Part 20

But to go back a little: you are quite right in speaking of dreams as representing these various modes of thought, provided that you are quite clear in your own minds that you are using an abbreviated form of expression and do not imagine that the manifold variety of which you speak is in itself part of the essential nature of _dreams_. When you speak of “a dream” you must mean either the manifest dream, i.e. the product of the dream-work, or at most that work itself, i.e. the mental process which forms the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream. To use the word in any other sense is a confusion of ideas which is bound to be mischievous. If what you say is meant to apply to the latent thoughts behind the dream, then say so plainly, and do not add to the obscurity of the problem by your loose way of expressing yourselves. The latent dream-thoughts are the material which is transformed by the dream-work into the manifest dream. What makes you constantly confound the material with the process which deals with it? If you do that, in what way are you superior to those who know of the final product only, without being able to explain where it comes from or how it is constructed?

The only thing essential to the dream itself is the dream-work which has operated upon the thought-material; and when we come to theory we have no right to disregard this, even if in certain practical situations it may be neglected. Further, analytic observation shows that the dream-work never consists merely in translating the latent thoughts into the archaic or regressive forms of expression described. On the contrary, something is invariably added which does not belong to the latent thoughts of the day-time, but which is the actual motive force in dream-formation; this indispensable component being the equally unconscious _wish_, to fulfil which the content of the dream is transformed. In so far, then, as you are considering only the thoughts represented in it, the dream may be any conceivable thing—a warning, a resolve, a preparation, and so on; but besides this, it itself is always the fulfilment of an unconscious wish, and, when you regard it as the result of the dream-work, it is this alone. A dream then is never simply the expression of a resolve or warning, and nothing more: in it the resolve, or whatever it may be, is translated into the archaic form with the assistance of an unconscious wish, and metamorphosed in such a way as to be a fulfilment of that wish. This single characteristic, that of fulfilling a wish, is the constant one: the other component varies; it may indeed itself be a wish; in which event the dream represents the fulfilment of a latent wish from our waking hours brought about by the aid of an unconscious wish.

Now all this is quite clear to myself, but I do not know whether I have succeeded in making it equally clear to you; and it is difficult to prove it to you; for, on the one hand, proof requires the evidence afforded by a careful analysis of many dreams and, on the other hand, this, the crucial and most important point in our conception of dreams, cannot be presented convincingly without reference to considerations upon which we have not yet touched. Seeing how closely linked up all phenomena are, you can hardly imagine that we can penetrate very far into the nature of any one of them without troubling ourselves about others of a similar nature. Since as yet we know nothing about those phenomena which are so nearly akin to dreams—neurotic symptoms—we must once more content ourselves with what we actually have achieved. I will merely give you the explanation of one more example and adduce a new consideration.

Let us take once more that dream to which we have already reverted several times, the one about the three theatre tickets for one florin and a half. I can assure you that I had no ulterior motive in selecting it in the first instance for an illustration. You know what the latent thoughts were: the vexation, after hearing that her friend had only just become engaged, that she herself should have married so hastily; depreciation of her husband and the idea that she could have found a better one if only she had waited. We also know already that the wish which made a dream out of these thoughts was the desire to “look on,” to be able to go to the theatre—very probably an offshoot of an old curiosity to find out at last what really does happen after marriage. It is well known that in children this curiosity is regularly directed towards the sexual life of the parents; that is to say, it is an infantile impulse and, wherever it persists later in life, it has its roots in the infantile period. But the news received on the day previous to the dream gave no occasion for the awakening of this skoptophilia; it only roused vexation and regret. This wish-impulse (of skoptophilia) was not at first connected with the latent thoughts, and the results of the dream-interpretation could have been used by the analysis without taking it into consideration at all. But again, the vexation was not in itself capable of producing a dream: no dream could be formed out of the thought: “It was folly to be in such a hurry to marry” until that thought had stirred up the early wish to see at last what happened after marriage. Then this wish formed the dream-content, substituting for marriage the going to the theatre; and the form was that of the fulfilment of the earlier wish: “Now I may go to the theatre and look at all that we have never been allowed to see; and you may not. I am married and you have got to wait.” In this way the actual situation was transformed into its opposite and an old triumph substituted for the recent discomfiture; and incidentally, satisfaction both of a ‘gazing’ impulse and of one of egoistic rivalry was brought about. It is this latter satisfaction which determines the manifest content of the dream; for in it she is actually sitting in the theatre, while her friend cannot get in. Those portions of the dream-content behind which the latent thoughts still conceal themselves are to be found in the form of inappropriate and incomprehensible modifications of the gratifying situation. The business of _interpretation_ is to put aside those features in the whole which merely represent a wish-fulfilment and to reconstruct the painful latent dream-thoughts from these indications.

