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We meet with the second of these facts almost every day in the course of our analytic work; and it does not imply such an important objection as the other does. One of the tasks of psycho-analysis, as you know, is to lift the veil of amnesia which hides the earliest years of childhood and to bring to conscious memory the manifestations of early infantile sexual life which are contained in them. Now these first sexual experiences of a child are linked to painful impressions of anxiety, prohibition, disappointment and punishment. We can understand their having been repressed; but, that being so, we cannot understand how it is that they have such free access to dream-life, that they provide the pattern for so many dream-phantasies and that dreams are filled with reproductions of these scenes from childhood and with allusions to them. It must be admitted that their unpleasurable character and the dream-work’s wish-fulfilling purpose seem far from mutually compatible. But it may be that in this case we are magnifying the difficulty. After all, these same infantile experiences have attached to them all the imperishable, unfulfilled instinctual wishes which throughout life provide the energy for the construction of dreams, and to which we may no doubt credit the possibility, in their mighty uprush, of forcing to the surface, along with the rest, the material of distressing events. And on the other hand the manner and form in which this material is reproduced shows unmistakably the efforts of the dream-work directed to denying the unpleasure by means of distortion and to transforming disappointment into attainment.

With the traumatic neuroses things are different. In their case the dreams regularly end in the generation of anxiety. We should not, I think, be afraid to admit that here the function of the dream has failed. I will not invoke the saying that the exception proves the rule: its wisdom seems to me most questionable. But no doubt the exception does not overturn the rule. If, for the sake of studying it, we isolate one particular psychical function, such as dreaming, from the psychical machinery as a whole, we make it possible to discover the laws that are peculiar to it; but when we insert it once more into the general context we must be prepared to discover that these findings are obscured or impaired by collision with other forces. We say that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish; but if you want to take these latter objections into account, you can say nevertheless that a dream is an attempt at the fulfilment of a wish. No one who can properly appreciate the dynamics of the mind will suppose that you have said anything different by this. In certain circumstances a dream is only able to put its intention into effect very incompletely, or must abandon it entirely. Unconscious fixation to a trauma seems to be foremost among these obstacles to the function of dreaming. While the sleeper is obliged to dream, because the relaxation of repression at night allows the upward pressure of the traumatic fixation to become active, there is a failure in the functioning of his dream-work, which would like to transform the memory-traces of the traumatic event into the fulfilment of a wish. In these circumstances it will happen that one cannot sleep, that one gives up sleep from dread of the failure of the function of dreaming. Traumatic neuroses are here offering us an extreme case; but we must admit that childhood experiences, too, are of a traumatic nature, and we need not be surprised if comparatively trivial interferences with the function of dreams may arise under other conditions as well.

LECTURE XXXDREAMS AND OCCULTISM

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, - To-day we will proceed along a narrow path, but one which may lead us to a wide prospect.

You will scarcely be surprised by the news that I am going to speak to you on the relation of dreams to occultism. Dreams have, indeed, often been regarded as the gateway into the world of mysticism, and even to-day are themselves looked on by many people as an occult phenomenon. Even we, who have made them into a subject for scientific study, do not dispute that one or more threads link them to those obscure matters. Mysticism, occultism - what is meant by these words? You must not expect me to make any attempt at embracing this ill-circumscribed region with definitions. We all know in a general and indefinite manner what the words imply to us. They refer to some sort of ‘other world’, lying beyond the bright world governed by relentless laws which has been constructed for us by science.

Occultism asserts that there are in fact ‘more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’. Well, we need not feel bound by the narrow-mindedness of academic philosophy; we are ready to believe what is shown to us to deserve belief.

We propose to proceed with these things as we do with any other scientific material: first of all to establish whether such events can really be shown to occur, and then and only then, when their factual nature cannot be doubted, to concern ourselves with their explanation. It cannot be denied, however, that even the putting of this decision into action is made hard for us by intellectual, psychological and historical factors. The case is not the same as when we approach other investigations.

