of the difficulties that are trying to keep the concealment going? If a child refuses to open his clenched fist to show what he has in it, we may feel sure that it is something wrong - something he ought not to have.

The moment we introduce the dynamic idea of a resistance into the facts of the case, we must simultaneously reflect that this factor is something variable in quantity. There may be greater and smaller resistances, and we are prepared to find these differences showing themselves during our work as well. We may perhaps be able to link with this another experience we also meet with during the work of interpreting dreams: sometimes it requires only a single response, or no more than a few, to lead us from a dream-element to the unconscious material behind it, while on other occasions long chains of associations and the overcoming of many critical objections are required for bringing this about. We shall conclude that these differences relate to the changing magnitude of the resistance, and we shall probably turn out to be right. If the resistance is small, the substitute cannot be far distant from the unconscious material; but a greater resistance means that the unconscious material will be greatly distorted and that the path will be a long one from the substitute back to the unconscious material.

3 And now perhaps it is time to take a dream and try our technique upon it and see whether our expectations are confirmed. Yes, but what dream are we to choose for the purpose: You cannot imagine how hard I find it to decide; nor can I yet make the nature of my difficulties plain to you. There must obviously be dreams which have on the whole been subjected to only a little distortion, and the best plan would be to begin with them. But what dreams have been least distorted? The ones that are intelligible and not confused, two examples of which I have already put before you? That would be leading us quite astray. Investigation shows that such dreams have been subjected to an extraordinarily high degree of distortion. If, however, I were to disregard particular requirements and were to select a dream at haphazard, you would probably be greatly disappointed. We might have to notice or record such a profusion of ideas in response to the separate dream-elements that we should be unable to make head or tail of the work. If we write down a dream and then make a note of all the ideas that emerge in response to it, these may prove to be many times longer than the text of the dream. The best plan would therefore seem to be to choose out a number of short dreams for analysis, each of which will at least tell us something or confirm some point. So we will make up our minds to take that course, unless experience may perhaps show us where we can really find dreams that have been only slightly distorted.

I can however think of something else that will make things easier for us - something, moreover, which lies along our path. Instead of starting on the interpretation of whole dreams, we will restrict ourselves to a few dream-elements, and we will trace out in a number of examples how these can be explained by applying our technique to them.4

(a) A lady reported that she very often dreamt when she was a child that God wore a paper cocked-hat on his head. What can you make of that without the dreamer’s help? It sounds completely nonsensical. But it ceases to be nonsense when we hear from the lady that she used to have a hat of that sort put on her head at meals when she was a child, because she could never resist taking furtive glances at her brothers’ and sisters’ plates to see whether they had been given larger helpings than she had. So the hat was intended to act like a pair of blinkers. This, incidentally, was a piece of historical information and was given without any difficulty. The interpretation of this element and at the same time of the whole short dream was easily made with the help of a further idea that occurred to the dreamer: ‘As I had heard that God was omniscient and saw everything’, she said, ‘the dream can only mean that I knew everything and saw everything, even though they tried to prevent me.’ Perhaps this example is too simple.

(b) A sceptical woman patient had a longish dream in the course of which some people told her about my book on jokes and praised it highly. Something came in then about a ‘a ‘channel’, perhaps it was another book that mentioned a channel, or something else about a channel... she didn’t know... it was all so indistinct.