The consideration which I said I wished to call to your notice is intended to direct your attention to these latent dream-thoughts now brought into prominence. I must beg you not to forget that, first, the dreamer is unconscious of them; secondly that they are quite reasonable and coherent, so that we can understand them as comprehensible reactions to whatever stimulus has given rise to the dream; and, thirdly, that they may have the value of any mental impulse or intellectual operation. I will designate these thoughts more strictly now than hitherto as _the residue from the previous day_; the dreamer may acknowledge them or not. I then distinguish between this ‘residue’ and ‘latent dream-thoughts,’ so that, as we have been accustomed to do all along, I will call everything which we learn from the interpretation of the dream ‘the latent dream-thoughts,’ while ‘the residue from the previous day’ is only a part of the latent dream-thoughts. Then our conception of what happens is this: something has been added to the residue from the previous day, something which also belongs to the unconscious, a strong but repressed wish-impulse, and it is this alone which makes the formation of a dream possible. The wish-impulse, acting upon the ‘residue,’ creates the other part of the latent dream-thoughts, that part which no longer need appear rational or comprehensible from the point of view of our waking life.

To illustrate the relation between the residue and the unconscious wish I have elsewhere made use of a comparison which I cannot do better than repeat here. Every business undertaking requires a capitalist to defray the expenses and an entrepreneur who has the idea and understands how to carry it out. Now the part of the capitalist in dream-formation is always and only played by the unconscious wish; it supplies the necessary fund of mental energy for it: the entrepreneur is the residue from the previous day, determining the manner of the expenditure. It is, of course, quite possible for the capitalist himself to have the idea and the special knowledge needed, or for the entrepreneur himself to have capital. This simplifies the practical situation but makes the theory of it more difficult. In economics we discriminate between the man in his function of capitalist and the same man in his capacity as entrepreneur; and this distinction restores the fundamental situation upon which our comparison is based. The same variations are to be found in the formation of dreams: I leave you to follow them out for yourselves.

We cannot go any further at this point; for I think it likely that a disturbing thought has long since occurred to you and it deserves a hearing. You may ask: “Is the so-called ‘residue’ really unconscious in the sense in which the wish necessary for the formation of the dream is unconscious?” Your suspicion is justified: this is the salient point in the whole matter. They are not both unconscious in the same sense. The dream-wish belongs to a different type of UNCONSCIOUS, which, as we have seen, has its roots in the infantile period and is furnished with special mechanisms. It is very expedient to distinguish the two types of “unconscious” from one another by speaking of them in different terms. But, all the same, we will rather wait until we have familiarized ourselves with the phenomena of the neuroses. If our conception of the existence of any kind of unconscious be already regarded as fantastic, what will people say if we admit that to reach our solution we have had to assume two kinds?

Let us break off at this point. Once more you have heard only an incomplete statement; but is it not a hopeful thought that this knowledge will be carried further, either by ourselves or by those who come after us? And have not we ourselves learnt enough that is new and startling?

FIFTEENTH LECTURE DOUBTFUL POINTS AND CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS

We will not leave the subject of dreams without dealing with the most common doubts and uncertainties arising in connection with the novel ideas and conceptions we have been discussing: those of you who have followed these lectures attentively will have collected some material of the kind.

1. You may have received an impression that even with strict adherence to technique our work of dream-interpretation leaves so much room for uncertainty that reliable translation of manifest dreams into their latent dream-thoughts will be thereby frustrated. You will urge first that one never knows whether any particular element in a dream is to be understood literally or symbolically, since things employed as symbols do not thereby cease to be themselves. Where there is no objective evidence to decide the question the interpretation on that particular point will be left to be arbitrarily determined by the interpreter. Further, since in the dream-work opposites coincide, it is in every instance uncertain whether a specific dream-element is to be understood in a positive or a negative sense, as itself or as its opposite—another opportunity for the interpreter to exercise a choice. Thirdly, on account of the frequency with which inversion of every kind is employed in dreams, it is open to him to assume whenever he chooses that such an inversion has taken place. Finally you will point to having heard that one is seldom certain that the interpretation arrived at is the only possible one, and that there is danger of overlooking another perfectly admissible interpretation of the same dream. In these circumstances, you will conclude, the discretion of the interpreter has a latitude that seems incompatible with any objective certainty in the result. Or you may also assume that the fault does not lie in dreams themselves, but that something erroneous in our conceptions and premises produces the unsatisfactory character of our interpretations.