First, the intellectual difficulty. Let me give you a crude and obvious explanation of what I have in mind. Let us suppose that the question at issue is the constitution of the interior of the earth. We have, as you are aware, no certain knowledge about it. We suspect that it consists of heavy metals in an incandescent state. Then let us imagine that someone puts forward an assertion that the interior of the earth consists of water saturated with carbonic acid - that is to say, with a kind of soda-water. We shall no doubt say that this is most improbable, that it contradicts all our expectations and pays no attention to the known facts which have led us to adopt the metal hypothesis. Nevertheless it is not inconceivable; if someone were to show us a way of testing the soda-water hypothesis we should follow it without objecting. But suppose now that someone else comes along and seriously asserts that the core of the earth consists of jam. Our reaction to this will be quite different. We shall tell ourselves that jam does not occur in nature, that it is a product of human cooking, that, moreover, the existence of this material presupposes the presence of fruit-trees and their fruit, and that we cannot see how we can locate vegetation and human cookery in the interior of the earth. The result of these intellectual objections will be a switching of our interest: instead of starting upon an investigation of whether the core of the earth really consists of jam, we shall ask ourselves what sort of person this must be who can arrive at such a notion, or at most we shall ask him where he got it from. The unlucky inventor of the jam theory will be very much insulted and will complain that we are refusing to make an objective investigation of his assertion on the ground of a pretendedly scientific prejudice. But this will be of no help to him. We perceive that prejudices are not always to be reprobated, but that they are sometimes justified and expedient because they save us useless labour. In fact they are only conclusions based on an analogy with other well-founded judgements.

A whole number of occultist assertions have the same sort of effect on us as the jam hypothesis; so that we consider ourselves justified in rejecting them at sight, without further investigation. But all the same, the position is not so simple. A comparison like the one I have chosen proves nothing, or proves as little as comparisons in general. It remains doubtful whether it fits the case, and it is clear that its choice was already determined by our attitude of contemptuous rejection. Prejudices are sometimes expedient and justified; but sometimes they are erroneous and detrimental, and one can never tell when they are the one and when the other. The history of science itself abounds in instances which are a warning against premature condemnation. For a long time it was regarded as a senseless hypothesis to suppose that the stones, which we now call meteorites, could have reached the earth from outer space or that the rocks forming mountains, in which the remains of shells are imbedded, could have once formed the bed of the sea. Incidentally, much the same thing happened to our psycho-analysis when it brought forward its inference of there being an unconscious. Thus we analysts have special reason to be careful in using intellectual considerations for rejecting new hypotheses and must admit that they do not relieve us from feelings of antipathy, doubt and uncertainty.

I have spoken of the second factor as the psychological one. By that I mean the general tendency of mankind to credulity and a belief in the miraculous. From the very beginning, when life takes us under its strict discipline, a resistance stirs within us against the relentlessness and monotony of the laws of thought and against the demands of reality-testing. Reason becomes the enemy which withholds from us so many possibilities of pleasure. We discover how much pleasure it gives us to withdraw from it, temporarily at least, and to surrender to the allurements of nonsense. Schoolboys delight in the twisting of words; when a scientific congress is over, the specialists make fun of their own activities; even earnest-minded men enjoy a joke. More serious hostility to ‘Reason and Science, the highest strength possessed by man’, awaits its opportunity; it hastens to prefer the miracle-doctor or the practitioner of nature-cures to the ‘qualified’ physician; it is favourable to the assertions of occultism so long as those alleged facts can be taken as breaches of laws and rules; it lulls criticism to sleep, falsifies perceptions and enforces confirmations and agreements which cannot be justified. If this human tendency is taken into account, there is every reason to discount much of the information put forward in occultist literature.

I have called the third doubt the historical one; and by it I mean to point out that there is in fact nothing new in the world of occultism. There emerge in it once more all the signs, miracles, prophecies and apparitions which have been reported to us from ancient times and in ancient books and which we thought had long since been disposed of as the offspring of unbridled imagination or of tendentious fraud, as the product of an age in which man’s ignorance was very great and the scientific spirit was still in its cradle. If we accept the truth of what, according to the occultists’ information, still occurs to-day, we must also believe in the authenticity of the reports which have come down to us from ancient times. And we must then reflect that the tradition and sacred books of all peoples are brimful of similar marvellous tales and that the religions base their claim to credibility on precisely such miraculous events and find proof in them of the operation of superhuman powers. That being so, it will be hard for us to avoid a suspicion that the interest in occultism is in fact a religious one and that one of the secret motives of the occultist movement is to come to the help of religion, threatened as it is by the advance of scientific thought. And with the discovery of this motive our distrust must increase and our disinclination to embark on the examination of these supposedly occult phenomena.

