Freud - Complete Works (535 page)

  
¹
[‘It doesn’t prevent things
from existing.’]

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   You will promise now, perhaps, to
disregard the repellent character of the censored dream-wishes and
will withdraw upon the argument that after all it is unlikely that
such a large space should be given to the evil in the constitution
of human beings. But do your own experiences justify your saying
this? I will not discuss how you may appear to yourselves; but have
you found so much benevolence among your superiors and competitors,
so much chivalry among your enemies and so little envy in your
social surroundings that you feel it your duty to protest against
egoistic evil having a share in human nature? Are you not aware of
how uncontrolled and untrustworthy the average person is in
everything to do with sexual life? Or do you not know that all the
transgressions and excesses of which we dream at night are daily
committed in real life by waking men? what does psycho-analysis do
here but confirm Plato’s old saying that the good are those
who are content to dream of what the others, the bad, really
do?

   And now turn your eyes away from
individuals and consider the Great War which is still laying Europe
waste. Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and lies
which are able to spread over the civilized world. Do you really
believe that a handful of ambitious and deluding men without
conscience could have succeeded in unleashing all these evil
spirits if their millions of followers did not share their guilt?
Do you venture, in such circumstances, to break a lance on behalf
of the exclusion of evil from the mental constitution of
mankind?

   You will represent to me that I
am giving a one-sided judgement on the War: that it has also
brought to light what is finest and noblest in men, their heroism,
their self-sacrifice, their social sense. No doubt; but are you not
now showing yourselves as accessories to the injustice that has so
often been done to psycho-analysis in reproaching it with denying
one thing because it has asserted another? It is not our intention
to dispute the noble endeavours of human nature, nor have we ever
done anything to detract from their value. On the contrary; I am
exhibiting to you not only the evil dream-wishes which are censored
but also the censorship, which suppresses them and makes them
unrecognizable. We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men
only because other people disavow it and thereby make the human
mind, not better, but incomprehensible. If now we give up this
one-sided ethical valuation, we shall undoubtedly find a more
correct formula for the relation between good and evil in human
nature.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   There it is, then. We need not
give up the findings of our work on the interpretation of dreams
even though we cannot but regard them as strange. Perhaps we shall
be able to approach an understanding of them later from another
direction. For the time being let us hold fast to this:
dream-distortion is a result of the censorship which is exercised
by recognized purposes of the ego against wishful impulses in any
way objectionable that stir within us at night-time during our
sleep. Why this should happen particularly at night-time and where
these reprehensible wishes come from - these are matters on which,
no doubt, much still remains for questioning and research.

   But it would be unfair if we
neglected at this point to emphasize sufficiently another outcome
of our investigations. The dream-wishes which seek to disturb us in
our sleep are unknown to us and indeed we only learnt of them
through dream-interpretation. They are thus to be described, in the
sense we have discussed, as unconscious for the time being. But we
must reflect that they are unconscious too for more than the time
being. The dreamer also disavows them, as we have seen in so many
instances, after he has come to know them through the
interpretation of his dream. We are then faced once again with the
position we first came across in the ‘hiccoughing’ slip
of the tongue, where the proposer of the toast protested
indignantly that neither then nor at any earlier time had he become
conscious of any disrespectful impulse towards his Chief. Already
at the time we felt some doubts about the weight of an assurance of
this kind, and suggested instead the hypothesis that the speaker
was permanently unaware of the presence of this impulse in him.
This situation is repeated now with every interpretation of a
strongly distorted dream and consequently gains an increased
importance in its bearing on the view we have taken. We are now
prepared to assume that there are in the mind processes and
purposes of which one knows nothing at all has known nothing for a
long time, and has even perhaps never known anything. With this the
unconscious acquires a new sense for us; the characteristic of
‘for the time being’ or ‘temporary’
disappears from its essential nature. It can mean
permanently
unconscious and not merely ‘latent at the
time’. We shall of course have to hear more about this on
some other occasion.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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LECTURE X

SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - We have found that the distortion in dreams,
which interferes with our understanding of them, is the result of a
censoring activity which is directed against unacceptable,
unconscious wishful impulses. We have not, of course, maintained
that the censorship is the sole factor responsible for the
distortion in dreams, and in fact when we study them further we can
discover that other factors play a part in producing this result.
This amounts to our saying that even if the dream-censorship was
out of action we should still not be in a position to understand
dreams, the manifest dream would still not be identical with the
latent dream-thoughts.

   We come upon this other factor
which prevents dreams from being lucid, this new contribution to
dream-distortion, by noticing a gap in our technique. I have
already admitted to you that it does sometimes really happen that
nothing occurs to a person under analysis in response to particular
elements of his dreams. It is true that this does not happen as
often as he asserts; in a great many cases, with perseverance, an
idea is extracted from him. But nevertheless there remain cases in
which an association fails to emerge or, if it
is
extracted,
does not give us what we expected from it. If this happens during a
psycho-analytic treatment, it has a peculiar significance with
which we are not here concerned. But it also happens in the
interpretation of normal people’s dreams or in that of our
own. If we convince ourselves that in such case no amount of
pressure is of any use, we eventually discover that this
unwished-for event regularly occurs in connection with particular
dream-elements, and we begin to recognize that a fresh general
principle is at work where we had begun by thinking we were only
faced by an exceptional failure of technique.

