Freud - Complete Works (190 page)

   There is a still more urgent
necessity in the case of the process of displacement than in that
of condensation to discover the motive for these puzzling efforts
on the part of the dream-work.

On Dreams

1074

VI

   It is the process of displacement
which is chiefly responsible for our being unable to discover or
recognize the dream-thoughts in the dream-content, unless we
understand the reason for their distortion. Nevertheless, the
dream-thoughts are also submitted to another and milder sort of
transformation, which leads to our discovering a new achievement on
the part of the dream-work - one, however, which is easily
intelligible. The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we
proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in
which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic
language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary
represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in
images resembling those of poetic speech. There is no difficulty in
accounting for the constraint imposed upon the form in which the
dream-thoughts are expressed. The manifest content of dreams
consists for the most part in pictorial situations; and the
dream-thoughts must accordingly be submitted in the first place to
a treatment which will make them suitable for a representation of
this kind. If we imagine ourselves faced by the problem of
representing the arguments in a political leading article or the
speeches of counsel before a court of law in a series of pictures,
we shall easily understand the modifications which must necessarily
be carried out by the dream-work owing to
considerations of
representability in the content of the dream
.

   The psychical material of the
dream-thoughts habitually includes recollections of impressive
experiences - not infrequently dating back to early childhood -
which are thus themselves perceived as a rule as situations having
a visual subject matter. Wherever the possibility arises, this
portion of the dream-thoughts exercises a determining influence
upon the form taken by the content of the dream; it constitutes, as
it were, a nucleus of crystallization, attracting the material of
the dream-thoughts to itself and thus affecting their distribution.
The situation in a dream is often nothing other than a modified
repetition, complicated by interpolations, of an impressive
experience of this kind; on the other hand, faithful and
straightforward reproductions of real scenes only rarely appear in
dreams.

On Dreams

1075

   The content of dreams, however,
does not consist entirely of situations, but also includes
disconnected fragments of visual images, speeches and even bits of
unmodified thoughts. It may therefore perhaps be of interest to
enumerate very briefly the modes of representation available to the
dream-work for reproducing the dream-thoughts in the peculiar form
of expression necessary in dreams.

   The dream-thoughts which we
arrive at by means of analysis reveal themselves as a psychical
complex of the most intricate possible structure. Its portions
stand in the most manifold logical relations to one another: they
represent foreground and background, conditions, digressions and
illustrations, chains of evidence and counter-arguments. Each train
of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory
counterpart. This material lacks none of the characteristics that
are familiar to us from our waking thinking. If now all of this is
to be turned into a dream, the psychical material will be submitted
to a pressure which will condense it greatly, to an internal
fragmentation and displacement which will, as it were, create new
surfaces, and to a selective operation in favour of those portions
of it which are the most appropriate for the construction of
situations. If we take into account the genesis of the material, a
process of this sort deserves to be described as a
‘regression.’ In the course of this transformation,
however, the logical links which have hitherto held the psychical
material together are lost. It is only, as it were, the substantive
content of the dream-thoughts that the dream-work takes over and
manipulates. The restoration of the connections which the
dream-work has destroyed is a task which has to be performed by the
work of analysis.

   The modes of expression open to a
dream may therefore be qualified as meagre by comparison with those
of our intellectual speech; nevertheless a dream need not wholly
abandon the possibility of reproducing the logical relations
present in the dream-thoughts. On the contrary, it succeeds often
enough in replacing them by formal characteristics in its own
texture.

On Dreams

1076

   In the first place, dreams take
into account the connection which undeniably exists between all the
portions of the dream-thoughts by combining the whole material into
a single situation. They reproduce
logical connection
by
approximation in space and time
, just as a painter will
represent all the poets in a single group in a picture of
Parnassus. It is true that they were never in fact assembled on a
single mountain-top; but they certainly form a conceptual group.
Dreams carry this method of reproduction down to details; and often
when they show us two elements in the dream-content close together,
this indicates that there is some specially intimate connection
between what correspond to them among the dream-thoughts.
Incidentally, it is to be observed that all dreams produced during
a single night will be found on analysis to be derived from the
same circle of thoughts.

   A
causal relation
between
two thoughts is either left unrepresented or is replaced by a
sequence
of two pieces of dream of different lengths. Here
the representation is often reversed, the beginning of the dream
standing for the consequence and its conclusion for the premise. An
immediate
transformation
of one thing into another in a
dream seems to represent the relation of
cause and
effect
.

   The alternative
‘
either-or
’ is never expressed in dreams, both
of the alternatives being inserted in the text of the dream as
though they were equally valid. I have already mentioned that an
‘either-or’ used in
recording
a dream is to be
translated by ‘and’.

   Ideas which are contraries are by
preference expressed in dreams by one and the same element.¹
‘No’ seems not to exist so far as dreams are concerned.
Opposition between two thoughts, the relation of
reversal
,
may be represented in dreams in a most remarkable way. It may be
represented by some
other
piece of the dream-content being
turned into its opposite - as it were by an afterthought. We shall
hear presently of a further method of expressing contradiction. The
sensation of
inhibition of movement
which is so common in
dreams also serves to express a contradiction between two impulses,
a
conflict of will
.