Sooner or later, however, this disinclination must be overcome. We are faced by a question of fact: is what the occultists tell us true or not? It must, after all, be possible to decide this by observation. At bottom we have cause for gratitude to the occultists. The miraculous stories from ancient times are beyond the reach of our testing. If in our opinion they cannot be substantiated, we must admit that they cannot, strictly speaking, be disproved. But about contemporary happenings, at which we are able to be present, it must be possible for us to reach a definite judgement. If we arrive at a conviction that such miracles do not occur to-day, we need not fear the counter-argument that they may nevertheless have taken place in ancient times: in that case other explanations will be much more plausible. Thus we have settled our doubts and are ready to take part in an investigation of occult phenomena.

But here unluckily we are met by circumstances which are exceedingly unfavourable to our honest intentions. The observations on which our judgement is supposed to depend take place under conditions which make our sensory perceptions uncertain and which blunt our power of attention; they occur in darkness or in dimmed light after long periods of blank expectation. We are told that in fact our unbelieving - that is to say, critical - attitude may prevent the expected phenomena from happening. The situation thus brought about is nothing less than a caricature of the circumstances in which we are usually accustomed to carry out scientific enquiries. The observations are made upon what are called ‘mediums’ - individuals to whom peculiarly ‘sensitive’ faculties are ascribed, but who are by no means distinguished by outstanding qualities of intellect or character and who are not, like the miracle-workers of the past, inspired by any great idea or serious purpose. On the contrary, they are looked upon, even by those who believe in their secret powers, as particularly untrustworthy; most of them have already been detected as cheats and we may reasonably expect that the same fate awaits the remainder. Their performances give one the impression of children’s mischievous pranks or of conjuring tricks. Never has anything of importance yet emerged from séances with these mediums - the revelation of a new source of power, for instance. We do not, it is true, expect to receive hints on pigeon-breeding from the conjurer who produces pigeons by magic from his empty top-hat. I can easily put myself in the place of a person who tries to fulfil the demands of an objective attitude and so takes part in occult séances, but who grows tired after a while and turns away in disgust from what is expected of him and goes back unenlightened to his former prejudices. The reproach may be made against such a person that this is not the right way of behaving: that one ought not to lay down in advance what the phenomena one is seeking to study shall be like and in what circumstances they shall appear. One should, on the contrary, persevere, and give weight to the precautionary and supervisory measures by which efforts have recently been made to provide against the untrustworthiness of mediums. Unfortunately this modern protective technique makes an end of the easy accessibility of occult observations. The study of occultism becomes a specialized and difficult profession - an activity one cannot pursue alongside of one’s other interests. And until those concerned in these investigations have reached their conclusions, we are left to our doubts and our own conjectures.

Of these conjectures no doubt the most probable is that there is a real core of yet unrecognized facts in occultism round which cheating and phantasy have spun a veil which it is hard to pierce. But how can we even approach this core? at what point can we attack the problem? It is here, I think, that dreams come to our help, by giving us a hint that from out of this chaos we should pick the subject of telepathy.

What we call ‘telepathy’ is, as you know, the alleged fact that an event which occurs at a particular time comes at about the same moment to the consciousness of someone distant in space, without the paths of communication that are familiar to us coming into question. It is implicitly presupposed that this event concerns a person in whom the other one (the receiver of the intelligence) has a strong emotional interest. For instance, Person A may be the victim of an accident or may die, and Person B, someone nearly attached to him - his mother or daughter or fiancée - learns the fact at about the same time through a visual or auditory perception. In this latter case, then, it is as if she had been informed by telephone, though such was not the case; it is a kind of psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy. I need not insist to you on the improbability of such events, and there is good reason for dismissing the majority of such reports. A few are left over which cannot be so easily disposed of in this way. Permit me now, for the purpose of what I have to tell you, to omit the cautious little word ‘alleged’ and to proceed as though I believed in the objective reality of the phenomenon of telepathy. But bear firmly in mind that that is not the case and that I have committed myself to no conviction.

Actually I have little to tell you - only a modest fact. I will also at once reduce your expectations still further by saying that at bottom dreams have little to do with telepathy. Telepathy does not throw any fresh light on the nature of dreams nor do dreams give any direct evidence of the reality of telepathy. Moreover the phenomenon of telepathy is by no means bound up with dreams; it can occur as well during the waking state. The only reason for discussing the relation between dreams and telepathy is that the state of sleep seems particularly suited for receiving telepathic messages. In such cases one has what is called a telepathic dream and, when it is analysed, one forms a conviction that the telepathic news has played the same part as any other portion of the day’s residues and that it has been changed in the same way by the dream-work and made to serve its purpose.