All that you say is undeniable and yet I do not think it justifies either of your conclusions: that dream-interpretation as practised by us is at the mercy of the interpreter’s arbitrary decisions or that the inadequacy of the results calls in question the correctness of our procedure. If for the “arbitrary decision” of the interpreter you will substitute his skill, his experience and his understanding, then I am with you. This kind of personal factor is of course indispensable, especially when interpretation is difficult; it is just the same in other scientific work, however; it can’t be helped that one man will use any given technique less well, or apply it better, than another. The impression of arbitrariness made, for example, by the interpretation of symbols is corrected by the reflection that as a rule the connection of the dream-thoughts with one another, and of the dream with the life of the dreamer and the whole mental situation at the time of the dream, points directly to one of all the possible interpretations and renders all the rest useless. The conclusion that the imperfect character of the interpretations proceeds from fallacious hypotheses loses its force when consideration shows that, on the contrary, the ambiguity or indefiniteness of dreams is a quality which we should necessarily expect in them.

Let us call to mind our statement that the dream-work undertakes a translation of the dream-thoughts into a primitive mode of expression, analogous to hieroglyphics. Now all such primitive systems of expression are necessarily accompanied by ambiguity and indefiniteness; but we should not on that account be justified in doubting their practicability. You know that the coincidence of opposites in the dream-work is analogous to what is called the antithetical sense of primal words in the oldest languages. The philologist, R. Abel, to whom we owe this information, writing in 1884, begs us not on any account to imagine that there was any ambiguity in what one person said to another by means of ambivalent words of this sort. On the contrary, intonation, gestures and the whole context can have left no doubt whatever which of the two opposites the speaker had in mind to convey. In writing where gestures are absent the addition of little pictorial signs, not meant to receive separate oral expression, replaced them: e.g. a drawing of a little man, either crouching or standing upright, according as the ambiguous _ken_ of the hieroglyphic meant “weak” or “strong.” So that misunderstanding was avoided in spite of the ambiguity of sounds and signs.

In ancient systems of expression, for instance, in the scripts of the oldest languages, indefiniteness of various kinds is found with a frequency which we should not tolerate in our writings to-day. Thus in many Semitic writings only the consonants of the words appear: the omitted vowels have to be supplied by the reader from his knowledge and from the context. Hieroglyphic writing follows a similar principle, although not exactly the same; and this is the reason why nothing is known of the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian. There are besides other kinds of indefiniteness in the sacred writings of the Egyptians: for example, it is left to the writer’s choice to inscribe the pictures from right to left or from left to right. To be able to read them, we have to remember that we must be guided by the direction of the faces of the figures, birds, and so forth. But it was also open to the writer to set the pictures in vertical columns and, in the case of inscriptions on smaller objects, he was led by considerations of what was pleasing to the eye, and of the space at his disposal, to introduce still further alterations in the arrangement of the signs. The most confusing feature in hieroglyphic script is that there is no spacing between the words. The pictures are all placed at equal intervals on the page, and it is generally impossible to know whether any given sign goes with the preceding one or forms the beginning of a new word. In Persian cuneiform writing, on the other hand, a slanting sign is used to separate the words.

