Freud - Complete Works (539 page)

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3264

   The production of composite
structures like these must be of great importance to the
dream-work, since we can show that, where in the first instance the
common elements necessary for them were missing, they are
deliberately introduced - for instance, through the choice of the
words by which a thought is expressed. We have already come across
condensations and composite structures of this sort. They played a
part in the production of some slips of the tongue. You will recall
the young man who offered to ‘
begleitdigen
’
[‘
begleiten
(accompany)' +
‘
beleidigen
(insult)’] a lady. Moreover, there
are jokes of which the technique is based on a condensation like
this. But apart from these cases, it may be said that the process
is something quite unusual and strange. It is true that
counterparts to the construction of these composite figures are to
be found in some creations of our imagination, which is ready to
combine into a unity components of things that do not belong
together in our experience - in the centaurs, for instance, and the
fabulous beasts which appear in ancient mythology or in
Böcklin’s pictures. The ‘creative’
imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of
inventing
anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one
another. But the remarkable thing about the procedure of the
dream-work lies in what follows. The material offered to the
dream-work consists of thoughts - a few of which may be
objectionable and unacceptable, but which are correctly constructed
and expressed. The dream-work puts these thoughts into another
form, and it is a strange and incomprehensible fact that in making
this translation (this rendering, as it were, into another script
or language) these methods of merging or combining are brought into
use. After all, a translation normally endeavours to preserve the
distinctions made in the text and particularly to keep things that
are similar separate. The dream-work, quite the contrary, tries to
condense two different thoughts by seeking out (like a joke) an
ambiguous word in which the two thoughts may come together. We need
not try to understand this feature all at once, but it may become
important for our appreciation of the dream-work.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3265

   But although condensation makes
dreams obscure, it does not give one the impression of being an
effect of the dream-censorship. It seems traceable rather to some
mechanical or economic factor, but in any case the censorship
profits by it.

   The achievements of condensation
can be quite extraordinary. It is sometimes possible by its help to
combine two quite different latent trains of thought into one
manifest dream, so that one can arrive at what appears to be a
sufficient interpretation of a dream and yet in doing so can fail
to notice a possible ‘over-interpretation’.

   In regard to the connection
between the latent and the manifest dream, condensation results
also in no simple relation being left between the elements in the
one and the other. A manifest element may correspond simultaneously
to several latent ones, and, contrariwise, a latent element may
play a part in several manifest ones - there is, as it were, a
criss-cross relationship. In interpreting a dream, moreover, we
find that the associations to a single manifest element need not
emerge in succession: we must often wait till the whole dream has
been interpreted.

   Thus the dream-work carries out a
very unusual kind of transcription of the dream-thoughts: it is not
a word-for-word or a sign-for-sign translation; nor is it a
selection made according to fixed rules - as though one were to
reproduce only the consonants in a word and to leave out the
vowels; nor is it what might be described as a representative
selection - one element being invariably chosen to take the place
of several; it is something different and far more complicated.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3266

   The second achievement of the
dream-work is
displacement
. Fortunately we have made some
preliminary examination of this: for we know that it is entirely
the work of the dream censorship. It manifests itself in two ways:
in the first, a latent element is replaced not by a component part
of itself but by something more remote - that is, by an allusion;
and in the second, the psychical accent is shifted from an
important element on to another which is unimportant, so that the
dream appears differently centred and strange.

   Replacing something by an
allusion to it is a process familiar in our waking thought as well,
but there is a difference. In waking thought the allusion must be
easily intelligible, and the substitute must be related in its
subject-matter to the genuine thing it stands for. Jokes, too,
often make use of allusion. They drop the precondition of there
being an association in subject matter, and replace it by unusual
external associations such as similarity of sound, verbal
ambiguity, and so on. But they retain the precondition of
intelligibility: a joke would lose all its efficiency if the path
back from the allusion to the genuine thing could not be followed
easily. The allusions employed for displacement in dreams have set
themselves free from both of these restrictions. They are connected
with the element they replace by the most external and remote
relations and are therefore unintelligible; and when they are
undone, their interpretation gives the impression of being a bad
joke or of an arbitrary and forced explanation dragged in by the
hair of its head. For the dream-censorship only gains its end if it
succeeds in making it impossible to find the path back from the
allusion to the genuine thing.

   Displacement of accent is
unheard-of as a method of expressing thoughts. We sometimes make
use of it in waking thought in order to produce a comic effect. I
can perhaps call up the impression it produces of going astray if I
recall an anecdote. There was a blacksmith in a village, who had
committed a capital offence. The Court decided that the crime must
be punished; but as the blacksmith was the only one in the village
and was indispensable, and as on the other hand there were three
tailors living there, one of
them
was hanged instead.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3267

   The third achievement of the
dream-work is psychologically the most interesting. It consists in
transforming thoughts into visual images. Let us keep it clear that
this transformation does not affect
everything
in the
dream-thoughts; some of them retain their form and appear as
thoughts or knowledge in the manifest dream as well; nor are visual
images the only form into which thoughts are transformed.
Nevertheless they comprise the essence of the formation of dreams;
this part of the dream-work is, as we already know, the second most
regular one, and we have already made the acquaintance of the
‘plastic’ representation of words in the case of
individual dream-elements.