During the analysis of one such telepathic dream, something occurred which seems to me of sufficient interest in spite of its triviality to serve as the starting-point of this lecture. When in 1922 I gave my first account of this matter I had only a single observation at my disposal. Since then I have made a number of similar ones, but I will keep to the first example, because it is easiest to describe, and I will take you straight away in medias res.

An obviously intelligent man, who from his own account was not in the least ‘inclined towards occultism’, wrote to me about a dream he had had which seemed to him remarkable. He began by informing me that his married daughter, who lived at a distance from him, was expecting her first confinement in the middle of December. This daughter meant a great deal to him and he knew too that she was very much attached to him. During the night of November 16-17, then, he dreamt that his wife had given birth to twins. A number of details followed, which I may here pass over, and all of which were never in fact explained. The wife who in the dream had become the mother of twins was his second wife, his daughter’s stepmother. He did not wish to have a child by his present wife who, he said, had no aptitude for bringing up children sensibly; moreover, at the time of the dream he had long ceased to have sexual relations with her. What led him to write to me was not doubt about the theory of dreams, though the manifest content of his dream would have justified it, for why did the dream, in complete contradiction to his wishes, make his wife give birth to children? Nor, according to him, was there any reason to fear that this unwished-for event might occur. What induced him to report this dream to me was the circumstance that on the morning of November 18 he received a telegram announcing that his daughter had given birth to twins. The telegram had been handed in the day before and the birth had taken place during the night of November 16-17, at about the same time at which he had had the dream of his wife’s twin birth. The dreamer asked me whether I thought the coincidence between dream and event was accidental. He did not venture to call the dream a telepathic one, since the difference between its content and the event affected precisely what seemed to him essential in it - the identity of the person who gave birth to the children. But one of his comments shows that he would not have been astonished at an actual telepathic dream: he believed his daughter would have thought particularly of him during her labour.

I feel sure, Ladies and Gentlemen, that you have been able to explain this dream already and understand too why I have told it you. Here was a man who was dissatisfied with his second wife and who would prefer his wife to be like the daughter of his first marriage. This ‘like’ dropped out, of course, so far as the unconscious was concerned. And now the telepathic message arrived during the night to say that his daughter had given birth to twins. The dream-work took control of the news, allowed the unconscious wish to operate on it - the wish that he could put his daughter in the place of his second wife - and thus arose the puzzling manifest dream, which disguised the wish and distorted the message. We must admit that it is only the interpretation of the dream that has shown us that it was a telepathic one: psycho-analysis has revealed a telepathic event which we should not otherwise have discovered.

But pray do not let yourselves be misled! In spite of all this, dream-interpretation has told us nothing about the objective reality of the telepathic event. It may equally be an illusion which can be explained in another way. The man’s latent dream-thoughts may have run: ‘To-day is the day the confinement should take place if my daughter is really out in her reckoning by a month, as I suspect. And when I saw her last she looked just as though she was going to have twins. How my dead wife who has so fond of children would have rejoiced over twins!’ (I base this last factor on some associations of the dreamer’s which I have not mentioned.) In that case the instigation to the dream would have been well-grounded suspicions on the dreamer’s part and not a telepathic message; but the outcome would remain the same. You see then that even the interpretation of this dream has told us nothing on the question of whether we are to allow objective reality to telepathy. That could only be decided by a thorough-going investigation of all the circumstances of the case - which was unfortunately no more possible in this instance than in any of the others in my experience. Granted that the telepathy hypothesis offers by far the simplest explanation, yet that does not help us much. The simplest explanation is not always the correct one; the truth is often no simple matter, and before deciding in favour of such a far-reaching hypothesis we should like to have taken every precaution.

We may now leave the subject of dreams and telepathy: I have nothing more to say to you on it. But kindly observe that what seemed to us to teach us something about telepathy was not the dream but the interpretation of the dream, its psycho-analytic working-over. Accordingly, in what follows we may leave dreams entirely on one side and may follow an expectation that the employment of psycho-analysis may throw a little light on other events described as occult. There is, for instance, the phenomenon of thought-transference, which is so close to telepathy and can indeed without much violence be regarded as the same thing. It claims that mental processes in one person - ideas, emotional states, conative impulses - can be transferred to another person through empty space without employing the familiar methods of communication by means of words and signs. You will realize how remarkable, and perhaps even of what great practical importance, it would be if something of the kind really happened. It may be noted, incidentally, that strangely enough precisely this phenomenon is referred to least frequently in the miraculous stories of the past.