No doubt you will be inclined to expect that the element ‘channel’, since it was so indistinct, would be inaccessible to interpretation. You are right in suspecting a difficulty; but the difficulty did not arise from the indistinctness: both the difficulty and the indistinctness arose from another cause. Nothing occurred to the dreamer in connection with ‘channel’, and I could of course throw no light on it. A little later - it was the next day, in point of fact - she told me that she had thought of something that might have something to do with it. It was a joke, too, - a joke she had heard. On the steamer between Dover and Calais a well-known author fell into conversation with an Englishman. The latter had occasion to quote the phrase: ‘Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas. [It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.]’ ‘Yes,’ replied the author, ‘le Pas de Calais’ - meaning that he thought France sublime and England ridiculous. But the Pas de Calais is a channel - the English Channel. You will ask whether I think this had anything to do with the dream. Certainly I think so; and it provides the solution of the puzzling element of the dream. Can you doubt that this joke was already present before the dream occurred, as the unconscious thought behind the element ‘channel’? Can you suppose that it was introduced as a subsequent invention? The association betrayed the scepticism which lay concealed behind the patient’s ostensible admiration; and her resistance against revealing this was no doubt the common cause both of her delay in producing the association and of the indistinctness of the dream-element concerned. Consider the relation of the dream-element to its unconscious background: it was, as it were, a fragment of the background, an allusion to it, but it was made quite incomprehensible by being isolated.

(c) As part of a longish dream a patient dreamt that several members of his family were sitting round a table of peculiar shape, etc. It occurred to him in connection with the table that he had seen a piece of furniture of the kind when he was on a visit to a particular family. His thoughts then went on to say that there was a peculiar relationship between the father and son in this family; and he soon added that the same thing was true of the relationship between himself and his own father. So the table had been taken into the dream in order to point out this parallel.

This dreamer had been long familiar with the requirement of dream-interpretation. Another person might perhaps have taken objection to such a trivial detail as the shape of a table being made the subject of investigation. But in fact we regard nothing in a dream as accidental or indifferent, and we expect to obtain information precisely from the explanation of such trivial and pointless details. You may perhaps also feel surprised that the thought that ‘the same thing was true of us and of them’ should have been expressed by, in particular, the choice of a table [Tisch]. But this too becomes clear when you learn that the name of the family in question was Tischler [literally, ‘carpenter’]. By making his relations sit at this Tisch, he was saying that they too were Tischlers. Incidentally, you will notice how inevitably one is led into being indiscreet when one reports these dream-interpretations. And you will guess that this is one of the difficulties I have hinted at over the choice of examples. I could easily have taken another example in place of this one, but I should probably merely have avoided this indiscretion at the price of committing another.

6 The moment seems to me to have arrived for introducing two terms, which we could have made use of long ago. We will describe what the dream actually tells us as the manifest dream-content, and the concealed material, which we hope to reach by pursuing the ideas that occur to the dreamer, as the latent dream-thoughts. Thus we are here considering the relations between the manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-thoughts as shown in these examples. These relations may be of very many different kinds. In examples (a) and (b) the manifest element is also a constituent of the latent thoughts, though only a small fragment of them. A small piece of the large and complicated psychical structure of unconscious dream-thoughts has made its way into the manifest dream as well - a fragment of them, or, in other cases, an allusion to them, a caption, as it were, or an abbreviation in telegraphic style. It is the business of the work of interpretation to complete these fragments or this allusion into a whole - which was achieved particularly nicely in the case of example (b). Thus one form of the distortion which constitutes the dream-work is replacement by a fragment or an allusion. In example (c) another kind of relation is to be observed in addition; and we shall find this expressed in a purer and clearer form in the examples which follow.

(d) The dreamer was pulling a lady (a particular one, of his acquaintance) out from behind a bed. He himself found the meaning of this dream-element from the first idea that occurred to him. It meant that he was giving this lady preference.¹

¹ [This example, like the next, depends on a purely verbal point: the resemblance between the German words for ‘pulling out’ (hervor ziehen) and ‘preferring’ (vorziehen).]

(e) Another man dreamt that his brother was in a box [Kasten]. In his first response ‘Kasten’ was replaced by ‘Schrank [cupboard]’, and the second gave the interpretation: his brother was restricting himself [‘

schränkt sich ein’].

