Freud - Complete Works (167 page)

  
¹
[
Footnote added
1925:] I used at one
time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to
the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the
latent dream-thoughts. Again and again arguments and objections
would be brought up based upon some uninterpreted dream in the form
in which it had been retained in the memory, and the need to
interpret it would be ignored. But now that analysts at least have
become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning
revealed by its interpretation, many of them have become guilty of
falling into another confusion which they cling to with equal
obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent
content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the
latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are
nothing other than a particular
form
of thinking, made
possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the
dream-work
which creates that form, and it alone is the
essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature. I say
this in order to make it possible to assess the value of the
notorious ‘prospective purpose’ of dreams. The fact
that dreams concern themselves with attempts at solving the
problems by which our mental life is faced is no more strange than
that our conscious waking life should do so; beyond this it merely
tells us that that activity can also be carried on in the
preconscious - and this we already knew.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

945

CHAPTER VII

THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DREAM PROCESSES

Among the dreams which have been reported to
me by other people, there is one which has special claims upon our
attention at this point. It was told to me by a woman patient who
had herself heard it in a lecture on dreams: its actual source is
still unknown to me. Its content made an impression on the lady,
however, and she proceeded to ‘re-dream’ it, that is,
to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own, so that, by
taking it over in this way, she might express her agreement with it
on one particular point.

   The preliminaries to this model
dream were as follows. A father had been watching beside his
child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child
had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door
open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which
his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing
round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and
sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’
sleep, the father had a dream that
his child was standing
besides his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him
reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m
burning?’
He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light
from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman
had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms
of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted
candle that had fallen on them.

   The explanation of this moving
dream is simple enough and, so my patient told me, was correctly
given by the lecturer. The glare of light shone though the open
door into the sleeping man’s eyes and led him to the
conclusion which he would have arrived at if he had been awake,
namely that a candle had fallen over and set something alight in
the neighbourhood of the body. It is even possible that he had felt
some concern when he went to sleep as to whether the old man might
not be incompetent to carry out his task.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

946

   Nor have I any changes to suggest
in this interpretation except to add that the content of the dream
must have been overdetermined and that the words spoken by the
child must have been made up of words which he had actually spoken
in his lifetime and which were connected with important events in
the father’s mind. For instance, ‘
I’m
burning
’ may have been spoken during the fever of the
child’s last illness, and ‘
Father, don’t you
see?
’ may have been derived from some other highly
emotional situation of which we are in ignorance.

   But, having recognized that the
dream was a process with a meaning, and that it can be inserted
into the chain of the dreamer’s psychical experiences, we may
still wonder why it was that a dream occurred at all in such
circumstances, when the most rapid possible awakening was called
for. And here we shall observe that this dream, too, contained the
fulfilment of a wish. The dead child behaved in the dream like a
living one: he himself warned his father, came to his bed, and
caught him by the arm, just as he had probably done on the occasion
from the memory of which the first part of the child’s words
in the dream were derived. For the sake of the fulfilment of this
wish the father prolonged his sleep by one moment. The dream was
preferred to a waking reflection because it was able to show the
child as once more alive. If the father had woken up first and then
made the inference that led him to go into the next room, he would,
as it were, have shortened his child’s life by that moment of
time.

   There can be no doubt what the
peculiar feature is which attracts our interest to this brief
dream. Hitherto we have been principally concerned with the secret
meaning of dreams and the method of discovering it and with the
means employed by the dream-work for concealing it. The problems of
dream-interpretation have hitherto occupied the centre of the
picture. And now we come upon a dream which raises no problem of
interpretation and the meaning of which is obvious, but which, as
we see, nevertheless retains the essential characteristics that
differentiate dreams so strikingly from waking life and
consequently call for explanation. It is only after we have
disposed of everything that has to do with the work of
interpretation that we can begin to realize the incompleteness of
our psychology of dreams.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

947

   But before starting off along
this new path, it will be well to pause and look around, to see
whether in the course of our journey up to this point we have
overlooked anything of importance. For it must be clearly
understood that the easy and agreeable portion of our journey lies
behind us. Hitherto, unless I am greatly mistaken, all the paths
along which we have travelled have led us towards the light -
towards elucidation and fuller understanding. But as soon as we
endeavour to penetrate more deeply into the mental process involved
in dreaming, every path will end in darkness. There is no
possibility of
explaining
dreams as a psychical process,
since to explain a thing means to trace it back to something
already known, and there is at the present time no established
psychological knowledge under which we could subsume what the
psychological examination of dreams enables us to infer as a basis
for their explanation. On the contrary, we shall be obliged to set
up a number of fresh hypotheses which touch tentatively upon the
structure of the apparatus of the mind and upon the play of forces
operating in it. We must be careful, however, not to pursue these
hypotheses too far beyond their first logical links, or their value
will be lost in uncertainties. Even if we make no false inferences
and take all the logical possibilities into account, the probable
incompleteness of our premises threatens to bring our calculation
to a complete miscarriage. No conclusions upon the construction and
working methods of the mental instrument can be arrived at or at
least fully proved from even the most painstaking investigation of
dreams or of any other mental function taken
in isolation
.
To achieve this result, it will be necessary to correlate all the
established implications derived from a comparative study of a
whole series of such functions. Thus the psychological hypotheses
to which we are led by an analysis of the processes of dreaming
must be left, as it were, in suspense, until they can be related to
the findings of other enquiries which seek to approach the kernel
of the same problem from another angle.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