I have formed an impression in the course of the psycho-analytic treatment of patients that the activities of professional fortune-tellers conceal an opportunity for making particularly unobjectionable observations on thought-transference. These are insignificant and even inferior people, who immerse themselves in some sort of performance - lay out cards, study writing or lines upon the palm of the hand, or make astrological calculations - and at the same time, after having shown themselves familiar with portions of their visitor’s past or present circumstances, go on to prophesy their future. As a rule their clients exhibit great satisfaction over these achievements and feel no resentment if later on these prophecies are not fulfilled. I have come across several such cases and have been able to study them analytically, and in a moment I will tell you the most remarkable of these instances. Their convincingness is unfortunately impaired by the numerous reticences to which I am compelled by the obligation of medical discretion. I have, however, of set purpose avoided distortions. So listen now to the story of one of my women patients, who had an experience of this kind with a fortune-teller.

She had been the eldest of a numerous family and had grown up with an extremely strong attachment to her father. She had married young and had found entire satisfaction in her marriage. Only one thing was wanting to her happiness: she had remained childless, so she could not bring her beloved husband completely into the place of her father. When, after long years of disappointment, she decided to undergo a gynaecological operation, her husband revealed to her that the blame was his: an illness before their marriage had made him incapable of procreating children. She took the disappointment badly, became neurotic and clearly suffered from fears of being tempted. To cheer her up, he took her with him on a business trip to Paris. They were sitting there one day in the hall of their hotel when she noticed a stir among the hotel servants. She asked what was going on and was told that Monsieur le Professeur had arrived and was giving consultations in a little room over there. She expressed a wish to have a try. Her husband rejected the idea, but while he was not watching she slipped into the consulting-room and faced the fortune-teller. She was 27 years old, but looked much younger and had taken off her wedding-ring. Monsieur le Professeur made her lay her hand on a tray filled with ashes and carefully studied the imprint; he then told her all kinds of things about hard struggles that lay before her, and ended with the comforting assurance that all the same she would still get married and would have two children by the time she was 32. When she told me this story she was 43 years old, seriously ill and without any prospect of ever having a child. Thus the prophecy had not come true; yet she spoke of it without any sort of bitterness but with an unmistakable expression of satisfaction, as though she were recalling a cheerful event. It was easy to establish that she had not the slightest notion of what the two numbers in the prophecy might mean or whether they meant anything at all.

You will say that this is a stupid and incomprehensible story and ask why I have told it you. I should be entirely of your opinion if - and this is the salient point - analysis had not made it possible to arrive at an interpretation of the prophecy which is convincing precisely from the explanation it affords of the details. For the two numbers find their place in the life of my patient’s mother. She had married late - not till she was over thirty, and in the family they had often dwelt on the fact of the success with which she had hastened to make up for lost time. Her two first children (with our patient the elder) had been born with the shortest possible interval between them, in a single calendar year; and she had in fact two children by the time she was 32. What Monsieur le Professeur had said to my patient meant therefore: ‘Take comfort from the fact of being so young. You’ll have the same destiny as your mother, who also had to wait a long time for children, and you’ll have two children by the time you’re 32.’ But to have the same destiny as her mother, to put herself in her mother’s place, to take her place with her father - that had been the strongest wish of her youth, the wish on account of whose non-fulfilment she was just beginning to fall ill. The prophecy promised her that the wish would still be fulfilled in spite of everything; how could she fail to feel friendly to the prophet? Do you regard it as possible, however, that Monsieur le Professeur was familiar with the facts of the intimate family history of his chance client? Out of the question! How, then, did he arrive at the knowledge which enabled him to give expression to my patient’s strongest and most secret wish by including the two numbers in his prophecy? I can see only two possible explanations. Either the story as it was told me is untrue and the events occurred otherwise, or thought-transference exists as a real phenomenon. One can suppose, no doubt, that after an interval of 16 years the patient had introduced the two numbers concerned into her recollection from her unconscious. I have no basis for this suspicion, but I cannot exclude it, and I imagine that you will be readier to believe in a way out of that kind than in the reality of thought-transference. If you do decide on the latter course, do not forget that it was only analysis that created the occult fact - uncovered it when it lay distorted to the point of being unrecognizable.

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