Freud - Complete Works (538 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   ‘Pulling off a
branch’ as a symbolic representation of masturbation is not
merely in harmony with vulgar descriptions of the act but has
far-reaching mythological parallels. But that masturbation, or
rather the punishment for it - castration -, should be represented
by the falling out or pulling out of teeth is especially
remarkable, since there is a counterpart to it in anthropology
which can be known to only a very small number of dreamers. There
seems to me no doubt that the circumcision practised by so many
peoples is an equivalent and substitute for castration. And we now
learn that certain primitive tribes in Australia carry out
circumcision as a puberty rite (at the festival to celebrate a
boy’s attaining sexual maturity), while other tribes, their
near neighbours, have replaced this act by the knocking out of a
tooth.

   Here I bring my account of these
specimens to an end. They are only specimens. We know more on the
subject; but you may imagine how much richer and more interesting a
collection like this would be if it were brought together, not by
amateurs like us, but by real professionals in mythology,
anthropology, philology and folklore.

   A few consequences force
themselves on our notice; they cannot be exhaustive, but they offer
us food for reflection.

   In the first place we are faced
by the fact that the dreamer has a symbolic mode of expression at
his disposal which he does not know in waking life and does not
recognize. This is as extraordinary as if you were to discover that
your housemaid understood Sanskrit, though you know that she was
born in a Bohemian village and never learnt it. It is not easy to
account for this fact by the help of our psychological views. We
can only say that the knowledge of symbolism is unconscious to the
dreamer, that it belongs to his unconscious mental life. But even
with this assumption we do not meet the point. Hitherto it has only
been necessary for us to assume the existence of unconscious
endeavours - endeavours, that is, of which, temporarily or
permanently, we know nothing. Now, however, it is a question of
more than this, of unconscious pieces of knowledge, of connections
of thought, of comparisons between different objects which result
in its being possible for one of them to be regularly put in place
of the other. These comparisons are not freshly made on each
occasion; they lie ready to hand and are complete, once and for
all. This is implied by the fact of their agreeing in the case of
different individuals - possibly, indeed, agreeing in spite of
differences of language. What can be the origin of these symbolic
relations? Linguistic usage covers only a small part of them. The
multiplicity of parallels in other spheres of knowledge are mostly
unknown to the dreamer; we ourselves have been obliged to collect
them laboriously.

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   Secondly, these symbolic
relations are not something peculiar to dreamers or to the
dream-work through which they come to expression. This same
symbolism, as we have seen, is employed by myths and fairy tales,
by the people in their sayings and songs, by colloquial linguistic
usage and by the poetic imagination. The field of symbolism is
immensely wide, and dream symbolism is only a small part of it:
indeed, it serves no useful purpose to attack the whole problem
from the direction of dreams. Many symbols which are commonly used
elsewhere appear in dreams very seldom or not at all. Some dream
symbols are not to be found in all other fields but only, as you
have seen, here and there. One gets an impression that what we are
faced with here is an ancient but extinct mode of expression, of
which different pieces have survived indifferent fields, one piece
only here, another only there, a third, perhaps, in slightly
modified forms in several fields. And here I recall the phantasy of
an interesting psychotic patient, who imagined a ‘basic
language’ of which all these symbolic relations would be
residues.

   Thirdly, it must strike you that
the symbolism in the other fields I have mentioned is by no means
solely sexual symbolism, whereas in dreams symbols are used almost
exclusively for the expression of sexual objects and relations.
This is not easily explained either. Are we to suppose that symbols
which originally had a sexual significance later acquired another
application and that, furthermore, the toning-down of
representation by symbols into other kinds of representation may be
connected with this? These questions can evidently not be answered
so long as we have considered dream-symbolism alone. We can only
hold firmly to the suspicion that there is a specially intimate
relation between true symbols and sexuality.

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   In this connection we have been
given an important hint during the last few years. A philologist,
Hans Sperber, of Uppsala, who works independently of
psycho-analysis, has put forward the argument that sexual needs
have played the biggest part in the origin and development of
speech. According to him, the original sounds of speech served for
communication, and summoned the speaker’s sexual partner; the
further development of linguistic roots accompanied the working
activities of primal man. These activities, he goes on, were
performed in common and were accompanied by rhythmically repeated
utterances. In this way a sexual interest became attached to work.
Primal man made work acceptable, as it were, by treating it as an
equivalent and substitute for sexual activity. The words enunciated
during work in common thus had two meanings; they denoted sexual
acts as well as the working activity equated with them. As time
went on, the words became detached from the sexual meaning and
fixed to the work. In later generations the same thing happened
with new words, which had a sexual meaning and were applied to new
forms of work. In this way a number of verbal roots would have been
formed, all of which were of sexual origin and had subsequently
lost their sexual meaning. If the hypothesis I have here sketched
out is correct, it would give us a possibility of understanding
dream symbolism. We should understand why dreams, which preserve
something of the earliest conditions, have such an extraordinarily
large number of sexual symbols, and why, in general, weapons and
tools always stand for what is male, while materials and things
that are worked upon stand for what is female. The symbolic
relation would be the residue of an ancient verbal identity; things
which were once called by the same name as the genitals could now
serve as symbols for them in dreams.