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   In this way we are tempted to
interpret these ‘mute’ dream-elements ourselves, to set
about translating them with our own resources. We are then forced
to recognize that whenever we venture on making a replacement of
this sort we arrive at a satisfactory sense for the dream, whereas
it remains senseless and the chain of thought is interrupted so
long as we refrain from intervening in this way. An accumulation of
many similar cases eventually gives the necessary certainty to what
began as a timid experiment.

   I am putting all this in a rather
schematic way; but that is permissible, after all, for didactic
purposes, nor has it been falsified, but merely simplified.

   In this way we obtain constant
translations for a number of dream-elements - just as popular
‘dream-books’ provide them for
everything
that
appears in dreams. You will not have forgotten, of course, that
when we use our
associative
technique constant replacements
of dream-elements never come to light.

   You will object at once that this
method of interpretation strikes you as far more insecure and open
to attack than the earlier one by means of free association. There
is, however, something further. For when, with experience, we have
collected enough of these constant renderings, the time comes when
we realize that we should in fact have been able to deal with these
portions of dream-interpretation from our own knowledge, and that
they could really be understood without the dreamer’s
associations. How it is that we must necessarily have known their
meaning will become clear in the second half of our present
discussion.

   A constant relation of this kind
between a dream-element and its translation is described by us as a
‘symbolic’ one, and the dream-element itself as a
‘symbol’ of the unconscious dream-thought. You will
recall that earlier, when we were investigating the relations
between dream-elements and the ‘genuine’ thing behind
them, I distinguished three such relations - those of a part to a
whole, of allusion and of plastic portrayal. I warned you at the
time that there was a fourth, but I did not name it. This fourth
relation is the symbolic one which I am now introducing. It gives
occasion for some most interesting discussions, and I will turn to
them before laying before you the detailed results of our
observations of symbolism.

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   Symbolism is perhaps the most
remarkable chapter of the theory of dreams. In the first place,
since symbols are stable translations, they realize to some extent
the ideal of the ancient as well as of the popular interpretation
of dreams, from which, with our technique, we had departed widely.
They allow us in certain circumstances to interpret a dream without
questioning the dreamer, who indeed would in any case have nothing
to tell, us about the symbol. If we are acquainted with the
ordinary dream-symbols, and in addition with the dreamer’s
personality, the circumstances in which he lives and the
impressions which preceded the occurrence of the dream, we are
often in a position to interpret a dream straightaway - to
translate it at sight, as it were. A piece of virtuosity of this
kind flatters the dream-interpreter and impresses the dreamer; it
forms an agreeable contrast to the laborious work of questioning
the dreamer. But do not allow yourselves to be led astray by this.
It is not our business to perform acts of virtuosity.
Interpretation based on a knowledge of symbols is not a technique
which can replace or compete with the associative one. It forms a
supplement to the latter and yields results which are only of use
when introduced into it. And as regards acquaintance with the
dreamer’s psychical situation, you must bear in mind that the
dreams of people you know well are not the only ones you have to
analyse, that you are not as a rule familiar with the events of the
previous day, which were the instigators of the dream, but that the
associations of the person you are analysing will provide you
precisely with a knowledge of what we call the psychical
situation.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

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   Moreover it is quite specially
remarkable - having regard, too, to some considerations which we
shall mention later - that the most violent resistances have been
expressed once again to the existence of a symbolic relation
between dreams and the unconscious. Even people of judgement and
reputation, who, apart from this, have gone a long way in agreeing
with psycho-analysis, have at this point withheld their support.
This behaviour is all the stranger in view, first, of the fact that
symbolism is not peculiar to dreams alone and is not characteristic
of them, and, secondly, that symbolism in dreams is by no means a
discovery of psycho-analysis, however many other surprising
discoveries it has made. The philosopher K. A. Scherner (1861) must
be described as the discoverer of dream-symbolism, if its beginning
is to be placed in modern times at all. Psycho-analysis has
confirmed Scherner’s findings, though it has made material
modifications in them.

   You will now want to hear
something of the nature of dream symbolism and to be given some
examples of it. I will gladly tell you what I know, though I must
confess that our understanding of it does not go as far as we
should like.

   The essence of this symbolic
relation is that it is a comparison, though not a comparison of
any
sort. Special limitations seem to be attached to the
comparison, but it is hard to say what these are. Not everything
with which we can compare an object or a process appears in dreams
as a symbol for it. And on the other hand a dream does not
symbolize every possible element of the latent dream-thoughts but
only certain definite ones. So there are restrictions here in both
directions. We must admit, too, that the concept of a symbol cannot
at present be sharply delimited: it shades off into such notions as
those of a replacement or representation, and even approaches that
of an allusion. With a number of symbols the comparison which
underlies them is obvious. But again there are other symbols in
regard to which we must ask ourselves where we are to look for the
common element, the
tertium comparationis
, of the supposed
comparison. On further reflection we may afterwards discover it or
it may definitely remain concealed. It is strange, moreover, that
if a symbol is a comparison it should not be brought to light by an
association, and that the dreamer should not be acquainted with it
but should make use of it without knowing about it: more than that,
indeed, that the dreamer feels no inclination to acknowledge the
comparison even after it has been pointed out to him. You see,
then, that a symbolic relation is a comparison of a quite special
kind, of which we do not as yet clearly grasp the basis, though
perhaps we may later arrive at some indication of it.