948

(A)

THE FORGETTING OF DREAMS

   I suggest, therefore, that we
should first turn to a topic that raises a difficulty which we have
not hitherto considered but which is nevertheless capable of
cutting the ground from under all our efforts at interpreting
dreams. It has been objected on more than one occasion that we have
in fact no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret,
or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know
them as they actually occurred.(See
p. 555 ff.
)

   In the first place, what we
remember of a dream and what we exercise our interpretative arts
upon has been mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory,
which seems quite especially incapable of retaining a dream and may
well have lost precisely the most important parts of its content.
It quite frequently happens that when we seek to turn our attention
to one of our dreams we find ourselves regretting the fact that,
though we dreamt far more, we can remember nothing but a single
fragment which is itself recollected with peculiar uncertainty.

   Secondly, there is every reason
to suspect that our memory of dreams is not only fragmentary but
positively inaccurate and falsified. On the one hand it may be
doubted whether what we dreamt was really as disconnected and hazy
as our recollection of it; and on the other hand it may also be
doubted whether a dream was really as connected as it is in the
account we give of it, whether in attempting to reproduce it we do
not fill in what was never there, or what has been forgotten, with
new and arbitrarily selected material, whether we do not add
embellishments and trimmings and round it off so that there is no
possibility of deciding what its original content may have been.
Indeed one author, Spitta (1882),¹ goes to the point of
suggesting that in so far as a dream shows any kind of order or
coherence, these qualities are only introduced into it when we try
to recall it to mind. Thus there seems to be a danger that the very
thing whose value we have undertaken to assess may slip completely
through our fingers.

  
¹
So too Foucault and Talmery.

The Interpretation Of Dreams

949

   Hitherto in interpreting dreams
we have disregarded such warnings. On the contrary, we have
accepted it as being just as important to interpret the smallest,
least conspicuous and most uncertain constituents of the content of
dreams as those that are most clearly and certainly preserved. The
dream of Irma’s injection contained the phrase ‘I
at
once
called in Dr. M.’; and we assumed that even this
detail would not have found its way into the dream unless it had
had some particular origin. It was thus that we came upon the story
of the unfortunate patient to whose bedside I had ‘at
once’ called in my senior colleague. In the apparently absurd
dream which treated the difference between 51 and 56 as a
negligible quantity, the number 51 was mentioned several times.
Instead of regarding this as a matter of course or as something
indifferent, we inferred from it that there was a
second
line of thought in the latent content of the dream leading to the
number 51; and along this track we arrived at my fears of 51 years
being the limit of my life, in glaring contrast to the
dream’s dominant train of thought which was lavish in its
boasts of a long life. In the ‘
Non vixit
’dream
there was an inconspicuous interpolation which I overlooked at
first: ‘
As P. failed to understand him, Fl. asked
me
’, etc. When the interpretation was held up, I went
back to these words and it was they that led me on to the childhood
phantasy which turned out to be an intermediate nodal point in the
dream-thoughts. This was arrived at by way of the lines:

                                                               
Selten habt ihr mich
verstanden
,

                                                               
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,

                                                               
Nur wenn wir im
Kot
uns fanden,

                                                               
So verstanden wir uns gleich.
¹

   Examples could be found in every
analysis to show that precisely the most trivial elements of a
dream are indispensable to its interpretation and that the work in
hand is held up if attention is not paid to these elements until
too late. We have attached no less importance in interpreting
dreams to every shade of the form of words in which they were laid
before us. And even when it happened that the text of the dream as
we had it was meaningless or inadequate - as though the effort to
give a correct account of it had been unsuccessful - we have taken
this defect into account as well. In short, we have treated as Holy
Writ what previous writers have regarded as an arbitrary
improvisation, hurriedly patched together in the embarrassment of
the moment. This contradiction stands in need of an
explanation.

  
¹
[Literally: ‘Rarely have you
understood
me, and rarely too have I understood you. Not
until we both found ourselves in the
mud
did we promptly
understand each other.’ Heine,
Buch der Lieder
,
‘Die Heimkehr’, LXXVIII.]