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1911:] It deserves
to be remarked that well-known philologists have asserted that the
most ancient human languages tended in general to express
contradictory opposites by the same word. (E.g.
‘strong-weak’, ‘inside-outside.’ This has
been described as ‘the antithetical meaning of primal
words’.)

On Dreams

1077

   One and one only of these logical
relations - that of
similarity, consonance, the possession of
common attributes
- is very highly favoured by the mechanism of
dream-formation. The dream-work makes use of such cases as a
foundation for dream-condensation, by bringing together everything
that shows an agreement of this kind into a new unity.

   This short series of rough
comments is of course inadequate to deal with the full extent of
the formal means employed by dreams for the expression of logical
relations in the dream-thoughts. Different dreams are more or less
carefully constructed in this respect; they keep more or less
closely to the text presented to them; they make more or less use
of the expedients that are open to the dream-work. In the second
case they appear obscure, confused and disconnected. If, however, a
dream strikes one as
obviously
absurd, if its content
includes a piece of palpable nonsense, this is intentionally so;
its apparent disregard of all the requirements of logic is
expressing a piece of the intellectual content of the
dream-thoughts. Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the
dream-thoughts of
contradiction, ridicule and derision
.
Since this statement is in the most marked opposition to the view
that dreams are the product of a dissociated and uncritical mental
activity, I will emphasize it by means of an example.

  
One of my acquaintances, Herr
M., had been attacked in an essay with an unjustifiable degree of
violence, as we all thought - by no less a person than Goethe. Herr
M. was naturally crushed by the attack. He complained of it
bitterly to some company at table; his veneration for Goethe had
not been affected, however, by this personal experience. I now
tried to throw a little light on the chronological data, which
seemed to me improbable. Goethe died in 1832. Since his attack on
Herr M. must have been made earlier than that, Herr M. must have
been quite a young man at the time. It seemed to be a plausible
notion that he was eighteen. I was not quite sure, however, what
year we were actually in, so that my whole calculation melted into
obscurity. Incidentally, the attack was contained in Goethe’s
well-known essay on ‘Nature’.

   The nonsensical character of this
dream will be even more glaringly obvious, if I explain that Herr
M. is a youngish business man, who is far removed from any poetical
and literary interests. I have no doubt, however, that when I have
entered into the analysis of the dream I shall succeed in showing
how much ‘method’ there is in its nonsense.

On Dreams

1078

   The material of the dream was
derived from three sources:

   (1) Herr M., whom I had got to
know among some
company at table
, asked me one day to
examine his elder brother, who was showing signs of general
paralysis. In the course of my conversation with the patient an
awkward episode occurred for he gave his brother away for no
accountable reason by talking of his
youthful follies
. I had
asked the patient the
year of his birth
(cf. the
year
of Goethe’s
death
in the dream) and had made him carry
out a number of calculations in order to test the weakness of his
memory.

   (2) A medical journal, which bore
my name among others on its title-page, had published a positively
‘
crushing
’ criticism by a youthful reviewer of a
book by my friend F. in Berlin. I took the editor to task over
this; but, though he expressed his regret, he would not undertake
to offer any redress. I therefore severed my connection with the
journal, but in my letter of resignation expressed a hope that
our personal relations would not be affected by the event
.
This was the true source of the dream. The unfavourable reception
of my friend’s work had made a profound impression on me. It
contained, in my opinion, a fundamental biological discovery, which
is only now - many years later beginning to find favour with the
experts.

   (3) A woman patient of mine had
given me an account a short time before of her brother’s
illness, and how he had broken out in a frenzy with cries of
‘
Nature! Nature!
’ The doctors believed that his
exclamation came from his having read Goethe’s striking essay
on that subject and that it showed he had been overworking at his
studies. I had remarked that
it seemed to me more plausible
that his exclamation of the word ‘Nature’ should be
taken in the sexual sense in which it is used by the less educated
people here. This idea of mine was at least not disproved by the
fact that the unfortunate young man subsequently mutilated his own
genitals. He was
eighteen
at the time of his outbreak.

   Behind my own ego in the
dream-content there lay concealed, in the first instance, my friend
who had been so badly treated by the critic. ‘
I tried to
throw a little light on the chronological data
.’ My
friend’s book dealt with the
chronological data
of
life and among other things showed that the length of
Goethe’s
life was a multiple of a number of days that
has a significance in biology. But this ego was compared with a
paralytic: ‘
I was not quite sure what year we were
in
.’ Thus the dream made out that my friend was behaving
like a paralytic, and in this respect it was a mass of absurdities.
The dream-thoughts, however, were saying ironically:
‘Naturally, it’s
he
who is the crazy fool and
it’s
you
who are the men of genius and know better.
Surely it couldn’t be the
reverse
?’ There were
plenty of examples of this
reversal
in the dream. For
instance, Goethe attacked the young man, which is absurd, whereas
it is still easy for quite a young man to attack the great
Goethe.

On Dreams

1079

   I should like to lay it down that
no dream is prompted by motives other than egoistic ones. In fact,
the ego in the present dream does not stand only for my friend but
for myself as well. I was identifying myself with him, because the
fate of his discovery seemed to foreshadow the reception of my own
findings. If I were to bring forward my theory emphasizing the part
played by sexuality in the aetiology of psychoneurotic disorders
(cf. the allusion to the eighteen-year-old patient’s cry of
‘Nature! Nature!’), I should come across the same
criticisms; and I was already preparing to meet them with the same
derision.