(f) The dreamer climbed to the top of a mountain, which commanded an unusually extensive view. This sounds quite rational and you might suppose that there is nothing to interpret in it and that all we have to do is to enquire what memory gave rise to the dream and the reason for its being stirred up. But you would be wrong. It turned out that this dream stood in need of interpreting just as much as any other, more confused one. For none of his own mountain climbs occurred to the dreamer, but he thought of the fact that an acquaintance of his was the editor of a ‘Survey’, dealing with our relations with the most remote parts of the earth. Thus the latent dream-thought was an identification of the dreamer with the ‘surveyor’,

Here we have a new type of relation between the manifest and latent dream-elements. The former is not so much a distortion of the latter as a representation of it, a plastic, concrete, portrayal of it, taking its start from the wording. But precisely on that account it is once more a distortion, for we have long since forgotten from what concrete image the word originated and consequently fail to recognize it when it is replaced by the image. When you consider that the manifest dream is made up predominantly of visual images and more rarely of thoughts and words, you can imagine what importance attaches to this kind of relation in the construction of dreams. You will see, too, that in this way it becomes possible in regard to a large number of abstract thoughts to create pictures to act as substitutes for them in the manifest dream while at the same time serving the purpose of concealment. This is the technique of the familiar picture-puzzles. Why it is that these representations have an appearance of being jokes is a special problem into which we need not enter here.

There is a fourth kind of relation between the manifest and latent elements, which I must continue to hold back from you until we come upon its key-word in considering technique. Even so I shall not have given you a full list; but it will serve our purpose.8

Do you feel bold enough now to venture upon the interpretation of a whole dream? Let us make the experiment, to see whether we are well enough equipped for the task. I shall of course not select one of the most obscure ones; nevertheless, it will be one that gives a well-marked picture of the attributes of a dream.

Very well then. A lady who, though she was still young, had been married for many years had the following dream: She was at the theatre with her husband. One side of the stalls was completely empty. Her husband had told her that Elisa L. and her fiancé had wanted to go too, but had only been able to get bad seats - three for 1 florin 50 kreuzers - and of course they could not take those. She thought it would not really have done any harm if they had.

The first thing the dreamer reported to us was that the precipitating cause of the dream was touched on in its manifest content. Her husband had in fact told her that Elise L., who was approximately her contemporary, had just become engaged. The dream was a reaction to this information. We know already that it is easy in the case of many dreams to point to a precipitating cause like this from the previous day, and that the dreamer is often able to trace this for us without any difficulty. The dreamer in the present case put similar information at our disposal for other elements of the manifest dream as well. - Where did the detail come from about one side of the stalls being empty? It was an allusion to a real event of the previous week. She had planned to go to a particular play and had therefore bought her tickets early - so early that she had had to pay a booking fee. When they got to the theatre it turned out that her anxiety was quite uncalled-for, since one side of the stalls was almost empty. It would have been early enough if she had bought the tickets on the actual day of the performance. Her husband had kept on teasing her for having been in too much of a hurry. - What was the origin of the 1 florin 50 kreuzers? It arose in quite another connection, which had nothing to do with the former one but also alluded to some information from the previous day. Her sister-in-law had been given a present of 150 florins by her husband and had been in a great hurry - the silly goose - to rush off to the jewellers’ and exchange the money for a piece of jewellery. - Where did the ‘three’ come from? She could think of nothing in connection with that, unless we counted the idea that her newly-engaged friend, Elise L., was only three months her junior, though she herself had been a married woman for nearly ten years. - And the absurd notion of taking three tickets for only two people? She had nothing to say to that, and refused to report any further ideas or information.

But all the same, she had given us so much material in these few associations that it was possible to guess the latent dream-thoughts from them. We cannot help being struck by the fact that periods of time occur at several points in the information she gave us about the dream, and these provide a common factor between the different parts of the material. She took the theatre tickets too early, bought them over-hurriedly so that she had to pay more than was necessary; so too her sister-in-law had been in a hurry to take her money to the jewellers and buy some jewellery with it, as though otherwise she would miss it. If, in addition to the ‘too early’ and ‘in a hurry’ which we have stressed, we take into account the precipitating cause of the dream-the news that her friend, though only three months her junior, had nevertheless got an excellent husband - and the criticism of her sister-in-law expressed in the idea that it was absurd of her to be in such a hurry, then we find ourselves presented almost spontaneously with the following construction of the latent dream-thoughts, for which the manifest dream is a severely distorted substitute:

‘Really it was absurd of me to be in such a hurry to get married! I can see from Elise’s example that I could have got a husband later too.’ (Being in too great a hurry was represented by her own behaviour in buying the tickets and by her sister-in-laws in buying the jewellery. Going to the play appeared as a substitute forgetting married.) This would seem to be the main thought. We may perhaps proceed further, though with less certainty, since the analysis ought not to have been without the dreamer’s comments at these points: ‘And I could have got one a hundred times better with the money!’ (150 florins is a hundred times more than 1 florin 50.) If we were to put her dowry in place of the money, it would mean that her husband was bought with her dowry: the jewellery, and the bad tickets as well, would be substitutes for her husband. It would be still more satisfactory if the actual element ‘three tickets’ had something to do with a husband. But we have not got so far as that in our understanding of the dream. We have only discovered that the dream expresses the low value assigned by her to her own husband and her regret at having married so early.

We shall, I fancy, be more surprised and confused than satisfied by the outcome of this first dream-interpretation. We have been given too much in one dose - more than we are yet able to cope with. We can already see that we shall not exhaust the lessons of this interpretation of a dream. Let us hasten to single out what we can recognize as established new discoveries.

In the first place, it is a remarkable thing that the main emphasis in the latent thoughts lies on the element of being in too great a hurry; nothing of the sort is to be found in the manifest dream. Without the analysis, we should have had no suspicion that that factor plays any part. It seems, therefore, to be possible for what is in fact the main thing, the centre of the unconscious thoughts, to be absent in the manifest dream. This means that the impression made by the whole dream must be fundamentally altered. In the second place, there is an absurd combination in the dream: three for 1 florin 50. We detected in the dream-thoughts the assertion that ‘it was absurd (to marry so early)'. Can it be doubted that this thought, ‘it was absurd’, is represented by the inclusion of an absurd element in the manifest dream? And in the third place, a glance of comparison shows us that the relation between the manifest and latent elements is no simple one; it is far from being the case that one manifest element always takes the place of one latent one. It is rather that there is a group-relation between the two layers, within which one manifest element can replace several latent ones or one latent element can be replaced by several manifest ones.

As regards the meaning of the dream and the dreamer’s attitude to it, we might point out much that is similarly surprising. She agreed to the interpretation indeed, but she was astonished at it. She was not aware that she assigned such a low value to her husband; nor did she know why she should set such a low value on him. So there is still much that is unintelligible about it. It really seems to me that we are not yet equipped for interpreting a dream and that we need first to be given some further instruction and preparation.

LECTURE VIII CHILDREN’S DREAMS

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - I am under the impression that we have advanced too quickly. Let us go back a little. Before we made our last attempt at overcoming the difficulty of distortion in dreams by the help of our technique, we were saying that our best plan would be to get round the difficulty by keeping to dreams in which there was no distortion or only a very little - if such dreams exist. This will once more mean a divergence from the historical development of our discoveries; for actually it was only after the technique of interpretation had been consistently applied and distorted dreams had been completely analysed that the existence of dreams that are free from distortion came to our notice.

The dreams we are in search of occur in children. They are short, clear, coherent, easy to understand and unambiguous; but they are nevertheless undoubtedly dreams. You must not suppose, however, that all children’s dreams are of this kind. Dream-distortion sets in very early in childhood, and dreams dreamt by children of between five and eight have been reported which bear all the characteristics of later ones. But if you limit yourselves to ages between the beginning of observable mental activity and the fourth or fifth year, you will come upon a number of dreams which possess the characteristics that can be described as ‘infantile’ and you will find a few of the same kind in later years of childhood. Indeed, under certain conditions even adults have dreams which are quite similar to the typically infantile ones.