   It is clear that this achievement
is not an easy one. To form some idea of its difficulties, let us
suppose that you have under taken the task of replacing a political
leading article in a news paper by a series of illustrations. You
will thus have been thrown back from alphabetic writing to picture
writing. In so far as the article mentioned people and concrete
objects you will replace them easily and perhaps even
advantageously by pictures; but your difficulties will begin when
you come to the representation of abstract words and of all those
parts of speech which indicate relations between thoughts - such as
particles, conjunctions and so on. In the case of abstract words
you will be able to help yourselves out by means of a variety of
devices. For instance, you will endeavour to give the text of the
article a different wording, which may perhaps sound less usual but
which will contain more components that are concrete and capable of
being represented. You will then recall that most abstract words
are ‘watered-down’ concrete ones, and you will for that
reason hark back as often as possible to the original concrete
meaning of such words. Thus you will be pleased to find that you
can represent the ‘possession’ of an object by a real,
physical sitting down on it.¹  And the dream-work does
just the same thing. In such circumstances you will scarcely be
able to expect very great accuracy from your representation:
similarly, you will forgive the dream-work for replacing an element
so hard to put into pictures as, for example,
‘adultery’ [‘
Ehebruch
’, literally,
‘breach of marriage’], by another breach - a broken leg
[‘
Beinbruch
’].² And in this way you will
succeed to some extent in compensating for the clumsiness of the
picture writing that is supposed to take the place of the
alphabetic script.

  
¹
[The German word
‘
besitzen
’ (‘to possess’) is more
obviously connected with sitting than its English equivalent
(‘
sitzen
’ = ‘to sit’).]

  
²
While I am correcting the proofs of these
pages chance has put into my hands a newspaper cutting which offers
an unexpected confirmation of what I have written
above:-

‘DIVINE PUNISHMENT

‘
A Broken Arm for a Broken
Marriage
.

  
‘Frau Alta M., wife of a militiaman, sued Frau Klementine K.
for adultery. According to the statement of claim, Frau K. had
carried on an illicit relationship with Karl M., while her own
husband was at the front and was actually making her an allowance
of 70 Kronen a month. Frau K. had already received a considerable
amount of money from the plaintiff’s husband, while she and
her child had to live in hunger and poverty. Fellow-soldiers of her
husband had informed her that Frau K. had visited taverns with M.
and had sat there drinking till far into the night. On one occasion
the defendant had asked the plaintiff’s husband in the
presence of several other soldiers whether he would not get a
divorce soon from "his old woman" and set up with her.
Frau K.’s caretaker also reported that she had repeatedly
seen the plaintiff’s husband in the house most incompletely
dressed.

  
‘Before a court in the Leopoldstadt Frau K. yesterday denied
knowing M., so that there could be no question of her having
intimate relations with him.

  
‘A witness, Albertine M., stated, however, that she had
surprised Frau K. kissing the plaintiff ‘s
husband.

  
‘At a previous hearing, M., under examination as a witness,
had denied having intimate relations with the defendant. Yesterday
the Judge received a letter in which the witness withdrew the
statements he had made on the earlier occasion and admitted that he
had had a love-affair with Frau K. up till the previous June. He
had only denied his relations with the defendant at the former
hearing because she had come to him before the hearing and begged
him on her knees to save her and say nothing. "Today",
the witness wrote, "I feel compelled to make a full confession
to the Court, for I have broken my left arm and this seems to me to
be a divine punishment for my wrong-doing."

  
‘The Judge stated that the penal offence had lapsed under the
statute of limitations. The plaintiff then withdrew her claim and
the defendant was discharged.’

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3268

   For representing the parts of
speech which indicate relations between thoughts -
‘because’, ‘therefore’,
‘however’, etc. - you will have no similar aids at your
disposal; those constituents of the text will be lost so far as
translation into pictures goes. In the same way, the dream-work
reduces the content of the dream-thoughts to its raw material of
objects and activities. You will feel pleased if there is a
possibility of in some way hinting, through the subtler details of
the pictures, at certain relations not in themselves capable of
being represented. And just so does the dream-work succeed in
expressing some of the content of the latent dream-thoughts by
peculiarities in the
form
of the manifest dream-by its
clarity or obscurity, by its division into several pieces, and so
on. The number of part dreams into which a dream is divided usually
corresponds to the number of main topics or groups of thoughts in
the latent dream. A short introductory dream will often stand in
the relation of a prelude to a following, more detailed, main dream
or may give the motive for it; a subordinate clause in the
dream-thoughts will be replaced by the interpolation of a change of
scene into the manifest dream, and so on. Thus the form of dreams
is far from being without significance and itself calls for
interpretation. When several dreams occur during the same night,
they often have the same meaning and indicate that an attempt is
being made to deal more and more efficiently with a stimulus of
increasing insistence. In individual dreams a particularly
difficult element may be represented by several symbols - by
‘doublets’.

Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

3269

   If we make a series of
comparisons between the dream-thoughts and the manifest dreams
which replace them, we shall come upon all kinds of things for
which we are unprepared: for instance, that nonsense and absurdity
in dreams have their meaning. At this point, indeed, the contrast
between the medical and the psycho-analytic view of dreams reaches
a pitch of acuteness not met with elsewhere. According to the
former, dreams are senseless because mental activity in dreams has
abandoned all its powers of criticism; according to our view, on
the contrary, dreams become senseless when a piece of criticism
included in the dream-thoughts - a judgement that ‘this is
absurd’ - has to be represented. The dream you are familiar
with of the visit to the theatre (‘three tickets for 1 florin
50') is a good example of this. The judgement it expressed was:
‘it was absurd to marry so early.’