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   The parallels we have found to
dream-symbolism also allow us to form an estimate of the
characteristic of psycho-analysis which enables it to attract
general interest in a way in which neither psychology nor
psychiatry has succeeded in doing. In the work of psycho-analysis
links are formed with numbers of other mental sciences, the
investigation of which promises results of the greatest value:
links with mythology and philology, with folklore, with social
psychology and the theory of religion. You will not be surprised to
hear that a periodical has grown up on psycho-analytic soil whose
sole aim is to foster these links. This periodical is known as
Imago
, founded in 1912 and edited by Hanns Sachs and Otto
Rank. In all these links the share of psycho-analysis is in the
first instance that of giver and only to a less extent that of
receiver. It is true that this brings it an advantage in the fact
that its strange findings become more familiar when they are met
with again in other fields; but on the whole it is psycho-analysis
which provides the technical methods and the points of view whose
application in these other fields should prove fruitful. The mental
life of human individuals, when subjected to psycho-analytic
investigation, offers us the explanations with the help of which we
are able to solve a number of riddles in the life of human
communities or at least to set them in a true light.

   Incidentally, I have said nothing
at all to you yet as to the circumstances in which we can obtain
our deepest insight into the hypothetical ‘primal
language’ and as to the field in which most of it has
survived. Until you know this you cannot form an opinion of its
whole significance. For this field is that of the neuroses and its
material is the symptoms and other manifestations of neurotic
patients, for the explanation and treatment of which
psycho-analysis was, indeed, created.

   The fourth of my reflections
takes us back to the beginning and directs us along our prescribed
path. I have said that even if there were no dream-censorship
dreams would still not be easily intelligible to us, for we should
still be faced with the task of translating the symbolic language
of dreams into that of our waking thought. Thus symbolism is a
second and independent factor in the distortion of dreams,
alongside of the dream-censorship. It is plausible to suppose,
however, that the dream-censorship finds it convenient to make use
of symbolism, since it leads towards the same end - the strangeness
and incomprehensibility of dreams.

   It will shortly become clear
whether a further study of dreams may not bring us up against yet
another factor that contributes to the distortion of dreams. But I
should not like to leave the subject of dream-symbolism without
once more touching on the problem of how it can meet with such
violent resistance in educated people when the wide diffusion of
symbolism in myths, religion, art and language is so
unquestionable. May it not be that what is responsible is once
again its connection with sexuality?

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LECTURE XI

THE
DREAM-WORK

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - When you have thoroughly grasped the
dream-censorship and representation by symbols, you will not yet,
it is true, have completely mastered the distortion in, dreams, but
you will nevertheless be in a position to understand most dreams.
In doing so you will make use of both of the two complementary
techniques: calling up ideas that occur to the dreamer till you
have penetrated from the substitute to the genuine thing and, on
the ground of your own knowledge, replacing the symbols by what
they mean. Later on we shall discuss some uncertainties that arise
in this connection.

   We can now take up once more a
task that we tried to carry out previously with inadequate means,
when we were studying the relations between the elements of dreams
and the genuine things they stood for. We laid down four main
relations of the kind: the relation of a part to a whole,
approximation or allusion, the symbolic relation and the plastic
representation of words. We now propose to undertake the same thing
on a larger scale, by comparing the manifest content of a dream
as a whole
with the latent dream as it is revealed by
interpretation.

   I hope you will never again
confuse these two things with each other. If you reach that point,
you will probably have gone further in understanding dreams than
most readers of my
Interpretation of Dreams
. And let me
remind you once again that the work which transforms the latent
dream-into the manifest one is called the
dream-work
. The
work which proceeds in the contrary direction, which endeavours to
arrive at the latent dream from the manifest one, is our
work of
interpretation
. This work of interpretation seeks to undo the
dream-work. The dreams of infantile type which we recognize as
obvious fulfilments of wishes have nevertheless experienced some
amount of dream-work - they have been transformed from a wish into
an actual experience and also, as a rule, from thoughts into visual
images. In their case there is no need for interpretation but only
for undoing these two transformations. The additional dream-work
that occurs in other dreams is called
‘dream-distortion’, and this has to be undone by our
work of interpretation.

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   Having compared the
interpretations of numerous dreams, I am in a position to give you
a summary description of what the dream-work does with the material
of the latent dream-thoughts. I beg you, however, not to try to
understand too much. of what I tell you. It will be a piece of
description which should be listened to with quiet attention.

   The first achievement of the
dream-work is
condensation
. By that we understand the fact
that the manifest dream has a smaller content than the latent one,
and is thus an abbreviated translation of it. Condensation can on
occasion be absent; as a rule it is present, and very often it is
enormous. It is never changed into the reverse; that is to say, we
never find that the manifest dream is greater in extent or content
than the latent one. Condensation is brought about (1) by the total
omission of certain latent elements, (2) by only a fragment of some
complexes in the latent dream passing over into the manifest one
and (3) by latent elements which have something in common being
combined and fused into a single unity in the manifest dream.

   If you prefer it, we can reserve
the term ‘condensation’ for the last only of these
processes. Its results are particularly easy to demonstrate. You
will have no difficulty in recalling instances from your own dreams
of different people being condensed into a single one. A composite
figure of this kind may look like A perhaps, but may be dressed
like B, may do something that we remember C doing, and at the same
time we may know that he is D. This composite structure is of
course emphasizing something that the four people have in common.
It is possible, naturally, to make a composite structure out of
things or places in the same way as out of people, provided that
the various things and places have in common something which is
emphasized by the latent dream. The process is like constructing a
new and transitory concept which has this common element as its
nucleus. The outcome of this superimposing of the separate elements
that have been condensed together is as a rule a blurred and vague
image, like what happens if you take several photographs on the
same plate.