From these children’s dreams we can draw conclusions with great ease and certainty on the essential nature of dreams in general, and we can hope that those conclusions will prove decisive and universally valid.

(1) No analysis, no application of any technique is necessary in order to understand these dreams. There is no need to question a child who tells us his dream. One has, however, to add a piece of information to it from the events of the child’s life. There is invariably some experience of the previous day which explains the dream to us. The dream is the reaction of the child’s mental life in his sleep to this experience of the previous day.

We will take a few examples on which to base our further conclusions.

(a) A boy of 22 months was told to hand over a basket of cherries to someone as a birthday present. He was obviously very unwilling to do it, although he was promised that he should have a few of them for himself. Next morning he reported having dreamt: ‘Hermann eaten all the chewwies!’

(b) A girl of 3¼ years was taken across the lake for the first time. At the landing-stage she did not want to leave the boat and wept bitterly. The crossing had been too short for her. Next morning she announced: ‘

Last night I went on the lake.’ We may safely add that this crossing had lasted longer.

(c) A boy of 5¼ years was taken on an excursion up the Echerntal near Hallstatt. He had been told that Hallstatt was at the foot of the Dachstein. He had shown great interest in this mountain. There was a fine view of it from where he was staying at Aussee, and the Simony Hut on it could be made out through a telescope. The child had often tried to see it through the telescope - with what success was not known. The excursion began in an atmosphere of cheerful expectation. Whenever a fresh mountain came into view the boy asked: ‘Is that the Dachstein?’ and he became more and more depressed the more often he was told it was not. Finally he fell completely silent and refused to go with the rest of the party up the short ascent to the waterfall, and it was thought that he must be overtired. But next morning he said with a radiant face: ‘Last night I dreamt we were at the Simony Hut.’ So that had been what he expected to do on the excursion. He gave no further details except something he had heard before: ‘You have to climb up steps for six hours.’

These three dreams will give us all the information we require.

(2) As we can see, these children’s dreams are not senseless. They are intelligible, completely valid mental acts. You will recall what I told you of the medical view of dreams and of the analogy with unmusical fingers wandering over the keys of a piano. You cannot fail to observe how sharply these children’s dreams contradict this view. It would really be too strange if children could perform complete mental functions in their sleep while adults were content under the same conditions with reactions which were no more than ‘twitchings’. Moreover, we have every reason to think that children’s sleep is sounder and deeper.

(3) These dreams are without any dream-distortion, and therefore call for no interpretative activity. Here the manifest and the latent dream coincide. Thus dream-distortion is not part of the essential nature of dreams. I expect this will be a weight off your minds. But when we examine these dreams more closely, we shall recognize a small piece of dream-distortion even in them, a certain distinction between the manifest content of the dream and the latent dream-thoughts.

(4) A child’s dream is a reaction to an experience of the previous day, which has left behind it a regret, a longing, a wish that has not been dealt with. The dream produces a direct, undisguised fulfilment of that wish. Let us recall now our discussions on the part played by somatic stimuli from outside and from within as disturbers of sleep and instigators of dreams. In that connection we came to know some quite undoubted facts, but by their means we were only able to explain a small number of dreams. In these children’s dreams, however, there is nothing that points to the operation of somatic stimuli of that kind; we could not be mistaken in this, for the dreams are completely intelligible and easy to grasp. But this does not mean that we need abandon the stimulus aetiology of dreams. We can only ask how it has happened that from the first we have forgotten that besides somatic stimuli there are mental stimuli that disturb sleep. We know, after all, that it is excitations of this kind that are chiefly responsible for disturbing the sleep of an adult by preventing him from establishing the mood required for falling asleep - the withdrawing of interest from the world. He does not want to interrupt his life but would rather continue his work on the things he is concerned with, and for that reason he does not fall asleep. In the case of children, therefore, the stimulus that disturbs sleep is a mental one - the wish that has not been dealt with - and it is to this that they react with the dream.

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