The Chinese language, both spoken and written, is exceedingly ancient but is still used to-day by four hundred million people. Don’t suppose that I understand it at all; I only obtained some information about it because I hoped to find in it analogies to the kinds of indefiniteness occurring in dreams; nor was I disappointed in my expectation, for Chinese is so full of uncertainties as positively to terrify one. As is well known, it consists of a number of syllabic sounds which are pronounced singly or doubled in combination. One of the chief dialects has about four hundred of these sounds, and since the vocabulary of this dialect is estimated at somewhere about four thousand words it is evident that every sound has an average of ten different meanings—some fewer, but some all the more. For this reason there are a whole series of devices to escape ambiguity, for the context alone will not show which of the ten possible meanings of the syllable the speaker wishes to convey to the hearer. Amongst these devices is the combining of two sounds into a single word and the use of four different “tones” in which these syllables may be spoken. For purposes of our comparison a still more interesting fact is that this language is practically without grammar: it is impossible to say of any of the one-syllabled words whether it is a noun, a verb or an adjective; and, further, there are no inflections to show gender, number, case, tense or mood. The language consists, as we may say, of the raw material only; just as our thought-language is resolved into its raw material by the dream-work omitting to express the relations in it. Wherever there is any uncertainty in Chinese the decision is left to the intelligence of the listener, who is guided by the context. I made a note of a Chinese saying, which literally translated runs thus: “Little what see, much what wonderful.” This is simple enough to understand. It may mean: “The less a man has seen, the more he finds to wonder at,” or “There is much to wonder at for the man who has seen little.” Naturally there is no occasion to choose between these two translations which differ only in grammatical construction. We are assured that in spite of these uncertainties the Chinese language is a quite exceptionally good medium of expression; so it is clear that indefiniteness does not necessarily lead to ambiguity.

Now we must certainly admit that the position of affairs is far less favourable in regard to the mode of expression in dreams than it is with these ancient tongues and scripts; for these latter were originally designed as a means of communication; that is, they were intended to be understood, no matter what ways or means they had to employ. But just this character is lacking to dreams: their object is not to tell anyone anything; they are not a means of communication; on the contrary, it is important to them not to be understood. So we ought not to be surprised or misled if the result is that a number of the ambiguities and uncertainties in dreams cannot be determined. The only certain piece of knowledge gained from our comparison is that this indefiniteness (which people would like to make use of as an argument against the accuracy of our dream-interpretations) is rather to be recognized as a regular characteristic of all primitive systems of expression.

Practice and experience alone can determine the extent to which dreams can in actual fact be understood. My own opinion is that this is possible to a very great extent; and a comparison of the results obtained by properly-trained analysts confirms my view. It is well known that the lay public, even in scientific circles, delights to make a parade of superior scepticism in the face of the difficulties and uncertainties which beset a scientific achievement; I think they are wrong in so doing. You may possibly not at all know that the same thing happened at the time when the Babylonian and Assyrian inscriptions were being deciphered. There was a point at which public opinion was active in declaring that the men deciphering the cuneiform writing were victims of a chimera and that the whole business of investigation was a fraud. But in the year 1857 the Royal Asiatic Society made a conclusive test. They challenged four of the most distinguished men engaged in this branch of research—Rawlinson, Hincks, Fox Talbot and Oppert—to send to the Society in sealed envelopes independent translations of a newly-discovered inscription, and, after comparing the four versions, they were able to announce that there was sufficient agreement between the four to justify belief in what had been achieved and confidence in further progress. The mockery of the learned laity then gradually came to an end, and certainty in the reading of cuneiform documents has advanced enormously since then.

2. A second series of objections is closely connected with an impression which you also have probably not escaped; namely, that a number of the solutions achieved by our method of dream-interpretation seem strained, specious, “dragged in,”—in other words, forced, or even comical or joking. These criticisms are so frequent that I will take at random the last that has come to my ears. Now listen: a head-master in Switzerland—that free country—was recently asked to resign his post on account of his interest in psycho-analysis. He protested and a Berne paper published the decision of the school authorities on his case. I shall quote a few sentences from the article which refer to psycho-analysis: “Further, we are amazed at the far-fetched and factitious character of many of the examples given in the said book by Dr. Pfister of Zurich.... It is indeed a matter for surprise that the head-master of a Training College should accept so credulously all these assertions and such specious evidence.” These sentences purport to be the final opinion of “One who judges calmly.” I am much more inclined to think this “calm” factitious. Let us examine these remarks more closely in the expectation that a certain amount of reflection and knowledge of the subject will do no harm, even to a “calm judgement.”

It is really quite refreshing to see how swiftly and unerringly anyone relying merely on his first impressions can arrive at an opinion on some critical question of psychology in its more abstruse aspects. The interpretations seem to him far-fetched and strained, and do not commend themselves to him; consequently, they are wrong and the whole business is rubbish. Such critics never give even a passing thought to the possibility that there may be good reasons why the interpretations are bound to convey this very impression—a thought which would lead to the further question what these good reasons are.